Science, Natural Magic, and the Subaltern Worldview in Postwar Italian Historiography

Abstract

Focusing on the work of the historians of early modern science and philosophy Eugenio Garin and Paolo Rossi, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, and the historian Carlo Ginzburg, this essay aims to frame the relationship between science and magic in postwar Italian historiography within the context of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Garin and Rossi investigated the seventeenth-century science’s roots in Renaissance authors. In the same years, De Martino carried out fieldwork on the magical worldview of farmers of southern Italy, aiming to explain how such doctrines had been connected and somehow shaped by the culture of the elites since the Renaissance. Some years later, Ginzburg, explicitly inspired by De Martino’s work, investigated the popular magic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friulan peasants and its relationship with the culture of the elites. This essay aims to show how the ideas of these historians was influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s ideas and how they were connected with the cultural policies of the Italian Communist Party, which indirectly affected the view of historians on science, magic, popular culture and the culture of the elites, and modernity in postwar Italy. This essay also highlights the differences between contemporary Italian, British, and US historians in light of their different cultural agendas.