Carlo Ginzburg Reading Group Session One: Microhistory
Wednesday 28 October, 12:30-14:00
Venue: Room 20.501, Faculty of History, Schwarzman Centre
Session One: Microhistory
The night battles: witchcraft and agrarian cults in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Baltimore, 1992), preface to the first edition, chapters 1 and 4 (first published 1966).
The cheese and the worms: the cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller (London, 1980) (first published 1976).
‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, 1986), 96-125 (first published 1979).
About the Carlo Ginzburg Reading Group
Renowned worldwide for The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and his other masterpieces of microhistory, Carlo Ginzburg (1939–2026) was one of the most inspiring historians of our time. This special reading group offers a unique opportunity to critically engage with his scholarship, constantly inspired by original historical questions, carefully tested analytical categories, as well as civic engagement.
The Carlo Ginzburg Reading Group consists of four meetings: two in Michaelmas Term 2026 and two in Hilary Term 2027. During these sessions, we will discuss a selection of Ginzburg's most representative and thought-provoking writings from the early 1960s onwards, ranging from his earliest to his most recent works. After an initial session on his seminal works on microhistory, we will examine the lesser known yet equally illuminating contribution of Ginzburg's studies of witchcraft to comparative and global history. We will then move on to his impassioned reflections on the foundations of historical knowledge and conclude with a session on the intersection between Ginzburg's initial interest in popular culture and his subsequent engagement with the potential applications and limitations of European records in investigating cultural processes worldwide.
The Carlo Ginzburg Reading Group is open to all. Coffee will be provided. Participants are welcome to bring their own sandwiches.
Convenors: Filippo de Vivo (St Edmund Hall, filippo.devivo@history.ox.ac.uk) and Giuseppe Marcocci (giuseppe.marcocci@history.ox.ac.uk).
Photo and credit: © Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons.
