History

A provocative analysis of how Christianity helped legitimize the death penalty in early modern Europe, then throughout the Christian world, by turning execution into a great cathartic public ritual and the condemned into a Christ-like figure who accepts death to save humanity.

In this wide-ranging investigation of the death penalty in Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, Adriano Prosperi identifies a crucial period when legal concepts of vengeance and justice merged with Christian beliefs in repentance and forgiveness.

On 5 December 1709 in Bologna, Lucia Cremonini is accused of a terrible crime: the murder of her newborn son. This tragic episode, exhumed from the depths of time, is placed at the centre of an enthralling study by one of the leading scholars of modern history and the history of religious beliefs. During the course of a dramatic trial the crime is debated by representatives of religious, philosophical, moral, and scientific culture, all characteristic of the formative period of the modern world and all seeking a convincing answer to fundamental questions. When does life begin?

Ten years of contributions as a columnist for the newspaper "la Repubblica": as an historian, but also as a critical witness of many, too many, difficult moments for the public ethics of Italy, for the secularity of our state, for the civic values on which our coexistence should be based. Pages from a civil diary, in which historical expertise provides the material for argument, the rigor of method tempers the heat of indignation, and the measured pace of the scholar enhances the ethical quality of the intellectual's denunciation.

'Barbarism' is found either barefaced or concealed under synonyms. Among them 'identity' is experiencing increasing fortune. And next to 'identity', 'roots', but also 'ethnicity', with the ancestors 'nation' and 'nationality'. Words that have become common sense but can become stones because, like everything that serves to distinguish and become aware of separation, they contain a violent potential ready to justify civil aggression and wars.

In 1492 Jews, heretics and savages all came together in one place: the city of Granada, which had just been conquered by King Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. These two potentates, the creators of the Spanish Inquisition, took two decisions of great historical importance: the first was to expel all unbaptized Jews; the second was to support Columbus’s expedition to the Indies, which led to Spanish colonial dominion over the various human populations that were discovered on the other side of the Atlantic.

Summit of everything is the individual, his conscience and faith. This is Luther’s revolution. And if the world discovered in the West will inherit the name from Amerigo Vespucci, he is credited with «the discovery of freedom as the true horizon of European Christianity.»

An illuminating and thought-provoking study of the various meanings of distance.

«Suddenly I realized that in my ongoing research for years on the Sabbath I was using a much more morphological than historical method. ... The known historical connections could not guide me, because these myths and beliefs could go back to a much more distant past. So I used morphology as a probe, to explore a layer that cannot be reached with the usual instruments of historical knowledge». In six chapters, Carlo Ginzburg revolutionized the art of inquiry and gives a decisive interpretation of it in the seventh of the essays that make up this book: Traces.

Carlo Ginzburg is known as a historian of medieval microhistory, witches, sorcerers and inquisitors. This time he presents a book about a 20th century event. As in his well-known work The Cheese and the Worms, this story, which begins in the Italian "hot autumn" of 1968, is about a trial. The trial, among others, of his friend Adriano Sofri accused of being one of the masterminds of the murder of Commissario Luigi Calabresi in 1972. «There are two reasons for him to write these pages.

The now-classic tale of a sixteenth-century miller facing the Roman Inquisition. First published in 1976, it returns with a new afterword.

The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in.