An international specialist in microhistory, the Italian Carlo Ginzburg, who died on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday at the age of 87, contributed to raising awareness of popular culture, a world that had long remained apart from the major historical trends.
Démarrée sous les “years of lead”who saw Italy descend into violence in the 1960s and 70s, his work is partly part of the framework of microhistory. This current was born in reaction against quantitative history, represented in France by the famous Annales School since the 1930s.
Passionate about the analysis of peasant beliefs and the behavior of ordinary people, always attentive to details that make sense, Carlo Ginzburg wrote as much about witchcraft trials or magic in Renaissance Italy as about the intellectual history of Europe, art or literature.
A left-wing Italian, this professor at the University of Bologna, the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Pisa and the University of California (UCLA, Los Angeles), was also the author of important theoretical works on the historical method. He defended, with other intellectuals, the far-left journalist Adriano Sofri, convicted of the assassination of a commissioner in 1972. Sofri, a friend of Ginzburg, was sentenced in 1997, after seven trials, to 22 years in prison then released in 2012.
Specialist of sorcières
Carlo Ginzburg wrote a work in 1991 on the first of these trials,“Le juge et l’historien”(‘Il giudice e lo storico’), speaking of a judicial error and saying he found, in this file, aspects of witchcraft trials, which he studied from a historical point of view, like those carried out by the Inquisition in the 16th and 17th centuries.
He was born on April 15, 1939 in Turin. His mother, Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi), is a novelist and translator (notably of Proust into Italian). His father, Leone Ginzburg, is a professor of Russian literature. An anti-fascist activist, he was sent to house arrest by Mussolini, then arrested and murdered by the Germans when Carlo was 5 years old. “I grew up in a house full of books, a privilege linked to an experience of marginality: that of a Jew in fascist Italy during the war.”he said.
The young man obtained a doctorate in philosophy at the Normal School of Pisa. In 1976, he signed“Cheese and Worms”(‘Il formaggio ei vermi’, published in France in 1980). In this work, which aims to be written as close as possible to reality, has become a classic and widely translated, he reconstituted the idea that a miller from Friuli (northeast) of the 16th century had of the world.
Carlo Ginzburg will establish himself as a historian of popular mentalities and witchcraft. On this last subject, he published in particular“Le sabbat des sorcières”(‘Storia notturna’, 1989). We owe him works like“Inquest on Piero della Francesca”(»Indagini su Piero», 1981), centré sur l’iconographie du peintre,“No island is an island”(No Island is an Island, 2000) which deals with periods in English literature where the interpretation of a classic text eventually leads to the understanding of its international context.
Carlo Ginzburg also wrote about the nature of historical testimony in« Mythes, emblèmes, traces »(»Miti, emblemi, spie», 1986) et sur l’idée de preuve historique dans“Balance of power: history, rhetoric, proof” ( »History, Rhetoric, Proof », 1999). “The way of achieving a result counts in a way as much as the results (…). I was able to present provisional results, drafts. And it’s very useful. You have to learn from your own mistakes.”he said.
