The Cheese And The Worms: The Cosmos Of A Sixteenth-Century Miller

Carlo Ginzburg is an Italian historian credited as a key founder of the field of microhistory (See: Background). He was born in 1939 in Turin to a Jewish family, the son of Natalia and Leone Ginzburg. His mother was a notable novelist, whose work received widespread recognition in the post-war era for its explorations of life under fascist rule in Italy. His father was a similarly influential writer, and both parents were key members of the anti-fascist movement, collaborating on the publication of L’Italia Libera, a resistance newspaper.

For much of Ginzburg’s early childhood, the family was exiled to a commune in Abruzzo because of antisemitic laws, and his parents were forced to publish under pseudonyms that concealed their Jewishness. In 1943, when Ginzburg was 12 years old, Leone Ginzburg was arrested, tortured, and murdered by the Nazi police for his publication of L’Italia Libera. Emerging from this immense political adversity, Ginzburg credits his parents’ careers as being highly influential in his narrative approach to history.

Ginzburg’s areas of research are highly varied, but tend to center on Early Modern popular religiosity in Northern Italy. He received his PhD in 1961 from the University of Pisa. His first book, The Night Battles (1966), explored the mystical benandanti cult tradition, also of the Friuli region, and trials of its members by the Roman Inquisition in the 16th and 17th centuries.