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Introduction28 appropriations that go into the molecular foundations of power and social relations,”85 micro-history arose as a trend that refocused attention on lived experience at ground level. Thus, while micro-history itself is not conceived as biographical—if anything, it resorts to biography as a procedure in its quest to explain culture86—it provided a great deal of inspiration and impetus to his- torical biography in a new key. With the exhaustion and the dwindling self-confidence of quantitative, structurally, and functionally arguing social history—a “history without humans”—pre-eminent Annalistes themselves began to speak out in favor of a resuscitation of biography in which, however, the individual was to be “historicized.”87 In the same vein, almost simultaneously it was one of the clas- sics of micro-history that called attention to the fundamental “ambivalence” of biography, in some cases employed to demonstrate the futility of explaining individuals and their behavior with reference to normative systems, while in others, conversely, the life story appears as a terrain to assess the value of hy- potheses about the practical operation of social rules and regularities.88 In this regard, the chief concern of biographical research is with the degree of free- dom an individual has in making choices and decisions, and the kind and de- gree of rationality she or he is capable of asserting in the face of the prevailing social norms and web of institutional power, assuming that these, while more or less solid, are never fully devoid of gaps and contradictions that enable indi- vidual actors to consciously interpret, manipulate, or negotiate constraining rules and structures.89 The emphasis on both the possibilities and the limita- tions of the scope of agency and individual rationality, and the additional im- plication that these scopes are subject to temporally and spatially changeable contexts, amounts to a compelling response to the critique of biography as a genre with reference to the “biographical illusion”: the assumption that life is a history, “a coherent and finalized whole, which can and must be seen as a uni- tary expression of a subjective and objective ‘intention’ of a project.”90 The 85 Lynn Hunt, “Jacques Revel and the Question of Scale,” in La forza delle incertezze: Dialoghi storiografici con Jacques Revel, ed. Antonella Romano and Silvia Sebastiani (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016), 35–45, here 42. 86 Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 129–44, here 133. 87 Jacques Le Goff, “Comment écrire une biographie historique aujourd’hui,” Le débat 54 (1989): 49–53. 88 Giovanni Levi, “Les usages de la biographie,” Annales esc 44, no. 6 (1989): 1325–36, here 1325. 89 Levi, “Les usages de la biographie,” 1335–36. 90 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Biographical Illusion [1986],” in Identity: A Reader, ed. Paul de Gay, Jessica Evans, and Peter Redman (London: Sage, 2000), 299–305, here 299. Of course, the