Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg 2013
Born	(1939-04-15) April 15, 1939 (age 77) Turin, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Alma mater	University of Pisa

Carlo Ginzburg (Italian: [ˈkarlo ˈɡintsburɡ]; born April 15, 1939) is a noted Italian historian and proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for Il formaggio e i vermi (1976, English title: The Cheese and the Worms), which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.

In 1966, he published The Night Battles, an examination of the benandanti visionary folk tradition found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friuli in northeastern Italy. He returned to looking at the visionary traditions of early modern Europe for his 1989 book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath.

The son of Natalia Ginzburg and Leone Ginzburg, Carlo Ginzburg was born in 1939 in Turin, Italy. He received a PhD from the University of Pisa in 1961. He subsequently held teaching positions at the University of Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles (1988–2006), and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. His fields of interest range from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European history, with contributions to art history, literary studies, and the theory of historiography.