Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, founding figure of microhistory, has died

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Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian historian instrumental in establishing microhistory as a scholarly approach, died on June 17 at age 87. His research concentrated on ordinary individuals during early modern European Inquisition proceedings, notably a sixteenth-century miller accused of heresy, employing rigorous archival analysis to reveal how ordinary people navigated institutional power. Across professorships at Bologna, Yale, and Harvard, he developed a methodology emphasizing meticulous examination of singular cases and the recognition that contingency shapes historical outcomes.