Abstract
Critiques the "conjectural/semiotic paradigm" represented by the cultural microhistorical approach associated with historian of early modern Italy Carlo Ginzburg and offers historian Paul Veyne's "serial approach" as a methodological alternative. Microhistory emerged in the 1980's amid a more widespread interdisciplinary emphasis on semiotics as a mode of inquiry, which inevitably relied on an empirical method of unraveling truth typical of the medical sciences and Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who viewed evidence as clues that might reveal surface truths. Alternatively, the "serial method" can be seen in the practices of detective Auguste Dupin, protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Purloined Letter' (1839), who, instead of viewing cultural/historical objects as reflective of truth, considered the meaning of evidence relative to various observers or happenings. Thus, in the "serial method," because historical evidence does not signify culture, historians must identify the specific conditions of historical sources in order to analyze their meaning.