Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian scholar famous for his approach to history that focused on the group of humanity that existed outside the political and social elites of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, died on Wednesday in Bologna. He was 87 years old.
His death was announced by the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he taught. No reason or specific location was provided.
In the 1960s, when Mr. Ginzburg began his research, there was little interest in learning what the farmers of previous centuries thought and believed. Few serious academics were writing about witchcraft or heretical cults. The study of history focused on great leaders and events, such as the Medici banking and political dynasty of nearby Florence or the powerful dogs that ruled Venice.
By contrast, Mr. Ginzburg spent six years figuring out what a 16th-century miller meant when he said the world was made of rotting cheese. He devoted even more time to exposing the beliefs of the peasants, who were condemned as witches and werewolves by the Inquisition. One of his more eccentric efforts involved attempting to connect Oedipus’s swollen foot and Cinderella’s lost slipper to ancient myths about journeys to the afterlife.
Mr. Ginzburg’s interdisciplinary approach spans anthropology, literary theory, art criticism, and psychoanalysis. One of his essays demonstrated how Sigmund Freud, an avid reader of Arthur Conan Doyle, gained insight into the psyche by absorbing seemingly insignificant clues uncovered by Sherlock Holmes to solve his cases. Similarly, Mr. Ginzburg uses the most arcane evidence to open the minds and hearts of Italian common people who lived centuries ago – emphasizing how different things were at that time.
“The more we discover about the mental universe of these people, the more we are shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them,” Mr. Ginzburg, who taught for many years at the University of Bologna and the University of California, Los Angeles, told The New York Times Magazine in 1991.
Mr. Ginzburg was a leading member of a group of like-minded scholars who rose to prominence in the latter half of the 20th century. French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s “Montalou” (1975), a study of sex and heresy in a Languedoc village around the year 1300, became a best-seller in his country. “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1983), written by Natalie Zeman Davis, is based on the life of a 16th-century French peasant who so successfully assumes the identity of another man that he betrays that man’s wife, parents, and friends. Robert Darnton’s essay titled “The Great Cat Massacre” (1984) attempted to explain why apprentices in an 18th-century printing shop in Paris happily tortured and killed their employers’ pets.
“Ginzburg showed that non-intellectuals had an intellectual life – and showed what that life was,” Mr. Darnton said in an interview for this obituary. “This was a great achievement that inspired many other scholars to make similar efforts.”
Some scholars felt that Mr. Ginzburg and his colleagues went too far in dismissing the historical significance of great events and personalities. A frustrated British historian, J.H. Plumb, felt it necessary to remind his colleagues that “the life of Sir Isaac Newton is more important than the details of all the witchcraft trials of 17th-century England.”
But “micro-history” and “history of mentalities” – streams of historiography introduced by Mr. Ginzburg – are being felt in a wave of academic, biographical and literary attention paid to previously neglected groups, including women, minorities and the underprivileged.
Carlo Ginzburg was born on April 15, 1939 in Turin, the eldest of three children in a Jewish family. His mother, Natalia (Levi) Ginzburg, was a renowned novelist and essayist. His father, Leon Ginzburg, born in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire, was an accomplished historian and literary critic.
Carlo’s family spent several years in a small southern Italian village where his parents were exiled for opposing the Mussolini regime. After his father was tortured and executed for publishing an anti-fascist underground newspaper during the Nazi occupation of Italy in 1944, Carlo spent the remainder of the war hiding in another rural village under the protection of his maternal grandmother.
Mr. Ginzburg later recalled, “She was my only non-Jewish relative, and to protect me she told me to use her maiden name.” “I became Carlo Tanzi.”
He found his interest as a historian right from his childhood. A peasant woman hired as his nanny filled his imagination with tales of werewolves and witches, stories taken as gospel by local villagers, despite long-standing efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to stamp out pagan beliefs.
“I also connected with these marginalized people because I was Jewish,” Mr. Ginzburg said.
Thinking about a scholarly career, he was undecided about whether he should study art history, literary criticism, philosophy, or linguistics. “I didn’t consider history because I found it so boring,” he said. What ultimately inspired him to become a historian was a seminar in which he was asked to spend an entire week analyzing 10 lines of a 19th-century text.
He said, “I learned the importance of reading and re-reading a page, even the same passage, over several days, weeks.”
Mr. Ginzburg relied on chance and intuition to find the subjects of his research. His first book, published in 1966 and called “The Night Battles” in English, was inspired by a trip to the Inquisition archives in Venice, where he took out volumes at random until he found the details of a 16th-century shepherd’s trial from a village north of the city.
The man said he belonged to a sect called the Benandanti (or good walkers), whose members were said to sometimes get drunk and go to isolated fields, where they would participate in games and fight witches. In his book, Mr. Ginzburg interprets the Benandanti as a fertility cult, and carefully demonstrates how they were descendants of one of the many pagan groups that preceded Christianity, with rituals and beliefs that opposed those of the Catholic Church and the ruling elite.
“This case is reminiscent of a fairy tale,” he said, “and I think that’s why I reacted to it so quickly.”
Mr. Ginzburg’s most famous work, “The Cheese and the Worms,” published in 1976, tells the story of Menocchio, an obscure miller who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1599 because he said God and the universe were created from rot.
The book, which reads like a tragic novel, was a historical study of the impact of the introduction of reading on villagers raised in the oral culture of folklore. Menocchio gave his inquisitors the titles of the sections that shaped his heretical beliefs. But it turned out that he had embellished his studies about how God had created the universe from a shapeless mass, with ancient myths still circulating in his village.
Mr. Ginzburg had two daughters, Sylvia and Lisa, with his wife, the historian Anna Rossi-Doria, who died in 2017. He then married Luisa Ciamitti, an art historian, curator and museum director. Complete information about their survivors was not immediately available.
He published several other books and numerous essays on subjects such as history as well as art, literature, mythology, and psychology.
His 1991 work “The Judge and the Historian” sought to defend a close friend, Adriano Sofri, a leftist journalist, who had been convicted of murder in the events following a 1969 terrorist bombing. Although the book failed to get Mr. Sofri a new trial, it was praised by some reviewers for its insights into the commonality of judges and historians gathering physical evidence before reaching conclusions.
Early in his career, Mr. Ginzburg was assigned to teach students who primarily cared about history lessons for the massive worker strikes going on at the time.
He later said, “I shared the political concerns of my students.” “But I had to accept that my professional interests had nothing to do with the turmoil around me. I learned painfully that history should be studied even when it has no direct connection with contemporary issues.”
ash woo Contributed to the reporting.
