Courses

Prerequisites: The class will be in Italian. The knowledge of Italian is required. However, students who understand Italian but prefer to discuss the texts in English are very welcome.

Between 1960 and 1980 Leonardo Sciascia and Italian micro-historians reflected extensively on the relation between history and fiction. How did they relate with nineteenth century Italian historical fiction? How did they use fiction and non-fiction as hermeneutical tools to understand the Italian past, and especially pre-modern Italy? How did Carlo Ginzburg and Leonardo Sciascia read Manzoni? And what did Sciascia find in Natalie Zemon Davis’ books? Are microhistory and global history compatible? What is history from ‘below’? Is it compatible with the history of the ‘in-between’? We will probe these questions of large import for both literary historians and historians through an examination of Alessandro Manzoni’s Storia della Colonna Infame, Italian historical non-fictions, such as Leonardo Sciascia’s inchieste, Nuto Revelli’s Il disperso di Marburg and Wu Ming’s Asce di guerra, and the masterpieces of Italian, European and American microhistory. Also we will explore the impact of Italian Microhistory on both contemporary American historiography and Italian non-fiction. Topics include pre-modern popular culture and literacy, minority and marginality, the Inquisition, individual identity, and the relation between pre-modern Italy, Europe and the global world.