Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg 2013
Born	(1939-04-15) April 15, 1939 Turin, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Alma mater	University of Pisa

Carlo Ginzburg (Italian: [ˈkarlo ˈɡintsburɡ]; born April 15, 1939^[1]) is a noted Italian historian and proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for Il formaggio e i vermi (1976, English title: The Cheese and the Worms), which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.

In 1966, he published The Night Battles, an examination of the benandanti visionary folk tradition found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friuli in northeastern Italy. He returned to looking at the visionary traditions of early modern Europe for his 1989 book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath.

Life

The son of Natalia Ginzburg and Leone Ginzburg, Carlo Ginzburg was born in 1939 in Turin, Italy. He received a PhD from the University of Pisa in 1961. He subsequently held teaching positions at the University of Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles (1988–2006), and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. His fields of interest range from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European history, with contributions to art history, literary studies, and the theory of historiography.

In 1979, Ginzburg formally requested that the former Pope John Paul II open the Inquisition Archives. While the immediate response of the Vatican has not yet come to light, a limited group of scholars had been granted access by 1991. In January 1998 the archives were formally opened to "qualified researchers." Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI) credited Ginzburg, and his 1979 letter, as having been instrumental in the Vatican's decision to open these archives.^[2] Ginzburg had his doubts about using statistics to reach a judgment about the period. “In many cases, we don’t have the evidence, the evidence has been lost,” said Ginzburg.^[3]

Along with Paul Ginsborg, Marcello Flores, Sergio Luzzatto, Claudio Pavone, Enzo Traverso, etc., Ginzburg called, in January 2002, for the rejection of a bill, presented by Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, that would have outlawed Holocaust denial. They argued that Italy's legislation was sufficient to cope with such acts. The amended bill finally restricted itself to reinforcing sentences concerning hate speech.^[4]

He was awarded the 2010 Balzan Prize^[5] and was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013.^[6]

Work

In The Night Battles and Ecstasies, Ginzburg traced a complex path from certain European witch persecutions to the benandanti and a wide variety of practices which he describes as evidence of a substrate of shamanic cults in Europe. His 1999 work, The Judge and the Historian, sought to expose injustice in the trial of Adriano Sofri, but failed to win a new trial. His book was not only about Sofri, but was also a general reflection on the scientific methods used by a historian, and their similarity to the work of a judge, who also has to correlate testimonies with material evidence in order to deduce what really happened. Thus, he explains how the judicial model of early historiography made it focus on easily verifiable facts, resulting in studies that centered on individuals or on what Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch called in the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale an "evenemential history."

Bibliography

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, ISBN 0-8018-4387-1 . First published in Italian as Il formaggio e i vermi, 1976.
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1983, ISBN 0-8018-4386-3. First published in Italian as I benandanti, 1966.
Umberto Eco; Thomas Sebeok, eds. (1984), "Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method", The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington, IN: History Workshop, Indiana University Press, pp. 81–118, ISBN 978-0-253-35235-4
The Enigma of Piero, London, 1985 (revised edition, 2000), ISBN 0-86091-904-8.
Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989, ISBN 0-8018-4388-X.
Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, New York, 1991, ISBN 0-226-29693-8. First published in Italian as Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del Sabba, 1989.
Wooden Eyes, Milan, 1998, ISBN 0-231-11960-7.
The Judge and the Historian. Marginal Notes and a Late-Twentieth-century Miscarriage of Justice, London 1999, ISBN 1-85984-371-9. First published in Italian as Il giudice e la storico (1991).
History, Rhetoric, and Proof. The Menachem Stern Jerusalem Lectures, London and Hanover 1999, ISBN 0-87451-933-0.
Das Schwert und die Glühbirne. Eine neue Lektüre von Picassos Guernica, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-12103-0.
No Island is an Island. Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective, New York 2000, ISBN 0-231-11628-4.
Un dialogo, Milano, 2003.
Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive, (papers), University of California Press, 2012, ISBN 9780520274488
Latitude, Slaves and the Bible: An Experiment in Microhistory (PDF) Online paper by Carlo Ginzburg.

