The Judge and the Historian

A bomb, an anarchist's 'accidental death', the murder of a police commissar, and the confession of a former member of Lotta Continua led to seven dubious court cases and a tale of political opportunism and dishonesty. Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola's famous J'accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the nineteenth-century, the historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in this late-twentieth-century political show-trial and reflects more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of the historian and the judge.

Carlo Ginzburg was born in Turin and now teaches at UCLA. He is the author of The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of the Sixteenth-Century Miller, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath and The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.