Karlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg is an Italian historian and one of the founders of microhistory. He has also made a significant contribution to the study of social history and religious beliefs in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, as well as to historical methodology.

He was born into a family of well-known writers and anti-fascists. His father, Leone Ginzburg, born in Odessa, was a scholar of nineteenth-century Russian literature and a translator of it into Italian; in 1944 he was arrested and killed by the Nazis. His mother, Natalia Ginzburg, was a well-known writer. By his own admission, his scholarly work was influenced by nineteenth-century Russian literature and Soviet cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, with which he became acquainted through his father’s activities. In 1961, he graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, after which he received a degree in history. He taught at various universities in Italy and the United States (Rome, Bologna, Lecce, Los Angeles), and since 2006 he has taught at his alma mater.

In the early 1960s, he began working with materials from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Inquisition trials. Later, he actively advocated the opening of the Vatican archives to a broad range of researchers. His first monograph, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (I benandanti. Ricerche sulla stregoneria e sui culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento) (1966), was devoted to survivals of pagan fertility cults in the Friuli region of northern Italy. Local peasants believed in the existence of a special category of people, the “benandanti,” endowed with supernatural powers that could be used to help the harvest and to fight evil beings from the other world. Ginzburg also concluded that by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the role of the “benandanti” changed and the witch hunt intensified, local people’s perception of them had changed: they came to be seen as allies of Satan.

Ginzburg’s best-known work, Cheese and the Worm