When I began to teach microhistory twenty-five years ago, I was struck by two glaring absences. First, while there was an abundance of historical writing focused on the early modern period, the same could not be said of the Middle Ages (with the possible exception of Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s seminal Montaillou). [1] Second, while the great methodological debates around the genre had occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century, no one had prepared a handbook or a teaching tool to capture them, let alone one that provided an update on microhistorical thinking over its first thirty years. My solution was to publish my own medieval microhistory, the product of ten years of pedagogical experimentation and student input. That book told the tale of a fourteenth-century townswoman accused of murdering her husband by poison or magic. [2] I had access to a detailed criminal transcript and to a series of civil actions that followed, along with the accused woman’s last will and testament and an abundance of village records pertaining to her friends, family, and adversaries. It has always been somewhat of a personal disappointment that my efforts did not lead to a flurry of similar volumes by my fellow medievalists. Today, the continued dearth of medieval microhistories is explicable, in part, by the challenges posed by medieval records and by entrenched disciplinary habits. It is these two obstacles that Paul Dutton seeks to remedy in his Micro Middle Ages of 2023. Through this book, Dutton provides medievalists with a thoughtful new assessment on the beauty, complexity, and pertinence of small things and a proposed expansion of the traditional microhistorical method.
Dutton is a master medievalist, long known throughout Canada and around the world for his meticulous craftsmanship, impeccable text editions, and fluid prose. His corpus spans eight books and thirty-five articles, and, at this stage in his career, he now considers himself an occasional “particle historian.” The most famous object of his prior close focus, famously, was Charlemagne’s mustache. [3] As he writes in the preamble to Micro Middle Ages, “Too often the dust of history’s little things, unexamined and unattended, has been swept into corners to collect there in purgatorial greyness” (3).
Dutton’s Micro Middle Ages is a masterclass in writing the history of small things and, in so doing, it offers a type of micro-history if not always, strictly speaking, microhistory. The book does not recount a single tale, à la Martin Guerre or Cheese and the Worms, but rather presents a series of essays in the form of elaborate case studies. [4] The first half of Dutton’s collection thus includes the strange medieval tale of the green children, an analysis of Heloise’s connections to philosophy and prostitution, and a very close reading of a perplexingly ambiguous scene in the lower border of the Bayeux Tapestry. Dutton then pauses midway through his assemblage to offer a sideways venture into the “coiled terrain of small and invisible things,” providing a deep methodological discussion on microhistory as a genre (209). Taken with the book’s introduction, that middle chapter will be very helpful to any who teaches microhistory. Dutton then resumes with two more essays. The first examines a Carolingian joke left by Theodulf of Orléans about a stolen horse, which leads to a discussion on apprehending historical humor. The second essay unpacks a single sentence left behind by a Carolingian monk who rode off to war with the Desert Fathers (revised from Dutton’s superb 2017 essay). The author concludes with an elegant summative essay entitled “Ambles End in Tears,” which pulls together his thoughts on the little particles left underfoot, which are all too often overlooked (418).
Each essay in Micro Middle Ages has little topically or thematically to do with the others except in so far as they all allow Dutton the opportunity to springboard off a single small thing into larger questions. In this, the book does absolutely fulfill one of the core goals of the early Italian microhistorians: to look at something small to understand something big. Carlo Ginzburg famously used the tale of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century heretical miller, to unpack the cultural and religious ideas of that man’s age. Natalie Zemon Davis’s analysis of the sixteenth-century imposter Pansette led her to expound upon topics ranging from the Protestant Reformation to village charivari to the sex lives of peasants. My own reconstruction of the events surrounding the prosecution of a sixteen-year-old Provençal townswoman illuminated village politics, magic, feminine networks of solidarity, legal inheritance, widowhood, disability, sexual dysfunction, and social promotion. In the same manner, Paul Dutton’s Micro Middle Ages provides insights into far-ranging topics.
While each of Dutton’s chapters is extremely well developed, the author’s ability to extrapolate is perhaps best evidenced in the second, which he entitles “A Name: Heloise, Philosophess and Prostitute.” Ironically, Dutton himself wonders whether that chapter fails as a microhistory. Far from it. [5] It begins with Heloise’s famous comment that the abbess would much rather be called Peter Abelard’s prostitute than his empress. The nature of their relationship has long provided fodder to medievalists, but Dutton goes beyond the regular retelling of their story. In his chapter, he unpacks their words to sketch a complicated history of Abelard’s pursuit of financial security, of what student fees meant to a master in a twelfth-century university, and of the economic politics surrounding academic appointments at that time. The chapter then builds on the significant scholarly work done elsewhere on prostitution and women’s bodies to consider how men and women, secular and religious, construed such matters. It looks to Abelard’s relationship to sex-for-money, to Heloise’s assessment of fornication for profit, and to how this framed Abelard’s advice to their adolescent son, Astrolabe. By the end of the chapter, Dutton has unpacked Heloise’s famous statement to explain the social, political, financial, moral, and educational values that structured twelfth-century Parisian high culture. The result is stunning.
