Carlo Ginzburg, Ph.D., professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, will present “Copies, Facsimiles, and the Invisible Text” for the 2009 Rolando Lara Memorial Lecture at 8 p.m. Nov. 2 in Whitaker Hall Auditorium. The lecture, sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures in Arts & Sciences, is free and open to the public.
Ginzburg is a pioneer of microhistory and a major intellectual figure whose work has influenced multiple disciplines, including history, philosophy, anthropology, literature and art history.
He is most famous for his groundbreaking book, “The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller.”
“The Cheese and the Worms” is a study of the popular culture in the 16th century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the political and religious conditions of his time.
Ginzburg will focus on the fact that the attachment of different symbolic and monetary value to reproductions of paintings and reproductions of texts is rooted in history, not in intrinsic features of painting and literature. Ginzburg claims Dante was one of the first poets to articulate this divergence.
For more information, call 935-5175 or visit rll.wustl.edu/ginzburg.