Carlo Ginzburg died in Bologna on June 17, 2026. He was 87. The news arrived without fanfare, as it does with any serious thinker of late. He was the son of Leone Ginzburg—the anti-Fascist intellectual and resistance activist who was arrested by Italian police, transferred to the German section of Rome’s Regina Coeli prison, and died under torture on February 5, 1944—and of Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy’s most important postwar literary voices. That inheritance was not a burden on him but a vocation.

Born in Turin in 1939, he studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the Warburg Institute in London before embarking on a career that took him to Bologna, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and UCLA. Internationally, he is known as a pioneer of microhistory. What that label does not tell one is more interesting than what it does.

In 1976, he published Il formaggio e i vermi (The Cheese and the Worms), a reconstruction of the cosmological views of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century miller from Friuli who was tried twice by the Inquisition. The source material was trial records sitting in the Archivio della Curia Arcivescovile in Udine. No one had used these documents for centuries, because no one thought a miller’s ideas were worth knowing.

Ginzburg thought otherwise. He read those records against the grain and found out not only what the interrogators hoped to confirm but what Menocchio believed, how he thought, and where his strange syncretic theology came from. What emerged was a complete human being with a cosmology of his own: cheese forming in darkness, worms emerging, and becoming angels. It was neither orthodox Christianity nor plain heresy but something rather extraordinary. Menocchio was not a case study. He was a pressure point on which large historical processes bore down.

The methodological core of Ginzburg’s work is the collection of essays gathered in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. He found a lineage of clue-readers across disciplines: the art critic Giovanni Morelli, who identified forgeries of Renaissance works by attending to involuntary details—the rendering of fingernails, earlobes—that artists painted without deliberate intention; Sherlock Holmes, whose method of inference built from marginal evidence into large narrative claims; and Freud, who read in his patients’ symptomatic details the clues they were trying to suppress. Each began with the small mark and arrived at the large claim. Ginzburg called this the “conjectural paradigm”—the true epistemology of the human sciences, he argued, obscured by a misdirected anxiety about quantification.

This has implications for sociology, and the discipline has been slow to absorb them. Pierre Bourdieu mapped the practical sense of social actors. Erving Goffman analysed the performances staged within institutional contexts. But neither provided a sustained methodology for handling documents created by power against the interests of the people they documented. Ginzburg did. He showed that the archive exceeds what it was designed to contain—precisely because the people who made it were human. They wrote more than they were told to write, made mistakes, and let things fall through the cracks.

From the archive to the obligation

I first encountered Ginzburg’s work during my M.Phil at Jawaharlal Nehru University, while working on a paper on Italian extra-parliamentary movements—specifically Lotta Continua. I arrived at Il giudice e lo storico (1991), his pamphlet on the trial of Adriano Sofri, a former leader of Lotta Continua convicted of commissioning the 1972 murder of Milan police commissioner Luigi Calabresi. Ginzburg, among many others, considered the trial deeply flawed. His argument was epistemological: the standards of evidence admissible in a court of law are insufficient for the historian, and the two institutions arrive at their conclusions through fundamentally different procedures.

From there I went back to the earlier work. On opening The Cheese and the Worms for the first time, I thought I was reading historiography and found instead something closer to a craft manual for reading any document produced by an institution that wants a particular answer. Understanding how social movements are documented, prosecuted, and archived requires understanding how institutions convert the open texture of social life into the closed record of official knowledge. Ginzburg’s entire career was devoted to charting that transformation and its residue.

Beginning in 1982, Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies collective questioned the absence of the Indian peasantry from colonial histories, asking why peasants appeared in the record as objects of administrative concern rather than as agents with a coherent worldview. Ginzburg had been asking identical questions of European peasants several years earlier. Both traditions rejected the assumption that historical scale is a prerequisite for historical significance. Both recovered the texture of subaltern life from documents made by the institutions that organised that life.

The difference, however, matters. Ginzburg continued to insist on reconstruction. Through careful philological and inferential work, he argued, one could actually recover what Menocchio was thinking. Subaltern historiography grew increasingly sceptical of such claims, particularly after Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial turn: subaltern speech is already translated by the time it enters the archive, and the historian’s act of retrieval enacts yet another form of discursive power. It is a serious criticism. But when reconstruction is abandoned, when the archive is read only as evidence of what power sought to erase, the discipline risks becoming a staging of epistemological humility. Ginzburg refused that retreat. His refusal was not methodological stubbornness. It was a moral stance.

In 1599, Menocchio was burnt at the stake. His ideas blended materialism and cosmological speculation with no intelligible roots in any tradition Ginzburg could readily identify. In his time and place, he was a heretic. He also had a view of the world that needed to be seen for what it was before being evaluated. Ginzburg did that work, and in doing so he made a claim that extended well beyond his historical subject: that individual existence, documented in records designed to deny its particular texture, matters.

History is a living thing in Ginzburg’s account not because the past is mystically continuous with the present but because those who lived it were as alive as we are, and their records are capable of generating genuine contradiction and thought. The archive is not a graveyard of events. It is a product of pressure, and that pressure remains legible. Locating it—in the unintended detail, the marginal note, the testimony that contradicts the verdict—is not a technical trick. It is a way of attending to people across the span of history.

Sociologists who treat the archival question as a historian’s concern should reconsider. Social movements are archived in police files, court transcripts, and administrative records. Those documents are as contested as any Inquisition register. They need to be read just as carefully, and just as suspiciously.

For nearly 60 years, Ginzburg showed what that responsibility could look like in practice. He will be missed for his books. He will be missed too for the discomfort his books caused—the insistence that recovering the thoughts of someone we did not think worth knowing is a serious scholarly task, and an obligation for anyone who claims to study society.

Himadri Sekhar Mistri is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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