ROME (AP) — Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian historian whose pioneering work transformed the study of the past by recovering the voices of marginalized people, died Wednesday at 87.The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he was both a student and professor emeritus, said he died in the northern Italian city of Bologna.Ginzburg was a pioneer of microhistory, which focuses on small, specific units of analysis — such as an individual, a community, or a singular event — to reveal broader themes and issues within history.A leading figure in contemporary historiography, Ginzburg developed the so-called “evidential paradigm,” a method based on interpreting clues, traces and seemingly minor details to reconstruct the experiences of those excluded from dominant narratives.His early work focused on the “benandanti,” a pagan fertility cult in the 16th- and 17th-century Friuli region whose members, seen as shamanic healers, were accused of heresy by the Inquisition.
The research underpinned his first book, published in 1966, in which he traced the cult’s roots to older Central European beliefs.He later explored heresy in his landmark 1976 book “The Cheese and the Worms,” widely regarded as one of the most important works of Italian historiography.
