Il vincolo della vergogna. Letture oblique

“The country to which we belong is not, as the rhetoric would have it, the one we love, but the one we are ashamed of—or of which we might be ashamed”: this sentence, taken from the essay that gives its title to Carlo Ginzburg’s new book, has—after a moment of bewilderment—gained the approval of a wide variety of people, even though the weight of shame varies with the times and from country to country. But the bond that arises from shame invites us to reflect on the limits of the very notion of the individual: the common thread running through the essays collected here, which approach an author, a book, an image, a phrase, or even a single word from an oblique angle. The in-depth analysis of specific cases paves the way for a series of generalizations—answers that provoke further questions. Speaking of “microhistory” in relation to this cognitive strategy seems legitimate, but the results are more important than the labels. Readers are invited to share in the joy of research and the encounter with the unexpected.