Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian scholar renowned for an approach to history that focused on the mass of humanity that existed outside the political and social elites of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, died on June 17 at his home in Bologna. He was 87.

In the 1960s, when Mr. Ginzburg embarked on his research, there was little interest in discovering what the peasants of centuries past thought and believed. History was focused on great leaders and events, like the Medici banking and political dynasty of nearby Florence or the powerful doges who ruled over Venice. Mr. Ginzburg’s interdisciplinary approach straddled anthropology, literary theory, art criticism, and psychoanalysis.

His family spent several years in a small, southern Italian village to which his parents had been exiled for their opposition to the Mussolini regime. His father was tortured and killed in 1944 during the Nazi occupation of Italy. Carlo spent the remainder of the war hidden in another rural village, under the protection of his maternal grandmother. “She was my only non-Jewish relative, and to protect me, she made me use her maiden name,” Mr. Ginzburg recalled. “I became Carlo Taszi.”