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“... The eruption of youthful insubordination in 1968 seemed to go beyond barriers of language, culture and class. Today, almost thirty years later, one is struck not only by the homogeneity of the movement, but also by the diversity of the traces it left behind in different countries. In Germany, for example, the effects of 1968 (or so it seems to a foreigner) were expressed mainly in people’s private lives and a gulf opened up between generations ...”

“... In a book which appeared in Venice in 1565, later reprinted and translated many times, La Historia del mondo nuovo, the Milanese Girolamo Benzoni described what he had seen in the course of his 14 years of travelling in the ‘newly discovered islands and seas’ beyond the Ocean. About the island of Hispaniola, he related the following: In this island, as also in other provinces of these new countries, there are some bushes, not very large, like reeds, that produce a leaf in shape like that of the walnut, though rather larger, which (where it is used) is held in great esteem by the natives, and very much prized by the slaves whom the Spaniards have brought from Ethiopia ...”

“... only in texts which postdate the picture by well over a decade. Two more theories are examined by Carlo Ginzburg. According to one of these, the angels represent Concord and the composition as a whole commemorates the short-lived union of the Greek and Latin Churches. The other hypothesis is that the angels signify Liberality and were shown in this way ...”

“... Carlo Ginzburg became famous as a historian for extraordinary discoveries about popular belief, and what was taken by its persecutors to be witchcraft, in the early modern period. The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, each a case-study from the north-east corner of Italy, were followed by a synthesis of Eurasian sweep in Ecstasies ...”

“... of Old Thiess and the werewolf stories of premodern Europe are recurring motifs in the work of Carlo Ginzburg, and they tell us something about that work’s ambition and breadth of reference. When History Workshop Journal published a Ginzburg essay in 1980, the translator, Anna Davin, explained that ‘this article ...”

“... of those who had died ‘before their time’. Being a benandante was clearly a risky business. Carlo Ginzburg’s account of this Friulian ‘fertility cult’, as he calls it, first appeared in Italian as I Benandanti in 1964, and has now been skilfully, even elegantly translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi. Night Battles follows the ...”

“... Carlo 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. He made his debut with a spectacular discovery: the first, and still only, documented case of a magical fertility and funerary cult in the countryside of Early Modern Europe, the trances of the Benandanti in Friuli, stumbled upon unawares by the Roman Inquisition ...”

“... This is not quite another Montaillou. Professor Ginzburg’s book deals with an isolated heretical individual, not with a heretical community. But it shares some of the qualities of that marvellous book. It reveals an almost equally startling body of wholly unorthodox ideas existing within a nominally Roman Catholic society ...”

“... way one utterance, aloud or on paper, resonates with others, have been raised by scholars such as Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Zemon Davis, both always alert to the politics of utterance. How far, for instance, did a particular medium – gossip, say, or an ambassadorial report or a political pamphlet – shape or transform the contents? What forces shaped ...”

“... appropriate in medals and in court masques and frescoes. One of the books which Hope discussed, Carlo Ginzburg’s Indagini su Piero has now appeared in translation. It includes much valuable research on the involvement of Piero’s probable patrons in the great political, religious and cultural events of the time – the union of the Greek and Latin ...”

“... access to the singular facts of nature as a means to legitimate its power. Fifteen years ago, Carlo Ginzburg offered a radical interpretation of this motif of the clue, arguing that techniques for reading the signs were primordial, as old as hunting itself. Divination, common to medical diagnostics and astrology, artistic connoisseurship and ...”

“... this account. Redondi’s book first appeared in a series of ‘microhistories’ edited by Carlo Ginzburg, a series of studies employing the concepts of anthropologists and concerned with history from below, often at village level. At first sight, few figures appear more remote from microhistory than Galileo, although he, like ...”

“... may have been a one-off city goat, as his contemporary the Italian miller Menocchio, recorded by Carlo Ginzburg, may have been a one-off village sceptic; but you can’t deny that he provides a heap of evidence about the penchant for adultery of Elizabethan wives. And just as Rowse’s speculations about Emilia Bassano were not absurd, since Emilia was ...”

“... confessions were simply words put into their mouths by their torturers. In Night Battles (1966) Carlo Ginzburg had already demonstrated that in Friuli a peculiar group of people, the benandanti, believed they had the power to leave their bodies and gather together to do battle against evil. Without torture (in Italy and Spain the Inquisition was ...”

“... Witchcraft, for example – with the researches of historians of witchcraft and exorcism, such as Carlo Ginzburg, Keith Thomas and the late Perkin Walker, and with the theories of anthropologists concerned with possession in contemporary societies, from Alfred Métraux on Haiti to Bruce Kapferer on Sri Lanka. In a similar way, Greenblatt’s essay on ...”