The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century MillerThe Cheese and the Worms is a study of the popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels." |
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Contents
Menocchio | 1 |
The town | 3 |
First interrogation | 5 |
Possessed? | 6 |
From Concordia to Portogruaro | 7 |
To speak out against his superiors | 12 |
An archaic society | 13 |
They oppress the poor | 16 |
Peasant religion | 68 |
The soul | 69 |
I dont know | 70 |
Two spirits seven souls four elements | 72 |
Contradictions | 75 |
Paradise | 76 |
A new way of life | 79 |
To kill priests | 81 |
Lutherans and Anabaptists | 18 |
A miller a painter a buffoon | 21 |
head | 27 |
The books | 28 |
Readers of the town | 30 |
Printed pages and fantastic opinions | 31 |
Blind alley? | 32 |
The temple of the virgins | 34 |
The father of Christ | 36 |
Judgment day | 37 |
Mandeville | 41 |
Pigmies and cannibals | 44 |
God of nature | 47 |
The three rings | 49 |
Written culture and oral culture | 51 |
Chaos | 52 |
Dialogue | 54 |
Mythical cheeses and real cheeses | 56 |
The monopoly over know ledge | 58 |
The words of the Fioretto | 60 |
The function of metaphors | 62 |
An hypothesis | 65 |
End of the interrogations | 86 |
Letter to the judges | 87 |
Rhetorical figures | 90 |
Prison | 93 |
Denunciations | 98 |
Nocturnal dialogue with the Jew | 101 |
Second trial | 102 |
Fantasies | 103 |
Vanities and dreams | 107 |
Oh great omnipotent and holy God | 108 |
If only I had died when I was fifteen | 109 |
Second sentence | 110 |
Torture | 111 |
Scolio | 112 |
Master steward and workers 62 | 115 |
Pellegrino Baroni | 118 |
Two millers | 119 |
ordinate culture | 125 |
Letters from Rome | 127 |
Notes | 129 |
173 | |
Other editions - View all
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller Carlo Ginzburg Limited preview - 2013 |
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller Carlo Ginzburg Limited preview - 2013 |