H I S T O R I C A L K N O W L E D G E

IN QUEST OF THEORY, M E T H O D AND EVIDENCE

edited by
Susanna Fellman a n d Marjatta Rahikainen

C A M B R I D G E
D
S C H O L A R S

P U B L I S H I N G

*-77H<mS&3>
 1

TABLE OF C O N T E N T S

Preface vii
Introduction 1
Marjatta Rahikainen and Susanna Fellman

CHAPTER ONE 5
On Historical Writing and Evidence
Marjatta Rahikainen and Susanna Fellman

CHAPTER TWO 45
The Method of Clues and History Theory
Matti Peltonen

CHAPTER THREE 77
The Silences of the Archives, the Renown of the Story
Natalie Zemon Davis
Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence CHAPTER FOUR 97
Edited by Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian's Craft, Today
Carlo Ginzburg
This book first published 2012
CHAPTER FIVE 121
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Microhistory and the Recovery of Complexity
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 axx, ux Giovanni Levi

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data C H A P T E R SIX 133

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Revisiting Microhistory from the Perspective of Comparisons
Risto Alapuro
Copyright © 2012 by Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen and contributors
C H A P T E R SEVEN 155
All rights for this book reserved.
Source Pluralism as a Method of Historical Research
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or Janken Myrdal
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contributors 191
ISBN (10): 1-4438-3451-3. ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3451-3 Index 193
11
96 CHAPTER THREE

