Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg is a noted historian and pioneer of microhistory.

Born 1939 in Italy, received a PhD from the University of Pisa in 1961. Occupied teaching positions at the University of Bologna and since 1988 at the University of California, Los Angeles. Field of interests range from the Italian Renaissance to Early Modern European History, a leader in microhistory methodologies. He is most famous for his ground-breaking book The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller which looked at the life of a peasant in Montereale Valcellina, Italy. In The Night Battles and Ecstasies he traced a complex path from certain European witch persecutions to the Benandanti, to 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, though it failed to win a new trial.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)