An international specialist in microhistory, the Italian Carlo Ginzburg, who died on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday at the age of 87, contributed to raising awareness of popular culture, a world that had long remained apart from the major historical trends.
Started during the “years of lead”, which saw Italy descend into violence in the 1960s and 70s, his work is partly part of the framework of microhistory. This current was born in reaction against quantitative history, represented in France by the famous École des Annales since the 1930s.
Passionate about the analysis of peasant beliefs and the behavior of ordinary people, always attentive to details that make sense, Carlo Ginzburg wrote as much about witchcraft trials or magic in Renaissance Italy as about the intellectual history of Europe, art or literature.
A left-wing Italian, this professor at the University of Bologna, the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Pisa and the University of California (UCLA, Los Angeles), was also the author of important theoretical works on historical method. He defended, with other intellectuals, the far-left journalist Adriano Sofri, convicted of the assassination of a commissioner in 1972. Sofri, a friend of Ginzburg, was sentenced in 1997, after seven trials, to 22 years in prison then released in 2012.
Witch Specialist
Carlo Ginzburg wrote a work in 1991 on the first of these trials, “The Judge and the Historian” (“Il giudice e lo storico”), speaking of a judicial error and saying he found, in this file, aspects of the witchcraft trials, which he studied from a historical point of view, such as those carried out by the Inquisition in the 16th and 17th centuries.
He was born on April 15, 1939 in Turin. His mother, Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi), is a novelist and translator (notably of Proust into Italian). His father, Leone Ginzburg, is a professor of Russian literature. An anti-fascist activist, he was sent under house arrest by Mussolini, then arrested and murdered by the Germans when Carlo was 5 years old. “I grew up in a house full of books, a privilege linked to an experience of marginality: that of a Jew in fascist Italy during the war,” he said.
The young man obtained a doctorate in philosophy at the Normal School of Pisa. In 1976, he signed “Cheese and Worms” (“Il formaggio ei vermi”, published in France in 1980). In this work, which aims to be written as close as possible to reality, has become a classic and widely translated, he reconstituted the idea that a miller from Friuli (north-east) in the 16th century had of the world.
Carlo Ginzburg will establish himself as a historian of popular mentalities and witchcraft. On this last subject, he notably published “The Witches’ Sabbath” (“Storia notturna”, 1989). We owe him works such as “Investigation of Piero della Francesca” (“Indagini su Piero”, 1981), centered on the iconography of the painter, “No Island is an Island”, 2000) which deals with periods of English literature where the interpretation of a classic text ends up leading to the understanding of its international context.
Carlo Ginzburg also wrote on the nature of historical testimony in “Myths, emblems, traces” (“Miti, emblemi, spie”, 1986) and on the idea of historical proof in “Ratio of power: history, rhetoric, proof” (“History, Rhetoric, Proof”, 1999). “The way of achieving a result counts in some way as much as the results (…). I was able to present provisional results, drafts. And it’s very useful. You have to learn from your own mistakes,” he said.