Henningsen, Gustav. The Witches'Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inqui-
sition (1609-1614). Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 1980.
Ibafiez Perez, Alberto C. Burgos y los burgaleses en el siglo XVI. Burgos: Excmo. Ayun-
tamiento de Burgos, 1990.
Lancre, Pierre de. Tableau de Vinconstance des mauvais anges et demons. Paris: Jean
CHAPTER FOUR
Berjon, 1612.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Nouveaux essais sur I'entendement humain. In Oeuvres
philosophiques, vol. 3, book 3, chap. 4. Amsterdam and Leipzig: Jean Schroeder,
1765. O U R W O R D S , A N D T H E I R S
L6pez Martinez, Nicolas. "El Cardenal Mendoza y la Reforma Tridentina en Burgos,"
Hispania Sacra, 16 (1963): 1-3. A REFLECTION O N THE H I S T O R I A N ' S
Malvezin, Theophile. Michel de Montaigne, son origine, safamille. Bordeaux: C. Le- CRAFT, T O D A Y
febvre, 1875.
Mendoza y Bobadilla, Francisco de. El T\z6n de la Nobleza, edited by Jos6 Antonio
Carlo Ginzburg
Escudero. Madrid: El Colegio Heraldico de Espaiia y de las Indias, 1992. El Ttzdn
< de la Nobleza de Espana, edited by Armando Mauricio Escobar Olmedo. Mexico
I* City: Frente de Afirmacidn Hispanista, 1999. 3
Montaigne, Michel de. Les Essais, edited by Denis Bjai, Benldicte Boudou, Jean Clard,
& Isabelle Patnin, under the direction of Jean Ciard [based on the 1595 edition "C'est que la chirnie avait le grand avantage de s'adresser a des r^alites
edited by Marie Jars de Gournay]. Paris: La Pochotheque, 2001. incapables, par nature, de se nommer elles-m&mes."
Novikov, V. V. Teatr sudovedeniya, volume 5. Moscow, 1791. Marc Bloch !
Pasquier, F. "Nomination d'un notaire a Artigat en 1578." Bulletin de la SocUti Arie- 3
goise des Sciences, Lettres et Arts 6:1 (1897): 52-56.
Rabade Obrad6, Maria del Pilar. Una elite depoder en la Corte de los Reyes Catdlicos. 1. 3
Los judeoconversos. Madrid: Sigilo, 1993. In his methodological reflections, posthumously published as Apologie pour
Ravel, Jeflrey S. The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in l'histoire ou Mdtier d'historien (The Historian's Craft) Marc Bloch remarked:
Seventeenth-Century France. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. "To the great despair of historians, men fail to change their vocabulary every
Thomas, Jack. "Unfilsde Martin Guerre: le vrai-faux retour d'Arnaud Lamaure a time they change their customs."1
Toulouse a lafindu XVIlIe siecle." Annates du Midi 120: 264 (Oct.-Dec 2008): The result of this divergence is semantic ambiguity. Let us take a funda-
535-561. mental word in our intellectual and emotional vocabulary - 'liberty* - whose
VTcario Santamarfa, Matfas. Censo-Guia de los Archivos parroqutales de la Didcesis de manifold meanings have for a long time been at the very heart of Bloch's
Burgos. Burgos: Publicaciones del Arzobispado de Burgos, 1988. concerns. A closer look at them will cast some light over his ironically
Vicario Santamaria, Matfas. Catdlogo de los Archivos de Cofradias de la Didcesis de
emphatic reference to historians' "despair," vis-a-vis the gap between the re-
Burgos. Burgos: Asociaci6n de Archiveros de la Iglesia en Espaiia, 1996.
Different versions of this paper have been presented in Rome (Universita della
Sapienza), Beer Sheva (Ben-Gurion University), in Los Angeles (Department of
History, UCLA), Berlin (Freie Universitat). Many thanks are due to Andrea Ginz-
burg, Christopher Ligota, Perry Anderson and (especially) Simona Cerutti for their
criticism, and to Sam Gilbert and Henry Monaco for their linguistic revision.
1. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 34; "Car, an grand desespoir des historiens, les hommes
nbnt pas coutume, chaque fois qu'ils changent de mceurs, de changer de vocabulaire."
Bloch, "Apologie pour rhistoire", 872. This passage has been brought again to my
attention by Ciafaloni, "Le domande di Vittorio. Un ricordo di Vutorio Foa", 42.
98 CHAPTER FOUR
silience of words and their shifting meaning. Bloch mentioned "historians,"
thinking of himself: but his personal reactions had more distant, as well as
more complex, roots.
2.
"History" from the Greek historla, is another word of our vocabulary which,
translated into various languages, remained the same along twenty-five cen-
turies but changed its meaning.2 After being used by physicians, anatomists,
botanists and antiquarians in a sense which included both 'description' and
'inquiry/ history has been referred almost exclusively to the realm of human
action - although a trace of its previous usage can be detected in expres-
sions such as the "clinical history" of a patient. This narrowing down of
its meaning is a side-effect of a turning point which can, symbolically, be
identified with this famous passage in Galileo's Assayer.
Philosophy is written in this vast book, which continuously lies open
before our eyes (I mean the universe). But it cannot be understood un-
less you have first learned to understand the language and recognize
the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of
mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geo-
metricalfigures.Without such means, it is impossible for us humans to
understand a word of it... 3
Galileo, notwithstanding his close connections with scientists committed
to a non-mathematical approach to the study of nature, announced that the .
language of nature is - or was bound to become - the language of math-
ematics.4 On the contrary, the language of history was, and has always been,
from Herodotus's time onwards, a human language: in fact, the language of
2. Pomata and Siraisi, eds. Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe.
3. Galilei, II Saggiatore, 264: "... lafilosofiae scritta in questo grandissimo libro che
continuamente ci sta aperto dinanzi agli occhi (io dico l'universo), ma non si
puo intendere se prima non s'impara a intender la lingua, e conoscere i caratteri
ne' quali e scritto. Egli e scritto in lingua matematica, e i caratteri son triangoli,
cerchi, ed altrefiguregeometriche, senza i quali mezzi e impossible a intendeme
umanamente parola ... ."Here I am developing an interpretation of this passage
put forward in Ginzburg, "Spie: radici di un paradigma indiziario", 172-173, and in
Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm", especially 107-108.
4. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern
Natural History.
OUR WORDS, AND THEIRS 99
everyday life, even when it is supported by statistics and diagrams.3 But the
evidence the historian relies upon is also mostly written in the language of
everyday life.
Bloch reflected intensely on this contiguity, and its implications. "His-
tory receives its vocabulary" we read in another section of his posthumous
reflections "for the most part, from the very subject matter of its study. It ac-
cepts it, already worn out and deformed by long usage; frequently, moreover,
ambiguous from the very beginning, like any system of expression which
has not derived from the rigorously organized efforts of technical experts."6
Thus, historians are faced with two alternatives: either to echo the terminol-
ogy used in their evidence, or to use a terminology which is foreign to it. The
former alternative, Bloch remarks, leads nowhere: at times, the resilience
of intrinsically ambiguous words conceals the change in their meanings; at
m
others, similar meanings are concealed by a multipUcity of terms. We are
left with the other alternative, which is risky: terms like 'factory system,' for *
instance, may seem to be a substitute for analysis, hence promoting "anach-
ronism: the most unpardonable of sins in a time-science."7 Only scholarly
exchanges, Bloch concludes, will ultimately lead to the construction of a
common vocabulary of human sciences; but inventing new words is prefer-
able to a tacit projection of new meanings within commonly used terms.8
Hence, a rigorous vocabulary may allow history to cope with its intrin- 3
sic weakness - the everyday language it shares with most of its evidence.
The reference to chemistry's artificial terminology, which surfaces over and
over again in Blochs pages, is telling enough: rarely had he been so close to
positivism. But one of positivism's classical texts, Claude Bernard's Introduc-
tion a la mickcine expfrimentale (1865) - a book which Bloch mentioned
with some disagreement - had noted, in a paragraph entitled "Experimental
criticism must look at facts, not at words," that ambiguity also threatens
science's conventional languages:
When we create a word to characterize a phenomenon, we then agree in
general on the idea that we wish it to express and the precise meaning
5. Ginzburg, "Spuren einer Paradigmengabelung: Machiavelli, Galilei und die Zensur
der Gegenreibrmation".
6. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 158; Bloch, "Apologie pour l'histoire", 959.
7. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 173;"... il fomente ranachronisme: entre tous les piches,
au regard d'une science du temps, le plus impardonnable.." Bloch, "Apologie pour
l'histoire", 969.
8. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 176-177; Bloch, "Apologie pour rhistoire", 971.
ioo CHAPTER FOUR
we are giving to it; but with the later progress of science the meaning of
the word changes for some people, while for others the word remains in
the language with its original meaning. The result is often such discord
that men using the same word express very different ideas. Our language,
in fact, is only approximate, and even in science it is so indefinite that if
we lose sight of phenomena and cling to words, we are speedily outside
of reality.9
3.
But what is, from the historian's perspective, the relationship between words -
the words from the evidence - and reality? In Bloch's answer to this question
one may detect many intertwined elements. First of all, a sense of the inad-
equacy of words vis-a-vis what generates them: passions, feelings, thoughts,
needs. Bloch exemplifies this inadequacy by evoking an extreme case:
How instructive it would be - whether as to the God of yesterday or
today - were we able to hear the true prayers on the lips of the humble!
Assuming, of course, that they themselves knew how to express the
impulses of their hearts without mutilating them.
For there, in the final analysis, lies the greatest obstacle. Nothing is
more difficult for us than self-expression (...) The most usual terms are
never more than approximations.10
9. Bernard, An Introduction to the Study ofExperimental Medicine, 188; "Quand on cree
un mot pour caracteriser un phenomene, on s'entend en general a ce moment sur
l'idee qubn veut lui faire exprimer et sur la signification exacte qu'on lui donne, mais
plus tard, par le progres de la science, le sens du mot change pour les uns, tandis que
pour les autres le mot reste dans le langage avec sa signification primitive. II en resulte
alors une discordance qui, souvent, est telle, que des hommes, en employant le meme
mot, expriment des idees tres differentes. Notre langage n'est en effet qu'approximatif,
et il est si peu precis, meme dans les sciences, que, si l'on perd les phenomenes
de vue, pour s'attacher aux mots, on est bien vite en dehors de la rfealite'." Bernard,
Introduction a I'itude de la midecine expirimentak, 330-331. Bloch referred to Claude
Bernard's Introduction in "Apologie pour rhistoire", 831,908.
10. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 166-167 (translation slightly modified); "Quel
enseignement si - le dieu fut-il d'hier ou d'aujourd'hui - nous reussissions a
atteindre sur les levres des humbles leur veritable priere! A supposer, cependant,
qu'il aient su, eux-memes, traduire, sans le mutiler, les elans de leur coeur. Car la
est, en dernier ressort, le grand obstacle. Rien n'est plus difficile a un homme que
de s'exprimer soi-meme. (...) Les termes les plus usuels ne sont jamais que des
approximations." Bloch, "Apologie pour rhistoire", 965.
OUR WORDS, AND THEIRS 101
These words, based on Bloch's personal research experience, were not inspired
by skepticism - quite the contrary. The awareness of any word's inadequacy,
whether written or told, had suggested indirect strategies to Bloch that ena-
bled him to read medieval sources against the grain. One may recall the mag-
nificent pages of Les rois thaumaturges dedicated to men and women affected
by scrophula, who traveled enormous distances yearning for the miraculous
touch of the royal hand.11 But the same awareness had reinforced his commit-
ment to a comparative history based, as in the case of Les rois thaumaturges,
on categories and terms inevitably distant from those used in the evidence.
4.
These elements come to the fore in the 1928 essay titled "Pour une histoire
compared des societes europeennes": a kind of methodological manifesto,
which is still an indispensable point of reference.12 In the conclusion to his
essay Bloch evoked the lasting prejudice which identifies comparative his- a
tory with a search for analogies, including the most superficial. The whole
point of comparative history, Bloch insisted, is to emphasize the specific
differences between the phenomena it deals with. For this purpose, one
TI
has to cast aside all false resemblances: for instance, in the domain of the
European Middle Ages, the alleged equivalence between English villainage in
and French servage. True, some intersections are undeniable:
3
Ser/and villain are both considered, by jurists and by general opinion,
