Carlo Ginzburg, a pioneering Italian historian known for shedding light on the beliefs and mentalities of common people in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, died Wednesday at his home in Bologna. He was 87. His literary agent, Roberto Gilodi, confirmed the death but did not disclose a cause.

Ginzburg distinguished himself by focusing on the lives and thought processes of peasants and marginalized groups often overlooked in conventional historical research, which traditionally centered on elites and major events. Beginning his work in the 1960s, he examined subjects such as witchcraft, heretical cults, and folk beliefs, areas that rarely drew serious scholarly attention at the time.

One of Ginzburg’s best-known works, published in 1976, “The Cheese and the Worms,” chronicled the life of Menocchio, a 16th-century miller condemned by the Inquisition for his unorthodox cosmology, which included the belief that the universe was created from rotting cheese. The book explored how oral traditions and emerging literacy shaped Menocchio’s worldview, offering a window into the intellectual life of an illiterate peasant.

Ginzburg’s interdisciplinary methodology combined history with anthropology, literary theory, art criticism, and psychoanalysis. He famously drew parallels between Sigmund Freud’s analytical techniques and the detective work of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, applying similar attention to obscure details in archival records to reconstruct the mental landscapes of historical commoners.

His first major book, “The Night Battles” (1966), was inspired by a chance discovery in Venetian Inquisition archives. It detailed the practices of the Benandanti, a secretive sect who believed they fought malevolent witches in underground battles to protect their communities’ fertility. Ginzburg interpreted this group as the remnants of a pre-Christian pagan cult resistant to Catholic orthodoxy.

Ginzburg was a key figure in the development of “microhistory” and the “history of mentalities,” approaches that emphasize the experiences and beliefs of ordinary people. These approaches complemented and sometimes challenged traditional historical focus on prominent figures and grand events. While some historians criticized this trend for downplaying major historical personalities—J.H. Plumb, for instance, argued that figures like Sir Isaac Newton deserved priority—it has nonetheless influenced scholarship on marginalized populations including women, minorities, and the underprivileged.

Born in Turin on April 15, 1939, Carlo Ginzburg came from a Jewish family with a rich intellectual heritage. His mother, Natalia Ginzburg, was a noted novelist and essayist; his father’s background was in history and literary criticism, and he was killed by fascist forces in 1944 for resistance activities. Ginzburg spent part of his childhood in hiding to escape Nazi persecution, adopting his grandmother’s surname during this period.

He credited his early fascination with folk beliefs, nurtured by a peasant nanny’s stories of werewolves and witches, as formative in shaping his scholarly interests. Initially uninterested in history as an academic field, he was drawn to it after experiencing the rigorous analysis required by close reading of texts.

Throughout his career, Ginzburg held teaching positions at the University of Bologna and the University of California, Los Angeles. His extensive writings covered topics from mythology and folklore to psychoanalysis and literature. A 1991 work, “The Judge and the Historian,” explored the parallels between historical and judicial inquiry amid the controversial case of a convicted journalist friend.

Ginzburg was survived by his second wife, art historian and museum director Luisa Ciammitti, his two daughters, Silvia and Lisa, and three grandchildren. His first wife, historian Anna Rossi-Doria, died in 2017. His legacy endures through his groundbreaking contributions to historical scholarship that illuminate the lives and thoughts of those beyond the traditional historical canon.