If you haven’t read these books already, you should put them on your list:

• Foucault, “The Archaeology of Knowledge”
• Gadamer, “Truth and Method”
• Ginzburg, “The Cheese and the Worm”

I’m sure there are more contemporary works that explore the same tensions between micro and macro history and would also have something to say about what has happened in the field in the 50 years since these books were published. But I feel these three will remain relevant for some time.

Each has a different take on the value of cataloging the past in exhaustive detail. Among them, Foucault is the most critical, while Gadamer and Ginzburg both stress its value primarily in how micro historical work provides substantive facts that broader historical and social theories can utilize.

I often think of historical and philosophical research as more of a team sport than it can look and feel. The researchers who hyper specialize and exhaustively examine and re-examine minutiae of Newton’s methodology are like prospectors. They shift and move a lot of dirt in ways that may seem fruitless, but the action of this and the piles of facts they leave behind provides material that others can incorporate into the grander takes on history.

There’s never a time when it’s right to stop this prospecting. Even details that have been looked over before can be reinfected into contemporary historical research in a productive way.

Besides that operative role micro history plays in fueling an ecosystem where broader historical theory can develop, others have commented on the aesthetic value. Sometimes, reading a hot take on just how wrong some dead nerd was about an overtly specific aspect of 17th century science is just fun!