Giovanni Levi

Giovanni Levi (born April 29, 1939 in Milan ) is an Italian historian .

Life

After finishing school in Turin and Genoa , Giovanni Levi studied history at the University of Turin from 1958 to 1964 , where he then worked in various assistant positions as a modern historian . From 1971 to 1983 he taught economic history at the University of Turin. From 1986 to 1990 Giovanni Levi worked as associate professor for modern history at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo and from 1990 as professor for economic history at the University of Venice . In 2008 Giovanni Levi retired.

In addition to teaching and research in Italy, Levi has taught at various universities in France, Spain, Argentina, Mexico and the USA.

He was co-editor of the magazine Quaderni storici and the Microstoria series of the Einaudi publishing house as well as the magazines Rivista di storia economica , Zakhor , l'Espill , Enquête and Pasajes .

Levi and the micro story

As an early modern historian, Giovanni Levi gained influence in the research world through a new approach to social history . Together with Carlo Ginzburg , Levi dealt in depth with the contrasts between the ruling urban elites and the simple rural population by developing and shaping the Italian microstoria ( micro history ) to a large extent in their work . With Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and Giovanni Levi's Das immaterial Erbe (1985), the two historians laid the foundation for a direction within historical science that was widely spread internationally.

Her micro-historical work is characterized by a reduction in the scope of the observation. They no longer only looked at what happened in the aristocratic elitist classes, but also local events in villages and families. The aim of this reduction in the scope of observation was to gain a new view of the power structure between those exercising power and the ruled, on the one hand, and the functioning and thinking of local social groups or families of the early modern period, on the other. According to Levi, however, micro-history is not defined exclusively by the reduced viewing space. Rather, Levi and Ginzburg use the intensive micro-historical examination of a small object of investigation to discover aspects that have not been considered until then, in order to draw conclusions on the macro level and thus to devote themselves to the 'big historical questions'.

In a 1992 paper, Levi summarized his main concerns about microhistory as follows:

"The unifying principle of all microhistorical research is the belief that microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved. Phenomena previously considered to be suffiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of observation. It is then possible to use these results to draw far wider generalizations although the initial observations were made within relatively narrow dimensions and as experiments rather than examples. "

Levi and other microhistorians explicitly distinguished themselves from other directions of historiography in their theoretical texts when developing the microhistorical research approach. In particular, they strictly rejected the principles of unification and the synthesis of history. The micro-historical criticism was directed primarily against the representatives of the Annales School and the serial historiography, which was shaped by Ernest Labrousse . Levi, in particular, accused them of a “quantitative epidemic”, which expressed itself in the excessive tendency to quantify data. Levi and others therefore wanted to separate the role of ordinary people from what they saw as anonymous economic or socio-cultural agents. Of course, Levi and other representatives of microhistory also used serial approaches. However, these do not enjoy the same total claim to validity in micro history.

While Ginzburg was involved in the left-wing radical movement Lotta continua in the 1970s , Giovanni Levi was active within the Italian Socialist Party in the movement of the New Left , which was very critical of the system and party. In an interview Levi emphasized a direct connection between his political engagement and the development of the scientific project of microhistory. Because of his political commitment, it had become clear to him that the previous understanding of classical Marxist class analysis no longer allowed an adequate understanding of historical reality. The concept of linearity within history is therefore no longer tenable, which is why a change in perspective has to be made. Levi saw this need implemented in the later developed micro-historical research approach. The micro-history can thus also be presented as the scientific conclusion of this political insight. Accordingly, Levi, as a social historian, also distinguished himself from historical sociology and cultural history , which, in his opinion, viewed political, social and economic structures too isolated from a macro perspective. For social historians, the political structures of rule, economic market relations and production relations are embedded in the social structures and are closely related to the world of religious and cultural representation. This social history of the effects of domination gained a growing dynamic in the 1960s with the influx of new political movements, reinforced by the increased involvement of British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology . Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg formed the Italian representatives of this new, strongly politically motivated direction.

