Carlo Ginzburg passed away on June 17th, at the age of 87. In the United States, Ginzburg is perhaps best known for his second book, The Cheese and the Worms (1976), an investigation into the idiosyncratic cosmology of a Friulian miller called Menocchio, whose name soon became a metonym for microhistory. The prefix here alludes to the art of intensive magnification. As part of his restless research into the cellular structure of European culture, Ginzburg has since published on a mind-boggling array of problems. From Pascal to Picasso, the mores surrounding tobacco consumption, and the moral quandaries generated by Holocaust denial—no matter the topic, his interventions were consistently disorienting and transformative. Yet he wore this erudition lightly; when I pressed him, once, for the secrets to his productivity, he arched an eyebrow, smiled and said simply, “I like to ski on fresh snow.”
This interview, which we are publishing here for the first time, was conducted a decade ago at the University of Chicago.1 Ginzburg was there to teach about Dante and continue a decades-long debate with Bruce Lincoln about a seventeenth-century werewolf.2 At the time, I was a graduate student conducting research into the first wave of subaltern studies in Italy and so—with the help of my co-conspirator, Oliver Cussen—I initially approached this giant of the historical profession in something like the way he approached the werewolf: as a case, a living example of a tradition that I sought to understand and generalize about. Ginzburg played his part with characteristic generosity, dutifully entering into the record evidence of his debt to Carlo Levi, to Gramsci (as he was read in the immediate postwar era) and the folklorist and storyteller Luigi Capuana. Along the way, he also demonstrated what a singular, truly exceptional scholar he was. And this is why we believe this conversation is worth reading now.
It is certainly true that Carlo Ginzburg was dedicated to listening to the voices of historically marginalized subjects, as other eulogists have noted. But—as he stressed during our conversation—there are many ways to dwell in this calling. Ginzburg, it must be said, was more than an Italian version of E.P. Thompson. Overcoming the enormous condescension of posterity was, as he liked to say, only the beginning of the game. Furthermore, although Ginzburg spent countless hours poring over the trials of people who clashed with powerful institutions (heretics, witches, his friend Adriano Sofri), he cautioned against the faddish embrace of a “populism with its symbols reversed,” in which “the only discourse that constitutes a radical alternative to the lies of constituted society is represented by … victims of social exclusion.”3 These methodological debates are worth rereading now, as scholars scramble to respond to a new wave of illiberal demagogues hell-bent on “correcting” history. In the long run, though, I would wager that Ginzburg will be remembered chiefly for his contributions to what Barrington Moore dubbed the “conquest of inevitability.” You can see glimpses of this below in the repeated references to surprise, shock, the unexpected and unpredictable. Microhistory, as Ginzburg practiced it, seeks to wake us from the nightmare of the ever-same. It exposes the ideology implicit in fatalists’ parade of “important events,” puncturing the thin concept of reality (and thereby of “being realistic”) that collaborationist logic relies on. This is, I gather, one reason why Ginzburg once called his craft the scienza del vissuto, a phrase that is difficult to render in English and has been translated as “the science of real life” and “the science of lived experience.”4 The formula is true in a way that he did not mean it: Ginzburg wrote histories that brought his readers to life, that made us want to be more alive to our world, in all its wondrous, frustrating, mysterious triviality. May his memory be a blessing.
—David Gutherz
●
David Gutherz: Could you tell us how it was that you became a historian? You’ve written elsewhere that it all came to you at once, one day.
Carlo Ginzburg: It’s strange, because in a sense since I work as a historian I’m very skeptical about retrospective reconstructions, but in this case I remember very well what happened. I was in Pisa, as a student of the Scuola Normale, which is a sort of elite institution—an elite but democratic institution—so I was in what was at that time in the library; I was looking at books, and I suddenly made a triple decision: that I wanted to become a historian; I wanted to study witchcraft trials; and I wanted to try to rescue the voices of the defendants, men and women. Now I was completely ignorant about witchcraft trials, I did not realize that the third move implied a series of obstacles which would actually affect my trajectory from the very beginning. In other words, the idea of, let’s say, reading the archives de la répression in order to rescue the voices of those who were the object of the repression implied a series of obstacles which ultimately—well, actually, very quickly—led me to a reflection on historical methods. Because in a way naivety was impossible ; it contradicted the project itself. The idea of reading between the lines and so on—all of this I would say was the result of that initial move.
DG: Can you say a little about what drew you to the trials?
CG: I published an article in the New Left Review which was called “Witches and Shamans,” where I tried to make sense retrospectively—many, many years later—of my own reaction to my first encounter with the benandanti trials, the “counter witches,” which was the subject of my first book. Now, this was not the beginning, I had already made my choice, but I tried to make sense of my reaction, and that reaction also implied my initial choice. And so [in that article] I mentioned Carlo Levi’s book, Christ Stopped at Eboli. Carlo Levi was a friend of my father, they were members of the same underground anti-Fascist group…
You see, my father [Leone Ginzburg] was born in Odessa. He came [to Italy] with his family. They first moved to Berlin and then to Torino, and my father, who was bilingual, became an Italian citizen, and only at that moment did he decide to commit himself to underground conspiracy against the Fascist regime. But he had started to work on Russian literature, and he became at a very young age a libero docente [lecturer] so he started a course at the University of Torino.
