Carlo Ginzburg, the Italian historian who reshaped his discipline by listening for the voices of the obscure and the forgotten, died on June 17, 2026, in Bologna. He was 87. Across six decades of scholarship he came to be regarded as one of the principal founders of microhistory, the practice of reconstructing the broad sweep of the past through a single life, a single trial, or a single overlooked detail.

He was born in Turin on April 15, 1939, into a family already woven into the moral history of twentieth-century Italy. His father, Leone Ginzburg, was an anti-fascist intellectual and editor who died under the Nazi occupation when Carlo was still a small child. His mother was the writer Natalia Ginzburg, whose memoir Family Lexicon would become a classic of Italian literature. That inheritance of conscience and language shaped a scholar who treated the study of the past as a form of attentiveness, and, as he once put it, as a discipline of "learning not to take reality for granted," according to the Catalan daily ARA.

Ginzburg studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and completed a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Pisa in 1961. His earliest research turned away from kings and statesmen toward the cosmologies of country people. His first book, published in 1966 and later translated as The Night Battles, recovered the world of the benandanti, a rural fertility cult in Friuli whose members were drawn into witchcraft trials. It was a method already fully his own: read the records of the powerful against the grain, and the lives of the powerless come into view.

That approach reached its fullest expression in The Cheese and the Worms, published in Italian in 1976. Working from the Inquisition file of Domenico Scandella, a sixteenth-century miller known as Menocchio who imagined the universe forming the way worms appear in aging cheese, Ginzburg let a single eccentric believer open a window onto the popular culture of an entire age. The book became one of the defining texts of microhistory and, as Il Sole 24 Ore noted in its tribute, was eventually translated into more than twenty languages.

His later work ranged widely while holding to that central conviction. In Ecstasies, published in 1989, he traced the deep mythic roots of the witches' Sabbath across Europe and Asia. In the essays gathered as Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, he set out what he called the evidential paradigm, arguing that historians, like physicians and detectives, work by reading small involuntary traces to reconstruct what cannot be observed directly. He brought the same rigor to questions of proof and testimony, insisting that the careful weighing of evidence was, in its own way, a form of justice.

Ginzburg's influence crossed oceans and generations of students. He taught modern history at the University of Bologna and held positions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and from 1988 to 2006 he occupied a chair in the history of modern Europe at the University of California, Los Angeles, before returning to teach at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. In 2010 the International Balzan Prize Foundation awarded him its prize for European History, citing, as recorded by the Balzan Foundation, "the exceptional combination of imagination, scholarly precision and literary skill with which he has recovered and illuminated the beliefs of ordinary people in early modern Europe." He also received the Prix Aby Warburg, the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize, and the Humboldt Research Award, as the Washington Times recounted in its Associated Press obituary.

He is survived by two daughters, the art historian Silvia Ginzburg and the writer and essayist Lisa Ginzburg, who carried forward in their own fields the family devotion to scholarship and letters. The Scuola Normale Superiore, where he spent some of his most productive years, remembered him as a historian who had "changed the way of practicing the historian's craft."

Carlo Ginzburg leaves a body of work that quietly redrew the boundaries of what history could be about. He insisted that a miller, a midwife, or a village healer mattered to the record as much as any prince, and that the meaning of the past could be found by following the faintest of clues with patience and humility. In teaching historians to look where almost no one had thought to look, he gave a voice to the silent and a dignity to the marginal that will outlast him. His scholarship remains a standing argument that no life is too small to illuminate the whole, and that the discipline of reading reality carefully is, in the end, a moral act.