The second path taken by microhistory has largely skirted these potential pitfalls of presentist projections onto the past, and attracted a different set of critiques. Here the focus has been not on the extraordinary, but precisely on the ordinary and mundane, or at most on what Edoardo Grendi has called the “normal exception” – actions that violate certain norms, thereby leaving traces in the archives, but that do so routinely. Alain Corbin has gone to particular lengths to ensure that his choice of subject did not correspond to any extraordinary or retroactive criteria, quite literally blindfolding himself in the archives, choosing a dossier at random, and using it as the starting point for the biography of an “unknown man.” This second form of microhistory, like the first, also operates on the smallest possible scale, and also requires rich, dense archival material. But rather than privileging certain especially colorful materials as points of entry into a foreign culture, it seeks to pick apart the tangled tissue of ordinary, banal, interpersonal relations, so as to reveal what Giovanni Levi, its most influential practitioner, calls “an individual's constant negotiation, manipulation, choices and decisions in the face of a normative reality which, though pervasive, nevertheless offers many possibilities for personal interpretations and freedoms.”