Carlo Ginzburg: Looking at Europe from the Orient

CEU Department of History presents "Looking at Europe from the Orient (1704-1706): An Exercise in Slow Reading" a public lecture by Carlo Ginzburg, University of California, Los Angeles The lecture focus on an early document of a comparative approach to religions as an example of the Enlightenment ambivalence towards European civilization. What is the relationship between wide-ranging historical statements and a punctual demonstration? Which are the implications of a negative case study? A tentative answer to these questions will follow. Carlo Ginzburg, one of the most influential historians living today, is founder of microhistory. He is the Franklin D. Murhpy professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at UCLA, and emeritus professor of history at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He is the author, among other influential works, "The Cheese and Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller"; "The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries"; "The enigma of Piero"; "The Judge and the Historian. Marginal Notes and a late-Twentieth-century Miscarriage of Justice". His latest book is "Threads and Traces: True, FAlse, Fictive, published in 2012.