What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? This title looks at these questions raised by decades of post-structuralism.

List of Illustrations Introduction 1. Description and Citation 2. The Conversion of the Jews of Minorca (A.D. 417--418) 3. Montaigne, Cannibals, and Grottoes 4. Proofs and Possibilities: Postscript to Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre 5. Paris, 1647: A Dialogue on Fiction and History 6. The Europeans Discover (or Rediscover) the Shamans 7. Tolerance and Commerce: Auerbach Reads Voltaire 8. Anacharsis Interrogates the Natives: A New Reading of an Old Best Seller 9. Following the Tracks of Israel Bertuccio 10. The Bitter Truth: Stendhal's Challenge to Historians 11. Representing the Enemy: On the French Prehistory of the Protocols 12. Just One Witness: The Extermination of the Jews and the Principle of Reality 13. Details, Early Plans, Microanalysis: Thoughts on a Book by Siegfried Kracauer 14. Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It 15. Witches and Shamans Notes Index

“Carlo Ginzburg weaves a spell-binding web of learning and surprises as he explores the question of truth in history and fiction and his own multiple engagement with the past. Whether dealing with Montaigne’s cannibals, Italian shamans, or anti-Semitic forgeries, Threads and Traces is a powerful and moving statement of the stakes in historical knowledge from one of our greatest historians.” —Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between WorldsPrevious Praise for Carlo Ginzburg“Ginzburg is a historian with an insatiable curiosity, who pursues even the faintest of clues with all the zest of a born detective until every fragment of evidence can be fitted into place.” —J.H. Elliott, New York Review of Books“Carlo Ginzburg has many claims to be considered the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties. Certainly few have equalled him in originality, variety and audacity.” —Perry Anderson, London Review of Books“Ginzburg's scholarship is dazzling and profound.” —Publisher’s Weekly