Compare methods

	Prosopography	Microhistory
Field	Social History	Social History
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1971	1976
Originator	Lawrence Stone; Lewis Namier; Charles Beard	Carlo Ginzburg; Giovanni Levi; Edoardo Grendi
Type	qualitative-quantitative collective method	qualitative interpretive method
Seminal source	Stone, L. (1971). Prosopography. Daedalus, 100(1), 46-79.	Ginzburg, C. (1980). The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN: 9780801843877
Aliases	Collective Biography, Prosopography, Group Biography, Multiple Career Analysis	Microstoria, Microhistory, Clue Paradigm, Evidential Paradigm
Related	4	4
Summary	Prosopography, or collective biography, is the investigation of the common characteristics of a defined group of historical individuals by means of a uniform set of questions, asked of every member, about their birth, family, education, wealth, careers, office-holding, and connections. Lawrence Stone, whose 1971 essay Prosopography is the field's classic methodological statement, defined it precisely as the study of a population through a collective study of their lives. Rather than writing the biography of one notable figure, the prosopographer treats many lesser-known lives as a dataset, seeking the patterns, the typical paths into an elite, the marriage strategies of a class, the recruitment of an administration, that no single biography could reveal. The method has two great traditions: the study of small, well-documented elites, exemplified by Lewis Namier's analysis of eighteenth-century members of Parliament, and the study of larger, more anonymous populations to map social structure and mobility. It transforms scattered biographical fragments into systematic knowledge of social composition and power.	Microhistory is the intensive study of a small, well-documented unit, a single person, family, village, or event, undertaken to illuminate the larger structures, beliefs, and contradictions of a society. Emerging in Italy in the 1970s around Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, and the journal Quaderni Storici, it was a reaction against the impersonal serial and quantitative history of the Annales school, which microhistorians felt had lost sight of real people and the texture of lived experience. By drastically reducing the scale of observation, the microhistorian can read sources with a density impossible at the macro level, attending to anomalies and apparently trivial details. Ginzburg theorized this as an evidential or clue paradigm, akin to the methods of the detective, the physician, and the connoisseur, in which small, overlooked signs disclose a hidden reality. The famous exemplar is Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976), which reconstructs the cosmology of a sixteenth-century miller from his inquisition records.