Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg was an Italian historian and one of the founders of microhistory, a way of writing the past that recovers small lives and marginal voices in order to illuminate larger structures. He died in the early hours of 17 June 2026 in Bologna at the age of 87. The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he had been both student and professor emeritus, announced his death.

He was born in Turin on 15 April 1939 into a family of Lithuanian, Russian and Italian Jewish origins. His father, Leone Ginzburg, a philologist, critic and co-founder of the Einaudi publishing house, was tortured and murdered by the Gestapo in 1944 for antifascist publishing. His mother, Natalia Ginzburg (born Levi), became one of Italy's major novelists and essayists. Carlo spent early childhood in internal exile and hiding. He took a PhD from the University of Pisa in 1961 and also studied at the Warburg Institute in London. Historians Delio Cantimori and Marc Bloch shaped his sense of the craft.

Ginzburg taught at the University of Bologna, held a Fulbright year at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in 1975-76, taught at UCLA from 1988 to 2006, and later held a chair at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. His first major book, The Night Battles (1966), examined the Friulian benandanti and the meeting of elite and popular culture. The Cheese and the Worms (1976), on the cosmos of the sixteenth-century miller Menocchio, became a manifesto of microhistory and was translated into about thirty languages. Ecstasies (1989) returned to visionary traditions and the witches' sabbath on a Eurasian scale. Essays such as "Clues" linked microanalysis to medicine, connoisseurship and psychoanalysis. He also wrote on Piero della Francesca, on the Sofri case in The Judge and the Historian, and on rhetoric and proof. In 1979 his request helped open the Vatican Inquisition archives to qualified researchers. He received the Balzan Prize in 2010 and was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013.

He married first the historian Anna Rossi-Doria, with whom he had two children including the writer Lisa Ginzburg; the marriage ended in divorce. He later married Luisa Ciammitti. Colleagues remembered him as a scholar who defended the truth-claims of history against radical scepticism while remaining alert to anomaly and shame as forms of belonging. His death closed a career that remade how historians listen for voices the archives almost erased.