A true philological, sarcastic and self-mocking "detective story." The proposition at the heart of this book, born in the pre-electronic age, is more relevant than ever: the "slow reading" of a text can, and should, be intertwined with the very fast wandering in the invisible spaces of the net.

This volume recounts the evolution of a historical research developed in a doctoral seminar at the University of Bologna, given by Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi in 1971. It shows how a collective research works applied to a widespread religious text condemned by the Inquisition in the sixteenth century that remained anonymous for a long time: the celebrated treatise “Beneficio di Cristo”. Pacience Games is interesting for any reader, but especially for historians or aspiring historians, since one of the most developed aspects highlighted is the research method, which immediately proves to be very instructive. It insists on the need to face an investigation without ideological prejudices or condemnations of any kind, but it stresses the importance of the precise intuitions of a confident and demanding researcher, even if they only arise or are barely sketched. The investigation wanders in a labyrinthine web of hypotheses and counter-hypotheses that alter and eliminate each other: clues that lead to clues that sometimes lead to dead ends.