A few years ago, after one of the presentations I’d given on reconstructing Émile Benveniste’s movements during the Second World War through various archives, one audience member said to another: “If I ever go missing, I want Stuart leading the search”. 

I think this is the main reason I like Carlo Ginzburg’s work, despite the differences in subject matter and sometimes in approach – Ginzburg is explicit that the historian works as a detective. Ginzburg died in June 2026, and I collected some of the many tributes to him in a previous post on this site. Here, I want to say a little about his work, with a focus on one of his essays.

The subjects of Ginzburg’s books are often intriguing in themselves – heretics, witches, werewolves. He is best known for The Cheese and the Worms, a meticulous reconstruction of the beliefs of a sixteenth-century miller (Italian 1976, English 1980), and for The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966, 1983) and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1989, 1990). After these three works, most of his subsequent books were collections of essays or lectures, sometimes thematically connected, sometimes more methodologically linked. He talks of “the freedom an essay offers, as a literary genre” (in Corriere della Sera, 18 October 2020). He also collaborated with the historian of religions Bruce Lincoln on Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective.

One of his most famous collections is entitled Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia, translated as Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. One of its chapters is “Clues”. This is a different translation of a text which had previously appeared in English, including in a collection edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce. In The Sign of Three the piece is entitled “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes”; in Ginzburg’s essay collection, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm”. 

As the title suggests, Ginzburg argues that Freud’s work in psychoanalysis and the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes share a similar approach to the art historian Giovanni Morelli. A series of articles were published in German by Ivan Lermolieff, a Russian art critic supposedly translated by Johannes Schwarze. Both Lermolieff and Schwarze were previously unknown, and Morelli later revealed his real identity (Morelli means dark or black, so Schwarze was a semi-translation; Lermolieff is an anagram of Morelli with a Russian suffix.) Morelli developed an approach to identifying paintings by looking at small details in them, less likely to be imitated by others – those of the same school, copyists or forgers. These might include the style of an ear, nails, fingers or toes in a secondary figure, for example. In contrast to the more central and obvious elements, these are stylistic fingerprints for an artist, helping to identify the person responsible. There are parallels to diagnosis in medicine, looking at various symptoms in relation to each other, and this makes sense, since Morelli was a physician by training. The ‘Morellian method’ was discussed by Ginzburg as akin to the work of a detective: “each discovering, from clues unnoticed by others, the author in one case of a crime, in the other of a painting” (“Clues: Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes”, p. 82). Or, as it reads in the other translation: “The art connoisseur resembles the detective who discovers the perpetrator of a crime (or the artist behind a painting) on the basis of evidence that is imperceptible to most people” (“Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” pp. 88-89).

The parallels to Sherlock Holmes are therefore obvious, and Ginzburg says they were previously discussed by Enrico Castelnuovo. Ginzburg provides some examples, including a case where Holmes compared two severed ears with those of an old lady, indicating peculiarities and parallels, and identifying the victim and old lady were related. As Ginzburg says: “There are countless examples of Holmes’s shrewdness in discovering clues by means of footprints, cigarette ashes, and the like” (“Clues”, p. 82/89).

Freud is explicit about his debt to Morelli in his essay “The Moses of Michelangelo”. He discusses his reading of ‘Lermolieff’, and the discovery this was actually Morelli. He says that Morelli insisted “that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a picture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of things like the drawing of the fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of halos and such unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artist executes in his own characteristic way” (p. 265). Freud spends most of this essay putting this to work in the same register of art criticism, but importantly he says that Morelli’s “method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations” (p. 265). This is not claiming that psychoanalysis anticipated this approach to art-criticism, but the reverse, opening this section of his text with the claim that he discovered ‘Lermolieff’, who published his first essays between 1874 and 1876, “long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psychoanalysis” (p. 265). Ginzburg notes that this essay by Freud was also first published anonymously, perhaps in tribute to Morelli, before being acknowledged in his collected works.