DG: And he was a translator as well, right?
CG: Yes, he translated Anna Karenina at a very young age, and other books—Pushkin, Gogol and so on. But his academic career was stopped very quickly because he refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the Fascist regime, which was extended to the liberi docenti as well. Usually when historians deal with this oath of allegiance they mention the fact that only twelve [full] university professors refused to swear the oath, but in fact there were—I don’t know how many liberi docenti refused to swear the oath of allegiance… in any case, very, very few. And in fact my father at that moment was very precocious. He was personally close to Benedetto Croce, and Croce himself insisted with my father that he had to swear the oath of allegiance and my father refused. Croce’s point was that we cannot leave the Italian university to the Fascists. My father refused. Immediately after, he was arrested, and he had a trial and he was condemned to four years of jail. He spent two years in all, then there was a general amnesty. Carlo Levi was arrested the year after and then sent to internal exile. So in “Witches and Shamans,” I reflected on let’s say the impact of Carlo Levi’s book…
DG: Which described his year in internal exile—
CG: Probably more than one year, maybe two, in Lucania. And I compared this to my own childhood experience, insofar as my father, because of the racial laws, he lost his citizenship. And so when Italy entered the war in 1940, my father was sent to internal exile to a place close to L’Aquila, in Abruzzi—not as isolated as Carlo Levi, but, in a way, I think I reacted to this idea of being exposed to Italian peasant culture.
Actually, there is a piece by my mother, called “Winter in Abruzzo,” which she published after the death of my father—my father died in the Roman jail in the section controlled by the Nazis in 1944—and in it she recalled the fact that there was, among other things, a young girl helping her and she was reciting filastrocche, lullabies, all with a sort of macabre overtone.5 And I remember—well I don’t remember those lullabies, those I learned from my mother—but I remember reading Luigi Capuana’s remarkable folk tales. I vividly remember a folk tale about a girl who meets a little man called Gomitetto, then you turn the page and there is a werewolf, Gomitetto is a werewolf, attacking the girl. And I remember looking back and forth, back and forth—powerful illustrations, I think by Carlo Chiostri—a very remarkable illustrator. So, anyway, I was exposed to this peasant culture, either directly or indirectly…
And then there is something else which I surprisingly did not realize for many years. I had a sort of emotional commitment to rescuing the voices of the victims, which was something related to my experiences as a child. I still remember the moment, after I published The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, when I had a conversation with an art historian, Paolo Fossati, and he said, ‘Well, it’s so obvious for a Jew to work on witches and heretics.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, how is it possible that I was not aware of this?’
DG: It just struck you at that moment?
CG: Yeah. I thought—it’s incredible. I mean, it’s so obvious! But on the other hand, something which is that obvious must be repressed, in order to act.
Then there was the impact of Gramsci, which I share with my generation, not only in Italy. Reading the Quaderni [Prison Notebooks], 1957, when I was eighteen.
DG: So those were the things that pushed you, right up until that moment when you made that decision to become a historian.
CG: Yes. I’m interested in the fact that there are flashes, but that those flashes are prepared. As a historian, one has to try to make sense of them. I still remember my own reaction to a document in Venice, in the state archive of Venice. I read the document, and it was completely unexpected and beyond imagination. A judge—this was in 1583, I think—was asking a question to a young cowherd Menocchio: “Why are you called benandanti?”—[meaning] a person who goes for the good—“Who are these benandanti?” And he, [Menocchio] started to say something vague, evading the question, and then he said: “We benandanti, we are born in a caul and our soul leaves our body four times a year and we fight in the meadow of Josephat against the witches, and we have fennel branches and the witches have sorghum sticks, and we fight for the fertility of the crops. And when we win, there is abundance, and when the witches win there is famine.” And I remember that when I read those two to three pages, I was so taken by what I read, that I had to stop reading, and I left the archive and I started to walk—I was still a smoker then, and I started to smoke one cigarette after another, thinking about it—
DG: Because you felt you’d found the voices you’d been looking for?
CG: Because there was this gap: something that was unexpected by the inquisitors and unexpected by myself.
DG: Both you and the inquisitors were thrown off?
CG: Yes! But the discovery of the intellectual contiguity with the inquisitors came later. First, there was the emotional contiguity with the victims. And then, after many years, the sudden realization that I was, in a way, intellectually close to the inquisitor. That was disturbing.
DG: But back at that first moment, there was just pure excitement that there was some way that you could bring these voices—
CG: Even more… there was something that was beyond even any kind of hope. A document which I would have never imagined, something bizarre. I had started out with this sort of naïve hypothesis (again, this is something I was very well aware of at the time, it’s not retrospective reconstruction) that it was possible to read those witchcraft trials as an example of a crude form of class struggle. I was directed by my mentor, Delio Cantimori, to the archival evidence kept in Modena. So I started to work in the Modena archive. There is a huge amount on inquisitional trials over there. I started reading, and I [quickly] came across a document about a trial, in 1519, against a woman, Chiara Signorini, a peasant, who was accused of having put a curse on her landlady, because the landlady had evicted Chiara and her husband from her property.