as individuals devoid of 'liberty*: therefore in some Latin texts they are
labelled servi . . . . Hence men of learning, starting from the absence
of liberty and the reference to servitude, were led to compare them to 5
Roman slaves.
But this, according to Bloch, is a
superficial analogy: the concept of non-liberty, as far as its content is
concerned, underwent many variations at different times and places.13
To sum up: we have two different geographic contexts, the English and the
French, and two different words, villain and serf. Medieval jurists and men
11. Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges, 89-157.
12. Bloch, "Pour une histoire comparee des societes europeennes".
13. Bloch, "Pour une histoire comparee des socie^s europeennes" 28.
 102 CHAPTER FOUR
of learning routinely conflated them with servi, the term for Roman slaves,
since villains, serfs and servi were assumed to have been deprived of their
liberty. Bloch rejected this conclusion as superficial, on the grounds of an
argument put forward by a number of scholars, including Paul Vinogradoff,
the great Anglo-Russian medievalist: meaning, that in 1300 or so villains
had joined the category "free tenants" in England; in France in the same
period tenants were sharply distinguished from serfs. Bloch traced these
divergent historical trajectories, concluding:
In the fourteenth century, the French serf and the English villain be-
long to two completely different classes. Is it helpful to compare them?
Certainly, but this comparison will end by fleshing out quite different
features, suggesting a remarkable disjuncture in the development of the
two nations.14
Here, as in other passages from the same essay, Bloch used the word "classes"
(classes) to identify two different social realities erroneously conflated by
medieval jurists. But his comment on the norms assumed by English jurists,
which ascribed a lesser degree of freedom to those individuals who had to
perform heavy agricultural tasks (corvies), headed in a different direction.
"Those norms," Bloch wrote, "were far from original. They simply relied upon
a layer of collective representations, elaborated much earlier, helter-skelter,
within medieval societies both on the Continent and in the British Isles.
r The idea that agricultural work is in some way intrinsically incompatible
with liberty springs from ancient mental habits, exemplified by the words
opera servilia, applied by barbarians to this kind of work."15 Abandoning
the domain of documented terminology, Bloch abruptly shifted to a more
slippery, hypothetical ground: "collective representations." This notion is
taken from Durkheim, whose name received special emphasis in a footnote.
In a previous passage Bloch had alluded to "an old, largely forgotten legacy
of popular representations."16
Liberty and servitude in the Middle Ages, seen in a longer chronologi-
cal perspective, surfaced again a few years later in another essay by Bloch.
In some cases the juridical terms referring to servitude did not change: but
their meaning (Bloch remarked) underwent imperceptible variations over
Il •
14 Bloch, "Pour une histoire compared des societes europeennes" 30.
15. Bloch, "Pour une histoire comparee des soci&es europeennes", 31.
16. Bloch, "Pour une histoire comparee des societes europeennes", 30 n. 1,29 n. 2.
OUR WORDS, AND THEIRS 103
time, as the Carolingian documents show. They display a series of shifts,
"obviously unconscious," which must be assessed for what they are: likewise,
linguists have pointed out that at a certain moment the word labourer took
on the meaning of the Latin word arare, to plough.17 Following the example
of linguists, Bloch wrote, historians should refrain from replacing interpre-
tations given in the past with their own.18
This is a somewhat unexpected statement. In a passage of his previous
essay Bloch had rejected the unfounded assimilation of medieval servitude
to ancient slavery, inspired by the Latin word servi. Nonetheless, one might
argue that reconstructing the jurists* perspectives and emphasizing their
hmitations are not incompatible aims. There is more. The essay in which
Bloch urged historians to take linguists as a model is entitled "Personal
Liberty and Personal Servitude in the Middle Ages, Particularly in France:
A Contribution to the Analysis of Classes" (Liberti et servitude personnelles
au Moyen age, particuHerement en France: contribution a Utude des classes,
1933)- For Bloch, "class," a modern category, far from effacing the categories
put forward by medieval jurists, inscribed them in a perspective which is
ours, not theirs. This point is emphasized in the final passages of the essay:
2
Everything brings us to the same conclusion. Since human institutions in
are realities of a psychological sort, a class never exists except inasmuch
3
as we perceive it To write the history of servitude means above all to
trace, in the complex, changing trajectory of its development, the his-
tory of a collective notion: the deprivation of liberty.19
Needless to say, the psychological interpretation of class put forward by
Bloch can be accepted, debated, or rejected on the grounds of different
analytic categories. But his reflections elicit a more general question: what is
the relationship between the observer's and the actors categories, retrieved
from medieval documents? Another question immediately follows. The
17. Bloch, "Liberie et servitude personnelles au Moyen age", especially 332.
18. Bloch, "Liberti et servitude personelles au Moyen age", 327-328.
19. Bloch, "Liberte et servitude personelles au Moyen age", 355: "Ainsi nous nous
trouvons ramenes de toutes parts a la meme lecon. Les institutions humaines
etant des realites d'ordre psychologique, une dasse n'existe jamais que par l'idee
qubn s'en fait. Ecrire l'histoire de la condition servile, c'est, avant tout, retracer,
dans la courbe complexe et changeante de son developpement, l'histoire d'une
notion collective: ceUe de la privation de liberte." Cf. Ginzburg, "A proposito della
raccolta dei saggi storici di Marc Bloch"
\C<
104 CHAPTER FOUR
medieval jurists were observers and actors at the same time. What is the
relationship between the representation of servitude shared by jurists and
the representation of servitude shared by servants?
5.
This last question, which Bloch does not explicitly raise, emerges irresistibly
from his own research. At this point I must make a personal digression.
Reading Les rois thaumaturges in 1959, when I was twenty, convinced me
to try to learn the historian's craft. A few months later I decided to commit
myself to the study of witchcraft trials, focusing on the men and women who
stood before the judges rather than on the persecution as such. Nudging me
in that direction were some books (Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks,
Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, Ernesto de Martino's II mondo magico)
as well as poignant memories of racial persecution. But only many years
later did I become aware that my experience as a Jewish child during the war
had led me to identify with the men and women accused of witchcraft.10
Following the advice of my mentor, Delio Cantimori, I began to study
the Inquisition trials (many of them dealing with witchcraft or related
crimes) preserved in the State Archive of Modena. Then I extended my re-
search to other archives - a quite erratic journey, as I had no specific agenda.
In the early nineteen sixties, reading through the Inquisition trial records
preserved in the State Archive of Venice, I came across a document which
was, as I immediately realized, a complete anomaly: a few pages, dated 1591,
recording the examination of Menichino della Nota, a young herdsman
from Friuli. Menichino replied to the inquisitor's questions saying that he
was a benandante. The meaning of this word was unknown to me - and
to the inquisitor as well, who apparently listened in astonishment to the
defendant's story. Since he had been born with a caul, Menichino said, he
was compelled to leave his body three times a year, "like smoke," traveling
with the other benandanti to fight "for the faith against the witches" in the
Josaphat meadow. "When the benandanti won," he concluded, "it was a sign
of a good harvest."11
Many years ago I put forward a retrospective analysis of my reactions to
that document which I had come across by pure chance: the first of nearly
fifty trials that I later discovered in the Ecclesiastical Archive of Udine. All
20. Ginzburg, "Streghe e sciamani".
21. Ginzburg, Ibenandanti, 84-87; Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrar-
ian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 74-77.
OUR WORDS, AND THEIRS 105
of them binge upon a word - benandante - which elicited questions from
the inquisitors; the answers provided by the defendants were filled with
extraordinary details. The trials show that the inquisitors soon made up
their minds: the benandanti, who claimed that their spirits fought against
witches and sorcerers, were in fact themselves sorcerers. These accusations
provoked indignant denials from the benandanti, who insisted on describ-
ing their "profession" (as they called it) sometimes with pride, sometimes
as the result of an obscure, inescapable drive. But ultimately, afterfiftyyears
of investigations, those who believed they had been fighting on the side of
good accepted the hostile image their interrogators had constructed. This
was the outcome of a cultural clash impregnated with violence - in this case,
mostly symbolic. The inquisitors' prestige, as well as the impending threat
of torture and death at the stake, had proven ineluctable.
In a book I published in 1966, translated into English as The Night Battles,
I analyzed the tales provided by the benandanti as a fragment of peasant n
culture, slowly distorted by the imposition of inquisitorial stereotypes. This
argument was based on the heated disagreements between defendants and
inquisitors over the actual meaning of the word benandante. What made
the extraordinary Friulian evidence so valuable for the historian was the
very lack of communication between two sides engaged in a dramatically
unequal dialogue.
3
After a break that lasted many years I resumed my work on witchcraft
trials. At that time I realized that my approach to the judges, both lay and
ecclesiastical, had been in many ways inadequate. Their behavior was some-
times marked by a genuine attempt to make sense of the defendants' beliefs
and acts - in order to eradicate them, of course. Cultural distance could
generate an effort to understand, to compare, to translate. Let me recall an
extreme but enlightening case. In 1453 the bishop of Brixen - the philosopher
Nicholas of Cusa - listened to the tales told by two old women from a nearby
valley. In a sermon delivered some time later he described them as being
"half crazy" (semideliras). They had paid homage to a nocturnal goddess they
called "Pdchella" (from "ricchezza", translatable as 'richness'). The learned
bishop identified Pdchella with Diana, Abundia, Satia: names mentioned in
those sections of medieval encyclopedias and treatises on canon law dealing
with popular superstitions.22 This hermeneutic attempt was not exceptional.
Less illustrious judges and inquisitors drew up summaries and translations
22. Ginzburg, Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba, 70-73,107-108; Ginzburg,
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches's Sabbath, 94-96-
 io6 CHAPTER FOUR
which, contained in a series of nested Chinese boxes, are available to the
modern interpreter - in this case, myself. With some embarrassment I
discovered, apart from my emotional identification with the victims, a trou-
bling intellectual contiguity with the persecutors: a condition that I sought
to analyze in an essay titled "The Inquisitor as Anthropologist."23
6.
I cannot imagine which direction my research - first of all, the one I did in
the Frulian archives - would have taken had I never come across Bloch's
writings. In hindsight, I am tempted to compare the benandanti's ecstatic
dreams to the "true prayers" of the humble evoked by Bloch: inner experi-
ences that words (documented in the former case, imagined in the latter)
record in an inevitably inadequate manner. In the case of benandanti we are
faced with words uttered at the inquisitors behest, and then transcribed by
the inquisitor's notaries: a conflictual context (albeit ruled by law) which
must be taken into account, yet one that does not make the evidence any
the less relevant.
I am inclined to believe that no historian would have missed such a
blatant conflict. Much less obvious, in my view, was the perception, which I
realized only many years later, of my contiguity with the inquisitors. Perhaps
this contiguity imposed itself upon my mind only when I grew aware of
the deep roots behind the preliminary choice that had shaped my research
project from its very outset
Emotional identification with the victims, intellectual contiguity with
the inquisitors: we are far removed from the elements which, in the model of
historical research described by Bloch, look closer to positivism. In his reflec-
IT
tions on nomenclature, conflict appears only on the actor's side: for instance,
in his remarks on a comparatively late phenomenon like class consciousness,
either of the twentieth century workers, or of the peasants on the eve of French
