“Historian’s Craft” graduate seminar members attend Carlo Ginzburg’s lecture at BU

Famed historian Carlo Ginzburg, author of the classic The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller;  Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, and The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. and numerous important essays on early modern European history and  on historiographical theory,  delivered an exciting lecture entitled “Unintentional Revelations: Reading Historical Evidence against the Grain”  on April 13, as part of the Boston University Lectures in Criticism.

Ginzburg is Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at UCLA, and professor emeritus at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, Italy. His lecture examined the historiographical insights of Marc Bloch, Arnaldo Momigliano, French 17th century antiquarians, Giambattista Vico and many others to show how “reading against the grain” and obliquely in sources is of capital importance to reveal historical clues and traces of oppression.

A small but enthusiastic contingent from the Historian’s Craft Graduate Seminar (HI 801) attended the event. Pictured with the visiting historical celebrity are Professor Eugenio Menegon (instructor) and graduate students Matthew Lavallee and Andrew Bell, together with  Prof. Anna Busquets Alemany, a visiting China historian from the Open University in Barcelona, currently at Boston University for research.

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