So in a way, here, I found a sort of support for my hypothesis. And I was deeply disappointed. I thought, there must be something wrong with the hypothesis, if the support can be found so easily! But then I published my first article—“Witchcraft and Popular Piety”—[on it] and at the end I turned to something else in the trial: the fact that Chiara had said that she had been inspired by the Virgin.6 The inquisitor tried to convince her that the Virgin was in fact the devil. But, at the end, there is this final paragraph in which I said, this case, in its specificity, points to something which is paradigmatic, exemplary. The case was anomalous, but at the same time pointing to something more general. And I’ve been working on this ever since.
DG: What would you say to someone who does not have the same kind of emotional attachment, or the same kind of commitment to the voices of the oppressed? What would you say to them about why they need to pay attention to these histories?
CG: Well, first, I would say, diversity—cultural diversity. But maybe also just intellectual curiosity. So I would say, “Okay, you are going to have fun! You can find something that is completely unexpected!”
In a way, the evidence I was lucky enough to find was so astonishing, because usually the Inquisitors tried to find what they were looking for. However, even in the case of Chiara Signorini, you have not only those class elements, but also—and this was striking—she says, “A woman appeared to me.”
“A woman?”
“Yes, a woman, she was pale, strong and with a red face…”
These details which the inquisitor certainly would not have invented. So, even in that case, there were cracks…
DG: And this points to a difference in the way you focus on these archives of the repressed, and say, Foucault — or maybe students of Foucault more than Foucault himself—who would say that you can’t get down to the base of what these people really thought.
CG: Well, because I think Foucault was obsessed by power, which certainly helped him to find something. But in my view he overrated this to the point of not listening to the voices of the oppressed.
I have an anecdote about Foucault. In 1979, I was in Paris, teaching at the École normale, and I was invited, maybe through Jacques Revel, to a kind of informal seminar at the in La Sorbonne. It was on Sunday, and it was about Surveiller et Punir [Discipline and Punish]. And there were around fifteen people sitting around a table in this empty building, and everybody is introducing themselves, saying “So-and-so historien,”, “So-and-so, philosophe,”… [and Foucault said] “Michel Foucault, pas historien” [not a historian]. That was very interesting. Because I immediately thought, well in a different context, with philosophers, he would have said “pas philosophe.” But there he said “pas historien.”
Now this is purely anecdotal, but there was something which is, on the one hand, extremely defensive about this, a desire to have everything under control. There were deep, deep—not only theoretical but also psychological psychological—roots to this, which I would label as extreme fragility. This man, who was maybe, on the surface, maybe the most aggressive man I’ve ever met (there’s another anecdote, which I’m not going to tell, about Foucault in this country…) but this aggressiveness concealed fragility. He didn’t like to be involved in a real debate. That was my feeling. Now, you may, and this is the real point, you may look at this from the point of view of his research project. And so Pierre Rivière becoming a sort of pretext… I mean the ideological investment is so heavy, that it became a sort of pretext.7
DG: Whereas in your case it seems like you are consistently interested in the unruly, the things that will throw you off, the uncontrollable aspects of the research.
CG: Yeah, exactly. If somebody finds what he or she is looking for—that’s a disaster. It’s not enough. You have to complicate the game. Finding what you’re looking for is a temptation, but it’s also a danger. So I think we have to multiply the obstacles, and also we have to interject a sort of daily dialogue with the devil’s advocate, with somebody who would ask really difficult questions, objections which are not easy to answer.
DG: Let’s swerve back to some of your work, particularly The Cheese and the Worms, which is probably your most widely read work, in this country at least. What drew you to The Cheese and the Worms and to Menocchio.?
CG: It’s very easy. I was doing a kind of tour of Italy, looking for inquisitional archives. That was after the collapse of my initial hypothesis. When I found that confirmation [in the case of Chiara Signorini], I was disappointed, and so I was left with no real research hypothesis. So I said to myself, I have to look for other evidence, so I started this tour. I went to Venice and I was playing a kind of “Venetian Roulette,” as I called it retrospectively. Because, since I had no clues, I was not looking for something specific, I was just looking through the witchcraft trials. There is an inventory, which is handwritten (probably from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century) in which you had names, and then a vague description of the topic of the trials—so magic, heresy and so on. And so, having no other clues, I entered the archive. I had limited time, and I was only allowed to ask for three or four volumes a day. So I said: 4, 26, 34, 99.
DG: Just at random…
CG: Yes. I find the role of chance in research very interesting. I mean, it is something that is usually concealed, but I think it’s very interesting. Anyway, so I came across that benandanti trial, and then I continued my journey into across Italy and I went to Udine, and I tried to enter the ecclesiastical archive, because I read an article by a late nineteenth-century erudite, saying that there were trials in Udine. I was unable to enter.
But, luckily, I had a connection at the library, and so I got a little sheet of paper saying, “Dr. Ginzburg is a reliable person.” I showed them this, and I was able to enter the archive. I was there in a huge room, full of wooden desks, and [there I found documents about] more than a thousand trials (and I was the first scholar to work on them, with one exception of one trial in Campanella). I was looking at the handwritten index and found two references to a peasant who believes that the world is born from rotten matter—putrefaction—and I looked at this, and I thought, “Wow, it’s so strange!” An anomaly, again. So I took a note. But only after seven years did I start to work on this.