revolution.24 But on the side of the observer-historians language, which Bloch
would have wished to conform, as much as possible, to the neutral and de-
tached language of the natural sciences, conflict is never mentioned.
In the perspective I am advocating, a critical, detached attitude can be a
goal, not a starting point. Although the end is not unlike Bloch's, the roads
leading to it are. In the light of the risky contiguity between the historian's
language and the language of evidence, the sterilization of the instruments of
23. Ginzburg, "The Inquisitor as Anthropologist".
24. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 167; Bloch, "Apologie pour l'histoire", 96.
OUR WORDS, AND THEIRS 107
analysis is more urgent than ever - especially in cases that display a contigu-
ity between observer and observers-actors (the inquisitor as anthropologist,
the inquisitor as historian).
7.
These retrospective reflections on the research I carried out in the Friulian
archives in the nineteen sixties and seventies are partly inspired by my later
encounter with the writings of Kenneth L. Pike. Pike, the American linguist,
anthropologist, and missionary, emphasized the opposition between two
levels of analysis, the observer's and the actor's, labeled, respectively, as etic
(from phonetic) and emic (from phonemic). Starting from language, Pike set
up a unified theory of the structure of human behavior - the title of his most
ambitious work, first published in three parts between 1954 and i960, and
then reprinted, in a revised and expanded version, in 1967.
The etic point of view, Pike explained, examines languages and cultures
in a comparative perspective; the emic point of view is "culturally specific,
applied to one language or culture at a time."25 But this static, and rather per- me
plexing, opposition is subsequently reworked into a more effective dynamic «—•
perspective: in
n
Preliminary versus final presentation: Hence, etic data provide access
3
into the system - the starting point of analysis. They give tentative results,
tentative units. The final analysis or presentation, however, would be in
emic units. In the total analysis, the initial etic description gradually is
refined, and is ultimately - in principle, but probably never in practice
- replaced by one which is totally emic.26
25. An echo of this definition in Subrahmanyam, "Monsieur Picart and the Gentiles
of India", especially 206: eric, i.e. "universalist" vs. emic, Le. "internalist"
26. Pike, Kenneth L. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of
Human Behavior, 37-39. The last sentence of this passage is quoted (with disa-
greement) in Harris, Marvin. "History and Significance" 329-350, which ends
with a criticism of Claude Levi-Strauss's attitude, labelled as "obscurantist" and
inspired by Berkeley's idealism. Levi-Strauss, whose hugefour-volumeswork My-
thologiques (1964-1971) had just come out, had dismissed the distinction claiming
that etics is "nothing but the emics of the observers." Levi-Strauss, "Structuralisme
et ecologie", 143-166, above all 161-162. Helpful remarks (which strangely enough
do not mention Levi-Strauss's essay) in Olivier de Sardan, Jean Pierre. "Emique",
151-166 (many thanks to Simona Cerutti for having brought this piece to my
attention). My own disagreement with Harris and (at an incomparably higher
level) with Levi-Strauss will emerge from what follows.
 w
108 CHAPTER FOUR
Most historians, familiar with Bloch's nuanced and sophisticated reflections,
M would react with some impatience to these remarks, deeming them to be
exceedingly abstract. True, Pike was addressing himself not to historians
but to linguists and anthropologists.27 For a long time those two groups
have been dealing with the distinction between emic and etic levels; histori-
ans, on the contrary, have ignored it, with few exceptions. (I myself became
aware of the emic/etic divide twenty years ago, which was twenty years after
the publication of Pike's magnum opus.)29 But it might not be pointless to
attempt a translation of the aforementioned passage, using words associated
with historical research. The result might sound like this:
I. ii i
"Historians start from questions using terms that are inevitably anachro-
nistic. The research process modifies the initial questions on the grounds of
new evidence, retrieving answers that are articulated in the actors* language,
and related to categories peculiar to their society, which is utterly different
from ours."
My translation of the "tentative results" generated by the etic perspective -
"Historians startfromquestions using terms that are inevitably anachronistic"
- echoes a remark made by Bloch.29 Questions, not answers: a distinction which
has been missed by those who either carelessly emphasized the role of anachro-
nism in historical research, or dismissed anachronism altogether as a pertinent
category.30 One starts from etic questions aiming to get emic answers.31
We may compare my tentative translation with one of the rules of the
decalogue that Arnaldo Momigliano proposed many years ago titled "The
27. "I am not a historical linguist," Pike wrote in "On the Emics and Etics of Pike and
Harris", 40.
28. [Ginzburg], "Saccheggirituali.Premesse a una ricerca in corso". A relevant excep-
tion is Simona Cerutti, "Microhistory: Social Relations versus Cultural Models?"
(see my comment, footnote 31).
29. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 158; "Les documents tendent a imposer leur nomen-
clature; rhistorien, s'il les ecoute, ecrit sous la dictee d'une epoque chaque fois
differente. Mais il pense, d'autre part, naturellement selon les categories de son
propre temps ..." Bloch, "Apologie pour l'histoire", 959-960.
30. See, respectively, Loraux, "Eloge de ranachronisme en histoire"; Didi-Huberman,
Devant le temps: Histoire de l'art et anachronisme des images; Ranciere, "Le concept
d'anachronisme et la verite de l'historienB, 53-68.
31. "Emic is a method of analysis, not the immediate context of behavior? S. Cerutti
wrote, criticizing my own approach (Cerutti, "Microhistory", 35; italics in the text).
But in my view the emic perspective can be grasped only through the mediation
of an etic perspective: hence the active role (which Ceruttifindsarbitrary: ibid.,
34), played by the researcher in the research process.
OUR WORDS, AND THEIRS 109
Rules of the Game in the Study of Ancient History? The rule applies to the
history of any period:
As soon as we enter thefieldof historical research, Judaism, Christianity,
Islam, Marx, Weber, Jung, and Braudel teach us to subject the evidence
to specific questions; they do not affect the answers that the evidence
provides. The historian's arbitrary will vanishes as soon as he has to
interpret a document.32
In my view Pike's passage, my translation of it, and Momigliano's rule do
not differ significantly. What I regard as a divergence lies elsewhere. The
residual eric element which, according to Pike, cannot be erased, should
be seen in positive terms: as an intrinsic element of the translation activity
which is, etymologically, synonymous with interpretation. The tension s
between our questions and the answers we get from the evidence must be n
kept alive, although the evidence may well modify our initial questions.33
If the difference between our words and theirs is carefully preserved, it will nz
prevent us from falling into two traps - empathy and ventriloquism.34 These
n
are indeed related: by assuming the transparency of the actors we ascribe to
them our language and our categories. The result is an insidious distortion, n
which is much more dangerous (because more difficult to pinpoint) than
grossly anachronistic assumptions such as homo oeconomicus and the like.
The Latin word interpres reminds us that any interpretation is a transla-
tion, and vice versa. Translation surfaces in the debates inspired by Pike's
arguments. A group of reactions was published in a book entitled Emics and
Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate, based on a conference held in Phoenix
S
in 1988. One of the participants, Willard Quine, the philosopher famous for
his reflections on "radical translation," ended his lecture as follows:
And yet there remains, between outside and inside, a vital asymmetry.
Our provisional but responsible commitment to our science extends to
32. Momigliano, "Le regole del gioco nello studio della storia antica", 483.
33. Curiously, the revision of the initial questions is missing in Clifford Geertz's ver-
sion of the hermenutic circle: see Geertz, "'From the Native's Point of View': On
the Nature of Anthropological Understanding".
34. Only after having written these pages I realized that the same metaphor has been
used in Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 257: "to ventriloquize nature" (but the
entire context is relevant).
no CHAPTER FOUR
what we say about the exotic culture, and does not extend to what the
insiders say within it.3S
The asymmetry between our words and theirs, emphasized by Quine (and
by Pike before him), has been experienced by historians as well: as the say-
ing goes, "The past is a foreign country^36 It is not surprising, after all, that
such an asymmetry was articulated and theorized by an anthropologist. The
distance, both linguistic and cultural, which usually separates anthropolo-
gists from the so-called "natives" prevents the former from assuming, as
historians so often do, that they have become the intimates of the characters
they are dealing with. As I pointed out before, ventriloquism is a profes-
sional illness many historians succumb to. But not all of them, obviously.
Somebody once spoke of an emic anthropology, specifically committed
to rescuing "the native's point of view," as Malinowski put it.37 By analogy,
one could speak of an emic historiography. Three splendid examples will
suffice: Paul Oskar Kristeller's and Augusto Campana's essays on the origins
of the word "humanista" and Ernst Gombrichs little known lecture on the
Renaissance as a period and as a movement.38 All three attempt to reconstruct
the actors' categories as distinct from the observers' categories - the latter
categories often inform the thinking of a group that extends far beyond the
circle of professional historians. At the end of his essay Campana remarked
that recently (this was written in 1946) somebody had spoken of "a new
humanism: and the old word has been impregnated with new ideals. Future
philologists and historians will deal with them." But in a postscript pub-
lished the following year, Campana used stronger words: he believed that
Kristeller, in the essay he had written independently on the same subject,
had demonstrated that the modern concept of "Renaissance humanism ...
is untenable."39 Untenable, of course, from a philological point of view. This
does not prevent us from using categories like "Renaissance" (as Campana
himself subsequently did).40 But we must always be aware that however
35. Quine, "The Phoneme's Long Shadow", 167.
36. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country.
37. Feleppa, "Emic Analysis and the Limits of Cognitive Diversity", 101 ff.
38. Kristeller, "Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance" (see also
introduction, XI-XII); Campana, "The Origin of the Word 'Humanist'"; Dioni-
sotti, "Ancora humanista-umanista"; Gombrich, "The Renaissance: Period or
Movement".
39. Campana, "The Origin of the Word 'Humanist'", 280-281.
40. Campana, "The Origin of the Word 'Humanist"1,405.
OUR WORDS, AND THEIRS m
useful they may be, such labels remain conventional. Those who make such
efforts to uncover the intrinsic features of humanism, the Renaissance, mo-
dernity, the twentieth century, are - to put it mildly - wasting their time.
8.
The emic dimension which I proposed, by way of experiment, to find in his-
toriography, can be described using more ancient and more familiar words:
philology, antiquarianism. (Anthropology was born from antiquarianism,
so the circle is closed.) But a mechanical transfer of the opposition between
emic and etic into the historiographic discourse would be misleading.
Drawing on their own practice, historians might point out that the emic/
etic dichotomy is somewhat simplistic. As my Friulian case shows, both the
emic and the etic dimension are theatres of conflicts: between inquisitors
and benandanti (in the former case), between scholars of varying orienta-
tions (in the latter). But becoming aware of the emic/etic distinction may n
help historians to free themselves from an ethnocentric bias: a task which is
becoming more urgent in a world shaped by globalization - a process that is
ac
has been going on for centuries, but has taken on a truly frantic pace in the
last decades. ft
U
Historians must meet this challenge - but the question is how? An an- n
swer has been offered by debates over literary texts. One can start from Erich
Auerbach's "Philology of World Literature [Weltliteratur]": a famous essay
that appeared in 1952, and that today has an almost prophetic ring to it.41
A gloomy prophecy. In the middle of the Cold War Auerbach saw a
widespread tendency towards cultural homogeneity: a phenomenon which,
notwithstanding the obvious differences, affected both blocs. The world was
becoming more alike; even nation states, which had been in the past agents
of cultural differentiation, had lost part of their power. Mass culture (a term
