Reflecting on the genesis of his most famous work, Carlo Ginzburg wrote that by immersing himself in the trial of a 16th-century miller burned by the Roman Inquisition, he turned a possible footnote into a book. Fifty years on, after being translated around the world, The Cheese and The Worms still stands as a supreme exemplar of historical research devoted to the lives of “the persecuted and the vanquished”.
Ginzburg’s death last week, at the age of 87, means that one of the last living links with a remarkable postwar generation of historians has gone. In its passion for reconstructing the fabric of lives previously thought too marginal to bother with, his writing had affinities with EP Thompson’s “history from below” movement and the Annales school in France. As the rise of 21st-century authoritarianism creates new generations of scapegoats and misfits, the approach of one of Italy’s greatest scholars speaks directly to our times.
In the preface to The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg wrote: “If the sources offer us the possibility of reconstructing not only indistinct masses but also individual personalities, it would be absurd to ignore it.” Examining the two trials of Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, an unusually literate miller in an Italian village, he duly performed an intellectual and cultural salvage operation.
The result was a gripping portrait of the defendant’s dangerously egalitarian views, which had been formed from a mishmash of peasant and pagan culture, religious chronicles and Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Menocchio’s fate was sealed when he rashly disclosed to the inquisitors his pantheistic beliefs and compared angels to the worms that emerge from rotten cheese. In a characteristically moving touch, Ginzburg noted that a childhood friend of the miller had desperately urged him “not to talk too much”.
The use of medieval and renaissance court records relating to heretics, witches and shamans influenced researchers of the history of women and oppressed minorities, as they too sought to read between the lines of documents written by the powerful. As Ginzburg noted with satisfaction, his works gained an enthusiastic reception in postcolonial societies, where imperial administrations had left treasure troves of official documents. During the 1990s, he deployed his detective methods to publicly contest the dubious conviction of the leftwing radical Adriano Sofri, who was found guilty of ordering the 1972 murder of a police commissioner during Italy’s “years of lead”.
In later life, Ginzburg came to realise that his commitment to history’s victims sprang from an impulse rooted in his own past and identity. During the Nazi occupation of Italy, his father, Leone, was tortured and murdered, and as a young boy Ginzburg was forced to disguise his Jewish identity and go into hiding. In a postscript to a 50th anniversary edition of The Cheese and the Worms published this year, he mused that this had been an internally suppressed connection.
As one of Ginzburg’s last pieces of writing, the postscript summed up the value of a legacy that can inspire us to think harder and better about today’s outsiders. In it, he recalled that Menocchio told his interrogators: “My mind … wished for a new world.” The state of the world in 2026, Ginzburg argued, “makes these words, pronounced nearly five centuries ago, more urgent than ever. Menocchio is with us, speaks to us.” The same will surely continue to be true of his own work.