Many of the most successful microhistories have evoked illustrative episodes in the past with cinematic intensity: early eighteenth-century New Englanders kidnapped from their homes to Canada by Iroquois in the depths of winter, the weak and wounded left to die in the snow or finished by a quick hatchet blow; Parisian apprentices gleefully slaughtering cats in a symbolic strike at their master; a young widow in Renaissance Florence angrily turning on her lover after he denied their secret marriage and married another woman; a sixteenth-century French adventurer posing as a long-lost soldier, accepted even by his purported wife, until his discovery, trial and execution (this last episode actually made it to the screen, in The Return of Martin Guerre).2 Certain microhistories have much the same relation to film that the great nineteenth-century works of narrative history did to the novel.