Mario Cresci's

Abstract

‘Any claim to systematic knowledge appears as a flight of foolish fancy. To acknowledge this is not to abandon the idea of totality .... Reality is opaque; but there are certain points — clues, symptoms — which allow us to decipher it’.¹ Searching for an epistemological model, or paradigm in the social sciences, the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg wrote these words in an essay published in 1979 under the title ‘Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes’. Ginzburg was able to weave into his essay many threads in an interdisciplinary discussion on the research method used, towards the end of the nineteenth century, by an Italian art connoisseur (Giovanni Morelli), a physician in Vienna (Sigmund Freud), and a British writer of detective stories (Arthur Conan Doyle). What unified their method was the attention paid to ‘marginal and irrelevant details as revealing clues’,² for the attribution of a painting, the analysis of a symptom, and the discovery of a criminal. In his own work, Ginzburg considered this paradigm as an effective research method for the study of obscure fields of human culture, such as witchcraft and popular beliefs.³