The Past is a Foreign Country: a readlist in honor of Carlo Ginzburg
“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” That line comes from The Go-Between by LP Hartley. Hardly any historians have read the book, but they have all used the line.
Historians tend to side with Hannah Arendt, human nature may be whatever it is, but the “human condition” is what is shaped by our environment and that definitely changes over time. The people of the past are not just like us without cellphones, they saw the world very differently. There are things they found funny that we find horrifying. Some didn’t even appreciate humor. This readlist is all about books that help us understand that the human condition isn’t the same in every time and place.
This readlist is in honor of Carlo Ginzburg, a historian who led the way in microhistory and who also really helped readers see how foreign the past could be.
Carol Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976)
This book is considered an all-time classic of cultural history and microhistory. It’s all about a miller, Menocchio, who never really amounted to much in the eyes of the world. But he did get in trouble for heresy and the inquisition records reveal his surprising worldview. Among other things, he thought the world was formed much like how cheese is formed from milk. The Cheese and the Worms documents the persistence of non-Christian beliefs in Europe but it also demonstrates how much of the peasant worldview and folk tradition we really never think about or study very much, because we’re often so focused on the words and ideas of people higher up the social ladder or who are writing the kind of books that end up in the canon.
Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966)
While we are on Ginzburg, this is another famous work he wrote. This one is pretty well-described in the subtitle. What Ginzburg does really well is demonstrate how normal people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw themselves as participants in a spiritual world. That participation looked right and good to many of them, even while it looked like witchcraft to much of the church. Not every scholar liked Ginzburg’s interpretation of the Benandanti as keeping alive earlier fertility cults, but this work drew attention to religious beliefs of the time and further demonstrated the value of church archives.
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984)
It’s no secret that Orange Blossom Ordinary adores Robert Darnton. We’ve even done an interview with him. He’s written many great books, but The Great Cat Massacre is absolutely a classic of cultural history and one of the best books for understanding that the people of the past thought differently. It really involves a cat massacre, carried out by apprentices who remembered it as one of the best moments of their lives. The book also explains how people could be moved to tears reading Rousseau and more. I use this book in my classes and it is entertaining and educative.
Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (1999)
Bridget Cleary was one of the last people to be killed for being a changeling. When was it that her husband (perhaps) became convinced that she had been switched with a fairy? 1895. Not as long ago as you’d think. Now, even in 1895, people thought her husband was more of a murderer than a believer, but the story and the trial revealed the presence and power of beliefs in fairies and traditional cures and much more, including the status of women. The book really gets into all the angles.
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)
We are familiar with the idea of a “good death” being important to the Greeks and Romans. It was also very important to Americans during the Civil War. In fact, there was almost a prescribed way in which someone ought to die, including Christian repentance and hope. This book will help you understand the Civil War in a new way and it will also lead you to ponder the way our present-day culture approaches death.
David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (1998)
This work of history is about an event in 1858. Back then, in Italy, some Jewish families sometimes hired Christians for domestic help. And sometimes, when a baby looked like it might die, a Christian nurse might baptize it on the sly, to save its soul. And occasionally, the child would recover. In this case, that nurse also told a priest and then it was decided that the baby had to be removed from the family. After all, how could a Jewish family raise a Christian child? That probably sounds crazy to you (it did to his family), but this book explains why some people thought that was reasonable in 1858. That makes this book another great example of a work that can familiarize you with the unfamiliarity of the past.
Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774-1880 (1980)
This book often makes an appearance on this website, because it’s a great book. Reading about the Marquesan culture of the past reminds you how differently people from different times and places can view the world. But Islands and Beaches goes even further, because the book documents how change came so suddenly and disruptively to the Marquesas that it made its own culture foreign to its own people in a very short period of time. (If you’re a big fiction reader, you may get a taste of the transformation by reading Melville’s Typee (1846) and then reading Jack London’s The Cruise of the Snark (1911), which documents his visit to the Marquesas and his inability to find the world Melville described because it had already expired.)
--Elizabeth Stice
