Carlo Ginzburg and David Gutherz in The Point Magazine:
David Gutherz: Could you tell us how it was that you became a historian? You’ve written elsewhere that it all came to you at once, one day.
Carlo Ginzburg: It’s strange, because in a sense since I work as a historian I’m very skeptical about retrospective reconstructions, but in this case I remember very well what happened. I was in Pisa, as a student of the Scuola Normale, which is a sort of elite institution—an elite but democratic institution—so I was in what was at that time in the library; I was looking at books, and I suddenly made a triple decision: that I wanted to become a historian; I wanted to study witchcraft trials; and I wanted to try to rescue the voices of the defendants, men and women. Now I was completely ignorant about witchcraft trials, I did not realize that the third move implied a series of obstacles which would actually affect my trajectory from the very beginning. In other words, the idea of, let’s say, reading the archives de la répression in order to rescue the voices of those who were the object of the repression implied a series of obstacles which ultimately—well, actually, very quickly—led me to a reflection on historical methods. Because in a way naivety was impossible; it contradicted the project itself. The idea of reading between the lines and so on—all of this I would say was the result of that initial move.
More here.
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