A collection of diverse yet interconnected essays from one of the
world's most respected historians.
Carlo Ginzburg has been at the forefront of the discipline of
microhistory ever since his earliest works were published to great
acclaim in the 1970s. The Soul of Brutes brings together four of
Ginzburg's recent scintillating essays and lectures that testify to the
diversity of his thoughts on history and philosophy.
"Civilization and Barbarism" resurrects a sixteenth-century debate
between two thinkers in Spain about the humanness, or lack thereof, of
Native Americans, and highlights the influence of classical thinkers,
from Herodotus to Aristotle, and the iterations and interpretations
through which their writings have traversed down to the Cinquecento. In
"The Soul of Brutes" Ginzburg traces the genealogy of the debate on the
rationality of animals and the limits of their imagination, from
Plutarch and Aristotle to sixteenth-century thinkers like Pietro
Pomponazzi and Girolamo Rorario. Following Montaigne, he provokes, are
we to beasts as they seem to us? In "Calvino, Manzoni and the Grey
Zone," Carlo Ginzburg pithily writes about the mental dialogue between
Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and two Italians who profoundly influenced
Levi's search for these "unexplored pockets of exception"--his
contemporary Italo Calvino and the nineteenth-century novelist and
philosopher Alessandro Manzoni. And finally, in "Schema and Bias", he
probes whether the historian can clearly see into the past, peering
through the layers of bias, which include their own prejudices, or if
relativism is the only path.
With several beautifully reproduced color illustrations, The Soul of
Brutes will interest not only scholars of history, philosophy, and art,
but also general intellectual readers.
