Historian Carlo Ginzburg Remembered as a Guiding Light

José Emilio Burucúa bids farewell to his friend, the renowned Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, remembering him as one of the "greatest lights of historical science" of the past two centuries.

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Carlo Ginzburg has been one of the greatest lights of historical science in these two centuries in which I have lived.

Ginzburg's most famous work, "The Cheese and the Worms," published in 1976, brought him international acclaim. The book originated from Ginzburg's discovery of unique documents in a Friuli archive detailing an Inquisition trial from the late 16th century against a miller named Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio. This meticulous research illuminated the life and death of a man in rural northeastern Italy, offering a rare biographical account of peasant life and marking a triumph for the microhistory movement emerging in Italy.

Burucúa notes that Ginzburg's influence extended far beyond "The Cheese and the Worms." The historian's further investigations revealed how European concepts of witchcraft between the 15th and 17th centuries were rooted in ancient beliefs about communication between the living and the dead. These complex cultural threads, woven across Eurasia since the mid-first millennium BCE, expanded the scope of microhistory into a macro-historical narrative about the intellectual and practical construction of Western witchcraft.

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His seminal work, or at least that which made him famous beyond the academic world, was undoubtedly The Cheese and the Worms, published in Italy in 1976.

Ginzburg's scholarship also encompassed broader inquiries, examining sources like books, images, and religious controversies that spanned continents. His work consistently demonstrated a profound engagement with the past, offering precise biographical details of historical figures and contributing significantly to the understanding of European cultural and intellectual history.

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Our dear friend brought to light an exciting chapter of the past that we, to a large extent, were unaware of.