DG: This would have been 1970. Do you think that the political situation in Italy in the late Sixties in some ways brought this trial back to mind?
CG: Yes, for sure. For instance, one thinks about ’68. But I would also mention a book by a priest, Don Lorenzo Milani—he was half-Jewish,the great-grandchild of a famous Italian scholar Dominico Camparrete, and he became a priest. And since he was very much close to the working class, he was exiled to Mugello, in the mountains of Tuscany. Then he published a book called Lettera a una professoressa in 1967, that was written anonymously by his pupils, who were a group of little young peasants. It was a really powerful book, and Milani became a kind of legend.
DG: And what was it about that book that captured…
CG: I mean, there was a class dimension that captured something completely absent from what the Communist Party was advocating at that time. It was a form of aggressive populism, delivered by a man who was certainly of a sort of elite intellectual. It was a really powerful book and it certainly had an impact on me, because of the idea that there was a peasant culture which was different from my elite culture, and also the fact that culture had a sort of imprint in relation to power.
DG: So it spurred a new set of reflections on how that peasant culture and elite culture could interact?
CG: Exactly. But, I think about the idea of a circularity, which I put forward in The Cheese and the Worms—this was an idea I take from Gramsci, obviously. When Gramsci spoke about “la cultura de la classe subalterne,” on the one hand, he was making a distinction between what is genuine popular culture and what is culture addressed to the popular classes by the elites. That was the first distinction. And then he also mentioned that there is a sort of circularity (I wonder whether he used the metaphor, I should check…) that there are ideas, in other words, that are put forward by the elite, but which are in fact rooted in society at large and also among popular classes.
DG: So the culture of the elite makes its way down into the peasant culture, and comes out looking like something different…
CG: Not only that, but also the other way around. Meaning, the elites are articulating something which actually has popular roots.
DG: Without knowing it?
CG: Yeah, usually without knowing it. So in the case of Menocchio [in The Cheese and the Worms], when he talks about toleration and so on, the most obvious explanation would be, okay, he read something written by such-and-such person, and so articulated the idea of tolerance in terms of his own oral culture. But I would say it’s maybe also the other way around. What is so striking about those documents was, first of all, the challenge to authority, both ecclesiastical and secular, and then the idea that there is this intersection between oral culture and written culture, which is something that took place so many times all over the world. That kind of evidence provides the possibility, in the most exceptional way, to read history against the grain.
DG: What do you mean by reading history against the grain?
CG: Reading the archives of repression in order to rescue the voices of the victims, like Menocchio’s voice. Now, in that case, you have those extraordinary conversations, with the inquisitor asking, “But what do you mean when you say that the world was created from putrefaction,” and so on—that kind of genuine intellectual curiosity, which was recorded!
DG: You’ve mentioned this contiguity between yourself and the inquisitors, that you were the first scholar in there reading these accounts since the days of the Inquisition. Is this disruption a way of distancing ourselves from the culture of the inquisitors? That in some way we have inherited that culture and this is an opportunity to set the record straight?
CG: Well, at that moment I felt I was not an inquisitor, and I was just working on the same evidence. But later, that unpleasant feeling of a contiguity emerged. And that’s the reason why I wrote “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist.”8 And also I realized that there are so many unpleasant things which should come to the forefront…
For instance, I once said the only idea I had in my life was the discovery that the notion of “historical perspective” is actually a sort of reworking of the Christian attitude toward the Jews. It had been inspired by the Augustinian perception of the Jews… an ambivalent attitude, which paved the way to persecution in some cases, yet was also rooted in the idea that the past should be understood in its own terms as well as in terms of our own perspective. So this notion of “historical perspective” being a secular version of this Christian attitude towards the Jews, was something which, I must say, puzzled me, it’s something I found disturbing. Because it was an idea which was at the very center of my—not only my, I would say—our attitude towards the past. Yet it was also something which paved the way to persecution. So this is disturbing. But I think historians should look for, should be aware of, what is most disturbing and most repressed.
DG: It strikes me—as you were speaking about the meaning of historical perspective—something that stands out to me is that you’re not as uneasy about starting from the questions that are imposed upon you from your own period, and then going into the past. There’s another Brecht quote, about “starting from the…
CG: Yes! This is one of my favourite mottos. In fact, it was recorded by [Walter] Benjamin… they were playing chess, in Denmark, as exiles, and Brecht said, “We should not start from good old things, but from bad new things.” I think this is a magnificent motto. There are questions that are unpleasant and we should address them. I’m not saying that I’m always able to keep up with this motto. But one should try.
