Distance and Historical Representation

Abstract

The questions I want to raise here first presented themselves to me in a pointed way during an undergraduate class on historiography. I had recently published a social and intellectual biography of a little-known mid fifteenth-century Florentine merchant and memorialist named Marco Parenti, whose anonymous history of a failed revolt against the Medici I had discovered in the Florentine archives.1 The collapse of the anti Medicean faction must have made it expedient to hide the narrative, and over time both the unfinished history and the would-be historian had faded into nearly total obscurity a condition that seemed to make Parenti an ideal subject for microhistory, that favourite form of late twentieth-century historical writing. My students had perhaps not taken away from the book as much as I would have wanted about the forms and traditions of Renais sance historical writing. Still, they appeared to have enjoyed the more concrete elements of this narrative of ideas, especially the mix of political intrigue, intimate social detail, and strong personality preserved in the family correspondence that was my chief biographical resource. But along side these narrative pleasures, there was also some nervousness about how much to trust this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vision of a period they were accustomed to thinking of in grander terms. One student in particu lar stays in my memory because he was prepared to put his doubts quite bluntly, as well as to extend them to other, more notable representatives of the genre the lousy Cathar peasants, massacred cats, deluded millers, and returned 'husbands' he had encountered in more than one of his under graduate history courses. My protestations that these microhistorians had found a new way to represent ordinary lives and everyday experience were simply waved away: 'Aren't you really saying that your generation came too late to get the really important stuff the lives of people like Cosimo de' Medici or Lorenzo the Magnificent so really there was not much left over for you to write about except this bunch of odd balls and small potatoes?' Since my first defence had met only limited success, I improvised a new direction that in retrospect has come to seem more fruitful because more historical. I asked them to consider a choice between two quite different accounts of the battle of Stalingrad. The first book presents this crucial battle in a form that is traditional to military histories: that is, it provides a tactical narrative of the conflict and analyzes the success of the Soviet command in outmanoeuvring the German army, so that the invaders found themselves encircled and cut off from all supplies, surrender finally being their only option. Alternately they might want to read a rather different sort of narrative, one that, deliberately ignoring the larger strategic