The whole essay by Ginzburg is well worth reading or re-reading. Among other themes, Ginzburg identifies when Freud might have been introduced to Morelli’s work, and traces all three approaches of Freud, Morelli and Arthur Conan Doyle to medicine: “In each of these cases the model of medical semiotics is evident: that discipline which permits the diagnosis of diseases inaccessible to direct observation based on superficial symptoms, sometimes thought to be irrelevant in the eyes of the layman” (“Clues”, p. 87/92). He notes that there are connections between each of the pairings in the group Morelli, Holmes, Freud, and that Freud expressed interest in the stories of Holmes, and that Steven Marcus had already discussed the relation. “In each case, infinitesimal traces permit the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality: traces—more precisely, symptoms (in the case of Freud), clues (in the case of Sherlock Holmes), pictorial marks (in the case of Morelli)” (p. 87/92). Ginzburg then traces the roots of this “evidentiary paradigm” much further back historically. 

Textual issues

The Sign of Three has a note that the original text was published in Italian in 1979 in a collection edited by Aldo Gargani, Crisi della ragione (The Sign of Three, p. 111 n. 1). The English version in the Eco and Sebeok collection had originally been published in the History Workshop Journal in 1980. There it is noted as being translated by Anna Davin (no translator is indicated in The Sign of Three, but it’s the same version). She notes that “the first sections, however, owe a great deal to Susanna Graham-Jones’s translation of an earlier, shorter version of the article, which she kindly made available” (p. 5 n. *). I don’t know if that earlier translation is available anywhere.

In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method the first publication is noted as the Gargani collection, and its English versions in History Workshop Journal and the Eco and Sebeok reprint (Italian p. xvii/p. xxiii). The Italian note also indicates some translations in other languages. Unmentioned there is that an earlier, much shorter version of the text had appeared in Italian in 1978 in Rivista di storia contemporanea and was translated in 1979 in Theory and Society, “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm”. There, a note says that:

This is a draft of an on-going research, a first version of which was discussed at Bellagio, in June 1977, during a conference on “Humanities and Social Thought,” sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. I am very grateful to all participants for their criticisms and suggestions, and to my translator, Marta Sofri Innocenti (Italian, p. 1 [without the final clause]; English, p. 288).

This text was expanded in 1979 for an article in the Ombre Rosse journal, which was the version reprinted in the Gargani collection. But the Ombre Rosse version has a note on its first page:

I present here an expanded (but still far from definitive) version of a research study that has already appeared elsewhere in a somewhat different form (see Rivista di storia contemporanea 7, 1978, 1-14; De Gids 2, 1978, 67-78). 

The essay is part of a miscellaneous volume, soon to be published by Einaudi, entitled Crisi della ragione, edited by A.G. Gargani. The reader is referred to this volume for the notes, which are necessarily much reduced here (p. 80).

The version in De Gids was a Dutch translation of the original Italian text. The first English translation, of the 1978 article, was made by Innocenti. It’s not clear to me whether the translation mentioned by Davin by Graham-Jones is a different translation of the 1978 article, or another different version.

There are a few differences between the later versions, but essentially there are three distinct texts – the 1978 version, the 1979 expansion in Ombre Rosse, and the one with the additional notes in Crisi della ragione, which is reprinted in Miti emblemi spie. The third of these is the version translated in History Workshop Journal, with a different translation in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Davin made the original English translation, but the translators of Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, John and Anne C. Tedeschi, made a fresh one, though they reference the original in their Translators’ note (p. xxi). John and Anne Tedeschi also translated some of Ginzburg’s other books, including The Cheese and the Worms and The Night Battles.

This means there are several different versions of the text in Italian and English. 

1. Rivista di storia contemporanea, 1978; with a Dutch translation in 1978 (Susanna Graham-Jones’s translation of an earlier, shorter version of the article – a version of 1?)
2. Theory & Society translation of 1, 1979
3. Expanded version in Ombre Rosse, 1979
4. Italian chapter in Crisi della ragione, 1979; a version of 3, but with additional notes
5. History Workshop translation of 4, 1980
6. Reprint of 5 in Eco & Sebeok eds. The Sign of Three, with minor changes, 1983
7. Reprint of 4 in Miti emblemi spie, 1986
8. English translation of 7 in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 1989, repaginated edition in 2013

The original title is “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indizario” (1), translated as “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm” (2). The expanded versions in Ombre Rosse (3) and the Gargani collection (4) have the same Italian title. This is retitled “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method” in the translation for History Workshop Journal (5), which is the same title it has in The Sign of Three (6). The reprint reverts to “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indizario” (7); the later translation “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (8). The Dutch title, interestingly, was “Tekens en symptomen: Morelli, Freud en Conan Doyle”, so in the subtitle it highlights the three figures which was not done until later versions in English, and not at all in Italian. (And instead of Holmes it is his creator.) The Dutch title would be close to “Signs and Symptoms” which plays on the semiological and medical notions.

