Carlo Ginzburg is a noted historian and pioneer of microhistory. Ginzburg was born in 1939 in Turin, Italy. He received a PhD from the University of Pisa in 1961. He has subsequently held teaching positions at the University of Bologna and (since 1988) at the University of California, Los Angeles. His fields of interest range from the Italian Renaissance to Early Modern European History, and is a leader in microhistory methodologies. He is most famous for his ground-breaking book The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller which looked at the life of a peasant in Montereale Valcellina, Italy. In The Night Battles and Ecstasies, he traced a complex path from certain European witch persecutions to the Benandanti to a wide variety of practices which he describes as evidence of a substrate of shamanic cults in Europe. His 1999 work The Judge and the Historian sought to expose injustice in the trial of Adriano Sofri, though it failed to win a new trial. His father and mother were Leone and Natalia Ginzburg.