Carlo Ginzburg: Christians and Jews - A Story of Ambivalence at Kings Place

Carlo Ginzburg in conversation with Lisa Jardine. Carlo Ginzburg, the pioneer of 'micro-history', is considered by many to be the outstanding European historian of his generation. Best known for The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, an account of a villager burned at the stake for heresy, he comes to Jewish Book Week to talk with fellow Renaissance scholar Lisa Jardine about the relations between Christians and Jews since early modern times. In Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, this profoundly original thinker bears moving witness to his life as a European Jew. His experience growing up as a Jew in fascist Italy in World War Two provided the background for what Ginzburg has called his 'emotional identification with victims of persecution... an unconscious projection of my Jewish identity, which persecution had reinforced'. His latest essay collection attests to his abiding scholarship and deep engagement with the historian’s craft, asking challenging questions about the boundaries between history, truth, fiction and memory.