Auerbach did not use: but this was the gist of his analysis) was spreading
across the entire surface of the globe. A Weltliteratur was emerging, in a
context completely different from the one imagined by Goethe: a world
literature in which Europe had a marginal role. Faced with this enormous
expansion in space and time, even a wide-ranging scholar like Auerbach
sensed the inadequacy of his instruments. So he gave young literary schol-
ars some advice, both negative and positive. On the one hand, he suggested
that they should avoid both general concepts like Renaissance or Baroque
41. Auerbach, "Philologie der Weltliteratur". See also the introduction: Salvaneschi
and Endrighi, "La letteratura cosmopolita di Erich Auerbach"
 T
112 CHAPTER FOUR
and a monographic approach based on the oeuvre of a single author. On the
other, he recommended that they should look for specific details that might
serve as connecting points (Ansatzpunkte).
Auerbach was alluding to the method which had inspired his great
book, Mimesis. But in 1952 the reflections he had put forward less than a
decade before, in the concluding section of Mimesis, were developed in a
different direction. If the relevance of the European literary tradition could
not be taken for granted any more, the issue of generalization came to the
forefront, albeit implicitly. Generalization - but starting from where, and
for what purpose?
A few years ago, in an essay entitled "Conjectures on World Literature"
(which curiously enough does not mention Auerbach), Franco Moretti
bravely addressed those issues.'*2 Faced with the challenge provided by
an enormous number of texts which no scholar working on comparative
literature could ever master, Moretti suggested a drastic solution: second-
hand reading. Scholars committed to a comparative approach to literature
would raise general questions by absorbing the insights of scholars who had
been working in a more circumscribed perspective, devoted to a specific
national literature. Therefore, the comparative study of literature would
be based not on close reading but on distant reading. This proposal, put
forward in a deliberately provocative tone, was framed by an argument
based on the Marc Bloch essay I had started from: "Toward a Comparative
History of European Societies." A comparison between the two relevant
passages - first Moretti's, then, in translation, Bloch's - will be helpful. Here
is Moretti:
Writing about comparative social history, Marc Bloch once coined
a lovely 'slogan,' as he himself called it: 'years of analysis for a day of
synthesis'; and if you read Braudel or Wallerstein you immediately see
what Bloch had in mind. The text which is strictly Wallerstein's, his
'day of synthesis,' occupies one third of a page, one fourth, maybe half;
the rest are quotations (fourteen hundred, in the first volume of The
Modern World-System). Years of analysis; other people's analysis, which
Wallerstein's page synthesizes into a system.43
42. Moretti, "Conjectures on World Literature*; Arac, "Anglo-GIobalism?" suggests
a parallel reading of Moretti's and Auerbach's essays.
43. Moretti, "Conjectures on World Literature", 56-57.
OUR WORDS, AND THEIRS 113
"The old dictum is always true: years of analysis for a day of synthesis" Bloch
wrote. He was referring to a passagefromFustel de Coulanges's introduction
to his La Gaule romaine, published in 1875. In a footnote Bloch provided the
exact quotation: "For a day of synthesis, years of analysis are needed." No
reassessment of the dictum's inventor is as important as Bloch's subsequent
comment:
Too often this dictum has been quoted without adding its indispensable
correction: the 'analysis' can be used for the 'synthesis' only if it takes
the latter into account and tries to put itself at its service from the begin-
ning.44
Bloch's qualification points in the opposite directionfromMoretti'sreading.43
One should not, as positivists trunk, accumulate bricks, that is monographic
research, for a building that exists only in the mind of the architect (or of
the professor of comparative literature). Evidence must be collected accord-
ing to an agenda which is already pointing towards a synthetic approach. re
In other words, one has to work out cases, which will lead to generaliza-
tions. But since most evidence has been collected, filtered or approached 0
by previous scholars, who started from questions different from ours, the n
history of historiography must be incorporated within historical research.
3
The greater our distance from the primary evidence is, the greater the risk
of being caught out by hypotheses put forward either by intermediaries or Q
by ourselves actually becomes. In other words, we risk finding what we are
looking for - and nothing else.
§
That distorted reading of Bloch's passage is especially surprising,
since Moretti himself, in a brilliant essay, published simultaneously with
"Conjectures on World Literature," shows that the only way to meet the
challenge stemming from the enormous, and unmasterable, mass of pub-
lished and forgotten texts, is to work on a case study: a first-hand analysis
of a limited series of texts, identified by way of a specific question. This
second essay, entitled "The Slaughterhouse of Literature" (an allusion to an
aphorism of Hegel), deals with a literary device which Conan Doyle put,
almost unwittingly, at the heart of his detective stories: clues.46 Many years
44. Bloch, "Pour une histoire comparee des societes europeennes", 38.
45. Bloch's passage is quotedfirst-hand(without the qualification which follows
immediately) in Moretti, II romanzo di formazione, "Prefazione 1999".
46. Moretti, "The Slaughterhouse of Literature".
114 CHAPTER FOUR
ago I wrote an essay entitled "Clues" that deals with Sherlock Holmes and
other topics in quite a different perspective.47
If I am not mistaken, both essays, Franco Moretti's and mine, imply
the device known as mise en abyme: since clues, as a topic, are analyzed by
means of an approach based on clues, the details replicate the whole.48 But
clues require first-hand reading: the person responsible for the final synthe-
sis cannot delegate this task to others. Moreover, a close, analytic reading
is compatible with an enormous amount of evidence. Those familiar with
archival research know that one can go on leafing through innumerable files
and quickly inspecting the contents of countless boxes before coming to a
sudden halt, arrested by a document which could be scrutinized for years.
Likewise, a chicken (I hope that nobody will be upset by such a compari-
son) walks back and forth, glancing around, before abruptly snatching up
a worm until then concealed in the ground. Once again we come back to
Ansatzpunkte: the specific points which, as Auerbach argued, can provide
the seeds for a detailed research program provided with a generalizing po-
tential - in other words, a case. Anomalous cases are especially promising,
since anomalies, as Kierkegaard once noted, are richer, from a cognitive
point of view, than norms, insofar as the former invariably includes the
latter - but not the other way round.4'
9.
For a certain number of years cases have been the object of growing at-
tention, partially related to ongoing debates about microhistory: a term -
whose prefix - micro - alludes, as has been repeatedly emphasized (but
never enough, perhaps) to the microscope, to the analytic gaze, not to the
dimensions, alleged or real, of the object under scrutiny.50 Yet microhistory,
based on analytic (and thus first-hand) research, aims at generalization: a
word which is usually, and wrongfully, taken for granted. Further reflection
47. Ginzburg, "Spie: radici di un paradigma indiziario"; Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of
an Indiciary Paradigm".
48. Dallenbach, Le ricit spiculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme.
49. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveranitat,
33, referring to an unnamed "Protestan theologian." Many thanks to Henrique
Espada Lima who made me aware of the source of this remark, which I had
unknowingly made my own.
50. The best introduction to the subject is still the chapter "Kasus" in Jolles, Einfache
Formen. See also Forrester, "If p, then what? Thinking in cases"; Passeron and
Revel, eds. Penserpar cas.
M
OUR WORDS, AND THEIRS 115
is needed to explore the wide range of its varieties, based on different start-
ing points (questions or answers) different kinds of analogy (metonymic,
metaphoric) and so forth.51
One could object that in a globalized world there is no room for
microhistory. I would argue the opposite. The international reception of
microhistory can be easily interpreted in a political perspective. The first
wave of interest in microhistory, after its birth in Italy, manifested itself
in Germany, France, England, the United States. It has been followed by
a second wave, related to peripheries or semi-peripheries: Finland, South
Korea, Iceland.52 Microhistory has provided an opportunity to subvert
pre-existing hierarchies thanks to the intrinsic relevance - demonstrated a
posteriori - of the object under scrutiny. This is completely different from
what has been labeled "Anglo-globalism": the unintentionally imperialistic
privileging of studies in comparative literature written in English, based on
studies mostly written in English, dealing with literary texts mostly written
in languages other than English.53
Relying on microhistory to subvert political and historiographic hier- s
archies sinks its roots in the distant past. It is not Tribe X which is relevant,
n
Malinowski once said, but the questions addressed to Tribe X. In a similar D
spirit, Marc Bloch argued that local history must be addressed through o
questions bearing general implications. In the light of what I have been
5
saying so far, the convergence between anthropology and history will seem
obvious. In a world like ours, in which some historians, reacting against
the pseudo-universality of Mircea Eliade's Homo religiosus, emphasized the
ethnocentric dimension, Roman and Christian, of the word "religion," case
studies related to specific contexts look promising, as they allow for new
51. Jakobson, "Due aspetti del linguaggio e due tipi di afasia" Much help will come
from Melandri, La linea e il circolo: Studio logico-filosofico sull'analogia.
52. Some bibliographical references: Chasob, ed., Mishisa ran muoshinga; Ginzburg,
Olafsson and Magnusson, Molar ogmygla: Urn einsogu ogglataoantima;Magnus-
son., "The Singularization of History: Social history and Microhistory within
the Postmodern State of Knowledge; Muir and Ruggiero, eds. Microhistory and
the Lost People of Europe-, Peltonen, "Carlo Ginzburg and the new microhistory";
Peltonen, "Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical
Research"; Revel, ed. Jeux d'echelles: la micro-analyse a I'expenence.
53. This criticism has been raised by Arac, "Anglo-Globalism?" In his answer Moretti
does not address this issue: cf. Moretti, "More Conjectures", (note 8 deals with the
language used by the critics, not with the second-hand or third-hand approach to
translated texts supposedly performed by the meta-critic working in a compara-
tive perspective).
 116 CHAPTER FOUR
generalizations, generating new questions and new research.54 Emic answers
generate etic questions, and vice versa.
I did not want to end my reflections by singing the praises of micro-
history. I am not interested in labels; bad microhistory is bad history. No
method can protect us from our limitations and our mistakes. When we
speak to the next generation we must be frank in admitting our shortcom-
ings, while describing what, against all odds, we had been trying to do. The
next generation will listen to us and will do something different, as has al-
ways happened. "Tristo e lo discepolo che non avanza il suo maestro" ("Poor
is the pupil who does not surpass his master") Leonardo said.
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Wizisla, Erdmut. Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story ofa Friendship; trans- Almost from the beginning, I knew that the Martin Guerre story had been told
lated by Christine Shuttleworth. London: Libris, 2009. and retold. I first learned of it from Judge Jean de Coras's Arrest Memorable •wl
Woolf, DanieL A Global History of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, of 1561 and soon after from the Admiranda Historia of lawyer Guillaume r
2011. Lesueur, close observer of the trial. By the time I published my Return of
Zambelli, Paola. "From Menocchio to Piero della Francesca: the Work of Carlo Ginz-
Martin Guerre in 1982-1983,1 could include a bibliography of reprintings
burg." The Historical Journal 28:4 (1985): 983-999.
and translations and accounts of the Martin Guerre imposture in various r
forms - from Rocoles's seventeenth-century Imposteurs insignes to the c:
eighteenth-century Causes cilebres of Gayot de Pitaval and Richer to Janet
Lewis's twentieth-century novel The Wife of Martin Guerre, not to mention
the various legal compendia incorporating Coras's judgment.1
And still news of the case expanded, as I came across references to Mar-
tin Guerre in surprising places and people sent me accounts that they had
found here and there. Thus it turned out that Simon Goulart, pastor, editor,
and historian at Geneva, inserted Arnaud du Tilh among the ventriloquists,
false-fasters, and other "imposteurs estranges" who peopled his Histoires

