Puzzles by Carlo Ginzburg
A seminar, a sixteenth-century heretical text, and the art of slow reading—this is historical research as you’ve never seen it before.Patience Games: A Seminar on the 'Benefit of Christ' invites readers into the unpredictable world of scholarly discovery, where interpretation is not a straight path but a labyrinth of dialogue revision. At the heart of this book is a seminar held forty years ago at the University of Bologna, where students wrestled with The Beneficio di Cristo, the incendiary sixteenth-century text that questioned Church authority and championed salvation through grace alone. This is not a neatly packaged historical study, however—it is an unfiltered look at the errors and insights that emerge in the collective process of reading and debating a text.
Through shifting hypotheses and the sheer unpredictability of research, Patience Games dismantles the illusion of scholarship as a sterile pursuit, revealing instead a messy, deeply human endeavor. Blending sharp analysis with wit and self-irony, the book makes a compelling case for the continued importance of slow reading—even in an age where knowledge is just a click away.
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Holderlins Madness
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The Kingdom and the Garden
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The Body of Language
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The Human Voice
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Name and Image
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The Unrealizable
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Self-Portrait in the Studio
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As Cruel as Anyone Else
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The Unspeakable Girl
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Studiolo
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Fear Reverence Terror
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Literary Genres and Their Origins
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Orphism and Tragedy
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On Impotence
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Within the Sweet Noise of Life
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The Still Arrow
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Blinding Polyphemus
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The Labour of Spirit
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The Twilight of Politics
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The Immemorial
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A Test of Powers
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Taste
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Nymphs
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The World Machine
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The World Saved by Kids
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Secret Germany
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Spartakus
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An Essay on Negation
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The Idea of World
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Primo Levi
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The Church and the Kingdom
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This Body That Inhabits Me
Carlo Ginzburg has taught at the University of Bologna, UCLA, and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He has received numerous awards and has published several books including Fear Reverence Terror and The Soul of Brutes. Adriano Prosperi is an emeritus professor of modern history at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. His works include Infanticide, Secular Justice, Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe and Crime and Forgiveness: Christianizing Execution in Medieval Europe. Thomas Haskell Simpson is associate professor in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University and a translator of many works from Italian. He has translated the works of Giorgio Agamben, Carlo Ginzburg, and Gianni Carchia.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781803095431 |
| ISBN 10 | 1803095431 |
| Title | Puzzles |
| Author | Carlo Ginzburg |
| Series | The Italian List |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Seagull Books London Ltd |
| Year published | 2026-01-05 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |