Review

Reviewed Work(s): L'eredita immateriale: Carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del

seicento by Giovanni Levi
Review by: Anne Jacobson Schutte
Source: The Journal of Modern History , Dec., 1986, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 961-
962
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/1880147

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Journal of Modern History

This content downloaded from

201.17.105.116 on Sat, 11 Jul 2020 22:33:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Book Reviews 961

L'eredita immateriale: Carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del seicento. By

G. . T -

zovannl LFevl.
Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1985. Pp. 202. L 18,000.

Giovanni Levi's study is the tenth volume in the Microstorie series edited by
Carlo Ginzburg. This rather diverse collection, which made its debut in 1981
with Ginzburg's controversial Indagini su Piero [della Francesca] (Turin), in-
cludes several works that first appeared in other languages most recently
Natalie Zemon Davis's 11 ritorno di Martin Guerre (Turin, 1984). At first sight,
L'eredita immateriale appears to be "microhistory" in the strict sense of the
term: a minute examination of a small incident that is shown to have resonances
far beyond its immediate context. Unlike the practitioners of this new genre
whose works are familiar to anglophone historians of early modern Europe
(Davis, Ginzburg, and, with reservations, Robert Darnton), however, Levi is
not a cultural but an economic historian. His particular disciplinary bent results
in a distinctive approach to microhistory, one with some clear strengths and a
less obvious but nevertheless troubling weakness.
The episode that Levi sets out to investigate is the rash of exorcisms (539
in all) performed in towns and villages east and south of Turin during a six-
week period in the summer of 1697 by the curate of Santena, a priest with the
marvelously appropriate name Giovanni Battista Chiesa. In Chiesa's trial be-
fore the criminal court of the archdiocese of Turin (not the Inquisition), a central
piece of evidence was the record book kept by the exorcist, which was sup-
plemented by the interrogation of numerous witnesses and the testimony of
the accused. What the archdiocesan investigators sought to determine was
whether Chiesa had followed orthodox procedure in performing exorcisms,
whether he had requested and received payment for his services, whether he
had actually cured people, and why he had not ceased his activities when
ordered to do so. After Chiesa's presentation of his defense in mid-November
1697, the record breaks off. Neither his sentence nor any information about
his subsequent life and death has survived.
Having narrated this brief story without a conclusion in his first chapter,
Levi devotes the rest of his book to implementing his explanatory strategy.
He aims at nothing less than an histoire totale of Santena, the tiny agricultural
center of which Chiesa was a lifetime resident as well as parish priest. His
evidence, meticulously assembled and ingeniously analyzed, includes records
of both poor peasants' and village notables' property transactions, arrange-
ments between the more prosperous peasants and the nobles whom they served
as massari (tenant farmers), and the ambiguous legal and political status of the
santenesi (pawns, but not completely helpless ones, in a complex struggle for
hegemony between the state-building dukes of Piedmont-Savoy, the arch-
diocese, a group of noble families, and the city of Chieri).
In a sure-handed, clearly presented, and convincing fashion, Levi moves
back and forth between his documentary base and several varieties of social
theory not only the cultural anthropology that constitutes the main meth-
odological matrix of most microstorici. He addresses in a masterful way the
agenda set forth in Peter Burke's Sociology and History (London and Boston,
1980); that is, he not only employs theory to organize his evidence but also
utilizes his evidence to test and refine currently fashionable concepts of the
family and of social, economic, and (to a lesser extent) religious behavior in
the early modern period. Like several recent historians of Renaissance Flor-

This content downloaded from

201.17.105.116 on Sat, 11 Jul 2020 22:33:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
962 Book Reviews

ence, he demonstrates that a "nuclear" pattern of residence by no means

precluded families' acting in concert with a wider group of kin to achieve
economic and political objectives. Refreshingly free of the abstract, oversim-
plified view of human behavior held by many economic historians, he shows
that santenesi on all social levels were not single-minded "economic men"
possessing perfect foresight and seeking only to maximize profit. (In fact, their
buying and selling of property took place in the absence of a genuine real estate
market; prices paid in land transactions between relatives tended to be higher
than in those involving outsiders, often covering previous loans and favors that
Levi is able to identify.) Instead, they worked to diversify their holdings and
activities in order to push back the boundaries of uncertainty and thus shieId
themselves against catastrophe.
What does this carefully nuanced reconstruction of life in a late seicento
Piedmontese village-one which goes far beyond the rather impressionistic
socioeconomic background briefly sketched in by Ginzburg for Menocchio and
by Davis for the true and false Martin Guerres have to do with Chiesa and
his huge, albeit temporary, following of lame, halt, blind, and otherwise dis-
tressed people? Levi suggests connections of two sorts. Chiesa's clients' resort
to exorcism was an effort to achieve some degree of control over their medical
and psychological conditions that ran parallel to and was linked with their
anxiety-minimizing behavior in the economic realm. And Giovanni Battista
Chiesa sought through exorcism to replicate the type of influence that his father,
Giulio CSesare, had attained in a most anomalous way: not by amassing property
and intangible assets potentially translatable into material ones (as his neighbors
were doing) but, rather, by gaining prestige as a mediator between nobles and
massari in an alliance designed to thwart some village notables' interest in
establishing closer ties with the city of Chieri hence the "immaterial heritage"
of the title.
The trouble is that these potentially persuasive causal explanations are only
suggested by Levi, not fully deployed in a tight, convincing, complete argu-
ment. Granted, the available documentation on Chiesa's life before the summer
of 1697 is limited to his father's career and some signs of resentment among
his parishioners caused by his demanding payment in advance for burials (brought
out during the trial); and we do not know the end of his story. Still, Chiesa's
short career as an exorcist the histoire probleme fades too far into the back-
ground, almost completely subsumed in the histoire totale of Santena. The
delicate balance between narrative and analysis desirable in a microhistory is
tipped much too far toward analysis. For future practitioners of microhistory
and commentators on the genre, therefore, Levi's book contains both positive
features to be applauded and emulated and pitfalls to be avoided.

ANNE JACOBSON SCHUTTE

Lawrence University

This content downloaded from

201.17.105.116 on Sat, 11 Jul 2020 22:33:00 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms