The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg

“In societies founded on oral tradition, the memory of the community involuntarily tends to mask and reabsorb changes. To the relative flexibility of material life there corresponds an accentuated immobility of the image of the past. Things have always been like this; the world is what it is. Only in periods of acute social change does an image emerge, generally a mythical one, of a different and better past—a model of perfection in the light of which the present appears to be a deterioration, a degeneration. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ The struggle to transform the social order then becomes a conscious attempt to return to this mythical past.”

-Carlo Ginzburg, 1976