Levi's major work The Intangible Heritage: A Peasant World on the Threshold of Modernity (1985)

→ Main article: The intangible inheritance

That under the original title L'eredità immateriale. Carriera di un exorcista nel Piemonte del Seicento is the best known work of Giovanni Levi. The micro-historical study examines the inhabitants of the small village of Santena , southeast of Turin, and carries out in-depth studies on the economy , agriculture and family structures as well as religion , magic and medicine . The focus is on the relationship between the ruled and the rulers. For the period from 1672 to 1709, Levi wanted to show that the peasant class of the population by no means played a purely passive role in dealing with modernity. On the basis of the findings from Santena, he attests that this segment of the population has future-oriented skills that are strongly geared towards the changes to be mastered in the near and distant future.

reception

Carlo Ginzburg mentions in his essay Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It that he first heard of the concept of microhistory in 1977 or 1978 through a conversation with Giovanni Levi. According to Ginzburg, microhistory is an older term, first introduced by George R. Stewart in 1959, but it was decisively further developed by Giovanni Levi, Carlo Ginzburg and Simona Cerutti through the editing of the Microstorie series of the Einaudi publishing house . According to Ginzburg, Levi was undoubtedly behind the development of microhistory away from pure microanalysis .

Also Francesca Trivellato a student Levis and even micro historian noted, in particular although few but the more influential theoretical writings on microhistory by Levi and Ginzburg. In addition to the journal Microstorie , she particularly mentions the journal Quaderni Storici , which served as a platform for Italian microhistorians. The importance of these journals lies primarily in the refusal of the Italian microhistorians to found their own, specifically microhistorically oriented school at a teaching institution.

Fonts (selection)

• Centro e periferia di uno Stato assoluto. Tre saggi su Piemonte e Liguria in età moderna. Rosenberg e Sellier, Turin 1985, ISBN 88-7011-211-X .
• The intangible inheritance. A rural world on the threshold of modernity. Wagenbach, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-8031-3527-3 .
• On microhistory. In: New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Pennsylvania State University Press, Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0-271-00834-2 .
• History of youth . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-10-021410-2 .
• The Origins of the Modern State and the Microhistorical Perspective. In: micro history - macro history. Complementary or Incommensurable? Wallstein, Göttingen 1998, ISBN 3-89244-321-1 .

Web links

• University of Venice, person research, Giovanni Levi.
• Blogspot, Curriculum Vitae, Giovanni Levi.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Samuele Potter: Giovanni Levi: Curriculum Vitae Giovanni Levi. December 20, 2010, accessed August 1, 2019 (Italian). 
2. ↑ Levi Giovanni. In: Università Ca 'Foscari Venezia. Retrieved August 1, 2019 (Italian). 
3. ^ Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon , István Szijártó : What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice . Routledge, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-415-69208-3 , pp. 20 .
4. ^ ^{A b} Lutz Raphael : History in the Age of Extremes. Theories, methods, tendencies from 1900 to the present . CH Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-60344-0 .
5. ↑ Giovanni Levi: On Microhistory . In: Peter Burke (Ed.): New Perspectives on Historical Writing . 2nd Edition. Pennsylvania State University Press, Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0-271-00834-2 , pp. 97 .
6. ↑ ^{a b} Thomas Kroll: The beginnings of the microstoria. Change of method, change of experience and transnational reception in European historiography of the 1970s and 1980s . In: Jeanette Granda, Jürgen Schreiber (eds.): Perspectives through retrospectives . Böhlau, Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-21086-1 .
7. ↑ Carlo Ginzburg: Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It . In: Critical Inquiry . tape 20 , no. 1 . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1993, pp. 10-35 .
8. ^ Francesca Trivellato: Microstoria / Microhistoire / Microhistory . In: French Politics, Culture & Society . tape 33 , no. 1 . Berghahn Books, New York 2015, pp. 122-134 .