KINGDOM OF ITALY AUTHOR · HISTORY · ART
Carlo Ginzburg
Also known as: GINZBURG CARLO
Leone Ginzburg (born Lev Fyodorovich Ginzburg; 4 April 1909 – 5 February 1944) was an Italian editor, writer, journalist and teacher, as well as an important anti-fascist political activist and a hero of the resistance movement. He was the husband of the renowned author Natalia Ginzburg and the father of the historian Carlo Ginzburg.
1. In 1321, we read in the chronicle of the monastery of St Stephen of Condom, a great deal of snow fell during the month of February.
— from Storia notturna, 1989
Most acclaimed
Il formaggio e i vermi
1976
Offers a study of culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. This book illustrates the confusing political and religious conditions of the time.
Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf
"The topic of werewolves has flared in the popular imagination in recent years, but the case of Thiess-a self-admitted werewolf who claimed that, thrice yearly, he transformed and battled Satan and his witches as a protector of humanity and the forest-is as baffling today as it was in seventeenth-century Livonia. At first, the judges in 1691 dismissed the 80-year-old was just a senile old man. But after protracted questioning and the testimonies of witnesses who knew Thiess as a werewolf, the judges delivered a guilty verdict a year-and-a-half later on Halloween. The sentence: flogging and banishment for stealing livestock. Even at the end, Thiess maintained that he "and a few other" werewolves were not servants of the Devil and refuted the inquisitors' accusations. This unusual and entertaining book is an attempt by two distinguished scholars from different methodological perspectives to wrestle with the case over the years. It is a hybrid work, at once a source text of the trial (reproduced in full in English for the first time); a glimpse at Nazi appropriation of the werewolf tale prior to WWII; a summary of Carlo Ginzburg's thoughts on the case (which he first encountered in the 1960s) using microhistorical analytic methods; Bruce Lincoln's analysis (from the 1970s), which he viewed from the perspective of comparative religion; their subsequent exchange of ideas and differing conclusions; and ending with an informal conversation. The result is a rare opportunity for students to attain an insight into the "modus operandi" of scholars who have left a great impact on the field, the merits and pitfalls of different interpretive approaches to the same historical materials, and an example of how scholarly exchange happens in the academic world, a debate not solely restricted to the exchange of formal articles in journals and conference papers"--
Storia notturna
1989
From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, men and women in Europe accused of witchcraft told how they were taken to the Sabbath—the nocturnal gathering before the devil at which they took part in orgies and obscene parodies of Christian rites, eating corpses and casting spells. These accounts, usually extracted by torture, are regarded by most historians today as the products of the inquisitors' own obsessions. Ecstasies is the culmination of Carlo Ginsburg's longstanding fascination with popular myths that are shared across different cultures and eras. An expert in the field of microhistory—the archaeology of the marginalized and forgotten elements of human history—Ginsburg here compares and follows the stories and their forms, and gradually they begin to weave together into new and startling patterns. Why, for example, in 1321 were Jews and lepers the object of frenzied persecution, accused of conspiring to take over the French kingdom? What do Oedipus, Achilles, and Cinderella have in common? The answers to these questions and more lead to compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across the European continent for thousands of years.