«Suddenly I realized that in my ongoing research for years on the Sabbath I was using a much more morphological than historical method. ... The known historical connections could not guide me, because these myths and beliefs could go back to a much more distant past. So I used morphology as a probe, to explore a layer that cannot be reached with the usual instruments of historical knowledge». In six chapters, Carlo Ginzburg revolutionized the art of inquiry and gives a decisive interpretation of it in the seventh of the essays that make up this book: Traces. The historian thus invents a new paradigm for the human sciences: the "indexical paradigm". By reading Ginzburg, one can better understand what the historian seeks and how he finds it.

The book brings together essays about Renaissance witchcraft, National Socialism, sixteenth-century Italian painting, Freud’s wolf-man, and other topics. Acknowledging his debt to art history, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and anthropology, Ginzburg challenges us to retrieve cultural and social dimensions beyond disciplinary boundaries.

«If one follows the trail that Ginzburg has drawn to the point of securing evidence, one crosses the intellectual central plateau of the 20th century with the author». Hannelore Schlaffer, Stuttgarter Zeitung