Reflecting on the genesis of his most famous work, Carlo Ginzburg wrote that by immersing himself in the trial of a 16th-century miller burned by the Roman Inquisition, he turned a possible footnote into a book. Fifty years on, after being translated around the world, The Cheese and The Worms still stands as a supreme exemplar of historical research devoted to the lives of “the persecuted and the vanquished”.
Ginzburg’s death last week, at the age of 87, means that one of the last living links with a remarkable postwar generation of historians has gone. In its passion for reconstructing the fabric of lives previously thought too marginal to bother with, his writing had affinities with EP Thompson’s “history from below” movement and the Annales school in France. As the rise of 21st-century authoritarianism creates new generations of scapegoats and misfits, the approach of one of Italy’s greatest scholars speaks directly to our times.
