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Carlo Ginzburg obituary

The Guardian UK Wednesday 01 July 2026, 16:43 UTC By John Foot 1 min read
Key Points

Italian academic and author who challenged traditional approaches with his pursuit of microhistoryIt would be no exaggeration to claim that the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who has died aged 87, revolutionised the practice and understanding of history. In particular, in a series of books published in the 1970s – above all, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976) – he embraced a new field of study called microhistory, which challenged traditional ways of...

Italian academic and author who challenged traditional approaches with his pursuit of microhistory

It would be no exaggeration to claim that the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who has died aged 87, revolutionised the practice and understanding of history. In particular, in a series of books published in the 1970s – above all, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976) – he embraced a new field of study called microhistory, which challenged traditional ways of understanding the discipline of which he was part.

Far from the overarching theoretical approaches of Marxism or liberalism, Ginzburg emphasised the edges, the marginalised, the detail rather than the bigger picture. The chance discovery of Inquisition trial documents in archives in Udine opened a way to an understanding of a society and culture through one individual previously ignored by history.

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Carlo Ginzburg (PERSON) Italian (ORG) Cheese (ORG) Miller (PERSON) Marxism (ORG) Ginzburg (PERSON) Inquisition (EVENT) Udine (LOCATION)
Originally published by The Guardian UK Read original →

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