Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian scholar "renowned for an approach to history that focused on the mass of humanity that existed outside the political and social elites of the Middle Ages and Renaissance," died June 17, the New York Times reported. He was 87. During the 1960s, when he began his research, most historians focused on leaders and events of the past, not on peasants.
Ginzburg, however, "spent six years figuring out what a 16th-century miller meant when he said that the world was created from rotting cheese. He devoted even more time to unraveling the beliefs of peasants denounced by the Inquisition as witches and werewolves," the Times wrote, noting that "one of his more eccentric efforts involved an attempt to link Oedipus's swollen foot and Cinderella's missing slipper to ancient myths about journeying to the afterworld."
Ginzburg's most celebrated work was The Cheese and the Worms (1976), which told the story of that obscure miller, who was burned at the stake in 1599 for his insistence that God and the universe had been created from rot.
"The more we discover about these people's mental universe, the more we should be shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them," Ginzburg told the New York Times Magazine in 1991.
During his teaching career, he held positions at the University of Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles (1988–2006), and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
"Ginzburg showed that non-intellectuals had an intellectual life--and demonstrated what that life was," said Robert Darnton, author of The Great Cat Massacre. "It was a great feat that inspired lots of other scholars to attempt the same thing."
The influence of "microhistory" and "the history of mentalities," the currents of historiography represented by Ginzburg, "continues to be felt in the wave of academic, biographical and literary attention paid to previously overlooked groups, including women, minorities and the underprivileged," the Times noted.
Ginzburg's first book, published in 1966 and titled The Night Battles in English, was inspired by a visit to Inquisition archives in Venice, where he found an account of the trial of a 16th-century shepherd from a village north of the city.
In The Judge and the Historian (1991), Ginzburg "sought to defend a close friend, Adriano Sofri, a left-wing journalist who had been convicted of murder in events related to the tangled aftermath of a 1969 terrorist bombing," the Times noted. He published books and essays on a range of subjects, including history, art, literature, mythology, and psychology.
Early in his academic career, Ginzburg was teaching students who cared about history primarily for the lessons it held regarding the mass worker strikes going on at the time. "I shared my students' political concerns," he later said. "But I had to admit that my professional interests had nothing to do with the turmoil around me. I learned in a painful way that history must be studied even when it has no visible relation to contemporary issues."