#did he read this essay when it was published? who knows. but a pleasant symmetry nonetheless

[power-chords]

The ability to tell an unhealthy horse from the state of its hooves, a storm coming up from a shift in the wind, or unfriendly intentions from the shadow in someone's expression would certainly not be learned from treatises on the care of horses, or of weather, or on psychology. In each case these kinds of knowledge were richer than any written authority on the subject; they had been learned not from books but from listening, from doing, from watching; their subtleties could scarcely be given formal expression and they might not even be reducible to words; they were the heritage — partly common and partly split — of men and women of any class. A fine common thread connected them; they were all born of experience, of the concrete and individual. That concrete quality was both the strength of this kind of knowledge and its limit; it could not make use of the powerful and terrible tool of abstraction.

From time to time attempts would be made to write down some part of this lore, locally rooted but without known origin or record or history, to fit it into a straitjacket of terminological precision. This usually constricted and impoverished it. . . it was perhaps only with medicine that the codifying and recording of conjectural lore produced a real enrichment; but the story of the relation between official and popular medicine has still to be written. In the course of the eighteenth century things changed. In a real cultural offensive the bourgeoisie appropriated more and more of the traditional lore of artisans and peasants, some of it conjectural, some not; they organized and recorded it, and at the same time intensified the massive process of cultural invasion which had already begun, though taking different forms and with different content, during the counter-reformation. . .

—Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: clues and scientific method,” 1980

#the italian lit theorists don’t have to go this hard but they always do #did he read this essay when it was published? who knows. but a pleasant symmetry nonetheless #thief 1981 #carlo ginzburg #michael mann