The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century MillerThe now-classic tale of a sixteenth-century miller facing the Roman Inquisition. The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in. 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." Ginzburg’s influential book has been widely regarded as an early example of the analytic, case-oriented approach known as microhistory. In a thoughtful new preface, Ginzburg offers his own corollary to Menocchio’s story as he considers the discrepancy between the intentions of the writer and what gets written. The Italian miller’s story and Ginzburg’s work continue to resonate with modern readers because they focus on how oral and written culture are inextricably linked. Menocchio’s 500-year-old challenge to authority remains evocative and vital today. |
From inside the book
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... Holy Office of Aquileia and Concordia, I ran into a brief résumé (no more than a few lines) of a trial against a peasant accused of saying that the world had been created from putrefaction. I copied the call numbers of the two trials ...
... Holy Office—the institution whose insistence on a full recording of all events transpiring before its tribunal made ... Inquisition, founded in 1542 by Pope Paul III as a direct response to the Protestant challenge in Italy, should not ...
... Holy Office after a life passed in almost complete obscurity. The records of his two trials, held fifteen years apart, offer a rich picture of his thoughts and feelings, of his imaginings and aspirations. Other documents give us ...
... Holy Office. He was accused of having uttered “heretical and most impious words” about Christ. It wasn't a matter of an occasional blasphemy. Menocchio had actually tried to disseminate his opinions, bolstering them up by “preaching and ...
... Holy Office on this matter than he was, but the vicar general didn't press him. He had no need to; it had been Vorai himself, instigated by another priest, don Ottavio Montereale, a member of the local seigneurial family, who had 3.
Contents
34 The soul | 65 |
35 I dont know | 66 |
36 Two spirits seven souls four elements | 67 |
37 The flight of an idea | 68 |
38 Contradictions | 70 |
39 Paradise | 72 |
40 A new way of life | 73 |
41 To kill priests | 75 |
19 | |
11 My opinions came out of my head | 26 |
12 The books | 27 |
13 Readers of the town | 28 |
14 Printed pages and fantastic opinions | 30 |
15 Blind alley? | 31 |
16 The temple of the virgins | 32 |
18 The father of Christ | 34 |
19 Judgment day | 35 |
20 Mandeville | 39 |
21 Pigmies and cannibals | 42 |
22 God of nature | 45 |
23 The three rings | 47 |
24 Written culture and oral culture | 49 |
26 Dialogue | 51 |
27 Mythical cheeses and real cheeses | 54 |
28 The monopoly over knowledge | 56 |
29 The words of the Fioretto | 57 |
30 The function of metaphors | 58 |
31 Master steward and workers | 59 |
32 An hypothesis | 61 |
33 Peasant religion | 64 |
42 A new world | 77 |
43 End of the interrogations | 82 |
45 Rhetorical figures | 84 |
46 First sentence | 86 |
47 Prison | 88 |
48 Return to the town | 90 |
49 Denunciations | 92 |
50 Nocturnal dialogue with the Jew | 95 |
51 Second trial | 96 |
52 Fantasies | 97 |
53 Vanities and dreams | 100 |
54 Oh great omnipotent and holy God | 102 |
55 If only I had died when I was fifteen | 103 |
56 Second sentence | 104 |
58 Scolio | 105 |
59 Pellegrino Baroni | 111 |
60 Two millers | 115 |
61 Dominant culture and subordinate culture | 119 |
62 Letters from Rome | 120 |
Notes | 123 |
Index of Names | 175 |
Other editions - View all
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller Carlo Ginzburg Limited preview - 1992 |
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller Carlo Ginzburg Limited preview - 2013 |