Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian scholar renowned for an approach to history that focused on the mass of humanity that existed outside the political and social elites of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, died on Wednesday in Bologna. He was 87.
His death was announced by the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he taught. No cause or specific location were provided.
In the 1960s, when Mr. Ginzburg embarked on his research, there was little interest in discovering what the peasants of centuries past thought and believed. Few serious academics were writing about witchcraft or heretical cults. The study of history was focused on great leaders and events, like the Medici banking and political dynasty of nearby Florence or the powerful doges who ruled over Venice.
Mr. Ginzburg, by contrast, spent six years figuring out what a 16th-century miller meant when he said that the world was created from rotting cheese. He devoted even more time to unraveling the beliefs of peasants denounced by the Inquisition as witches and werewolves. One of his more eccentric efforts involved an attempt to link Oedipus’s swollen foot and Cinderella’s missing slipper to ancient myths about journeying to the afterworld.
Mr. Ginzburg’s interdisciplinary approach straddled anthropology, literary theory, art criticism and psychoanalysis. One of his essays demonstrated how Sigmund Freud, an avid reader of Arthur Conan Doyle, gained insight into the psyche by absorbing the seemingly insignificant clues that Sherlock Holmes uncovered to solve his cases. Similarly, Mr. Ginzburg used the most arcane evidence to pry open the minds and hearts of Italian commoners living centuries ago — emphasizing how different things were back then.
“The more we discover about these people’s mental universe, the more we should be shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them,” Mr. Ginzburg, who also taught for many years at the University of Bologna and the University of California, Los Angeles, told The New York Times Magazine in 1991.
Mr. Ginzburg was a leading member of a group of like-minded scholars who rose to prominence in the second half of the 20th century. The French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s “Montaillou” (1975), a study of sex and heresy in a Languedoc village around the year 1300, became a best seller in his country. “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1983), by Natalie Zemon Davis, delved into the life of a 16th-century French peasant who assumed another person’s identity so successfully that he duped the man’s wife, parents and friends. The title essay of Robert Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre” (1984) tried to explain why apprentices at an 18th-century printing shop in Paris gleefully tortured and killed their employers’ pets.
“Ginzburg showed that non-intellectuals had an intellectual life — and demonstrated what that life was,” Mr. Darnton said in an interview for this obituary. “It was a great feat that inspired lots of other scholars to attempt the same thing.”
Some scholars felt that Mr. Ginzburg and his cohort went too far in dismissing the historical importance of great events and personalities. One exasperated British historian, J. H. Plumb, felt it necessary to remind his colleagues that “the life of Sir Isaac Newton is more important than a description of all the witch trials of 17th-century England.”
But the influence of “microhistory” and “the history of mentalities” — the currents of historiography represented by Mr. Ginzburg — continues to be felt in the wave of academic, biographical and literary attention paid to previously overlooked groups, including women, minorities and the underprivileged.
Carlo Ginzburg was born in Turin on April 15, 1939, the eldest of three children in a Jewish family. His mother, Natalia (Levi) Ginzburg, was a well-known novelist and essayist. His father, Leone Ginzburg, who had been born in Odesa, then part of the Russian empire, was an accomplished historian and literary critic.
Carlo’s family spent several years in a small southern Italian village to which his parents had been exiled for their opposition to the Mussolini regime. After his father was tortured and killed in 1944, during the Nazi occupation of Italy, for publishing an antifascist underground newspaper, Carlo spent the remainder of the war hidden in another rural village, under the protection of his maternal grandmother.
“She was my only non-Jewish relative, and to protect me she made me use her maiden name,” Mr. Ginzburg later recalled. “I became Carlo Tanzi.”
He traced his interests as a historian to his childhood. A peasant woman hired as his nanny fired his imagination with tales of werewolves and witches, stories taken as gospel by the local villagers despite longtime efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to stamp out pagan beliefs.
“I also identified with these marginalized people because I was Jewish,” Mr. Ginzburg said.
Mulling a scholarly career, he was undecided about whether to study art history, literary criticism, philosophy or linguistics. “I didn’t even consider history because I found it so boring,” he said. What finally convinced him to become a historian was a seminar in which he was asked to spend an entire week analyzing 10 lines of a 19th-century text.
“I learned the importance of reading and rereading one page, even a single passage, for days, weeks,” he said.
Mr. Ginzburg relied on chance and instinct to find the subjects of his research. His first book, published in 1966 and called “The Night Battles” in English, was inspired by a visit to the Inquisition archives in Venice, where he picked out volumes at random until he came across an account of the trial of a 16th-century shepherd from a village north of the city.
The man said he belonged to a sect known as the Benandanti (or good walkers), whose members were said to occasionally ride, intoxicated by visions, to isolated fields where they would take part in games and battle witches. In his book, Mr. Ginzburg interpreted the Benandanti as a fertility cult, and meticulously demonstrated how they were the descendants of one of the many pagan groups that predated Christianity, with rituals and beliefs that resisted the Catholic Church and ruling elites.
“The case was so reminiscent of a fairy tale,” he said, “and I suppose that’s why I reacted immediately to it.”
Mr. Ginzburg’s most celebrated work, “The Cheese and the Worms,” published in 1976, told the story of Menocchio, an obscure miller burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1599 for his insistence that God and the universe were created from rot.
The book, which read like a tragic novel, was a landmark study of the impact that the introduction of reading had on villagers who had grown up in an oral culture of folklore. Menocchio gave his Inquisitors the titles of the volumes that had shaped his heretical beliefs. But it turned out that he had embellished his readings about how God created the universe from a shapeless mass with ancient myths still circulating in his village.
Mr. Ginzburg had two daughters, Silvia and Lisa, with his wife, the historian Anna Rossi-Doria, who died in 2017. He then married Luisa Ciammitti, an art historian, curator and museum director. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available.
He published a range of other books and numerous essays on subjects that included history as well as art, literature, mythology and psychology.
His 1991 work “The Judge and the Historian” sought to defend a close friend, Adriano Sofri, a left-wing journalist who had been convicted of murder in events related to the tangled aftermath of a 1969 terrorist bombing. While the book failed to get Mr. Sofri a new trial, it was praised by some reviewers for its insights on the similarities of how judges and historians go about gathering material evidence before reaching conclusions.
Early in his career, Mr. Ginzburg had been assigned to teach students who cared about history mainly for the lessons it held for the mass worker strikes going on at the time.
“I shared my students’ political concerns,” he later said. “But I had to admit that my professional interests had nothing to do with the turmoil around me. I learned in a painful way that history must be studied even when it has no visible relation to contemporary issues.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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