Who Gets Silenced
Carlo Ginzburg, the Italian historian who built a career recovering the voices of marginalized people from the records of power, died Wednesday at 87. The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he was both a student and professor emeritus, said he died in the northern Italian city of Bologna. His work spent decades prying open the archives of authority and showing how the people pushed to the margins still left traces behind.
Ginzburg was a pioneer of microhistory, a method that zoomed in on small, specific units of analysis — an individual, a community, or a singular event — to expose broader themes and issues in history. He also developed the so-called “evidential paradigm,” a way of reading clues, traces and seemingly minor details to reconstruct the experiences of those excluded from dominant narratives. In other words, he made a discipline out of listening for what the powerful tried to bury.
Reading the Archives of Domination
His early work focused on the “benandanti,” a pagan fertility cult in the 16th- and 17th-century Friuli region whose members, seen as shamanic healers, were accused of heresy by the Inquisition. The research underpinned his first book, published in 1966, in which he traced the cult’s roots to older Central European beliefs. The subject itself is a reminder of how institutions of religious authority treated local belief as a threat to be disciplined, cataloged and punished.
He later explored heresy in his landmark 1976 book “The Cheese and the Worms,” widely regarded as one of the most important works of Italian historiography. The book reconstructed the trial of a 16th-century Friulian miller accused of holding unorthodox beliefs about the origins of the world and Jesus Christ. Ginzburg’s method turned a single trial into a window on the machinery of authority, where inquisitorial records preserved the clash between elite control and popular dissent.
Drawing on inquisitorial records, Ginzburg showed how power and resistance are embedded in the same documents, using small-scale cases to illuminate broader tensions between elite and popular culture, and between authority and dissent. The records of domination, in his hands, became evidence against the very systems that produced them.
What the Institutions Rewarded
Born in Turin in 1939 to writer Natalia Ginzburg and anti-fascist activist Leone Ginzburg, he taught at universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of California, Los Angeles. His books were translated into more than 30 languages. He received numerous international honors, including the Prix Aby Warburg, the Balzan Prize, the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize and the Humboldt Research Award.
In a 2023 interview with the Italian cultural magazine Lucy, Ginzburg said his approach could extend beyond historical research and that it should be applied “in everyday life” to better understand others. That idea matched the core of his work: pay attention to the overlooked, the dismissed, the people history’s gatekeepers would rather leave out.
In a statement, the Scuola Normale Superiore said he “changed the way of practicing the historian’s craft,” adding that he “restores voice to those who lack it, shows that the rigor of proof is a form of justice, and upholds a demanding idea of truth.” The institution’s praise, coming from the same academic apparatus that housed him, framed his work as both scholarship and a challenge to the silence imposed by power.
He is survived by his two daughters, Silvia, an art historian, and Lisa, a writer and essayist, from his marriage to his former wife, late historian Anna Rossi-Doria.