‘My questions were affected by fiction’: Carlo Ginzburg (1939-2026), pioneer in microhistory

Carlo Ginzburg was an Italian historian and one of the founders of the field of microhistory. His interest ranged from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European history, with contributions to art history, literary studies, and the theory of historiography.

A few of his best known works are The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, The Night Battles, and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath.

He was awarded the 2010 Balzan Prize and was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. Ginzburg died on June 17. He was 87.

In a conversation with his Indian publisher, Naveen Kishore in Kolkata, 2019, Ginzburg spoke about his career, “becoming” a Jew, his obsession with punctuation, and the deep influence of fiction on his work.

Excerpts from the conversation:

The thing about conversations of this nature is that they tend to begin midstream. There is a sense that you have been talking before and that you will continue to talk after. So I shall plunge into my homework.

The lure of walking into a living landscape of possibility, especially if no one else has trampled that way before, is exhilarating: discovering first your roots, and then the initial glimmer of clues to the possibility of a life of history; becoming...

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