Introduction

Abstract

Although the notion of ‘micro-studies’ is lacking one unambiguous meaning, its basic idea is that certain phenomena can best be studied at the micro-level and that at this level the essential is shown by unravelling its details. This idea will be familiar to students of historiography because the intuition that history is ultimately determined by human details has been formulated and defended for at least over the last two centuries. Ever since the early nineteenth century Romanticism, with its cult of the genius, influenced generations of historians, the cult of the detail has been somehow connected to the idea that individual action matters, that freedom of choice exists, and that the course of history is contingent and not predetermined by supra-individual structures and entities. The quintessence of this idea had already been phrased in 1670 by Blaise Pascal in one of his Pensées: ‘If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been different’, because if Cleopatra had not been so seductive she would not have been able to make Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony work for her. Thus the cults of the individual and of detail have gone hand in hand in history, just like the cult of the general and of the supra-individual have been firmly connected.