The Doyen Departs: Some Ruminations on the Life and Legacy of Carlo Ginzburg
By Shashi Singh
On the 17th of June 2026, Carlo Ginzburg passed away, bringing to a close the career of a legendary historian who pioneered the distinct approach of microhistory. The obituaries ensuing his death — either in the form of op-eds or social media posts — have rightfully dwelt on Menocchio, the heretical Friulian miller of The Cheese and the Worms.1 They also lay emphasis on the wider methodological intervention that a single obscure life, if properly interrogated, can be made to yield an entire cosmology. However, much before I was assigned The Cheese and the Worms in a class on book history, I was introduced to a different work of Ginzburg on how to check evidence, eponymously entitled Checking the Evidence.2 Ginzburg’s stance on the question would remain for me a very enduring bequest, in that it helped me avoid the pitfalls of two forms of extremes and arrive at a more holistic understanding of the historical evidence. Given the impossibility of surveying his extensive catalog in a single piece, I will explore two of Ginzburg’s key methodological interventions.
Before we begin, it is perhaps pertinent to lay out the broader contours within which the debate panned out. In the non-academic domain — into which can be decanted a plethora of pop history books as well as Twitter altercations — there exists a unilateral and highly confident view of historical evidence: that it is pristine and untainted, and that it, in itself, contains absolute historical truth. Eventually, these approaches, which date back to the times of Leopold Von Ranke, were castigated as positivist and the boisterous confidence towards evidence was supplanted by a pervasive skepticism. The practitioners of the new skepticist approaches earned the labels of relativism and constructivism. However, Ginzburg transcended both these approaches and it is precisely in his adept dialectical navigation of these two extremes that his genius shines the brightest.
Much of the anti-positivist writings, informed as they were by the interventions of scholars like Hayden White and Jacques Derrida, carried as an unacknowledged undertow a drift towards an unfettered relativism that would strip history of any claim to objectivity at all, thereby blurring the generic distinction between literary and non literary writings. Derridean deconstruction posits that all work — literary or otherwise — abounds in rhetorical surplus3, notwithstanding the authorial intent. Pushed to its logical end, this position would mean, at the risk of oversimplification, that the generic distinction between a work of history and a historical novel is artificial, since both are equally textual and abound in rhetorical surplus.
Hayden White’s position4 was equally beguiling: he argued that the writing of history is an act of emplotment: historians borrow narrative genres (romance, tragedy, satire) to organize chronicle into story. In order to impose some coherence, the historian’s craft entails a process that invariably forces raw events to project a specific moral judgment. And because this structuring subordinates the reality of the past to the author’s aesthetic choices, it is the narrative conventions that ultimately dictate the shape and trajectory of any historical account. Ruminating on this seductive yet thoroughly dangerous proposition, Ginzburg said: “In 1990, Hayden White, the author of well-known works on historical methodology, gave a lecture at UCLA in which he presented his neo-sceptical thesis that there is no rigorous difference between fictional narratives and historical narratives, since they both rely upon the use of rhetoric. I was in the audience (I had been teaching at UCLA for a year) and I intervened. White’s arguments seemed to me to be untenable and dangerous because they prevented the refutation of the thesis of so-called “negationists”, such as Robert Faurisson, according to whom the extermination of the Jews never happened. A civil but bitter clash ensued.” 5
Eventually, Ginzburg was caricatured as a “positivist”. This was a farcical charge for many reasons, as his position was way more nuanced than what these labels would allow. For instance, in Checking the Evidence, he chastised both the positivists as well as the relativists. He argued that the positivist treats evidence as an “open window” — a transparent medium through which reality presents itself more or less directly to the inquiring eye. However, the relativist, reacting against this purported naïveté, treats evidence as a “wall” — an opaque surface behind which no stable reality can be discerned at all, only the discursive conventions of how it was constructed. As per Ginzburg, both committed a fundamental error in that they assumed an unmediated relationship between evidence and reality: of either affirmation or denial, but neither interrogated the nature of the mediation itself. And, finally, Ginzburg offered what occurred to him as a more useful analogy — a distorted glass. A distorted glass is a medium that genuinely refracts and distorts what passes through it, but does so in patterned, analysable ways, and which therefore demands sustained attention to its own distortions.
