Carlo Ginzburg
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Carlo Ginzburg (Template:IPA; born 15 April 1939) is an Italian historian and a proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for Il formaggio e i vermi (1976, English title: The Cheese and the Worms), which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.
In 1966, he published The Night Battles, an examination of the benandanti visionary folk tradition found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friuli in northeastern Italy. He returned to looking at the visionary traditions of early modern Europe for his 1989 book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath.
Early life and education
The son of Natalia Ginzburg, a novelist, and Leone Ginzburg, a philologist, historian, and literary critic, Carlo Ginzburg was born on 15 April 1939 in Turin, Italy.<ref>Università degli Studi di Bologna. Professori ordinari. Template:Webarchive</ref> His interest for history was influenced by the works of historians Delio Cantimori and Marc Bloch. He received a PhD from the University of Pisa in 1961.
Career
He subsequently held teaching positions at the University of Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles (1988–2006), and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. His fields of interest range from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European history, with contributions to art history, literary studies, and the theory of historiography.<ref name="thehindu conversation">Template:Cite web</ref>
In 1979, Ginzburg formally requested that Pope John Paul II open the Inquisition Archives. While the immediate response of the Vatican has not yet come to light, a limited group of scholars had been granted access by 1991. In January 1998 the archives were formally opened to "qualified researchers." Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI) credited Ginzburg, and his 1979 letter, as having been instrumental in the Vatican's decision to open these archives.<ref>Putting the Inquisition on Trial, Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1998</ref> Ginzburg had his doubts about using statistics to reach a judgment about the period. “In many cases, we don’t have the evidence, the evidence has been lost,” said Ginzburg.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Along with Paul Ginsborg, Marcello Flores, Sergio Luzzatto, Claudio Pavone, Enzo Traverso, etc., Ginzburg called, in January 2007, for the rejection of a bill, presented by Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, that would have outlawed Holocaust denial. They argued that Italy's legislation was sufficient to cope with such acts. The amended bill finally restricted itself to reinforcing sentences concerning hate speech.<ref>Sous la pression des historiens, l’Italie renonce à pénaliser le négationnisme Template:Webarchive, Human Rights League (LDH), February 1, 2007 Template:In lang</ref>
He was awarded the 2010 Balzan Prize<ref>Balzan Prize winners in 2010 Template:Webarchive, from the website of the Fondazione internazionale Premio Balzan</ref> and was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Work
In The Night Battles and Ecstasies, Ginzburg traced a complex path from certain European witch persecutions to the benandanti and a wide variety of practices which he describes as evidence of a substrate of shamanic cults in Europe. His 1999 work, The Judge and the Historian, sought to expose injustice in the trial of Adriano Sofri, but failed to win a new trial. His book was not only about Sofri but was also a general reflection on the scientific methods used by a historian, and their similarity to the work of a judge, who also has to correlate testimonies with material evidence in order to deduce what really happened. Thus, he explains how the judicial model of early historiography made it focus on easily verifiable facts, resulting in studies that centred on individuals or on what Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch called in the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale an "evenemential history". In his book History, Rhetoric, and Proof (1999), he contrasts the ancient rhetoric of Aristotle with the modern rhetoric of Nietzsche.<ref name="thehindu conversation"/>
Bibliography
- Template:Cite book (First published in Italian as Il formaggio e i vermi, 1976)
- Template:Cite book (First published in Italian as I benandanti, 1966)
- Template:Cite book
- Template:Cite book (revised edition, 2000)
- Template:Cite book
- Template:Cite book (First published in Italian as Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del Sabba, 1989)
- Template:Cite book
- Template:Cite book (First published in Italian as Il giudice e la storico, 1991)
- Template:Cite book
- Template:Cite book
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- Template:Cite web
See also
- Leone Ginzburg (father), Natalia Ginzburg (mother)
- Vatican Secret Archives
- Menocchio, accused of heresy
References
External links
- Ginzburg UCLA Homepage
- Carlo Ginzburg at the International Balzan Prize Foundation
- On the Dark Side – Ginzburg interview
- Template:Webarchive
- “An Interview with Carlo Ginzburg by Yehuda Safran and Daniel Sherer,” Potlatch 5 (2022), 1–55.
Template:Viareggio Prize Template:Historians of Europe Template:Authority control
- 1939 births
- Living people
- 20th-century Italian historians
- 20th-century Italian Jews
- 20th-century Italian male writers
- 21st-century Italian historians
- Academic staff of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
- Italian atheists
- Italian male non-fiction writers
- Italian people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent
- Jewish historians
- Jewish Italian writers
- Microhistorians
- Viareggio Prize winners
- Writers from Turin
- International members of the American Philosophical Society