Photo credit: Claude Truong-Ngoc, Carlo Ginzburg 2013. © Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons
Carlo Ginzburg passed away on June 17th, at the age of 87. In the United States, Ginzburg is perhaps best known for his second book, The Cheese and the Worms (1976), an investigation into the idiosyncratic cosmology of a Friulian miller called Menocchio, whose name soon became a metonym for microhistory. The prefix here alludes to the art of intensive magnification. As part of his restless research into the cellular structure of European culture, Ginzburg has since published on a mind-boggling array of problems. From Pascal to Picasso, the mores surrounding tobacco consumption, and the moral quandaries generated by Holocaust denial—no matter the topic, his interventions were consistently disorienting and transformative. Yet he wore this erudition lightly; when I pressed him, once, for the secrets to his productivity, he arched an eyebrow, smiled and said simply, “I like to ski on fresh snow.”
This interview, which we are publishing here for the first time, was conducted a decade ago at the University of Chicago.1The transcript below has been edited lightly for clarity. Ginzburg was there to teach about Dante and continue a decades-long debate with Bruce Lincoln about a seventeenth-century werewolf.2The results of this debate have now been published in Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, A Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective (University of Chicago, 2020). At the time, I was a graduate student conducting research into the first wave of subaltern studies in Italy and so—with the help of my co-conspirator, Oliver Cussen—I initially approached this giant of the historical profession in something like the way he approached the werewolf: as a case, a living example of a tradition that I sought to understand and generalize about. Ginzburg played his part with characteristic generosity, dutifully entering into the record evidence of his debt to Carlo Levi, to Gramsci (as he was read in the immediate postwar era) and the folklorist and storyteller Luigi Capuana. Along the way, he also demonstrated what a singular, truly exceptional scholar he was. And this is why we believe this conversation is worth reading now.
It is certainly true that Carlo Ginzburg was dedicated to listening to the voices of historically marginalized subjects, as other eulogists have noted. But—as he stressed during our conversation—there are many ways to dwell in this calling. Ginzburg, it must be said, was more than an Italian version of E.P. Thompson. Overcoming the enormous condescension of posterity was, as he liked to say, only the beginning of the game. Furthermore, although Ginzburg spent countless hours poring over the trials of people who clashed with powerful institutions (heretics, witches, his friend Adriano Sofri), he cautioned against the faddish embrace of a “populism with its symbols reversed,” in which “the only discourse that constitutes a radical alternative to the lies of constituted society is represented by … victims of social exclusion.”3Carlo Ginzburg, “Preface to the Italian Edition,” The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). These methodological debates are worth rereading now, as scholars scramble to respond to a new wave of illiberal demagogues hell-bent on “correcting” history. In the long run, though, I would wager that Ginzburg will be remembered chiefly for his contributions to what Barrington Moore dubbed the “conquest of inevitability.” You can see glimpses of this below in the repeated references to surprise, shock, the unexpected and unpredictable. Microhistory, as Ginzburg practiced it, seeks to wake us from the nightmare of the ever-same. It exposes the ideology implicit in fatalists’ parade of “important events,” puncturing the thin concept of reality (and thereby of “being realistic”) that collaborationist logic relies on. This is, I gather, one reason why Ginzburg once called his craft the scienza del vissuto, a phrase that is difficult to render in English and has been translated as “the science of real life” and “the science of lived experience.”4Carlo Ginzburg, “Preface to the Italian Edition,” The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). The formula is true in a way that he did not mean it: Ginzburg wrote histories that brought his readers to life, that made us want to be more alive to our world, in all its wondrous, frustrating, mysterious triviality. May his memory be a blessing.
—David Gutherz
●
David Gutherz: Could you tell us how it was that you became a historian? You’ve written elsewhere that it all came to you at once, one day.
Carlo Ginzburg: It’s strange, because in a sense since I work as a historian I’m very skeptical about retrospective reconstructions, but in this case I remember very well what happened. I was in Pisa, as a student of the Scuola Normale, which is a sort of elite institution—an elite but democratic institution—so I was in what was at that time in the library; I was looking at books, and I suddenly made a triple decision: that I wanted to become a historian; I wanted to study witchcraft trials; and I wanted to try to rescue the voices of the defendants, men and women. Now I was completely ignorant about witchcraft trials, I did not realize that the third move implied a series of obstacles which would actually affect my trajectory from the very beginning. In other words, the idea of, let’s say, reading the archives de la répression in order to rescue the voices of those who were the object of the repression implied a series of obstacles which ultimately—well, actually, very quickly—led me to a reflection on historical methods. Because in a way naivety was impossible ; it contradicted the project itself. The idea of reading between the lines and so on—all of this I would say was the result of that initial move.
DG: Can you say a little about what drew you to the trials?
CG: I published an article in the New Left Review which was called “Witches and Shamans,” where I tried to make sense retrospectively—many, many years later—of my own reaction to my first encounter with the benandanti trials, the “counter witches,” which was the subject of my first book. Now, this was not the beginning, I had already made my choice, but I tried to make sense of my reaction, and that reaction also implied my initial choice. And so [in that article] I mentioned Carlo Levi’s book, Christ Stopped at Eboli. Carlo Levi was a friend of my father, they were members of the same underground anti-Fascist group…
You see, my father [Leone Ginzburg] was born in Odessa. He came [to Italy] with his family. They first moved to Berlin and then to Torino, and my father, who was bilingual, became an Italian citizen, and only at that moment did he decide to commit himself to underground conspiracy against the Fascist regime. But he had started to work on Russian literature, and he became at a very young age a libero docente [lecturer] so he started a course at the University of Torino.