If we unpack this rather colorful analogy, there’s so much to glean for a student of history. In the first place, there is suspicion toward the document: every trace is shaped by the
institutional, rhetorical, and ideological apparatus that produced it, and therefore a “purely internal reading”, which treats the text as a self-enclosed system of signs is what Ginzburg repudiates. Consequently, there is a refusal to let that suspicion overwhelm and slither its way into the relativist’s wall. A recognition of the fact that glass distorts does not mean that nothing lies behind it, as he fleshes out in his own words: “The fact that a source is not “objective” (for that matter, neither is an inventory) does not mean that it is useless.” Ginzburg’s position epitomizes the English saying of not throwing the baby out with the bath water; he highlighted the importance of staying true to the archive while avoiding the pitfalls of unfettered archival fetish that reigns undisputed amongst so many pop historians today.
The second fascinating facet of Ginzburg’s methodology is a sustained argument that runs through the preface of The Cheese and the Worms, and it involves a direct confrontation with his theoretical rival, Michel Foucault, whom he chastised as only being interested in “the act and the criteria of the exclusion,” while ignoring the “excluded.” In 1973 Foucault and a group of collaborators published the dossier of Pierre Rivière, provocatively entitled “I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother”. Rivière was a young Norman peasant who in 1835 killed his mother, sister, and brother and then wrote a long memoir. The editors deliberately chose not to impose a unifying biographical interpretation on Rivière’s text, for they were of the position that doing so would be tantamount to subjecting a singular voice to a normalising grid of medical and judicial discipline, which was external to it, and therefore constituted an act of intellectual violence. Thus, theirs was an attempt to let Rivière’s diary stand on its own register, untainted by any extraneous rationality.
Ginzburg’s response6 to Foucault is quite revealing. He argues that by refusing to interpret the text, Foucault and his cohorts completely ignored the concrete cultural reality of Rivière’s life. They disregarded his actual reading habits, which included popular almanacs, devotional books, and even the radical, atheistic text of the Curé Meslier. By ignoring these details, the post-structuralist editors did to the field of history a huge disservice: they transformed a literate, culturally complex peasant into an ahistorical, subhuman monster, as “a man without culture … an animal without instinct … a mythical being, a monster whom it is impossible to define because he is outside any recognizable order.” Ginzburg further argues that this absolute alien status is a direct consequence of the historians’ refusal to analyze the evidence.
It is quite fascinating how this debate on a purely internalist reading pans out in the Indian context. Tanika Sarkar, while analyzing the famous novel Anand Math by Bankim, expresses a rather sardonic exasperation at the arguments put forth by her critics, and argues: “In recent times, in yet another controversy over the novel in the pages of a leading Bengali daily, I have been accused of … claiming to identify the true Bankim, as well as of giving my own meanings to the narrative! It seems that, in some quarters, it is still considered illegitimate to look behind the written words and derive one’s own sense of them in terms that are not explicitly given in the text itself. The text is taken in such quarters to be fully identical with authorial intention, as an entirely transparent and stable text which resists meanings that accrue from different readers and contexts of readings.”7 The insistence of Sarkar’s critics on a “purely internal reading,” which is restricted to what the text explicitly says, is quite interesting. It is akin to the Foucauldian refusal which we discussed earlier in the sense that it also purports to be a principled abstention, which ironically forecloses the possibility of a serious reading. This is, however, notwithstanding the fact that both the approaches emanate from very different epistemological motives. In all likelihood, Sarkar’s critics come from an unyielding textual literalism whereas Foucauldian abstention was geared towards resisting the imposition of any alien, extraneous rationality, emanating from an anti-hermeneutic radicalism of sorts. The solution here is to “read” the text in the Althusserian sense of the term8, which entails a “symptomatic reading”, attending to the silences, fissures, and contradictions in the text.
These two arguments presented here are united in that they repudiate a binary that has structured a great deal of modern historiographical and literary debate. Either the text gives absolute unmediated access to reality or it gives none at all. However, for anyone interested in honestly reckoning with the past, Ginzburg proposed an alternative that in both the cases what is actually required is interpretive labour.
- Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) ↩︎
- Carlo Ginzburg, “Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1991): 79-92 ↩︎
- Sumit Sarkar, “Postmodernism and the Writing of History,” in Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), chap. 6, EPUB. ↩︎
- Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 5-27. ↩︎
- Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Trespassing,” Sidecar (New Left Review), July 3, 2026, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/trespassing. ↩︎
- Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms, xvii. ↩︎
- Tanika Sarkar, “The Birth of a Goddess: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya’s Anandamath,” in Hindu Nationalism in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), chap. 1 (PDF edition unpaginated). ↩︎
- Owing to a paucity of space, this mention is very cursorily — almost perfunctorily — done. For a fuller understanding of Althusserian “reading”, refer Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009). ↩︎
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