This variety of social history has remained very much an Italian specialty, although thanks to the influence of Jacques Revel, leader of what remains of the Annales school, it has also had a considerable impact in France, extending even to the history of the French Revolution. Its best-known work is Giovanni Levi's 1985 Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist. Despite the title, which hinted at a flashy, Ginzburgian tale of heresy, readers instead found a dense, meticulous, “total history” of the small seventeenth-century Piedmontese village of Santena over a fifty-year period. Levi paid particular attention to the strategies employed by individuals, families, and groups to maintain and advance their social position and landholdings, focusing on the judge Giulio Cesare Chiesa and his son, a vicar and exorcist. In the book, as throughout his work, Levi emphasized the slow, uncertain, constantly negotiated manner by which a traditional feudal economy changed, rejecting theories of sharp, sudden, large-scale transitions carried out by forces beyond the control of the participants. It is vintage “history from below,” but deliberately confined to the smallest possible space, teasing all possible meaning out of the often-mundane source material.