Dutton consciously pushes at the boundaries of conventional microhistory—Heloise’s statement is not, after all, the sort of “normal exception” first imagined by Edoardo Grendi and more recently refined by Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon. [6] Dutton fully acknowledges that while classical microhistory tends to focus on a singular event (or village, group of families, or individual), he seeks to include “objects, peculiar situations, unusual or rarely used words, off-kilter conversations, revealing incidents, and much of the small non-historical ephemera that other kinds of history tend to overlook” (233).
Some readers may well ask whether by stretching the method Dutton transcends its bounds in other ways, too. For example, the best microhistories tend to dodge and hedge; they encourage the reader to think interpretively. Dutton’s approach sometimes tilts more didactic than suggestive. This is not to imply that the author is absolutist in his conclusions. Indeed, his close reading of small things often leads him to speculate (persuasively) in response to the limitations of his sources. Often, this speculation is generative and helpful and very typically microhistorical. There are a few notable exceptions, one in his retelling of the case of the green children. In it, he notes that he would not wish to speculate on the cause of the children’s condition. He acknowledges, “The diagnosis of disease in history is almost always a specious undertaking” (43) He then goes on, however, to elaborate scientifically on “Why the Children Were Green.” He notes how an inherited deficiency of the Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase (G6PD) enzyme causes such a condition. He tells us outright that “since both children manifested the disease...The mother would have been the carrier...and the father’s X chromosome might have also had the G6PD deficiency gene.” After several pages, he then explains that G6PD deficiency “is typically a condition of the peoples of the wide Mediterranean basin” and subsequently therefore muses on “How a mother of Mediterranean background carrying the gene mutation and a potentially G6PD-deficient father found themselves in northern Europe” (46-47). Medical historians might have a hard time with this particular rationale, though it is a rare outlier in an otherwise persuasive book. Regardless, the strength of Dutton’s approach is that he uses the case of the green children to expand on wider contexts: high medieval famine, the growth of the wool trade, the movement of Flemish mercenaries, and the consumption (and risk of consumption) of broad beans in peasant diets. In this, he surely emulates other great microhistorians—who make whole cloth from sparse threads.
Dutton deviates from traditional microhistorical writing in one other stylistic way—by rarely adopting a narrative tone. Much of the recognizable flavour of canonical microhistories rests in the writing style. For example, Thomas V Cohen began his tale of double murder in Cretone castle with this gripping statement: “On the last night of her life Vittoria Savelli wore an old shift.” [7] Cohen did not start with, say, “Cretone Castle was built in the late Middle Ages and had fallen into disrepair by 1563, though it remained the seat of the Battista family.” The flavour marks the genre. Dutton is a beautiful writer and an expert analyst, but it can safely be said that the essays in this volume do not experiment with narrative structure. That stylistic choice, coupled with his call to expand the bounds of the genre, juxtaposes Dutton’s book against the central corpus of microhistories, and marks it, first and foremost, as an expert model on how to study small things. At the same time, The Micro Middle Ages certainly makes a strong case in favour of refocusing the microhistorical lens to allow for closer viewing of medieval particles.
Micro Middle Ages is an important and timely book, one that refreshes and enhances the traditional historiography on microhistory. Through it, Paul Dutton applies a career’s worth of careful thought about the past, and how, whether, when, and why we ought to handle the discarded little bits of history. The book works well as a whole to prompt its reader to think about how we choose to approach the medieval past. Each of its five core constituent chapters may, moreover, be read on their own merits or collectively. The introduction and middle chapter will most definitely be held up by medievalists for a long time as the most cogent, helpful, and clever reflection to date on the art and craft of micro-history.
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Notes:
1. Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: George Braziller, 1978).
2. Steven Bednarski, A Poisoned Past: The Life and Times of Margarida de Portu, a Fourteenth-Century Accused Poisoner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
3. Paul Edward Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age, The New Middle Ages series (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For more on Dutton’s achievements, see “Department of Humanities launches student award to honour retired Professor Paul Edward Dutton,” (https://www.sfu.ca/fass/news/2020/11/dept-of-humanities-launches-student-award-to-honour-retired-professor-paul-edward-dutton.html) accessed 9 August 2025.
4. See Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983) and Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (London: Routledge, 1980).
5. Dutton writes, “The study of Heloise encountered above in this book may well also fail as a microhistory or exceed its reasonable limits because it attempts too much, is too argumentative, and leaves too many loose ends” (245).
6. For the coining of the phrase, see Edoardo Grendi, “Micro-analisi e storia sociale,” Quaderni storici 35, no. 2 (1977): 506–20. For a more recent explanation, consult Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, “The Normal Exception,” in Emotional Experience and Microhistory: A Life Story of a Destitute Pauper Poet in the 19th Century (London: Routledge, 2020).
7. Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 17.