* This essayfirstappeared in French translation in a special issue of the Annales

du Midi (2008), and I am grateful to Jack Thomas and his colleagues for inviting
me to contribute to it. I also want to thank James Amelang for suggestions for the
essay and to acknowledge the many insights I have had about micro-history from
conversations with Matti Peltonen.
1. Davis, "Le Retour de Martin Guerre, erude historique"; Davis, The Return of Martin
Guerre.
78 CHAPTER THREE
admirables of 1600-1601. A century later the philosopher Leibniz used the
example of Martin Guerre to show how difficult it may be to acquire the idea
of individuation: "vous savez l'histoire du faux Martin Guerre, qui trompa la
femme me'me du veritable et les proches parents par la ressemblance jointe
a l'adresse," "you know the story of the false Martin Guerre, who fooled the
wife of the true one and even the close relatives by resemblance coupled
with skill."2
Meanwhile the case continued to be cited when other claims to identity
were fought before the courts. In 1698, the bigamous Louis de la Pivadiere,
who had returned to his first wife in Narbonne, was found to be really
himself in a trial in which Arnaud du Tilh's example was drawn upon by
lawyers on both sides. (La Pivadiere's story has been told in a recent book
by Jeffrey Ravel.) And now Jack Thomas has given us the intriguing story of
the man returning to Toulouse from Algerian captivity in 1785 and claiming
to be Arnaud Lamaure. Here lawyers were concerned to show how proof of
identity could be established without evidence of writing.3
Finally, popular andfictionalaccounts still abound. The story of Martin
Guerre was serialized in the New London [Connecticut] Gazette in 1763-
1764, recounted in Hoey's Dublin Mercury in 1771 (this reported to me by a
historian studying eighteenth-century advertising), and retold in Russian
translation in Moscow in 1791.4 As Janet Lewis's novel inspired an opera in
1958, with music by William Bergsma, so my book and the film Le retour
de Martin Guerre inspired three musical dramas, including Leslie Arden's
House of Martin Guerre, which first opened in Toronto in 1993, and Martin
Guerre, with libretto by Alain Boublil and music by Claude-Michel Schon-
berg, which opened in London in 1996.1 served as historical consultant for
the former, and wrote a piece for the opening-night program for the latter.
I have tried to give some sense to this plethora of tellings over the
centuries.5 On the one hand, there is the wide appeal of stories of uncanny
2. Natalie Zemon Davis, "From prodigious to heinous: Simon Goulart and the
reframing of imposture"; Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain.
3. Ravel, The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Se-
venteenth-Century France; Thomas, "Unfilsde Martin Guerre: le vrai-faux retour
d'Arnaud Lamaure a Toulouse a lafindu XVIIIe siecle"
4.1 am grateful to Donna Andrew for sending me information about the article in
Hoey's Dublin Mercury, 29 August 1771. Novikov, Teatr sudovedeniya, 138-148.
5. In this and the following paragraphs, I will be drawing from my discussion in Davis,
"From prodigious to heinous", and Davis, Remaking Impostors: From Martin Guerre
to Sommersby.
THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVES, THE RENOWN OF THE STORY 79
resemblance, persuasive deception, and remarkable memory, sometimes
spiced with secret complicity, and ending in unmasking. The Martin
Guerre tale has the advantage of a perfect plot line, with the wife receiving
the "false" Martin Guerre in her bed for more than three years and the "true"
Martin Guerre showing up at the Toulouse court room at the last moment.
On the other hand, such universal motifs have added resonance when they
can be connected with issues deeply important or troubling in a specific
time and place. So Arnaud du Tilh's gifts of speech and memory, his skill
at taking the roles of another person, were both a fearful attraction and a
warning for sixteenth-century French society constantly fretting about the
"hypocrisy" and "self-fashioning" associated with social and geographical
mobility and the quest for political favor. Part of the fascination of the case
of the bigamous La Pivadiere was that having acquired noble status and
:: 11
an aristocratic wife, he disappeared and married a commoner for several •Si k
years. Prompting a stage play at the Comedie Francaise in 1698, the case
expressed concern in the late reign of Louis XIV about the fixity of and
loyalty to noble status.6 S i
wil 6"
Impostor stories were also collected and framed somewhat differently r 5
over the centuries, as the stakes shifted in the perception of contested
identity. Thus in the sixteenth century, the Martin Guerre story was often
framed as "prodigious," that is, beyond nature, and was coupled with other 3
outlandish events on earth or the heavens. In the seventeenth century, the
fully developed genre of the Imposteurs insignes emerged, grouping together
types of deception usually treated separately in the past: false messiahs,
false prophets, false kings along with claimants to a specific identity, such as
Arnaud du Tilh. After a century of violent struggle about the true religion,
discerning the difference between holy and demonic possession, and rival
claims to kingship, deception was an everyday expectation. In the eight-
eenth and nineteenth century, impostor stories appeared in books of legal
Causes cilebres and other kinds of collection that emerge to accommodate
the various confidence men (and women) and tricksters who flourished in
the mobile population of Europe's great cities.
Whatever the frame, there is a curious paradox in regard to these impos-
tor stories: the question of what is true and how to prove what is true winds
through all the accounts, and yet their authors made no effort to get further
information about the cases and what might actually have happened. The
Martin Guerre story is told simply from a version of Coras's Arrest Memo-
6. Ravel, Would-Be Commoner, chap. 5.
80 CHAPTER THREE
table (virtually always without use of Coras's annotations, even when an
author claims to know of their existence) or of Lesueur's Histoire admirable
or from some later condensation of these sixteenth-century texts. Mistakes
that have slipped in - such as Artigne for Artigat or Sagjans for Arnaud du
Tilh's Sajas or Biscay for the Hendaye of the Daguerres - get perpetuated
over the centuries, as do inventions, such as Arnaud and Martin having
been fellow soldiers in the imperial armies against France. The accounts
are occasions for moral and psychological commentary by the tellers, not
for the pursuit of historical evidence and verification. Even the author the
best positioned for such inquiry - the Abbe* Haristoy, who included "Martin
Aguerre de Hendaye" in the "galerie basque" of his Recherche historique sur
le Pays Basque of 1884 - confined himself to a brief account of the imposture
and biblical warnings about false judgments made on the basis of appear-
ance. Jeffrey Ravel has noted a similar indifference to historical inquiry in
previous accounts of Louis de La Pivardiere.7
2.
My historian's curiosity, indeed, my historian's passion to "find out what ac-
tually happened," impelled me to go beyond the stories to archives and other
sources for the world of Martin Guerre, Bertrande de Rois, and Arnaud du
Tilh. Any historian will recognize this feeling: somewhere there is a mound
of papers, traces from the past, with the answers to one's questions. So in
1980-1982,1 betook myself tofivearchives departementales in southwestern
France, visited Artigat and Arnaud's Sajas, and went up north to the archives
departementales du Pas-de-Calais in pursuit of Guillaume Lesueur. I still
recall my sentiments during my first stop in Toulouse: my disappointment
that the sacs de proces for the criminal cases before Parlement no longer ex-
isted for the sixteenth century, that I could never get behind the descriptions
of Coras and Lesueur to the actual interrogations; my excitement when the
actual September 1560 decree of the Parlement on the Martin Guerre case
came before my eyes. So it really happened, I thought; here is the guarantee
of the arret published by Coras in his book.8
That archival quest brought three different fruits. First, from the many
local documents I found - marriage contracts, wills, sales and transactions,
disputes and arbitrations - I was able to paint a picture of the social, eco-
7. Haristoy, Recherches historiques sur le Pays Basque, voL 2,133-134; Ravel, Would-Be
Commoner, 268-269.
8. Archives departementales de la Haute-Garonne (henceforth ADHG), 1B34,12
September 1560; Coras, Arrest Memorable, 108-109,
THE SILENCE OP THE ARCHIVES, THE RENOWN OF THE STORY 81
nomic, religious, political and family patterns of Hendaye, Artigat, and
Sajas. Together with writings by sixteenth-century observers, these sources
allowed me to givefleshto Coras's narrative of marriages, property, peasant
aspirations, and village factions.
Second, I discovered only a few notarial documents in which the precise
villagers I was tracking were the actors or witnesses: Martin Guerre, Ber-
trande de Rois, Pierre Guerre, and Arnaud du Tilh - and their immediate
relatives, such as Martin's father Sanxi or Bertrande's mother. Specifically,
Pierre Guerre surfaced in three transactions in 1563, all of them recorded
by the same notary; Martin Guerre was the witness to one of them. These
documents added something to the texts of Coras and Lesueur; for instance,
Martin Guerre did not sign the notary's act he witnessed, thus confirming
my supposition that he could not write and that this was why a handwriting
test was not used during the trials. (Neither Coras nor Lesueur even men- 3 1!
tions the possibility of such a test, perhaps because it was taken for granted £ in
that most peasants would be unable to write.)
A precious notarial document from 1594 recorded the division of prop-
erties among the sons and heirs of the late Martin Guerre. It confirmed ^ <
Lesueur's statement that the Guerre brothers had set up a tile-works when
they came to Artigat, for la tuillerie was included in the estate; and it con-
tinued the story of Martin Guerre well after his return to Artigat in 1560,
with the tantalizing list of names of the sons he then had with Bertrande, r —
and after her death with his second wife. Meanwhile, other people surfaced
in the documents, such as the late Andreu Rois and his son Barthelemy of
Artigat in 1563 and Jehanto Daguerre of Hendaye in 1555 - surely related to
Bertrande de Rois and Martin Guerre, but exactly how I didn't know.
The result of this archival catch - ample local data, but scanty sources on
my specific figures - meant that to deepen or complicate the narratives of
Coras and Lesueur, I had to resort to collateral or associated evidence. So I
had not found the 1538 marriage contract of Bertrande and Martin? I could
suggest its provisions from the many others I had found from Artigat and
nearby. So I had found no archival materials expanding on Coras's account
of Martin's abandonment of his family? I could suggest the pull of Spain and
military adventure through the analogous movement of young men from
the Basque country and the Languedoc, and even cite marriage contracts
and wills made to provide for wives during an absence in Spain. So I had
come upon no direct statement from Bertrande herself about how she felt
about her honor and reputation? I could draw from examples of other local
women seeking amends for insult.
r
82 CHAPTER THREE
Sometimes a silence could be turned into an indicator: when Arnaud's
parents - the du Tilhs of Sajas and the Barraus of Le Pin - were not men-
tioned among the consuls and bassiniers responding to a 1551 diocesan
inquiry about heretics in their midst, I could conclude they were not among
the elite families of the region. Since Coras reported that by 1560 Arnaud
had inherited some property in Le Pin from his late father, I could go on to
place Arnaud's family "among the middle ranks of the peasants." Through-
out I used relevant evidence from the world around my historical actors, as
when I talked of how Arnaud du Tilh, with his nickname Pansette, the belly,
would have been attracted as a youth to the world of carnivalesque play and
disguise so widespread in Gascony. Throughout I marked my statements
drawn from such collateral or indirect evidence with conditional verbs
-"must have thought" "would have seen," - or adverbial qualifications such
as "perhaps," "surely" or "undoubtedly"
A third consequence of this archival quest was a new way of regarding
my legal texts, especially that of Coras. I was able to learn much about Jean
de Coras and Guillaume Lesueur and their families, both through their writ-
ings and in records of the Parlement de Toulouse and elsewhere. But early in
my inquiry, I had viewed the Arrest memorable and the Admiranda Historia
merely as sources for law and for the village imposture, to be confirmed
or amplified by archival proofs. Suddenly I realized that the narrative and
descriptive strategies of the legal accounts were treasures in themselves,
yielding clues to the authors' concerns and uncertainties about the Martin
Guerre case and to the subsequent fascination of readers with the story. So I
turned to a literary analysis of the texts, discovering, for instance, that Coras's
Arrest memorable was a new vernacular genre, a new way of combining legal
exposition with storytelling and cultural commentary. Its dialectic of "text"
and "annotation" introduced uncertainties into the assessment of events
whose judicial meaning Coras had determined by a death sentence. Coras's
presentation of the story as a "tragedyf or at least as a situation where it was
hard "to tell the difference between a comedy and a tragedy? ("surquoy nul
ne scait la difference entre tragedie et comedie") made it possible for him both
to condemn the impostor and to identify with a lowly peasant whose gifts of
speech and memory reminded him of his own.
3.
I ended my Return of Martin Guerre with my own uncertainty: the story
had such strange turns, had I been tricked myself? Or as I put it then, "I
think I have uncovered the true face of the past - or has Pansette done it
THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVES, THE RENOWN OP THE STORY 83
once again?" I have returned to the matter of uncertainty in later writing
about the case and in responding to criticism of my book: I had wanted my
book to be an exploration of truth and doubt, to suggest analogies between
a community's search for truth about identity in the sixteenth century and
the historian's search for truth about the past today.9 We historians do our
best to get evidence and give it convincing interpretation, but thorny issues
usually remain and press for further inquiry.
Rather than being at ease over the years with that state of uncertainty,
I was haunted by the ghosts of unanswered questions. Could I learn more
about what Martin Guerre had done during his years away from Artigat
and how come he decided to return? Could I discover some detail about the
married life of Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rois beyond that picture
of their sons dividing his property in 1594? What secrets about them and
Arnaud and Pierre still lay in the archives?
Now such a desire for archival return was not the aftermath for every - Tl
book I published. For my books on pardon tales and on gifts, I had seen
hundreds of letters of remission and gift transactions from all over France.10
I had ended my research when additional documents were simply repeating
the patterns I had already found. Yet another case of bribery or of revoca- i 73
tion of a gift might add local color, but was not going to change my overall
description. My curiosity was aroused not by secrets still lurking in the
archives or in manuscripts somewhere, but by other scholars' interpretation
of the kinds of documents I had used.
