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>(3) Toaff's research is based on the methodology of Carlo Ginzburg, a historian of Jewish descent, it is worth remembering. Ginzburg is a historian of microhistory. Specialist in popular religious beliefs of the late medieval and early modern era, he created a method of analysis in which he searches, in the texts and practices of the time, for a substratum of underground religions and cults that did not find documented expression. Due to the inquisitorial arm and the mostly Catholic culture in which they were inserted, such cults were transmitted orally; Access to them can only be done through a historical analysis that works based on unwritten sources. Ginzburg thus seeks to redesign shamanic and pagan cults that existed underground among peasant populations, for example, using alternative sources, such as fictional literary sources. Some will say that literature proclaims some impossibility of determination, both for the author/narrator and for the reader, in relation to the fiction that is intrinsic to it. But Ginzburg tries to resolve this complicated impasse. Ginzburg considers the use of such sources to be legitimate insofar as he associates this literary form with the need to subject something to verification. It would be captured in literature and other forms of period texts, which would escape institutionalization. Ginzburg will draw on English literature, and analyzes in his work “No island is an island”, among other works, Thomas More's Utopia. Utopia talks about “the multiple dimensions of a faceted and fugitive text”, but it also deals with the power of works of fiction to update and present for the implicit and explicit reader, the “ekpharasis” that already came from the ancient rhetorical tradition, that is to say, could propose “a strange sensation of reality”
