Farewell to the great historian Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg, the renowned Italian historian whose works have been translated all over the world, has died in Bologna at the age of 87. The son of the Jewish anti-fascist intellectual Leone Ginzburg and the writer Natalia Levi (née Ginzburg), he taught modern history at the University of Bologna and subsequently at Harvard, Yale (New Haven), Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles (where he also held a chair in the history of the Italian Renaissance). From 2006 to 2010, he taught the History of European Cultures at the Normale in Pisa.

His research focuses on the cultural and social history of the modern era, with particular attention to the interaction between elite culture and popular culture. Throughout his long academic and scholarly career, and in his numerous books – which have been translated into over twenty languages – he has engaged in a profound reflection on the historian’s craft. His books include *I Benandanti. Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, *Nicodemism: Religious Pretence and Dissimulation in Sixteenth-Century Europe*, and *Cheese and Worms: The World of a Sixteenth-Century Miller*.