What kind of paradigm? Ginzburg seems to alternate between an “paradigma indizario” or “indicative paradigm” (1, 2, 3, 4), “scientific method” (5, 6), before reverting to “indicative paradigm” or “evidentiary paradigm” as the Tedeschi translate it (7, 8).

The Italian collection of Ginzburg’s essays has the title Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia which would translate literally as something closer to ‘Myths, emblems, clues: Morphology and history”. The French title is Mythes, emblèmes, traces. Morphologie et histoire, which is more literal than the English. Spie is an interesting term here – ‘clues’ is preferred in English, ‘traces’ in French, but it is also ‘spies’, though with a sense of symbols or signs. Ginzburg acknowledges this in the preface to the 2013 English edition of Clues, Myths and the Historical Method: “The Italian term, intentionally ambiguous, alluded to clues as well as to espionage”. He said that the book took its title from this essay, “the central essay in the collection” for two reasons, “from the start, ‘Clues’ was the essay most read and discussed, and, while serving to justify my prior works (including those presented here), it also profoundly shaped those that followed it without my being aware of it” (p. vii).

In the version in the Eco and Sebeok collection there is a note that “the author hopes to publish a revised and enlarged version in the near future” (p. 111 n. 1). This does not appear in the Miti emblemi spie version or the Clues, Myths and the Historical Method translation. The Eco and Sebeok chapter though was already a translation of the revised and enlarged version of the text.

While the version in Miti emblemi spie and the translation in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method can be seen as definitive – or, at least, the version which Ginzburg does not appear to have further reworked – the history of the text is, I think, interesting for anyone concerned with the development of Ginzburg’s thought and his historical approach. It is a bigger question than I can cover here, but the text is a good indication of Ginzburg’s distinctive path between a naïve positivism and scepticism. He would discuss these and related themes in many other places. One particular example was a piece published in 2007: “Réflexions sur une hypothèse vingt-cinq ans après”.

Sherlock Holmes, Eco and the Judge

The essay’s interest in Sherlock Holmes and signs obviously fits thematically within the Eco and Sebeok collection. A note to that book says that when the editors were both working on the relation between linguistics, semiology and detective fiction, “Eco read a paper, published in 1979, which one of his colleagues at the University of Bologna had been announcing for a year or more” (p. vii). That colleague was Ginzburg. Eco is of course well known, and connects in various ways to my recent work, which I wrote about in Umberto Eco, Philosophers, Mythologists and Linguists. The Ginzburg connection would be another line to explore. 

As is well known, in Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, the main character, the monk William of Baskerville is a Sherlock Holmes type, investigating a series of mysterious deaths in an abbey with a detective’s zeal. The book is a chance for Eco to dramatize elements of the semiological method and deploy his early career expertise in medieval theology and history. Perhaps less well known is that the book has a framing device – Eco claims that the story was written in the fourteenth century, discovered in the eighteenth, translated into French in the nineteenth and then by him into Italian, before the French version was lost. Although there are other similar frames to pseudo-historical texts, such as Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, there is perhaps a link to Morelli’s double pseudonym of Lermolieff and Schwarze. At the very least, that’s a conceit I think he would have enjoyed.

Sebeok is perhaps less recognised today, but he was an important figure in the history of linguistics and semiotics, who published some of Émile Benveniste’s articles and was an early supporter of Julia Kristeva’s work. Earlier in this series, I wrote about a small part of Sebeok’s career, where he was part of a team tasked with trying to come up with a means of communicating the dangers of nuclear waste storage to humans far in the future, when current languages would be unknown. Sebeok’s proposal of an atomic priesthood is a story which sounds like it could have come out of one of Eco’s novels – Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Nuclear Waste. 

