Carlo Ginzburg, the Italian historian who revolutionized the study of history by recovering the voices and experiences of people excluded from power, died Wednesday at 87 in Bologna. The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he was both a student and professor emeritus, announced his death.
Ginzburg's pioneering work centered on illuminating the lives of those marginalized by authority and dominant narratives, transforming how historians understand the relationship between power and resistance. His methodology gave voice to ordinary people whose stories had been silenced or distorted by official records, revealing how the experiences of the powerless could illuminate broader social and political tensions.
A Method for the Voiceless
A pioneer of microhistory, Ginzburg focused on small, specific units of analysis—such as an individual, a community, or a singular event—to reveal broader themes and issues within history. A leading figure in contemporary historiography, he developed the so-called "evidential paradigm," a method based on interpreting clues, traces and seemingly minor details to reconstruct the experiences of those excluded from dominant narratives.
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 60 years ago in 1966, in which he traced the cult's roots to older Central European beliefs.
Landmark Work on Power and Resistance
He later explored heresy in his landmark 1976 book "The Cheese and the Worms," published 50 years ago and 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.
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.
Born in Turin 87 years ago 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.
Recognition and Legacy
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 3 years ago, Ginzburg said his approach could extend beyond historical research and that it should be applied "in everyday life" to better understand others.
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."
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.
Why This Matters:
Ginzburg's death marks the loss of a scholar who demonstrated that rigorous historical research could serve as a form of justice for those whose voices had been suppressed by power. His work showed that the experiences of ordinary people—peasants, millers, accused heretics—were not footnotes to history but essential to understanding how authority operates and how resistance emerges. By developing methods to recover marginalized voices from the very documents used to silence them, Ginzburg created a model for historians committed to uncovering inequality and challenging dominant narratives. His insistence that "the rigor of proof is a form of justice" connected scholarly work to broader questions of accountability and truth. In an era of growing concerns about whose stories are told and whose are erased, his legacy offers both a methodology and an ethical framework for understanding how power shapes the historical record and how careful research can challenge that power.