Mainstream obituaries have focused on the former, underscoring his role in developing the subdiscipline of microhistory. Although his wildly successful 1976 book The Cheese and the Worms was published before that term existed, it provided the template.
While all of Ginzburg’s work draws our attention to details that his predecessors tended to overlook, The Cheese and the Worms makes a particularly strong case for extricating individuals from the statistical categories that render their special qualities invisible.
The book tells the story of Menocchio, a common man from sixteenth-century Italy, who was twice tried by the Inquisition and ultimately executed for heresy.
Focusing on details that historians before him regarded as inconsequential, Ginzburg is able to reverse the flattening of individual differences that once reduced anyone outside the ruling classes to statistical erasure.
Ginzburg demonstrates how Menocchio combined impressive reasoning skills, a worldview passed down to him through oral tradition, and his encounters with both famous and obscure texts. While the miller’s speculations are strange and his conclusions sometimes contradictory, they reflect an admirable impulse to think freely.
Unfortunately for Menocchio, refusing to accept orthodox doctrine on faith was a recipe for disaster. The Inquisition decided to make an example of him, lest he lead other members of his community astray.
The success of The Cheese and the Worms reflects worldwide interest in the fate of dissidents. Ginzburg wrote the book in the opening stages of Italy’s Years of Lead, when his government was supposedly trying to suppress all political radicalism but disproportionately targeted the left.
During the late 1930s, Ginzburg’s family was sent into exile because his father Leone was a Jewish leftist. His earliest memories date from that period, when they were living in a village in the Abruzzo region, far from the intellectual fervour of their native Torino.
When Mussolini’s government collapsed, Leone went to Rome, where he helped publish the underground Partito d’Azione newspaper, L’Italia Libera, which played a vital role in the Italian resistance movement. After the Germans invaded, Leone was captured at its secret printing facility and tortured to death by the Gestapo.
Although Ginzburg did not learn of his father’s fate immediately, it shaped his intellectual trajectory. His mother made sure of that. Natalia shared her husband’s political convictions. She honoured his memory by becoming one of Italy’s most celebrated writers.
Ginzburg’s most important contribution to historiography may be as a role model for a practice which balances a commitment to objectively verifiable findings with unapologetic political convictions.
Perhaps because of his family history, Ginzburg avoided the sort of political involvement likely to lead to persecution during the Years of Lead. His friends were less cautious. So he found a way to write about them indirectly.
The Cheese and the Worms is a serious work of historical research. But it also served an allegorical function, documenting the lengths that authorities will go to punish free thinking.
What distinguishes Ginzburg’s work from other microhistorians is his unapologetic incorporation of autobiographical elements into his scholarship. Although he maintains the objectivity of a historian, he does so for subjective ends.
The interrogation and torture that members of the Italian resistance faced resemble that inflicted on Menocchio. But many of those members, including Leone Ginzburg, were intellectuals who had occupied a privileged place in Italy’s cultural life. They were not autodidacts who had cobbled together a worldview from a range of decontextualised sources.
The Inquisition was keen to preserve the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly on theological doctrine and saw free thinkers like Menocchio as a grave threat because their place within peasant society gave their heretical notions personal credibility.
The fascists also wanted to control the dissemination of ideas. But their primary target was the influence of the international left, not local folk culture. They tried to implement a top-down authoritarian populism that would absorb and restructure whatever bubbled up from the subaltern.
The fascists tried to drive a wedge between left-wing intellectuals and both the agrarian poor and urban working classes by underscoring Marxism and Anarchism’s foreign roots. That’s how they differed from the Inquisition. People like Leone Ginzburg were portrayed as dangerous outsiders, drawing upon Antisemitic discourse that refused to regard Jews as Italian.
Ironically, the decision to send left-wing intellectuals into rural exile sometimes had the opposite effect, giving them concrete experience of a world they might otherwise have only read about in books.
In a public conversation from a few years ago, Ginzburg tells the story of how a children’s book illustration of a werewolf fascinated him as a small child and may have inspired him to study werewolves for The Night Battles.
Retelling a story his mother relates in her short memoir “Winter in the Abruzzi”, he describes how a local peasant girl working in their household reinforced the impact of this illustration. The macabre songs she sang introduced him to folk ways that might otherwise have escaped his attention. “There was a filter,” he explains, “and the filter was a human being.”
This notion of a human filter holds the key for understanding how Ginzburg’s work applies to the future as much as the past.
Ginzburg’s research relied on the meticulous record-keeping of institutions, carried out by the people who staffed them.
This manner of record-keeping was already giving way to automated data collection in the days of primitive electronic machines. As computers became more sophisticated and their storage capacity soared, the sheer quantity of information being recorded outstripped what even the largest bureaucracies could achieve without modern technology. Instead of ensuring that facts were recorded with sufficient accuracy and precision, bureaucracies increasingly focused on retrospective analysis.
In other words, an information economy based on scarcity had given way to one based on excess.
Now, with the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, the interpretation of data itself is increasingly mediated by automated summaries that make it difficult to locate human sources. The consequences of this shift have inspired a range of concerns, from job loss to the cognitive damage it could inflict on a populace encouraged to outsource thinking. What hasn’t been discussed enough, however, is the long-term impact of AI on historiography.
While this revolution in archiving makes it easier to secure information, that ease of access comes at a high price. Not only does the ever-expanding scope of LLMs like Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT make it difficult to figure out where and when something came to light, it also makes correcting for bias vastly more difficult.
When human beings are responsible for filtering data, we have an opportunity to reconstruct the hermeneutic framework that shaped what they chose to focus on and how they interpreted it. All this requires is sufficient biographical detail about them.
When LLMs perform that task, their operation makes this possible. Because they are constantly aggregating input from a vast array of sources, their output is decontextualised. Even when they list sources, it is difficult to determine how they were synthesised. Asking follow-up questions about how results were generated can help. But there is an opacity to the computational processes involved that cannot be overcome through interrogation.
One of the key selling points of AI is its ability to manage the unprecedented volume of information available today. While consumers remain ambivalent about the technology—making Big Tech firms anxious about their colossal investments—there is no denying that we have passed the point at which even a well-organised team of human beings can effectively sort all the pertinent data at their disposal. In this regard, AI promises a solution to a problem that long predates its implementation.
Historians of the modern era were already struggling with the pendulum swing from scarcity to plenitude. It explains why many of them turned to statistical research. And why people like Menocchio, who were exceptions to the rule, were effectively erased from the histories this method produced.
The Cheese and the Worms inspires us to look for what gets filtered out of the historical record, whether by human beings working within institutions or automated processes.
Ultimately, microhistory is a response to the tyranny of statistics. It does not repudiate data-driven arguments, but complements them with research attuned to what they minimise or exclude.
The added dimension of Carlo Ginzburg’s work, making it particularly pertinent to a world in which humanity itself is threatened with erasure, is its insistence that we honour the details not only in our subjects of study but also in our own subjective experience.
Photograph courtesy of Claude Truong-Ndoc. Published under a Creative Commons license.
