Microhistory pioneer Carlo Ginzburg dies at 87, leaving mark on Italian scholarship

Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian historian whose methodological innovations transformed the study of the past by recovering the testimony of marginalized figures, died Wednesday at 87 in Bologna. The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where Ginzburg was both a student and professor emeritus, announced his death. His work pioneered microhistory, a field that focuses on small, specific units of analysis—a village, a family, a trial—to illuminate broader historical patterns and recover voices that conventional archives often silence.

Ginzburg's influence extended across Italian scholarship and into the international academy. His most celebrated work used inquisitorial records to trace the beliefs and lives of a sixteenth-century miller in Friuli, bringing the region's folklore and religious heterodoxy into sharp historical focus. That book, 'The Cheese and the Worms', became a model for how historians could use judicial and ecclesiastical documents to reconstruct the inner worlds of people without formal literacy or power. His method transformed not only what historians studied but how they read sources.