Carlo Ginzberg (1939-2026) and Orde Morton (1940-2026) RIP, historians

To my surprise, the Toronto Star published an article recently on the passing of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzberg.  It's from a wire service, not a Star original, but still, I would not have thought his importance was enough to catch the's Star attention.  

The article says his: 

pioneering work transformed the study of the past by recovering the voices of marginalized people. ...

Ginzburg was a pioneer of microhistory, which focuses on small, specific units of analysis — such as an individual, a community, or a singular event — to reveal broader themes and issues within history.

That's about right, though surely it was not an entirely new idea. Sometime in the 1980s I made a radio documentary for CBC Ideas that we called "Four New Historians" -- and each of the four historians I profiled had recently written a book that might have been called microhistory.  

I went to New Haven, Connecticut, to interview Ginzberg, then a visiting scholar at Yale University (CBC budgets in the 1980s!), about his recently translated book The Cheese and the Worms. It explored the world of  a sixteenth-century miller in a north Italian village who argued that life emerged from the universe as easily a worms arose in cheese -- and was eventually executed for heresy for the vigour with which he defended his atheistic views.  The other three were Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, author of Montaillou, Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre, and Jonathan Spence, author of The Death of Woman Wang.   

Not coincidentally I had recently written about marginalized people who had lived in 18th century New France, and while I had written it before I encountered any of these books, they had given me a sense that I was not completely alone in the world in what I was writing about.   

I remember Ginzberg as quiet, thoughtful, fluent in English, perhaps less talkative than he might have been in his own language, but generous with his time and attention. Reading the article, I recalled him fondly. 

***

F. Orde Morton was the son of W.L. Morton the historian of Canada, Manitoba, confederation, and much else. Like his father he was a Rhodes Scholar, but his first career was with Canada's department of External Affairs. I note his passing because he made some history as well as writing about it. His recent death notice says: 

In 1969 Orde was informed that he would be dismissed from External Affairs on the ground that his being gay made him a security risk. In 1970 he returned to Oxford at St. Antony’s College on a Canada Council doctoral fellowship, and in 1974 completed a doctorate with a thesis on Brazilian history at the time of Independence.

He taught and wrote Latin American history for a time, before turning to a business career.