Carlo Ginzburg

About the author

Carlo Ginzburg (1939–2026) was an Italian historian and one of the founders of microhistory, a discipline that illuminates broad historical forces through the close study of individuals and local worlds. Born in Turin into a Jewish family, he earned his PhD from the University of Pisa in 1961 and went on to a distinguished academic career. His landmark works — The Night Battles, The Cheese and the Worms, and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath — established him as a master of recovering the beliefs and experiences of ordinary people in early modern Europe.