DG: And he was a translator as well, right?
CG: Yes, he translated Anna Karenina at a very young age, and other books—Pushkin, Gogol and so on. But his academic career was stopped very quickly because he refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the Fascist regime, which was extended to the liberi docenti as well. Usually when historians deal with this oath of allegiance they mention the fact that only twelve [full] university professors refused to swear the oath, but in fact there were—I don’t know how many liberi docenti refused to swear the oath of allegiance… in any case, very, very few. And in fact my father at that moment was very precocious. He was personally close to Benedetto Croce, and Croce himself insisted with my father that he had to swear the oath of allegiance and my father refused. Croce’s point was that we cannot leave the Italian university to the Fascists. My father refused. Immediately after, he was arrested, and he had a trial and he was condemned to four years of jail. He spent two years in all, then there was a general amnesty. Carlo Levi was arrested the year after and then sent to internal exile. So in “Witches and Shamans,” I reflected on let’s say the impact of Carlo Levi’s book…
DG: Which described his year in internal exile—
CG: Probably more than one year, maybe two, in Lucania. And I compared this to my own childhood experience, insofar as my father, because of the racial laws, he lost his citizenship. And so when Italy entered the war in 1940, my father was sent to internal exile to a place close to L’Aquila, in Abruzzi—not as isolated as Carlo Levi, but, in a way, I think I reacted to this idea of being exposed to Italian peasant culture.
Actually, there is a piece by my mother, called “Winter in Abruzzo,” which she published after the death of my father—my father died in the Roman jail in the section controlled by the Nazis in 1944—and in it she recalled the fact that there was, among other things, a young girl helping her and she was reciting filastrocche, lullabies, all with a sort of macabre overtone.5Natalia Ginzburg, “Winter in Abruzzo,” trans. Richard Burns, European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, vol. 4, no. 2, 1970. And I remember—well I don’t remember those lullabies, those I learned from my mother—but I remember reading Luigi Capuana’s remarkable folk tales. I vividly remember a folk tale about a girl who meets a little man called Gomitetto, then you turn the page and there is a werewolf, Gomitetto is a werewolf, attacking the girl. And I remember looking back and forth, back and forth—powerful illustrations, I think by Carlo Chiostri—a very remarkable illustrator. So, anyway, I was exposed to this peasant culture, either directly or indirectly…
And then there is something else which I surprisingly did not realize for many years. I had a sort of emotional commitment to rescuing the voices of the victims, which was something related to my experiences as a child. I still remember the moment, after I published The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, when I had a conversation with an art historian, Paolo Fossati, and he said, ‘Well, it’s so obvious for a Jew to work on witches and heretics.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, how is it possible that I was not aware of this?’
DG: It just struck you at that moment?
CG: Yeah. I thought—it’s incredible. I mean, it’s so obvious! But on the other hand, something which is that obvious must be repressed, in order to act.
Then there was the impact of Gramsci, which I share with my generation, not only in Italy. Reading the Quaderni [Prison Notebooks], 1957, when I was eighteen.
DG: So those were the things that pushed you, right up until that moment when you made that decision to become a historian.
CG: Yes. I’m interested in the fact that there are flashes, but that those flashes are prepared. As a historian, one has to try to make sense of them. I still remember my own reaction to a document in Venice, in the state archive of Venice. I read the document, and it was completely unexpected and beyond imagination. A judge—this was in 1583, I think—was asking a question to a young cowherd Menocchio: “Why are you called benandanti?”—[meaning] a person who goes for the good—“Who are these benandanti?” And he, [Menocchio] started to say something vague, evading the question, and then he said: “We benandanti, we are born in a caul and our soul leaves our body four times a year and we fight in the meadow of Josephat against the witches, and we have fennel branches and the witches have sorghum sticks, and we fight for the fertility of the crops. And when we win, there is abundance, and when the witches win there is famine.” And I remember that when I read those two to three pages, I was so taken by what I read, that I had to stop reading, and I left the archive and I started to walk—I was still a smoker then, and I started to smoke one cigarette after another, thinking about it—
DG: Because you felt you’d found the voices you’d been looking for?
CG: Because there was this gap: something that was unexpected by the inquisitors and unexpected by myself.
DG: Both you and the inquisitors were thrown off?
CG: Yes! But the discovery of the intellectual contiguity with the inquisitors came later. First, there was the emotional contiguity with the victims. And then, after many years, the sudden realization that I was, in a way, intellectually close to the inquisitor. That was disturbing.
DG: But back at that first moment, there was just pure excitement that there was some way that you could bring these voices—
CG: Even more… there was something that was beyond even any kind of hope. A document which I would have never imagined, something bizarre. I had started out with this sort of naïve hypothesis (again, this is something I was very well aware of at the time, it’s not retrospective reconstruction) that it was possible to read those witchcraft trials as an example of a crude form of class struggle. I was directed by my mentor, Delio Cantimori, to the archival evidence kept in Modena. So I started to work in the Modena archive. There is a huge amount on inquisitional trials over there. I started reading, and I [quickly] came across a document about a trial, in 1519, against a woman, Chiara Signorini, a peasant, who was accused of having put a curse on her landlady, because the landlady had evicted Chiara and her husband from her property.
