Disappearance of Carlo Ginzburg, international specialist in microhistory – Livres Hebdo

Carlo Ginzburginternational specialist in microhistory, died on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday at the age of 87. Throughout his career, the Italian historian has contributed to raising awareness of popular culture, a world that has long remained apart from the major historical trends.

Started during the “years of lead”, which saw Italy sink into violence in the 1960s and 70s, his work is partly part of the framework of microhistory. This movement 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.

Historical method

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 Sofriconvicted of the assassination of a commissioner in 1972. Sofri, friend of Ginzburg, was sentenced in 1997, after seven trials, to 22 years in prison then released in 2012.

Carlo Ginzburg wrote a work in 1991 on the first of these trials, The judge and the historian (The judge and the historian), published in 1997 by Verdier, 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 brought by the Inquisition in the 16th^e and 17^e siècles.

Il naît le 15 avril 1939 à Turin. Sa mère, Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi), is a novelist and translator (notably of Proust into Italian). His father, Leone Ginzburgis 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.

Historian of popular mentalities and witchcraft

The young man obtained a doctorate in philosophy at the Normal School of Pisa. In 1976, he signed Cheese and worms (The cheese and the wormspublished 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^e century was made of the world.

Carlo Ginzburg will establish himself as a historian of popular mentalities and witchcraft. On this last subject, he published in particular Witches’ Sabbath (Night story1989), published by Gallimard in 1992.

We owe him works like Enqu̻te sur Piero della Francesca (Investigations on Piero1981 РFlammarion, 1983), centered on the iconography of the painter, No island is an island (No Island is an Island2000 РVerdier, 2005) which deals with periods of English literature where the interpretation of a classic text ultimately leads to the understanding of its international context.

Carlo Ginzburg also wrote about the nature of historical testimony in Mythes, emblèmes, traces (Myths, emblems, spies1986 – Flammarion, 1989) and on the idea of ​​historical proof in Balance of power: history, rhetoric, proof (History, Rhetoric, Proof1999 – Seuil, 2003).

« 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. We must learn from our own mistakes“, he said.