The Judge and the Historian

Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witchcraft trials to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of Italy's case against Adriano Sofri, figurehead of the Italian Left, demonstrating the importance of intellectual rigor and passion against political opportunism and dishonesty at the end of the twentieth-century

Historian Carlo Ginzburg here draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in the late-20th century political show trial of Italian communists, Continua, Sofri, Bompressi and Piotresetafani.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.