Ginzburg used this approach to clues and other pieces of evidence in much of his academic writing, but also in an unusual work of contemporary activism, the 1999 book The Judge and the Historian about the case of Adriano Sofri. (He also wrote about the case in the London Review of Books.) Sofri was convicted of ordering the assassination of a policeman, and Ginzburg tried to expose the inconsistencies in the legal case. If some of his work uses the approach of a detective to history, here he is more using the forensic approach of a historian in relation to a crime. Although Ginzburg was unsuccessful in getting a new trial, the book also discusses the historian’s approach to evidence, here comparing it to a judge examining material, written and spoken sources. (The Italian judge is more of an inquisitor or investigator than a British one, who acts a bit more like an arbiter.) Ginzburg indicates many similarities and also some differences between judge and historian. As well as the approach of historian as detective, Ginzburg was able to draw upon his experience with studying witchcraft trials and the process of the inquisition. He had been a significant figure in getting the Vatican to open up previously closed archives.

Ginzburg discusses this case, The Judge and the Historian, and the consequences in an interesting late interview with Filippo Barbera and Maurizio Catlino. An even-wider ranging interview with Yehuda Safran and Daniel Sherer was published in Potlatch in 2022. Ginzburg’s interviews are often fascinating, and collecting them in a volume would be an interesting project for someone. There must also be a lot of uncollected essays, and even a comprehensive bibliography would be useful.

The relation between historian and detective is not new, of course. Robin W. Winks edited a collection entitled The Historian as Detective in 1969; thirty years later, Ray B. Brown and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. produced the collection The Detective as Historian, to which Winks contributed a short preface. One interview by António Guerrerio with Ginzburg was entitled “The Historian as a Detective”. Ginzburg seems to exemplify this relation, and the important early essay I’ve focussed on here gives some significant clues as to how he worked.

References

Ray B. Brown and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. eds. The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver, London: Minerva, 1992 [1983].

Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo”, in Art and Literature: The Penguin Freud Library Volume 14, trans. Alix Strachey, London: Penguin, 1985, 251-82. 

Carlo Ginzburg, “Spie. Radici di un paradigma scientifico”, Rivista di storia contemporanea 7, 1978, 1-14; “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm”, trans. Marta Sofri Innocenti, Theory and Society 7, 1979, 273-88.

Carlo Ginzburg, “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziario”, Ombre Rosse 29, 1979, 80-107; reprinted as “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indizario”, in Aldo Gargani ed., Crisi della ragione, Torino: Einaudi, 1979, 57-106.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method”, trans. Anna Davin, History Workshop Journal 9 (1), 1980, 5-36; reprinted as “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes”, in Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988 [1983], 81-118.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, New York: Penguin, 1983.

Carlo Ginzburg, Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia, Torino: Einaudi, 1986.

Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989; new edition, 2013, with different pagination.

Carlo Ginzburg, Mythes, emblèmes, traces: Morphologie et histoire, trans. Monique Aymard, Christian Paoloni, Elsa Bonan and Martine Sancini-Vignet, Paris: Flammarion, 1989.

Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Penguin, 1990.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice, trans. Antony Shugar, London: Verso, 1999.

Carlo Ginzburg, “Réflexions sur une hypothèse vingt-cinq ans après”, trans. Martin Rueff, in Denis Thouard ed. L’Interpretation des indices: Enquête sur le paradigme indiciare avec Carlo Ginzburg, Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires de Septentrion, 2007, https://books.openedition.org/septentrion/65335

Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Carlo Ginzburg, “In Conversation with Filippo Barbera and Maurizio Catino: The Historical Method at the Crossroad of Social and Human Sciences”, Sociologica 20 (1), 2026, 111-24.

António Guerrerio, “Carlo Ginzburg: The Historian as Detective”, Electra 10, 2020,https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-10/carlo-ginzburg-historian-detective

Giovanni Morelli, Italian Masters in German Galleries: A Critical Essay on the Italian Pictures in the Galleries of Munich—Dresden—Berlin, trans. Louise M. Richter, London: George Bell & Sons, 1883.

Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, trans. Ian MacLean, London: Penguin, 1996.

Robin W. Winks ed. The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence, New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Thanks to John Raimo for sharing some of these references.

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This is the 83rd post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I wasn’t sure I’d keep to a weekly rhythm throughout 2026, but have ideas for at least a few more pieces.

The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.