A micro-história como ferramenta historiográfica

The paper presents a type of historiography that emerged in the 1970s under the name of “microhistory”. The first part deals with three classics, namely Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976), Levi's Inherited Power (1985), both examples of the Italian line, and Medick's Weaving and Surviving in Laichingen (1996), which is part of the German history of everyday life. The three authors wanted to know details about commercial activity, culture, language, customs, beliefs and the social dynamics of society in the distant past. These topics connect microhistory not only with anthropology and economics, but also with psychology. The second part of the article shows how, towards the end of the 20th century, microhistory had established itself as a new methodology in the curriculum of historians and some historians of psychology. They used it to introduce a new standard for quality in historical research. Given the current methodological variety, this article calls for a reclassification of microhistory as a type of historiography and it discusses the methodology using, as examples, three microhistorical research projects in the field of the history of psychology. The article concludes with a table outlining certain advantages and disadvantages of microhistory.