Магистратура
2025/2026
Научно-исследовательский семинар "Микроистория"
Статус:
Курс по выбору (Мусульманские миры в России (История и культура))
Кто читает:
Институт классического Востока и античности
Где читается:
Факультет гуманитарных наук
Когда читается:
1-й курс, 3 модуль
Охват аудитории:
для всех кампусов НИУ ВШЭ
Язык:
английский
Кредиты:
3
Контактные часы:
24
Course Syllabus
Abstract
Microhistory, one of the new trends in writing history in the late twentieth century, has become a widely recognized approach. It stands with one leg in structure-oriented social history and the other in cultural history and easily blends the two. Cultural history regards society as discursive and infused with meanings for which historians must search. But the approach of the cultural historians, who seek understanding and meaning, can take them no closer to the past than where the authors of their sources stood; cultural historians thus want to climb inside past persons' heads and see and feel from inside them, a task at once enticing and difficult, if not formally impossible, as "the past is a foreign country" and we have no way to go there.
If cultural history explains from inside out, social history tends the opposite way, from the outside inwards, with an eye to larger structures, be they political, institutional, material, or spatial and temporal. Past persons, as thinkers and actors, were embedded in their wide and complex worlds, in ways they were sometimes only half aware of.
The advantage, and charm, of microhistory is that the small -- the person, the situation, the event, the notable object -- offers us historians a fine vantage point, where culture and structure intersect. Our cultural investigation confronts us with the ambiguities of our own subjectivity, and with the gap between us modern scholars and past persons, whose minds, senses, and bodies elude us. Our social investigation reveals structures that, shaping past lives, half-eluded the perceptions of those who lived back then. Facing this complexity, the modern scholar strives at once for clarity about what we can know and for honesty about what, for us, remains out of reach.
Microhistory is thus epistemologically rich. But it also often has a strong esthetic streak, as it seeks artful ways of building an honest dialogue between researchers and their readers. It shows not only the allure of connection with persons far away in space and time, but also the difficulty of the closeness we long for. At the center of its practice is the pursuit and analysis of clues, using habits of close reading and inference precious for historical research at every scale. It thus offers excellent training in what Marc Bloch called the historian's métier.
Learning Objectives
- Course objectives: close reading, argument from detail, skill at generalizing from the small to the large, overview of an important school of historical practice - microhistory, with an eye to its epistemology and habits of analysis and synthesis. The course intends an English-language introduction to microhistory, its theories and present practices. It will look to its Italian origins, and its spread to other countries and continents. It will give especial attention to the recent microhistory of the Muslim world. Students will read some of the classics, and some more recent works. They will also try their hands at a microhistory of their own, decoding an enticing a short criminal trial from sixteenth-century Rome. There they will practice close reading and decoding, pursuing clues, mapping spaces and times, and spotting our many gaps in knowledge. They will then plan a coherent narrative, with its explanatory logic, structure, mood, and tone. The course objectives are themselves both macro and micro. The course aims for a big picture of an evolving practice and for an intuitive hands-on understanding, thanks to a brief attempt at doing it oneself.
Expected Learning Outcomes
- The students will both sharpen skills in the interrogation of historical documents and the elaboration of argument from the evidence they contain, and be able to link those skills to the conceptual apparatus and epistemology of microhistorical writing. They should sharpen their sense of the risks and advantages of using their own position as observers and investigators.
Course Contents
- Introduction and praxis
- A classical work of microhistory
- The microhistory of the Muslim world
- The Global Turn and Microhistory
- Looking inwards // looking outwards
- Summing up and Russian prospects
Assessment Elements
- ExamIndividual oral conversation with the instructor on the topics of the course. 40% of Final grade.
- Accumulated gradeAccumulated grade: 25% technical outlines / 25% proposal for an article and sample writings / 50% reading and participation in discussion. Accumulated grade is 60% of Final grade.
Bibliography
Recommended Core Bibliography
- Michelle Evans Restrepo. (2016). Comparative reading of The cheese and the worms by Carlo Ginzburg and The Inheriting Power by Giovanni Levi. Historia y Sociedad, (30), 105. https://doi.org/10.15446/hys.n30.52472
- The cheese and the worms : the cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller, Ginzburg, C., 1980
- Казус : индивидуальное и уникальное в истории, , 2022
Recommended Additional Bibliography
- Evans Restrepo, M. (2016). Comparative reading of The cheese and the worms by Carlo Ginzburg and The Inheriting Power by Giovanni Levi ; Lectura comparada de El queso y los gusanos de Carlo Ginzburg y La herencia inmaterial de Giovanni Levi. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.87E3D209