In contrast, for my books centered on individual life stories - Women on
the Margins on Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Maria Sib-
ylla Merian, and Trickster Travels on Hasan al-Wazzan/Giovanni Leone/Leo
Africanus - 1 had a strong preference to find out more about what "actually"
happened. In the case of the three women, where I had quite ample sources,
I did go back to the archives after the edition in English had appeared. There
I finally found a document signed in Glikl's own hand and could include
it in the French translation to show what name this seventeenth-century
Jewish woman actually gave to herself. I still regret my inability to track the
destiny of the Carib slave woman that Maria Sibylla Merian brought back
to the Netherlands after her entomological and biological explorations in
Suriname. Slave that she was, she did not surface in any of the documents
9. Davis, "On the Lame".
10. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century
France; Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France.
84 CHAPTER THREE
I looked at in Amsterdam, and I was left only to speculate on her role as
informant for Merian's great Metamorphosis of the Insects ofSuriname.11
Even more acute has been my sense of evidence packed away in the
archives of Rome or elsewhere in Italy about the social ties of al-Wazzan/
Giovanni Leone during his years as a Christian in Italy. His manuscripts
brought me rich insights into him as a man "between worlds," but there
were gaps about his past and connections that I stubbornly wanted to
fill. Turning hundreds of pages in papal accounts and in notarial records
from the Roman neighborhoods in which Giovanni Leone had likely lived
yielded nothing sure, so in my recent book I did my best to construct his
social networks from related evidence and to interpret archival silence as an
indication of his marginal status in Rome. And I reminded myself: it would
take years to go through the mountains of the relevant documents in Rome
and I was then nearing eighty; a younger historian will come upon these
secrets one day and add to the story.
Then in 2007,1 was invited to contribute an essay to a special issue of the
Annales du Midi on the Martin Guerre case, and I thought, "Here the archives
are manageable and I know them quite well. Now is the time, in the spirit of
fun and curiosity, to go back and see what I canfind."My goal was carefully
limited, however: I was focusing on the central actors in my tale, seeking new
details on their particularfives.I returned to the Archives departmentales de
la Haute-Garonne in Toulouse, the Archives departementales de TAriege in
Foix, and the Archives departmentales des Pyrenees Atlantiques in Pau. In
Toulouse and in Foix, I was greeted by the same archivists, Genevieve Douil-
lard at the former and Claudine Pailhes at the latter, whom I had known
years before when they were early in their distinguished careers.
I opened each register with eagerness, most of them from notaries and
judicial courts, some I'd had in my hands before, others held for thefirsttime.
It was a pleasure to have that world pass before my eyes again, but I found
no new documents in which Martin Guerre, Bertrande de Rois, Arnaud du
Tilh, Pierre Guerre or persons known to be their immediate family were
the actors. No sought-after marriage contracts or wills made at their com-
mand, no further trace of the civil suit that "Martin Guerre" brought against
Pierre Guerre before the court at Rieux for the revenues on "his" property
administered by Pierre during the absence of his nephew, nothing new.
11. Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, 177; Davis, Juive,
Catholique, Protestante: Trois femmes en marge au XVTIesiede, chap. 1,fig.9; Davis,
Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds.
THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVES, THE RENOWN OF THE STORY 85
I had mixed reactions. I tried to congratulate myself: I had done a good
job of searching the first time around; I had found what there was. But I
also felt the loss of documents from the past even more poignantly than I
had years ago. Not just the court cases that I sought, but the quarrels and
contestations of so many folks laying out their cases in the sixteenth century
before the judge at Rieux or the Sen&hal at Toulouse or the bailiff of the
Labourd - lost, their voices stilled. Not just the marriage contracts and wills
I sought, but those family plans and final words of other Artigatois before
their local notary - lost. Inhabitants of Artigat had gone to notaries as far
away as Montesquieu-Volvestre to have their contracts drawn, while others
had waited until a notary from elsewhere in the Conni de Foix came to
Artigat on his regular rounds.
Indeed, it was in the papers of Jean Pegulha, notary of nearby Le Fossat,
3 S
that I had found the 1563 documents with the names of Pierre and Martin
Guerre. This time around I discovered in Pegulha's circle at Le Fossat in r Tl
the 1560s one Francois Belbeze, a notary who decades later would record
the division of property between the heirs of Martin Guerre.11 But by the
1560s, Artigat had its own notary as well. I arrived now with his name, Tl
culled from another act of Pegulha - Me Jean Bramayrac - and that of his 9_ =0
successors later in the century, Claude Guilhemet and Jacques Loze.131 gave 3 £
their names to the archivist as if somehow uttering them would bring their 3
itudes into being, but in fact their contracts, so carefully drawn up, have
r t_
disappeared and with them the fullest look at Artigat life.
C
8
•«» J>
4. s: 33
I had yet a third reaction as I leafed through the archival registers: baffled *•• <
delight at discoveries whose relevance is felt but elusive. On the 20th of
September 1559, the Tournelle of the Parlement de Toulouse turned down
the appeal of Dominge Rebendaire and Jean Deloch, prisoners in the
Conciergerie, from a sentence of the Sen&hal de Toulouse; the Senegal's
sentence - not specified here - was to be put into effect.141 jumped at the
name Dominge Rebendaire. On the 16th September 1560, a few hours before
his execution in Artigat, Arnaud du Tilh had named two men to serve as
executors of his will and guardians of his daughter with Bertrande de Rois,
12. Archives departementales de l'Ariege (henceforth ADAr), 5E6653,7v-8v, i4r, 6iv,
72r, 2i2v-2i3r. ADHG, B, Insinuations, vol. 6,95V-97V.
13. ADAr, 5E6655, i4r-i6r; 3E5335, io8r-v; Pasquier, "Nomination d'un notaire a
Artigat en 1578".
14. ADHG, 1B3427,20 September 1559.
86 CHAPTER THREE
now to be known as Bernarde du Tilh. One of those men was his brother
Jean du Tilh, the other was Dominique Rebendaire of Toulouse.
Back in 1981,1 had tried and failed to find out more about Rebendaire:
if he had been on a list of suspected heretics, for instance, that would have
added confirmation to my speculation that Arnaud had sympathies for the
new religion. But this brief decree did not mention heresy, and Raymond
Mentzer and Joan Davies, specialists on heretics before the court of Toulouse,
have no record of him.15 The decisions of the Sendchal de Toulouse for that
year are lost in regard to criminal cases, so I could pursue his trial no further.
Could I then draw any meaning from the document I had come across?
Two days later, on the 22th of September 1559, the Tournelle had freed a
certain Gratianne de Ribaulte from the prisons of the Capitouls of Tou-
louse, where she had been held until she paid a fine of 200 livres to Jean
d'Escornebeuf.161 knew the latter well and had written about him in my
Return of Martin Guerre: a small seigneur in the Leze Valley, who had been
trying to buy land and expand his influence in Artigat. In late 1559 he had
accused "Martin Guerre" of burning down one of his farms and had him ar-
rested and imprisoned in the Conciergerie of Toulouse. It was in the course
of that trial before the Sen6chal that doubts about the identity of Martin
Guerre had first been mooted in a judicial setting; Bertrande had been a
warm supporter of the imprisoned man, and he hadfinallybeen freed after
arbitration between him and Escornebeuf.
Perhaps Arnaud/Martin had first met Dominique Rebendaire in the
prisons of Toulouse. Perhaps there was an earlier connection between the
two men. Perhaps Rebendaire's imprisonment had something to do with
Escornebeuf as well, and maybe Gratienne de Ribaulte was also known to
Arnaud/Martin and Rebendaire. Whatever the case, when did Rebendaire
learn of the true identity of Martin Guerre? Was Rebendaire among the
Toulousains and others from near and far who crowded into the courtroom
on the 12th of September 1560 to hear the decree condemning Arnaud du
Tilh for imposture?
These questions are unanswerable on the basis of documents discovered
until now, and collateral evidence can not serve in this particular instance.
15. Letter of Barbara Beckerman Davis, 26 November 1981 regarding her search
for Rebendaire in Toulouse tax recordsfrom1555 to 1560.1 have checked and
re-checked for Rebendaire in La France protestante and the Livre des habitants de
Geneve. E-mail of Raymond Mentzer, 30 September 2008; e-mail of Joan Davies,
3 October 2008.1 am very grateful to these colleagues for their kind help.
16. ADHG, 1B3427.22 September 1558.
THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVES, THE RENOWN OF THB STORY 87
What "actually happened" to Rebendaire might advance Arnaud du Tilh's
story in interesting ways; what "might have happened" less so. I pose the
questions here only to illustrate the intellectual pleasure a document can
bring to a historian, unexpected surprises that unsettle any notion of com-
plete knowledge.
Here is one other example of both the openness and the opacity of the
past. In returning to the archives, I decided to try once again to locate the
Guerre family of Artigat in the Basque world of Hendaye, from which Sanxi
Guerre had departed with his wife, his son Martin, and his brother Pierre
around 1528. What connections did they continue to have with relatives
there? Did Martin Guerre pass through during his years of absence from
Artigat? And could I find traces of Arnaud/Martin's efforts in the late 1550s
to sell some of the Daguerre family holdings in the Labourd?
The only remnants of notarial action in the Labourd are tucked away in
the papers of the Urtubie family, the dominant seigneurs in the region from
the fifteenth century. Rereading these papers, I pondered the Daguerres
who surfaced as they crossed the paths of the Urtubies. Who was this
Johanto Daguerre, caught in 1555, together with several other inhabitants Tl
of Hendaye and adjacent Urrugne, in a property dispute with Jean Dalsate,
seigneur d'Urtubie? Who was this Jehan Daguerre, cure' of a tiny rural par-
ish, and present at the 1554 contract of Jean Dalsate's son and heir? And 3
especially, who was this Martin Guerre, royal notary in the bailliage de
Labourd, before whom a member of the Urtubie clan made his will in the
Urrugne chateau in June 1559?'7 Of course, this was not my man with the
wooden leg, who could not write his name and who, as a former combatant
for the armies of Spain, did not dare enter France until the recently signed E 5
Treaty of Cateau-Cambr&is was fully in effect. But could the efforts of the
Artigat "Martin Guerre" to sell the Daguerre properties in Hendaye have
come to attention of this Basque notary with the same name? Again, ques-
tions with no possible answer in sight, and the source only of the historian's
amused wonder.
As for Martin Guerre's years in Spain and in the service of the Mendoza
family, I had long yearned to cross the Pyrenees myself and track him down.
Burgos, where Martin had served as a lackey in the household of the absen-
tee archbishop Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla and his brother Pedro,
was daunting. To try to locate one specific Basque runner in the wealth of
17. Archives departmentales des Pyrenees Atlantiques (henceforth ADPyA), 1J160/2,
9 January 1553/54; 1J160/3,121559; 1J160/4,5 March 1554/55,1 April 1555.
I f f
r
88 CHAPTER THREE
city and diocesan records would take months, and the papers of Francisco
and Pedro de Mendoza y Bobadilla were dispersed.18
But perhaps I could find the house of the order of San Juan de Jerusalen,
in which one of the Mendoza brothers (presumably the muitary captain
Pedro) had found a place for Martin Guerre as a lay brother after he lost his
leg at the battle of Saint-Quentin. Here might lie a clue to his decision to
return to France. James Amelang kindly investigated for me at the archives
for the military orders of Spain (the Seccion de Ordenes Militares of the Ar-
chivo Hist6rico Nacional), located near his home in Madrid, but could find
nothing in the catalogues. He and a helpful archivist agreed that some clue
was needed as to which of the commanderies among the four great units of
the Spanish Hospitalers (Castilla y Leon, Amposta, Navarra, Cataluna) had
received the man with the wooden leg. The only possibility was to find the
letter of Pedro de Mendoza to Philip II requesting the appointment and the
king's response, and it was most likely located in the Camara de Castilla (the
i n
section of the Royal Council that handled petitions) in the state archives at
Simancas. Before getting my plane ticket, I checked the Guia del Investigador
for the Simancas archives, only to discover that the most probable section of
the Camara de Castilla, the registers concerning solicitations for positions
in the military orders, did not begin till the second half of the reign of Philip
II, much too late for Martin Guerre.19
To console myself for yet another silence, I explored recent publications
on the Hospitalers in Spain, a moving front in current Spanish social history.
And there in the records of the Grand Priory of Navarre I found Sanxi Guerra
making a gift of land and a vineyard in Carranza in the Basque country to his
son Martin Guerra, to pass to a commandery of San Juan de Jerusalem at his
death. The only problem was that this all happened in 1247.20
18. Books on Burgos published since 1982 showing the richness of the archives there
include Ibanez Perez, Burgos y los burgaleses en el sigh XVI; Vicario Santamarfa,
Censo-Guia de los Archivosparroquiales de la Didcesis de Burgos; Vicario Santama-
rfa, Catdlogo de los Archivos de Cofradias de la Didcesis de Burgos.
19. E-mail from James Amelang, 16 July 2008.1 am very grateful to James Amelang
and the archivist at the Seccion de Ordenes Militares for their assistance. Archive
General de Simancas, Guia del Investigador, 148. A printed catalogue exists for
"diversos de Castilla," the other promising section of the Camara de Castilla -
Catdlogo 1, Diversos de Castilla. Cdmara de Castilla (972-1716) - but, though full
of fascinating material, it includes nothing on Martin Guerre.
20. Gutierrez del Arroyo, Catdlogo de la documentacidn navarra de la Orden de San
Juan de JerusaUn en el Archivo Histdrko Nacional. Sighs XII-XIX, no. 2537. A
Martin Guerra makes a donation in 1197-1198, nos. 1424,3674.
THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVES, THE RENOWN OF THE STORY 89
5.
Is there any connection between the silences of the archives and the renown
of the story, or are these losses just coincidental? There is a connection
insofar as the Martin Guerre story concerns specific individuals - it is not a
generic tale - and the persons are peasants. Indeed, that Martin, Bertrande,
and Arnaud were mere villagers was part of the fascination of the tale to
well-born readers and listeners over the centuries. But peasants are much
more difficult to document individually than judges of the court of Toulouse
like the storyteller Jean de Coras.
The stubborn search for direct evidence is the historian's heartbeat.
Gaps in the evidence can be left open as mysteries to ponder or can be filled
with well-grounded speculation, but the desire to tell a good story is always
in exchange with the hunger to know.
I end with two sets of relations I uncovered in this recent quest. They 0