So in a way, here, I found a sort of support for my hypothesis. And I was deeply disappointed. I thought, there must be something wrong with the hypothesis, if the support can be found so easily! But then I published my first article—“Witchcraft and Popular Piety”—[on it] and at the end I turned to something else in the trial: the fact that Chiara had said that she had been inspired by the Virgin.6Carlo Ginzburg, “Witchcraft and Popular Piety: Notes on a Modenese Trial of 1519,” Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). The inquisitor tried to convince her that the Virgin was in fact the devil. But, at the end, there is this final paragraph in which I said, this case, in its specificity, points to something which is paradigmatic, exemplary. The case was anomalous, but at the same time pointing to something more general. And I’ve been working on this ever since.
DG: What would you say to someone who does not have the same kind of emotional attachment, or the same kind of commitment to the voices of the oppressed? What would you say to them about why they need to pay attention to these histories?
CG: Well, first, I would say, diversity—cultural diversity. But maybe also just intellectual curiosity. So I would say, “Okay, you are going to have fun! You can find something that is completely unexpected!”
In a way, the evidence I was lucky enough to find was so astonishing, because usually the Inquisitors tried to find what they were looking for. However, even in the case of Chiara Signorini, you have not only those class elements, but also—and this was striking—she says, “A woman appeared to me.”
“A woman?”
“Yes, a woman, she was pale, strong and with a red face…”
These details which the inquisitor certainly would not have invented. So, even in that case, there were cracks…
DG: And this points to a difference in the way you focus on these archives of the repressed, and say, Foucault — or maybe students of Foucault more than Foucault himself—who would say that you can’t get down to the base of what these people really thought.
CG: Well, because I think Foucault was obsessed by power, which certainly helped him to find something. But in my view he overrated this to the point of not listening to the voices of the oppressed.
I have an anecdote about Foucault. In 1979, I was in Paris, teaching at the École normale, and I was invited, maybe through Jacques Revel, to a kind of informal seminar at the in La Sorbonne. It was on Sunday, and it was about Surveiller et Punir [Discipline and Punish]. And there were around fifteen people sitting around a table in this empty building, and everybody is introducing themselves, saying “So-and-so historien,”, “So-and-so, philosophe,”… [and Foucault said] “Michel Foucault, pas historien” [not a historian]. That was very interesting. Because I immediately thought, well in a different context, with philosophers, he would have said “pas philosophe.” But there he said “pas historien.”
Now this is purely anecdotal, but there was something which is, on the one hand, extremely defensive about this, a desire to have everything under control. There were deep, deep—not only theoretical but also psychological psychological—roots to this, which I would label as extreme fragility. This man, who was maybe, on the surface, maybe the most aggressive man I’ve ever met (there’s another anecdote, which I’m not going to tell, about Foucault in this country…) but this aggressiveness concealed fragility. He didn’t like to be involved in a real debate. That was my feeling. Now, you may, and this is the real point, you may look at this from the point of view of his research project. And so Pierre Rivière becoming a sort of pretext… I mean the ideological investment is so heavy, that it became a sort of pretext.7Carlo Ginzburg, “Witchcraft and Popular Piety: Notes on a Modenese Trial of 1519,” Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
DG: Whereas in your case it seems like you are consistently interested in the unruly, the things that will throw you off, the uncontrollable aspects of the research.
CG: Yeah, exactly. If somebody finds what he or she is looking for—that’s a disaster. It’s not enough. You have to complicate the game. Finding what you’re looking for is a temptation, but it’s also a danger. So I think we have to multiply the obstacles, and also we have to interject a sort of daily dialogue with the devil’s advocate, with somebody who would ask really difficult questions, objections which are not easy to answer.
DG: Let’s swerve back to some of your work, particularly The Cheese and the Worms, which is probably your most widely read work, in this country at least. What drew you to The Cheese and the Worms and to Menocchio.?
CG: It’s very easy. I was doing a kind of tour of Italy, looking for inquisitional archives. That was after the collapse of my initial hypothesis. When I found that confirmation [in the case of Chiara Signorini], I was disappointed, and so I was left with no real research hypothesis. So I said to myself, I have to look for other evidence, so I started this tour. I went to Venice and I was playing a kind of “Venetian Roulette,” as I called it retrospectively. Because, since I had no clues, I was not looking for something specific, I was just looking through the witchcraft trials. There is an inventory, which is handwritten (probably from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century) in which you had names, and then a vague description of the topic of the trials—so magic, heresy and so on. And so, having no other clues, I entered the archive. I had limited time, and I was only allowed to ask for three or four volumes a day. So I said: 4, 26, 34, 99.
DG: Just at random…
CG: Yes. I find the role of chance in research very interesting. I mean, it is something that is usually concealed, but I think it’s very interesting. Anyway, so I came across that benandanti trial, and then I continued my journey into across Italy and I went to Udine, and I tried to enter the ecclesiastical archive, because I read an article by a late nineteenth-century erudite, saying that there were trials in Udine. I was unable to enter.
