Carlo Ginzburg, the historian who read silences of the past

Thrashed by the sea, the world curdled like cheese, from which multitudes of worms were born. These became men, of whom the most powerful and wisest was God.” This statement of the 16th-century Italian miller Menocchio would land him in prison. Four centuries later, Carlo Ginzburg tapped into Menocchio’s often contradictory claims about Christ and the Church to reveal a European world outside the Renaissance. First published in Italian in 1976, Cheese and the Worms established Ginzburg, who died on Wednesday, as one of the pioneers of microhistory, whose practitioners would study a small unit, an event, an individual or a village.

In his celebrated essay, ‘Clues, Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, Ginzburg compared the historian’s craft to that of detectives. Judicial records, though created by the elite, preserve the sentiments of the socially excluded. By reading their silences, historians could show how the lives of millers, witches, farmers carry insights into power, knowledge and social change.

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Ginzburg’s methods often exasperated his more traditionally inclined peers. J H Plumb is reported to have said that “the life of Isaac Newton is more important than witch trials”. But microhistory would leave its imprint, influencing scholars from members of the Subaltern school to writers of broad sweep accounts like Pulitzer prize winner Jill Lepore. That’s because its greatest contribution was to seek meaning in the smallest traces of the past.