Carlo Ginzburg, the influential Italian historian and intellectual, has died at the age of 87. According to several reports, he died in Bologna yesterday morning.
Ginzburg was born in Turin to a Jewish family. His mother was the prominent writer Natalia Ginzburg, and his father, the intellectual Leone Ginzburg, was murdered by the Nazis when Carlo was about 5 years old.
His main field of research was heresy in 16th-century Italy. In that context, he wrote what became his best-known book, "The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller," published in 1976. The book focused on a common man named Menocchio, who was sentenced to death by the Inquisition for his beliefs.
Ginzburg examined the trial transcripts and used different methods to bring the obscure figure and the world that shaped him to life. The book became a bestseller and was later translated into Hebrew by Ora Eyal, published by Carmel. Because of this landmark work, Ginzburg came to be seen as one of the leading figures in microhistory, alongside scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis and Judith C. Brown.