But, luckily, I had a connection at the library, and so I got a little sheet of paper saying, “Dr. Ginzburg is a reliable person.” I showed them this, and I was able to enter the archive. I was there in a huge room, full of wooden desks, and [there I found documents about] more than a thousand trials (and I was the first scholar to work on them, with one exception of one trial in Campanella). I was looking at the handwritten index and found two references to a peasant who believes that the world is born from rotten matter—putrefaction—and I looked at this, and I thought, “Wow, it’s so strange!” An anomaly, again. So I took a note. But only after seven years did I start to work on this.
DG: This would have been 1970. Do you think that the political situation in Italy in the late Sixties in some ways brought this trial back to mind?
CG: Yes, for sure. For instance, one thinks about ’68. But I would also mention a book by a priest, Don Lorenzo Milani—he was half-Jewish,the great-grandchild of a famous Italian scholar Dominico Camparrete, and he became a priest. And since he was very much close to the working class, he was exiled to Mugello, in the mountains of Tuscany. Then he published a book called Lettera a una professoressa in 1967, that was written anonymously by his pupils, who were a group of little young peasants. It was a really powerful book, and Milani became a kind of legend.
DG: And what was it about that book that captured…
CG: I mean, there was a class dimension that captured something completely absent from what the Communist Party was advocating at that time. It was a form of aggressive populism, delivered by a man who was certainly of a sort of elite intellectual. It was a really powerful book and it certainly had an impact on me, because of the idea that there was a peasant culture which was different from my elite culture, and also the fact that culture had a sort of imprint in relation to power.
DG: So it spurred a new set of reflections on how that peasant culture and elite culture could interact?
CG: Exactly. But, I think about the idea of a circularity, which I put forward in The Cheese and the Worms—this was an idea I take from Gramsci, obviously. When Gramsci spoke about “la cultura de la classe subalterne,” on the one hand, he was making a distinction between what is genuine popular culture and what is culture addressed to the popular classes by the elites. That was the first distinction. And then he also mentioned that there is a sort of circularity (I wonder whether he used the metaphor, I should check…) that there are ideas, in other words, that are put forward by the elite, but which are in fact rooted in society at large and also among popular classes.
DG: So the culture of the elite makes its way down into the peasant culture, and comes out looking like something different…
CG: Not only that, but also the other way around. Meaning, the elites are articulating something which actually has popular roots.
DG: Without knowing it?
CG: Yeah, usually without knowing it. So in the case of Menocchio [in The Cheese and the Worms], when he talks about toleration and so on, the most obvious explanation would be, okay, he read something written by such-and-such person, and so articulated the idea of tolerance in terms of his own oral culture. But I would say it’s maybe also the other way around. What is so striking about those documents was, first of all, the challenge to authority, both ecclesiastical and secular, and then the idea that there is this intersection between oral culture and written culture, which is something that took place so many times all over the world. That kind of evidence provides the possibility, in the most exceptional way, to read history against the grain.
DG: What do you mean by reading history against the grain?
CG: Reading the archives of repression in order to rescue the voices of the victims, like Menocchio’s voice. Now, in that case, you have those extraordinary conversations, with the inquisitor asking, “But what do you mean when you say that the world was created from putrefaction,” and so on—that kind of genuine intellectual curiosity, which was recorded!
DG: You’ve mentioned this contiguity between yourself and the inquisitors, that you were the first scholar in there reading these accounts since the days of the Inquisition. Is this disruption a way of distancing ourselves from the culture of the inquisitors? That in some way we have inherited that culture and this is an opportunity to set the record straight?
CG: Well, at that moment I felt I was not an inquisitor, and I was just working on the same evidence. But later, that unpleasant feeling of a contiguity emerged. And that’s the reason why I wrote “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist.”8Carlo Ginzburg, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in Clues, Myths… And also I realized that there are so many unpleasant things which should come to the forefront…
For instance, I once said the only idea I had in my life was the discovery that the notion of “historical perspective” is actually a sort of reworking of the Christian attitude toward the Jews. It had been inspired by the Augustinian perception of the Jews… an ambivalent attitude, which paved the way to persecution in some cases, yet was also rooted in the idea that the past should be understood in its own terms as well as in terms of our own perspective. So this notion of “historical perspective” being a secular version of this Christian attitude towards the Jews, was something which, I must say, puzzled me, it’s something I found disturbing. Because it was an idea which was at the very center of my—not only my, I would say—our attitude towards the past. Yet it was also something which paved the way to persecution. So this is disturbing. But I think historians should look for, should be aware of, what is most disturbing and most repressed.
DG: It strikes me—as you were speaking about the meaning of historical perspective—something that stands out to me is that you’re not as uneasy about starting from the questions that are imposed upon you from your own period, and then going into the past. There’s another Brecht quote, about “starting from the…
CG: Yes! This is one of my favourite mottos. In fact, it was recorded by [Walter] Benjamin… they were playing chess, in Denmark, as exiles, and Brecht said, “We should not start from good old things, but from bad new things.” I think this is a magnificent motto. There are questions that are unpleasant and we should address them. I’m not saying that I’m always able to keep up with this motto. But one should try.
Photo credit: Claude Truong-Ngoc, Carlo Ginzburg 2013. © Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.