Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, Puzzles: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ’ – trans. Thomas Haskell Simpson, Seagull, March 2026

I’ve previously shared some of the many tributes to Ginzburg, who died in June. I hadn’t seen that this early seminar was now translated. I’m writing a short piece on Ginzburg for the ‘Sunday Histories‘ series, which I’ll share soon.

Update 4 August 2026: My piece on Ginzburg is now posted – The Historian as Detective – Carlo Ginzburg and the Search for ‘Clues’

Update 7 August 2026: Christopher Smith discusses the book, Ian McEwan’s new novel and much else in Clio reads a book

A seminar, a sixteenth-century heretical text, and the art of slow reading—this is historical research as you’ve never seen it before.

Patience Games: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ’ invites readers into the unpredictable world of scholarly discovery, where interpretation is not a straight path but a labyrinth of dialogue revision. At the heart of this book is a seminar held forty years ago at the University of Bologna, where students wrestled with The Beneficio di Cristo, the incendiary sixteenth-century text that questioned Church authority and championed salvation through grace alone. This is not a neatly packaged historical study, however—it is an unfiltered look at the errors and insights that emerge in the collective process of reading and debating a text.

Through shifting hypotheses and the sheer unpredictability of research, Patience Games dismantles the illusion of scholarship as a sterile pursuit, revealing instead a messy, deeply human endeavor. Blending sharp analysis with wit and self-irony, the book makes a compelling case for the continued importance of slow reading—even in an age where knowledge is just a click away.

(I’ve taken the description above from the University of Chicago Press website, the distributor for Seagull, which has a different title for the book, Patience Games, despite what appears elsewhere on that page.)