Carlo Ginzburg often quoted the words of the great sinologist Marcel Granet, “the method is the path after we have traveled it”. He who devoted his life to thinking about the relationship between scholarship and theory thus recalled, with humor and elegance, the hazards and doubts of historical research of which he is perhaps the most famous contemporary figure throughout the world.
In retrospect, Carlo Ginzburg’s path may seem to have been mapped out. He was born in 1939 in Turin, son of Leone, an academic opponent of fascism assassinated in 1944, and Natalia, one of the great voices of 20th century Italian literature.
The young Carlo Ginzburg studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Pisa with the best masters, the historian of heresies Delio Cantimori, the medievalist Arsenio Frugoni or the philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro, in the company of the most brilliant comrades, Salvatore Settis, Adriano Prosperi or Adriano Sofri.
Birth of microhistory
In 1966 his first book was published, based on his thesis, Les Batailles nuits, which focuses on the pagan and supernatural rites and beliefs of the peasants of Friuli in the 16th-17th centuries, supposed to promote harvests. His interest in the words of the dominated, the history of the working classes and cultural expressions considered heterodox or deviant is combined with inimitable methodological and narrative brilliance.
These traits are found in 1976 in his most famous book, Cheese and Worms, which traces the tragic fate of Menocchio, a miller from the end of the 16th century pursued by the inquisition for his singular beliefs on the origin and order of the world.
The 1970s corresponded to the rise of “microhistory”, this new approach to past societies based on case studies combining the intensive analysis of archives and the use of anthropology. With Giovanni Levi, Carlo Poni and Edoardo Grendi, Ginzburg participates in the adventure of the magazine Quaderni storici and in the development of a collection at the publisher Einaudi which he directs with Simona Cerruti.
This is also the moment when he writes his most famous essay, devoted to the “indexical paradigm”, a deductive method based on the analysis of indices, for which he invokes the Zadig of Voltaire, Sherlock Holmes and Freud and which seems to him to be specific to the human sciences.
International influence
In the following decade, he published two books demonstrating the diversity of his interests, one on Piero della Francesca, in 1983, and the other on the witches’ sabbath, in 1989. Leaving the University of Bologna, he began a new career at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which ultimately gave him international influence.
He then turned away from the genre of the monograph in favor of essays, then assembled by theme in books, from Myths, emblems, traces, in 1989, to La Lettre tue, in 2021, via À distance, a set of texts on the point of view in history, published in 1998 in Italy.
But this impressive bibliography, as well as this remarkable academic career which led him to receive the most prestigious awards in the human sciences – the Warburg Prize in 1992, the Viareggio Prize in 1998, the Balzan Prize in 2010 – does not fully reflect the progress he has made.
Because what mattered so much to Carlo Ginzburg, and which contributed to making him a global intellectual, is what discreetly accompanied him throughout this path. Cinema, one of the great passions of his life, which is reflected in the importance given to Sergei Eisenstein’s reflections on editing for the writing of history.
Literature, always present, as evidenced by his friendship with Italo Calvino, his admiration for Cesare Pavese, a friend of his mother, or his famous analysis of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Painting, which he sometimes said he would have liked to devote his life to, and which occupies so much of his writing, between history and art history – he who shared his life for more than half a century with the art historian and curator Luisa Ciammetti.
Exceptional speaker
Carlo Ginzburg was also a passionate and exciting speaker whose inimitable chant carried the audience away.
His expressive face went from amusement to anger without ever departing from an unusual generosity and a keen sense of friendship. But he was also a tireless fighter, fighting against Holocaust denial – he who, as a child, had fled anti-Semitic persecution –, against fascism and its contemporary resurgences, but also against all forms of injustice and intolerance.
His entire life was an art of deciphering, an infinite attempt to adapt the gaze to read between the lines and see behind the images. He had a religion of books and their commentary, which he had placed at the heart of modernity, embodying to the highest degree the humanism of the 20th century.
The world’s tragedies were not a reason for him to renounce belief in humanity and the power of critical thinking. If today we are orphans of Carlo Ginzburg, his dreams, his struggles and his hopes still light the path to come.
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