can suggest how the Martin Guerre story might have been received in dif-
ferent family settings.
The Moroccan diplomat Hasan al-Wazzan, the subject of my Trickster
Travels, was captured in 1518 by the Spanish pirate Pedro de Cabrera y Boba-
TI
dilla, and before being imprisoned at the papal Castel Sant'Angelo was held
for a time at the Roman residence of Pedro's brother, Francisco de Cabrera
y Bobadilla, absentee bishop of Salamanca and Cardinal of the Holy Roman 3
Church. The brothers surely kept some track of al-Wazzan's life in Rome:
his baptism at Saint Peter's in 1520 at the hand of Pope Leo X and his new
name of Giovanni Leone, his teaching of Arabic, his writing, and his abrupt
departure and return to North Africa and Islam in 1527 (a return disap-
pointing to the Christians). News of the captive and his shifts undoubtedly 3
reached their sister in Spain, Isabel de Cabrera y Bobadilla, wife of Diego
Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis de Canete. While the Muslim convert was
spending his years traveling and writing in Italy, Isabel was bringing up her
sons Francisco and Pedro de Mendoza y Bobadilla. By 1528, Erasmus was
already celebrating the talented young humanist Francisco.31
Francisco and Pedro are, of course, the men into whose household
in Burgos Martin Guerre arrived around 1550. (All the time I was writing
my book on al-Wazzan I did not make this connection between the two
21. Davis, Trickster Travels, 55-56,77.293 n. 1,294 n. 3; Davis, Lion I'Africain, 69-70,
93,331 nn. 1,3; Gutierrez Coronel, Historia genealdgica de la casa de Mendoza,
tome 2,483-484; Lopez Martinez, "El Cardenal Mendozay la Reforma Tridentina
en Burgos".
90 CHAPTER THREE
generations.) During the years up to 1557, when Francisco was in papal
service in Italy, he must have heard anew of his uncle's earlier captive: the
Ramusio edition of the Descrittione dell'Africa by "Giovan Lioni Africano"
was coming out in two editions from the Venetian presses (1550,1556), and
Francisco's cousin, the royal ambassador and humanist Diego Hurtado de
Mendoza, with whom Francisco was in touch in those years, had already
acquired one of al-Wazzan's precious manuscripts.21
Back in Spain, Pedro, too, must have got word from his brother of the
former family captive, who seems to have dissimulated his conversion
and then abandoned Christianity, but who had at least left valuable writ-
ings about Africa, Islam and Arabic language and letters behind him. I do
not imagine Pedro de Mendoza y Bobadilla, comendador of Santiago and
captain in the king's army, talking about "Joan Lione Africano" to Martin
Guerre, a mere lackey in his household and then a mere foot-soldier under
one of his officers. But I do think that the earlier family connection to the
kidnapped Muslim would have influenced the brothers' eventual reception
of the story of Martin Guerre.
In the summer of 1560, Francisco was ensconced in Burgos, attend-
ing to the reform of his diocese. Several months before, at the request of
Philip II, he and Pedro had met the king's new bride, Elisabeth de Valois, at
Roncesvalles to welcome her to Spain in confirmation of the peace recently
struck between France and Spain. But now Francisco had a complaint to
make to the king: his cousin on his mother's side, Pedro de Cabrera y
Bobadilla, second Count of Chinchon - a nephew of the pirate Pedro - had
sought entry into one of the Spanish military orders but was being refused
on the grounds of insufficient proof of nobility. In response, Francisco
penned a surprising text for Philip II, El Tizdn de la Nobleza (The Stain of
the Nobility), in which he showed that the great houses of Spain all had Jews,
or sometimes Muslims or slaves among their ancestors, or had progenitors
born illegitimately to men of the church. (Along the way he concealed the
Jewish conversos among the relatives of his maternal grandfather Andres de
Cabrera.) The Cardinal signed his Tizdn on the 20th of August 1560.23
22. Davis, Trickster Travels, 97-97,255,258,395; Davis, Lion I'Africain, 114-115,291-292,
295,442.
23. Mendoza y Bobadilla, El Tizdn de la Nobleza, ed. Escudero, 25; El Tizdn de la
Nobleza de Espafia, ed. Escobar Olmedo, xxx, 84. Baron, A Social and Religious
History of the Jews, vol. 15: Resettlement and Exploration, 478 n. 62. http://grandesp.
org.uk/historia/gzas/chinchoni.htm; Rabade Obrad6, Una elite de poder en la
Carte de los Reyes Catdlicos. Los judeoconversos, 173-191.
THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVES, THE RENOWN OF THE STORY 91
Francisco and Pedro had much else on their minds a few weeks later
when Martin Guerre appeared at the Parlement de Toulouse, but they surely
heard about the dramatic turn of events in which their former lackey/soldier
was involved. Word would have gotten across the border to Burgos even
before the books of Coras and Lesueur spread the news. To the family's
memory of its kidnapped Muslim could now be added its contact with a
runaway husband and his return; to the dissimulation of al-Wazzan, the
imposture of Arnaud du Tilh; to the unmasking of the genealogy of Spanish
nobility, the unmasking of genealogy in a Pyrenean village.
6.
A second set of relations is set in the Labourd and spanned more than a
century. During my recent search, I visited Hendaye for the first time, in-
cluding a stop close by at the Urtubie chateau at Urrugne. There I learned
the story of the heiress Marie d'Urtubie. Her husband Jean de Montreal went n
off with Louis XI in 1463 and Marie, perhaps believing him dead, remarried
in 1469 Roderigo de Gamboa Dalsate. Some years later Jean de Montreal
returned, but was able to reclaim his rights to his wife and her property only
in 1497, after Roderigo had died and the Parlement of Bordeaux had issued
a decree in Jean's favor. Rather than accede, Marie, now known throughout
the Labourd as "la bigame? set fire to the chateau and went to live with her 3
Dalsate relatives till her death in 1503. The quarrel between the Montreal and
Dalsate descendants continued for decades, with the latter keeping the title
to the seigneury of Urtubie and the former reconstructing the chateau; it was
finally resolved in 1574, when Jean Dalsate married Aim6e de Montreal.24
Thus, the story of "la bigame" Marie d'Urtubie was afloat when Sanxi 5
and Pierre Daguerre were growing up in Hendaye, and it was still part of the
local memory decades later, when rumors of the two husbands of Bertrande
de Rois reached the town in which her first husband had been born and
still had relatives. This conjuncture must have aroused laughter and head-
shaking, and encouraged a suspicion among the Basques that Bertrande
had some initiative in the matter.
Then at the end of the century, a second way of framing the case of
Martin Guerre came into Hendaye and Urrugne. In 1598, Tristan d'Urtubie,
great-great-grandson of la bigame, married Catherine de Montaigne,
daughter of Geoffroy de Montaigne, seigneur de Bussaguet and conseiller
in the Parlement of Bordeaux. Geoffroy de Montaigne was first cousin to
24. Coral, Chateau d'Urtubie.
92 CHAPTER THREE
Michel de Montaigne, and had known him well until Michel's death in 1592.
Michel had, we recall, been present at the reading of Coras's arret before
the Parlement of Toulouse in September 1560 and had heard Arnaud du
Tilh still claiming that day that he was Martin Guerre. Undoubtedly the
two cousins, both men of the law, had debated this case between them even
before Michel de Montaigne raised questions about the death sentence in
his "Des boiteux," "On the Lame," published in the Essais of 1588.25
Catherine de Montaigne surely had a copy of the Essais among her
books at the chateau d'Urtubie, perhaps even a signed presentation copy of
the new 1595 edition, edited by Montaigne's chosen literary executor Marie
Jars de Gournay. Gournay had visited Geoffroy de Montaigne shortly after
Michel's death, and she spoke of him approvingly in her preface to the Es-
sais as the cousin who now bore "with dignity the name of the house of
Montaigne."26
Michel de Montaigne used the imposture case, among other examples,
to illustrate how difficult it can be to know what is true: "la verite" et le
mensonge ont leurs visages conformes" "truth and falsehood have faces
that resemble each other" (I give Montaigne's argument again as I did in
my book, an argument that bears repeating in all seasons.) So many abusive
consequences in the world derived from reckless and arrogant judgment,
made in situations where uncertainty or the moderate expression of opin-
ion was in order. "On me fait hair les choses vraisemblables quand on me les
plante pour infaillibles," "I am made to hate plausible things when they are
pitched to me as infallible." The admission of ignorance was sometimes the
best path to knowledge (science). Montaigne then spoke of the trial he had
seen and of Coras's book about "un accident Strange," "a strange case":
25. ADPyA, 1J160/2,2 April 1598. Geoffroy de Montaigne, sieur de Bussaguet, was the
oldest son and heir of Montaigne's uncle Raymond Eyguem de Montaigne, sieur
de Bussaguet. Geoffrey's relations with his cousin Michel and his close relatives
can be followed in the documents published in Malvezin, Michel de Montaigne,
son origine, safamille, 84-87,286-287,301-303.306-307,314-315-
26. Montaigne, Les Essais, "Preface... par sa.Fille d'Alliance", 49: "Et le sieur de
Bussaguet son cousin, qui porte dignement le nom de la maison de Montaigne, a
laquelle il sert d'un bon pilier depuis quelle a perdu le sien." The footnote here (49,
n. 2) wrongly identifies "le sieur de Bussaguet" as the youngest of Montaigne's four
uncles; the latter was Raymond de Bussaguet, Geoffrey's father, who died in 1563
(Malvezin, Montaigne, 286-287; Montaigne, Essais, Livre 3, chap. 37,1191). After
his father's death, Geoffroy de Montaigne is repeatedly referred to as the Sieur de
Bussaguet in the documents published by Malvezin.
THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVES, THE RENOWN OF THE STORY 93
... de deux hommes qui se presentaient l'un pour l'autre: il me souvient
... qu'il me sembla avoir rendu 1'imposture de celui qu'il jugea coupable,
si merveilleuse et exc^dant de si loin notre connaissance, et la sienne
qui £tait juge, que je trouvai beaucoup de hardiesse en l'arret qui l'avait
condamn^ a &tre pendu.
(... of two men who presented themselves one for the other. I remember
... that [Coras] seemed to have rendered the imposture of the man
whom he judged guilty so wondrous and so exceeding our knowledge
and his own as judge, that I found much boldness in the edict that had
condemned him to be hanged.)
He then went on to talk of the "sorcieres," the witches, in his neighborhood
and of authors who gave flesh to the mere dreams of these women. Accusa-
tions against them and their confessions, often in contradiction to everyday
observation, should be greeted with doubt and with recognition of our
human frailty.27
We do not know how Catherine de Montaigne put her cousin Michel's "n
response to the imposture of Arnaud du Tilh together with Hendaye gossip "•Xi
about Martin Guerre and other local bigamy. But the larger message of "Des
boiteux" was totally lost on her husband. In 1608 Tristan d'Urtubie was one 3
of the two seigneurs in the Labourd who urged the Parlement de Bordeaux
to send a commission to investigate the witchcraft activities in their lands.
Indeed, according to the Bishop of Pamplona, who was troubled about the
witch craze that had crossed the border into the Spanish Basque country, it
had all begun when 3
the Lord of Urtubie ... seized certain old women on his own authority
and, holding them prisoners, extracted from one of them an account
of all the witches in the village of Urrugne ... Those mentioned in the
account - both religious and lay - were enemies and opponents of the
Lord of Urtubie.
The Parlementary investigation, headed by Pierre de Lancre, lasted for four
months, during which the devil's disguises and spells and the abominations
of the witches' sabbaths were described. Two teen-aged girls confessed that at
one sabbath the devil convinced them they were hanging the Sire d'Urtubie
27. Montaigne, Essais, Livre 3, chap. 11,1593-1608.
 T
94 CHAPTER THREE
and the other seigneur who had denounced them; neither man reported
feeling a thing. Several witches were executed, including Petri Daguerre,
aged seventy-three, found to be "le maistre des ceremonies et gouverneur
du sabbat," "the master of ceremonies and governor of the sabbath," his wife,
and most of his family.28
Pierre de Lancre mentioned approvingly the demise of Petri Daguerre
in his vehement Tableau de I'inconstance des mauvais anges et demons of 1612,
intended to prove beyond a doubt that witches really did all the dreadful and
dangerous things they confessed to. Jean de Coras, who had written of the
"tragicomedy" of Arnaud du Tilh and Martin Guerre, would have drawn a
more mixed and uncertain message from the trials of these Basque women
and men. But Coras was long since dead, murdered in an anti-Protestant riot
in Toulouse in October 1572. Still, as we have seen, the strange tale of Martin
Guerre, with all its gaps, had a life of its own, entwining people of diverse
station and unsettling claims to absolute knowledge and social pretension.
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Archivo General de Simancas, Gufa del Investigador, second edition. Madrid: Min-
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Baron, Salo Wittmayer. A Social and Religious History of the Jews 18 vols; voL 15: Reset-
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Inquisition (1609-1614), 24,123,130-131, 384. As an amusing coincidence, the
Spanish Council of Inquisition, which in 1614 put an end to the witch-craze in the
Spanish Basque country, included Francisco de Mendoza and Rodrigo de Castro
y Bobadilla. Following the recommendations of the insightful Friar Alonso de
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to establishing whether confessions referred to events that had really happened
and instructed priests to tell their people "that it is ... most undesirable to ...
believe that the witches are always to blame" for damage to crops, the death of
animals or children. Sometimes these were God's punishment, sometimes natural
events (ibid., 359, 371-376). Perhaps these men were cousins of the Mendoza y
Bobadilla who welcomed Martin Guerre.
THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVES, THE RENOWN OF THE STORY 95
Coras, Jean de. Arrest Memorable, du Parlement de Tolose, Contenant une histoire
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; i
Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Madison, Wis.: Univer-
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96 CHAPTER THREE

Henningsen, Gustav. 77ie Witches'Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inqui-
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CHAPTER FOUR
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Vicario Santamaria, Marias. Censo-Gufa de los Archivos parroquiales de la Didcesis de manifold meanings have for a long time been at the very heart of Bloch's
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Different versions of this paper have been presented in Rome (Universita della
Sapienza), Be'er Sheva (Ben-Gurion University), in Los Angeles (Department of
History, UCLA), Berlin (Freie Universitat). Many thanks are due to Andrea Ginz-
burg, Christopher Ligota, Perry Anderson and (especially) Simona Cerutti for their
criticism, and to Sam Gilbert and Henry Monaco for their linguistic revision.
1. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 34; "Car, au grand desespoir des historiens, les hommes
n'ont pas coutume, chaque fois qu'ils changent de mceurs, de changer de vocabulaire."
Bloch, "Apologie pour l'histoire", 872. This passage has been brought again to my
attention by Ciafaloni, "Le domande di Vittorio. Un ricordo di Vittorio Foa", 42.