In Memoriam: Carlo Ginzburg (1939-2026)

“It is all that is made.” Julian of Norwich

The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has died. The newspaper headlines read that he was a founder of “microhistory”, a genre of the discipline characterized by the narrow scope of its research: single events, single individuals, single communities. But this description is somewhat misleading, since it was precisely because—rather than despite—of the narrow scope of his books that Ginzburg was able to plumb the subterranean depths of human experience—micro focus, macro significance. Reading his work for the first time, I felt that I was about as close as I could get to Julian of Norwich’s vision of the cosmos: all that is made contained “within the quantity of a hazelnut”. History couldn’t get more compact, or sublime, than that.

As the term “microhistory” might imply, the two books that levered Ginzburg into eminence in his field —The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms—are somewhat slim, at least compared to their outsize reputation. Both concern the folk beliefs of peasants in the northern Italian region of Friuli, situated between the Adriatic Sea and the Alps. The Night Battles is a description of the benandanti or “good walkers”, male practitioners of agrarian magic, and the efforts of the Roman Inquisition to suppress them. Examining court testimonials with the eye of an anthropologist, Ginzburg situates the benandanti with a host of mythic and mystical traditions from across Europe, everything from werewolves to post-Christian remnants of Venus worship. Heterodoxy and its suppression was also a subject in The Cheese and the Worms, which follows the career of Menocchio, a literate miller, who, for his metaphysical speculations on the origins of the cosmos, was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1599. Throughout his career, Ginzburg excavated the mental world of ordinary people, those on the outermost periphery educational and ecclesiastical power structures, but he never let abstruse social theory obscure the humanity, the individuality, of his subjects.

I read The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms as an undergraduate at the University of Washington, as readings for Professor Mary O’Neil’s course on the historical study of witchcraft. To the dismay of many of my classmates, the prospective seminarians as well the astrological influencers in training, the class wasn’t easy and it took no moralistic stance, either for or against, the occult. There was just as much methodology as there was magic. Along with Ginzberg, we were assigned Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s anthropological study of a medieval Occitan village that had been investigated by the French Inquisition during the Albigensian Crusade. The texts were quite a bit more dense than I had encountered, but all the more compelling for that. The questions they posed seemed much more vital than anything I had encountered before in my coursework. Chief among them was this: how far should the records of persecutors be trusted as a historical source regarding the people they persecuted?

Ginzburg didn’t pose his questions—not merely, at least—within the cloistered moral universe of academic history. Born as he was into a prominent Jewish Italian intellectual family in 1939, questions of authority, epistemological or otherwise, were in the air—, in the air sometimes in the form of human smoke. Carlo’s father, Leone, was an editor at the Einaudi publishing house and, after being stripped of citizenship, an antifascist partisan during the Second World War, efforts which caused him to be imprisoned, tortured, and eventually murdered by the Nazis in 1944. Carlo’s mother, Natalia, survived the war and became a leftwing politician and a leading writer in Postwar Italy. Her memoir A Family Lexicon is an account of the world in which Carlo was born, focusing not on grand narratives but intimate portraits, an index of the shared expressions and mannerisms that serve as the semantic mortar of family life. I remember the awkward silence that descended on the class when Professor O’Niel asked us if we had read anything by her. The question seemed absurd—the mother of some guy in our coursebook? How could we have? Now, having read both Natalia and Carlo a fair bit, I could see why she was curious, even if that curiosity was ultimately wasted on us.

My study of historical witchcraft was a source of interest, at least initially, to my non-student friends, especially those with occult interests. Was I going to study tea leaves along with textbooks? Was I going to summon up some kind of demonic tutor to aid me in my studies? I was asked all of these questions and more and sometimes asked in earnest. But any kind of dark, subcultural appeal was quickly washed away by what was, at least in their minds, a flood of abstruse (not arcane) historical detail. It was a settled case that they—the sons and daughters and genderfluid children of the witches they couldn’t burn—they had nothing (nothing!) to learn from reading the reports of their Christian oppressors. Even the more rational-minded among my friend group, which included the budding academics, were nonplussed. What could be the use of cataloging the superstitions of a few unfortunate peasants in some rural Italian backwater?

For me, the use, the benefit was immediate—at least it felt immediate—and has remained with me. Reading Ginzburg resolved a painful tension in my mind. Since childhood, I had nursed a fascination with the occult that was tempered by a violent distaste for the deception and credulity that often, perhaps inevitably, goes along with it. (Don’t heretics and defenders of orthodoxy alike say such things put the soul at hazard?) Anyway, the dominant modes of esoteric inquiry at the time—Twitter astrology along with Tumblr witchcraft—didn’t feel very esoteric or inquiring to me. But, to my delight, I could read Ginzburg and could grasp the idiosyncrasy of his human subjects and be fascinated by them; I could grasp the strange bent of their thought, compare it to what I knew of their world and my own: I could learn history from them, independent of whether I believed (or disbelieved) in the content of their thoughts.

In Ginzburg’s subjects, I found everyday people seeking to unbind themselves from the shackles of earthly authority and find the subtle and beautiful threads that bound the cosmos together. That many of these subjects were feckless and ignorant themselves was immaterial. Ginzburg was writing history and not hagiography. But preserved in their speech, recorded scrupulously by their torturers and executioners, there could be found scattered traces of deep time, deep time on a human scale: sayings and myths from antiquity, told more than a thousand years after the victory of Constantine. The significance of this was not, to the disappointment of my friends, in some imagined pagan resistance to Christendom, but in the durability of human thought, which closes all mortal gaps in an instant.

William A. Foster from The Bible Panorama, or The Holy Scriptures in Picture and Story (1891)