ABSTRACT
Humility, he decided somewhere between his first and this, his third book, commands the historian to resist the desire for total understanding of the past and for global explanation of its relationship to our age, and instead to undertake a patient exploration of the chosen landscape. Guided perhaps by concepts, certainly not by theories, the historian should rescue sources which may give us new insights into what bothered and puzzled people in the past, hoping but not expecting that the yield will shed at least a pale light on what bothers and puzzles us. In his books on witch hunting and madness among sixteenth-century Germans, Midelfort has worked out a method for working profitably in this dimly lit world. Doing history is to “dig postholes down into the cluttered archival middens of the past.”2 My purpose in this brief essay is to visit some of Midelfort’s most important postholes, not to learn what he found but to see what he thought and thinks of his discoveries.
