Just one year later, Carlo Ginzburg published a work of even greater import: The Cheese and the Worms. Like Le Roy Ladurie, Ginzburg had plunged into the wonderfully rich records of the Catholic Inquisition, and found a heresy case of irresistible color and interest. Unlike Le Roy Ladurie, however, he did not treat the heresy as incidental, but made it the breathing center of his story. The case involved an obscure Friulian miller, known as Menocchio, first arrested in 1584 and finally put to death in the last year of the sixteenth century. Under interrogation, he expounded a bizarre, idiosyncratic series of beliefs: “I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is earth, air, water and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” Menocchio's “cosmos” appeared both relativistic and materialist, and on occasion he even invoked the Koran. In an impressive piece of historical detection, Ginzburg determined which books Menocchio had read, how he had read them, and how, in the dynamic context of the Reformation and the invention of printing, the miller had come to express his conclusions openly. Ginzburg also argued, provocatively, that in the final analysis, Menocchio had made use of confused fragments of advanced philosophy and theology “to express the elemental, instinctive material of generation after generation of peasants” – that his trial transcript provided a blurred look into nothing less than an essentially autonomous, ancient, unwritten peasant culture.13 Unlike Le Roy Ladurie, Ginzburg gave a strong sense of his subjects as active agents in history, helping to shape cultural patterns rather than simply reflecting them