Laureation address: Professor Carlo Ginzburg

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Professor Bridget Heal, School of History

Monday 27 June 2022

Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Professor Carlo Ginzburg. 

Carlo is a scholar with an insatiable sense of curiosity. Over the course of his career, spent at the University of Bologna, at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, he has made influential contributions not only to early modern history but also to art history, philosophy, and literary studies. His interests range widely, from Italian Renaissance art to seventeenth-century Livonian werewolves, and to all of his studies he brings an intellectual creativity, a historical sensibility, and a literary verve that have inspired generations of students. 

Carlo is famed above all as a pioneer of microhistory, an analytical approach that presents an intensive study of a particular event, individual or community, placing it under the historical microscope. The Cheese and the Worms, first published in 1976 and today translated into more than 20 languages, reconstructed the extraordinary world view of a sixteenth-century Italian miller known as Menocchio, who was sentenced to death by the Inquisition for his unorthodox beliefs. It demonstrated Carlo’s determination to make the persecuted and vanquished the focus of his research, and confirmed his passion for anomalies, exceptions, and deviations from the historical norm. 

Already in his first book, The Night Battles, published in 1966, Carlo had captured in exciting and innovative ways the attitudes and experiences of men and women living beyond the boundaries of elite, high culture. He analysed the beliefs of the benandanti, or “good walkers”, a group of sixteenth-century Friulian peasants who claimed to go out at night to fight witches and ensure the fertility of the crops. Here, and in his later Ecstasies, Carlo salvaged fragments of an obliterated peasant culture through his brilliant close reading of hostile sources: trial records produced by the Inquisition. No historian can now ignore his call to go beyond the inquisitors’ “deforming perspective” when studying early modern popular culture. Moreover, Carlo himself played a role in the opening up of the Vatican’s Inquisition archives to researchers during the 1990s. 

Alongside these key works of early modern scholarship, Carlo has also been a methodological innovator, writing about the nature of historical evidence and the concept of historical proof. In his most recent, co-authored work, Old Thiess, he explores the self-understanding of a seventeenth-century Livonian peasant, known in his village as a werewolf. The book presents multiple readings of Thiess’s story, reflecting on the role of the historian and demonstrating the importance of scholarly exchange. Here, and throughout his work, Carlo shows us that the historian’s craft consists of intellectual openness to the unexpected and of detective work, combined with careful reading, painstaking research, and meticulous attention to detail. 

In 1992 Carlo was awarded the Aby Warburg prize by the city of Hamburg; in 2007 he
received the Humboldt Research Prize, acknowledging a lifetime of achievement; and in 2010 he won Balzan Prize for European History in recognition of ‘the exceptional combination of imagination, scholarly precision and literary skill with which he has recovered and illuminated the beliefs of ordinary people in early modern Europe’. 

Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to historical scholarship, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Professor Carlo Ginzburg.