Product Description: More than twenty years after Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method was first published in English, this extraordinary collection remains a classic. The book brings together essays about Renaissance witchcraft, National Socialism, sixteenth-century Italian painting, Freud’s wolf-man, and other topics...read more

An anthology of private letters, sketches, photographs, and working drafts by some of history's most significant figures includes a letter by Gandhi in which he predicts his assassination, an intimate note from Trotsky to Frida Kahlo, and a letter from Casanova alluding to his past.

Looks at the paintings of Piero della Francesca, including the 'Baptism of Christ' and the Arezzo Cycle, and provides insight into the lives of patrons and the intriques found in the paintings.

Drawing upon his study of sixteenth-century witchcraft trials, the author analyses the Italian government's case against the men accused of the 1972 murder a police superintendent (view table of contents)

This is an illuminating and thought provoking study of the various meanings of distance. Opening with a discussion of defamiliarisation, which traces the roots of the idea in classical and enlightenment culture, he moves in to fascinating explorations of the concepts of perspective, representation, imagery and myth.

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Product Description: Historian Carlo Ginzburg uses the occasion of his Menachem Stern Lectureship to present a provocative and characteristically brilliant examination of the relation between rhetoric and historiography. In four lectures, based on a wide range of texts -- Aristotle's Poetics; humanist Lorenzo Valla's tract exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; an early 18th-century Jesuit historical account purporting to record the diatribe of a Mariana Island native against Spanish rule; and Proust's commentary on Flaubert's style -- he demonstrates that rhetoric, if properly understood, is related not only to ornament but to historical understanding and truth...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Historian Carlo Ginzburg uses the occasion of his Menachem Stern Lectureship to present a provocative and characteristically brilliant examination of the relation between rhetoric and historiography. In four lectures, based on a wide range of texts -- Aristotle's Poetics; humanist Lorenzo Valla's tract exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; an early 18th-century Jesuit historical account purporting to record the diatribe of a Mariana Island native against Spanish rule; and Proust's commentary on Flaubert's style -- he demonstrates that rhetoric, if properly understood, is related not only to ornament but to historical understanding and truth...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The Cheese and the Worms is a study of the popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed―just as cheese is made out of milk―and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels." (view table of contents)

Product Description: The vivid portrait of Piero della Francesca in a new edition.Sifting the available evidence, Carlo Ginzburg builds up a vivid portrait of Piero della Francesca's patrons and convincingly explains the contemporary intrigues resonant in his painting...read more