Under the stars: a journey into light

and postmodernist deconstruction all being proposed as frameworks for thought. The division between the discussants is however clear. Both face the huge problem of the lack of evidence for pre-modern popular behaviour and belief, but they differ over how to use the small and scattered scraps that we possess. Ginzburg is prepared to take more risks in stitching them together speculatively than Lincoln. As part of this, the former is more inclined to see Thiess’s testimony as embedded in a community rooted in ancient culture, and the latter as the imaginative and anomalous product of an unrepresentative individual. Ginzburg prioritises archaic myth and ritual in explaining the whole Livonian werewolf trope, while Lincoln sees it as developing more out of the relations between the German conquerors and their native subordinates. Ginzburg’s own thought is itself embedded in a more archaic stratum, still heavily influenced by the method of comparing cultural traits worldwide to arrive at general theories which was exemplified by Sir James Frazer and Mircea Eliade, and by the structuralism preached by Claude Lévi-Strauss. In this sense he remains very much a mid-twentieth-century scholar. Lincoln, Eliade’s pupil, began very much in this tradition as well, which is why he emerged as a famed scholar of the Indo-Europeans. One of the revelations of the debate is how completely he has rejected it now (and above all the work of the most famous theorist of Indo-European culture, Dumézil), believing that the reconstruction of ancient prototypes works well for historic languages, but not for prehistoric equivalents, let alone for the cultures that spoke them. Instead he has shed an interest in origins for one in the power dynamics of historic societies, driven by what is ultimately Marxism, reborn after 1990 as post-colonial theory. The debate of course ends in friendly and respectful disagreement. Readers will agree with one or the other, or neither, depending likewise on personal and ideological predispositions. I am in both camps, as I see value in comparisons across time and structures, but Carlo Ginzburg’s leaps are too long for me, much as I admire him. The publication of the discussion takes up the final quarter of the book, following a translation of the original trial records and then a reprinting of Höfler’s, Ginzburg’s and Lincoln’s earlier reflections on the case. It is not really about Livonian werewolves, as it ignores the work of other scholars of the subject, and it is accordingly limited as a study of the Thiess case itself. It is essentially a discussion of the comparative method in cultural studies and history, between two giants of those disciplines, and a guide to their current thought; and valuable as such.