Dies Carlo Ginzburg, the great historian who looked where no one looked

BarcelonaThe Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has died at the age of 87, according to the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Born in Turin in 1939, Ginzburg was a meticulous master, with an insatiable curiosity, who revolutionized historical studies. He grew up in a home that strongly nurtured his vocation. His father, the philologist, journalist, and editor Leone Ginzburg, was a prominent anti-fascist who died tortured by the Nazis in 1944. His mother was the writer Natalia Ginzburg, author of seminal works of Italian literature such as Family Sayings. The historian would later confess that his mother's passion for literature, combined with the stories he heard as a child about the persecutions and repression of the war, was decisive for his future.

Ginzburg found new paths that demonstrated that traditional historical methodology is often insufficient, and he made available to scholars a mass of documents that no one had analyzed before. "If someone asked me what the meaning of history is, I would say it is learning not to take reality for granted," he explained in

an interview with ARA. With microhistory, he showed that the lives of anonymous and marginalized figures could help to better understand the past. He published a work that made history: The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976), published in Catalan by Curial. The book demonstrates that the daily lives and ideas of ordinary people also influence and form part of major historical processes. It narrates the real case of Menocchio (Domenico Scandella), a miller from Friuli born in 1532 who could read and write and who fiercely defended his own cosmological and religious theories. For this reason, he suffered two heresy trials by the Inquisition and was finally sentenced to death and burned at the stake.

Ginzburg puts forward the thesis that Menocchio's thought did not come solely from the books he read, but rather that these readings brought to the surface much older, orally transmitted popular and precristian beliefs from generation to generation. The author directly uses the notarial records of the Inquisition to recreate the dialogues, allowing the reader to grasp firsthand the protagonist's emotions, doubts, and contradictions in the face of the inquisitors. Another major study of his in this vein is "Els Benandanti" (1966), published by the University of Valencia. It is a profound investigation into the meaning and origin of popular witchcraft through the declarations of those accused by the Inquisition, and it offers an indispensable immersion into the peasant society and beliefs of the time.

A Sherlock Holmes of history

For Ginzburg, the historian was like a detective searching for evidence. He explained this in books and essays such as Radici di un paradigma indiziario (1979), Miti emblemi spie. Morfologia e storia (1986), Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba (1989), or Il giudice e lo storico. Considerazioni in margine al processo Sofri, and in his last interventions he argued that history has an unavoidable moral duty towards real events.

Regarding his academic career, he earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pisa in 1961 and subsequently taught at universities around the world. He was a professor of modern history at the University of Bologna and held the Chair of History of Modern Europe at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), between 1988 and 2006, before returning to Italy to teach at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa.

Ginzburg continued to defend his way of looking at the past and history until the very end. He always remained committed to intellectual debate, published essays, gave interviews, and regularly participated in conferences. Until the last moment, his great obsession was the defense of historical truth in the face of the rise of fake news, and in his last interventions, he argued that history has an unavoidable moral duty to real facts.