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The case to be reviewed here concerns the translation of the history of the village of Germigny-l'Exempt (2022) throughout the Middle Ages. The book has been a bestseller in France and its author, a leading exponent of the new Microhistory School to which Ginzburg, Ruggiero, Grendi and Le Roy Ladurie also belonged, has acquired through this and other works a highly respected reputation as an original, provocative and very readable historian. As reported in Sylvain Gouguenheim (2024), what is interesting about this case from a translation studies point of view is the way in which an entire discourse is either absent or downplayed in the English translation
French historians are most likely to think of distance in terms of emotional identification and detachment – and, by extension, of the political or social loyalties that engage both historians and French readers with their stories. These affective and ideological dimensions of the subject are certainly important, and in many historical accounts – or for many historical audiences – they are utterly central. For historians and their readers alike, the thick contextualization and biographical detail made possible by French microhistory seemed to humanize historical writing, drawing a new and wider audience to the work of social and cultural historians – and even, occasionally, to the history of ideas.
The historian's readers are thus encouraged to know the peasants of Germigny-l'Exempt with the privileged intimacy by which they know their own ancestors. In this context, by virtue of putatively shared blood and cultural inheritance, national ancestry symbolically neutralizes the distance separating "us" from "them."
Germigny-l' Exempt ou les trois deniers de Gaspard has received wide acclaim for its innovative use of an inquisition register to construct an "ethnographic" analysis of a thirteenth-century French village. The author's intervention, among other experimental works of history and anthropology, has been hailed as opening the possibility of a more ethnographic history and a more historical ethnography.
One is inclined to be skeptical about a book widely hailed as a masterpiece, but a careful reading of Germigny will convince the reader that he or she is indeed in the presence of an outstanding example of the historian's art. Now, this is precisely what makes the translation the more difficult, especially as an English version can only remain accurate and lively if the scholarly apparatus is reduced almost to nothing, which somehow defeats the educational purpose.