References

↑ Università degli Studi di Bologna. Professori ordinari Archived March 18, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
↑ Putting the Inquisition on Trial, Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1998
↑ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/5218373/ns/world_news/t/vatican-downgrades-inquisition-toll/#.VP8gMPnF-Sp
↑ Sous la pression des historiens, l’Italie renonce à pénaliser le négationnisme, Human Rights League (LDH), February 1, 2007 (French)
↑ Balzan Prize winners in 2010, from the website of the Fondazione internazionale Premio Balzan
↑ https://www.amphilsoc.org/members/electedApril2013

External links

Ginzburg UCLA Homepage
Carlo Ginzburg at the International Balzan Prize Foundation
On the Dark Side – Ginzburg interview
Review of Cheese and the Worms (PDF) at the Wayback Machine (archive index)

Recipients of the Viareggio Prize

1930s	Anselmo Bucci – Lorenzo Viani (1930) Corrado Tumiati (1931) Antonino Foschini (1932) Achille Campanile (1933) Raffaele Calzini (1934) Mario Massa – Stefano Pirandello (1935) Riccardo Bacchelli (1936) Guelfo Civinini (1937) Vittorio Giovanni Rossi – Enrico Pea (1938) Arnaldo Frateili – Orio Vergani – Maria Bellonci (1939)

1940s	Silvio Micheli – Umberto Saba (1946) • Antonio Gramsci (1947) • Aldo Palazzeschi – Elsa Morante – Sibilla Aleramo (1948) • Arturo Carlo Jemolo – Renata Viganò (1949)

1950s	Francesco Jovine – Carlo Bernari (1950) • Domenico Rea (1951) • Tommaso Fiore (1952) • Carlo Emilio Gadda (1953) • Rocco Scotellaro (1954) • Vasco Pratolini (1955) • Carlo Levi – Gianna Manzini (1956) • Italo Calvino – Pier Paolo Pasolini (1957) • Ernesto de Martino (1958) • Marino Moretti (1959)

1960s	Giovanni Battista Angioletti (1960) • Alberto Moravia (1961) • Giorgio Bassani (1962) • Antonio Delfini – Sergio Solmi (1963) • Giuseppe Berto (1964) • Goffredo Parise (1965) • Ottiero Ottieri – Alfonso Gatto (1966) • Raffaello Brignetti (1967) • Libero Bigiaretti (1968) • Fulvio Tomizza (1969)

1970s	Nello Saito (1970) • Ugo Attardi (1971) • Romano Bilenchi (1972) • Achille Campanile (1973) • Clotilde Marghieri (1974) • Paolo Volponi (1975) • Mario Tobino – Dario Bellezza – Sergio Solmi (1976) • Davide Lajolo (1977) • Antonio Altomonte – Mario Luzi (1978) • Giorgio Manganelli (1979)

1980s	Stefano Terra (1980) • Enzo Siciliano (1981) • Primo Levi (1982) • Giuliana Morandini (1983) • Gina Lagorio – Bruno Gentili (1984) • Manlio Cancogni (1985) • Marisa Volpi (1986) • Mario Spinella (1987) • Rosetta Loy (1988) • Salvatore Mannuzzu (1989)

1990s	Luisa Adorno – Cesare Viviani – Maurizio Calvesi (1990) • Antonio Debenedetti (1991) • Luigi Malerba (1992) • Alessandro Baricco (1993) • Antonio Tabucchi (1994) • Maurizio Maggiani – Elio Pagliarani (1995) • Ermanno Rea – Alda Merini (1996) • Claudio Piersanti – Franca Grisoni – Corrado Stajano (1997) • Giorgio Pressburger – Michele Sovente – Carlo Ginzburg (1998) • Ernesto Franco (1999)

2000s	Giorgio van Straten – Sandro Veronesi (2000) • Niccolò Ammaniti – Michele Ranchetti – Giorgio Pestelli (2001) • Fleur Jaeggy – Jolanda Insana – Alfonso Berardinelli (2002) • Giuseppe Montesano (2003) • Edoardo Albinati – Andrea Tagliapietra – Livia Livi (2004) • Raffaele La Capria – Alberto Arbasino – Milo de Angelis (2005) • Gianni Celati – Giovanni Agosti – Giuseppe Conte – Roberto Saviano (2006) • Filippo Tuena – Paolo Mauri – Silvia Bre – Simona Baldanzi – Paolo Colagrande – Paolo Fallai (2007) • Francesca Sanvitale – Miguel Gotor – Eugenio De Signoribus (2008) • Edith Bruck – Adriano Prosperi – Ennio Cavalli (2009)

2010s	Nicola Lagioia – Michele Emmer – Pierluigi Cappello (2010) Alessandro Mari – Mario Lavagetto – Gian Mario Villalta (2011) Nicola Gardini – Franco Lo Piparo – Antonella Anedda (2012)

Authority control	WorldCat Identities VIAF: 108148905 LCCN: n80005406 ISNI: 0000 0001 0930 7752 GND: 12096967X SUDOC: 026892251 BNF: cb11904997h (data) NDL: 00440975 ICCU: IT\ICCU\CFIV\011720

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/19/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.