Carlo Ginzburg on Montaigne: “The Wave and the Diagram: Depicting Life (and Death)”

Ginzburg does a close analysis of the context in which the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” the most famous of Montaigne’s Essays, emerged; this will pave the way to a new reading of the central, half-concealed argument of the “Apology.”

The University of Pennsylvania is the joint producer of this series—through the Italian Studies section of the Department of Romance Languages, the Center for Italian Studies, and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts.

Carlo Ginzburg (born 1939) has taught at the University of Bologna, at UCLA, and at the Scuola Normale of Pisa. His books, translated into more than twenty languages, include The Night Battles; The Cheese and the Worms; Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method; The Enigma of Piero della Francesca; History, Rhetoric, and Proof; The Judge and the Historian; Wooden Eyes; No Island is an Island; Threads and Traces; Fear Reverence Terror: Five Essays in Political Iconography; and Nondimanco. Machiavelli, Pascal. He received the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the Humboldt-Forschungs Prize (2007), and the Balzan Prize for the History of Europe, 1400-1700 (2010).