It is precisely in the problem of integrating the microscopic scale of observation with other, larger ones that microhistory of both varieties has remained most unsatisfying. Of what, if anything, was the seventeenth-century village of Santena typical? Giovanni Levi does not say. Once historians have highlighted the individual agency of landowners or artisans in a single community at a single moment in time, how do they then proceed to understand the aggregate history of thousands or millions of landowners or artisans over a time-span of centuries? Few microhistorians have matched Carlo Ginzburg's daring in generalizing from the experience of a single individual to that of an entire peasant culture across the centuries. Gareth Stedman-Jones has scathingly criticized microhistorians, particularly Levi and his French followers, arguing that their emphasis on individual agency prevents them from even considering the wide range of historical phenomena which require analysis at a broad, general level. For Brad Gregory, the attention to individuals, and the abandonment of any attempt to elucidate long-term historical forces and laws, “exaggerates both the fragility of large institutions and the contingency of their development.”