ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

Praise for Carlo Ginzburg:
‘Ginzburg is a historian with an insatiable curiosity, who pursues even the faintest of clues with all the zest of a born detective until every fragment of evidence can be fitted into place.’—New York Review of Books

Praise for Carlo Ginzburg:
‘Ginzburg has many claims to be considered the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties. Certainly few have equalled him in originality, variety, and audacity.’—London Review of Books

Praise for Carlo Ginzburg:
‘Ginzburg’s scholarship is dazzling and profound.’—Publishers Weekly

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Wherein the reader is brought up to date on the intentions of the authors.
1. Wherein we first speak of the Beneficio di Cristo and the circumstances of its composition.
2. Wherein we speak of historiographical preconceptions, historians at the green felt table, the pleasure of research, interpretations of the Beneficio di Cristo, and in closing reference is made to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
3. Wherein we speak of a character destined to reappear only fleetingly in the course of the book.
4. Wherein we speak of the beginning of the seminar, the Catholic Reformation, and objective and subjective ambiguity.
5. Wherein a first discovery is made.
6. Wherein we speak of the two authors of the Beneficio, the four versions of the parabola of the proclamation, and how a discovery receives unhoped-for confirmation.
7. Wherein we set aside the surgeon’s scalpel for a large kitchen knife, speak of Valdesians and free will, catch a glimpse of a Benedictine line, and end up in quicksand.
8. Wherein we visit archives and libraries and find nothing; we overcome obstacles with help from the students in the seminar; we discuss free will and predestination, eucharist and vicious circles, patience games and construction games, bones and tails; and we commit, with regard to Chapter VI of the Benefit, gross errors which are later corrected.
9. Wherein we seek to remove any trace of John Calvin from the first version of the Beneficio.
10. Wherein we speak of justification by faith and conduct some fanta-philology on Chapter IV of the Benefit.
11. Wherein we speak again of Chapter VI, the certainty of predestination, and how the two authors of the Beneficio were able to collaborate despite it all.
12. Wherein we integrate the chronology of the Beneficio and speak briefly of a conference of historians.
13. Wherein we speak of God’s mercy, philosophers, theologians, and blacksmiths.
14. Wherein we speak of Pelagian and non-Pelagian texts, Benedictines and non-Benedictines, and the death of Lady Elisabetta.
15. Wherein we speak of a lucky trip to Mantua.
16. Wherein we speak of writing a four-handed article and the surprises that may lie in store.
17. Wherein we speak of a bishop and various heretics.
18. Wherein we speak of an unlucky trip to Ferrara.
19. Wherein we speak of historical methodology, preconceptions, and chance.
20. Wherein we speak of important things in an inadequate way.
21. Wherein the book ends, or begins.
Appendix: A Treatise Most Profitable of the Benefit that True Christians Receive by the Death of Jesus Christ (1548).
Afterword I by Adriano Prosperi
Afterword II by Carlo Ginzburg
Bibliography