Carlo Ginzburg: Rapporti di forza
History

Reviews

History, Rhetoric, and Proof

Storia, retorica, prova


ISBN: 9788822907417
publisher: Quodlibet
year: 2022
pages: 192

 

Historian Carlo Ginzburg uses the occasion of his Menachem Stern Lectureship to present a provocative and characteristically brilliant examination of the relation between rhetoric and historiography. In four lectures, based on a wide range of texts -- Aristotle’s Poetics; humanist Lorenzo Valla’s tract exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; an early 18th-century Jesuit historical account purporting to record the diatribe of a Mariana Island native against Spanish rule; and Proust’s commentary on Flaubert’s style -- he demonstrates that rhetoric, if properly understood, is related not only to ornament but to historical understanding and truth. Ginzburg discovers a middle ground between the empiricist or positivist view of history, and the current postmodern tendency to regard any historical account as just one among an infinity of possible narratives, distinguished or measured not by the standard of truth, but by rhetorical skill. As a whole, these lectures stake out a position that both mediates and transcends warring factions in the current historiographical debate.

 

Translations

Carlo Ginzburg: History, Rhetoric, and Proof
USA. University Press of New England, 1999
Carlo Ginzburg: Güç İlişkileri. Tarih, Retorik, Kanıt
Turkey, Dost Kitabevi, 2006
Carlo Ginzburg: Rekishi, retorikku, risshō
Japan, Misuzu Shobo, 2001
Carlo Ginzburg: Relações de força
Brazil, Companhia das letras, 2002