front cover of Ecstasies
Ecstasies
Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath
Carlo Ginzburg
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Weaving early accounts of witchcraft—trial records, ecclesiastical tracts, folklore, and popular iconography—into new and startling patterns, Carlo Ginzburg presents in Ecstasies compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across Europe and in England for thousands of years.
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front cover of Fear Reverence Terror
Fear Reverence Terror
Carlo Ginzburg
Seagull Books, 2017
We are surrounded by images, fairly drowning in them. From our cell phones to our computers, from our televisions at home to the screens that light up while we wait in the grocery store checkout line, images of all kinds are seducing us, commanding us to buy!, scaring us, dazzling us.

Fear, Reverence, Terror invites us to look at images slowly, with the help of a few examples: Picasso’s Guernica, the “Lord Kitchener Wants You” World War I recruitment poster, Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, a cup of gilded silver with scenes from the conquest of the New World. Are these political images, Carlo Ginzburg asks? Yes, because every image is, in a sense, political—an instrument of power. Tacitus once wrote, unforgettably, that we are enslaved by lies of which we ourselves are the authors. Is it possible to break this bond? Fear, Reverence, Terror will answer this question.

Praise for Ginzburg
 
“Ginzburg has many claims to be considered the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties. Certainly few have equalled him in originality, variety, and audacity.”—London Review of Books 
 
“Ginzburg’s scholarship is dazzling and profound.”—Publisher’s Weekly 
 
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front cover of History, Rhetoric, and Proof
History, Rhetoric, and Proof
Carlo Ginzburg
Brandeis University Press, 1999
Historian Carlo Ginzburg uses the occasion of his Menachem Stern Lectureship to present a provocative and characteristically brilliant examination of the relation between rhetoric and historiography. In four lectures, based on a wide range of texts -- Aristotle's Poetics; humanist Lorenzo Valla's tract exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; an early 18th-century Jesuit historical account purporting to record the diatribe of a Mariana Island native against Spanish rule; and Proust's commentary on Flaubert's style -- he demonstrates that rhetoric, if properly understood, is related not only to ornament but to historical understanding and truth. Ginzburg discovers a middle ground between the empiricist or positivist view of history, and the current postmodern tendency to regard any historical account as just one among an infinity of possible narratives, distinguished or measured not by the standard of truth, but by rhetorical skill. As a whole, these lectures stake out a position that both mediates and transcends warring factions in the current historiographical debate.
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front cover of Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf
Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf
A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective
Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In 1691, a Livonian peasant known as Old Thiess boldly announced before a district court that he was a werewolf. Yet far from being a diabolical monster, he insisted, he was one of the “hounds of God,” fierce guardians who battled sorcerers, witches, and even Satan to protect the fields, flocks, and humanity—a baffling claim that attracted the notice of the judges then and still commands attention from historians today.

In this book, eminent scholars Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln offer a uniquely comparative look at the trial and startling testimony of Old Thiess. They present the first English translation of the trial transcript, in which the man’s own voice can be heard, before turning to subsequent analyses of the event, which range from efforts to connect Old Thiess to shamanistic practices to the argument that he was reacting against cruel stereotypes of the “Livonian werewolf” a Germanic elite used to justify their rule over the Baltic peasantry. As Ginzburg and Lincoln debate their own and others’ perspectives, they also reflect on broader issues of historical theory, method, and politics. Part source text of the trial, part discussion of historians’ thoughts on the case, and part dialogue over the merits and perils of their different methodological approaches, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf opens up fresh insight into a remarkable historical occurrence and, through it, the very discipline of history itself.
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front cover of The Soul of Brutes
The Soul of Brutes
Carlo Ginzburg
Seagull Books, 2022
A collection of diverse yet interconnected essays from one of the world’s most respected historians.

Carlo Ginzburg has been at the forefront of the discipline of microhistory ever since his earliest works were published to great acclaim in the 1970s. The Soul of Brutes brings together four of Ginzburg’s recent scintillating essays and lectures that testify to the diversity of his thoughts on history and philosophy.
 
“Civilization and Barbarism” resurrects a sixteenth-century debate between two thinkers in Spain about the humanness, or lack thereof, of Native Americans, and highlights the influence of classical thinkers, from Herodotus to Aristotle, and the iterations and interpretations through which their writings have traversed down to the Cinquecento. In “The Soul of Brutes” Ginzburg traces the genealogy of the debate on the rationality of animals and the limits of their imagination, from Plutarch and Aristotle to sixteenth-century thinkers like Pietro Pomponazzi and Girolamo Rorario. Following Montaigne, he provokes, are we to beasts as they seem to us? In “Calvino, Manzoni and the Grey Zone,” Carlo Ginzburg pithily writes about the mental dialogue between Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and two Italians who profoundly influenced Levi’s search for these “unexplored pockets of exception”—his contemporary Italo Calvino and the nineteenth-century novelist and philosopher Alessandro Manzoni. And finally, in “Schema and Bias”, he probes whether the historian can clearly see into the past, peering through the layers of bias, which include their own prejudices, or if relativism is the only path.
 
With several beautifully reproduced color illustrations, The Soul of Brutes will interest not only scholars of history, philosophy, and art, but also general intellectual readers.
 
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