Editorial

This issue is mainly taken up with a Special Section, ‘Clues, Cases, Contexts: Carlo Ginzburg and Psychoanalysis’, which celebrates, contextualizes and explores the rich dialogue created between psychoanalysis and historiography in the work of Carlo Ginzburg, one of the most significant European historians of his generation. Edited by Freud scholar and historian of psychoanalysis Andreas Mayer, who supplies his own substantial introductory essay, the encounter between Ginzburg and Freud is here situated via two other conversations: first, and translated into English for the first time, that set out in the correspondence between Ginzburg and Italian philologist, essayist and historical materialist Sebastiano Timpanaro, whose The Freudian Slip aimed to puncture the irrationalist mythology surrounding Freud’s modes of interpretation which was supposedly debilitating the European political left; and second, a discussion between Ginzburg and Andreas Mayer, growing out of a set of conversations about psychoanalysis and historiography taking place over the last decade. Readers should turn to Mayer’s ‘Introduction’ which admirably sets the stage for a number of crucial questions and lines of enquiry prompted by Ginzburg’s work; suffice to say that at the heart of these encounters lies Ginzburg’s ground-breaking ‘Clues. Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’ - his ‘manifesto’ for microhistorical research, which, as one can track here in their letters from the 1970s, developed in part as a response to Timpanaro’s critique of Freud, turning it brazenly on its head. According to Ginzburg, Timpanaro ‘would have rejected my attempts to pull divination, psychoanalysis and historiography together into a single paradigm as a dalliance with irrationalism’. Timpanaro in fact never did pen a response to ‘Clues’, a silence which ‘still astonishes’ Ginzburg to this day, but in the interview with Andreas Mayer we have a chance to reconsider that earlier dialogue, as well as to explore, not th