Yet these accomplishments are offset by significant problems. The vividness of “extraordinary” microhistory has often come at the expense of satisfactory engagement with stubbornly problematic source material. The meticulous engagement with the sources on the part of “ordinary” microhistory has often come at the expense not only of vividness, but of clarity and coherence. And the genre as a whole has as yet proven frustratingly incapable of integrating its microscopic scale of analysis with the larger ones through which we organize our overall sense of the past. In short, the microhistorical lens has shown us many grains of sand in all their strange and often wonderful detail and complexity, but it has not yet found the world in them.