The Cheese and the Worms is an early and
celebrated work by Professor Carlo Ginzburg, currently at
University of California, Los Angeles and a trailblazer in
the field of microhistory. In this subfield of “new history”
developed in the 1970s, historians analyze individuals,
small communities or case studies to bring light upon
greater questions. Here, Ginzburg studies the currents
running through popular culture in 16th century Italy
through the lens of the experiences and thoughts of
Menocchio, a miller and heretic. However, he does not
limit himself to mere description. With acute analysis, he
examines the intersection between high and low culture,
the effect of written literature on a predominantly oral
culture and the influences working upon popular faith
beyond the traditional tenets of Roman Catholicism.
The immediate sources of Professor Ginzburg’s
book are the inquisitorial records he discovered by chance.
These records cover both of the trials for heresy of
Menocchio and include verbatim his own words as well as
the questions and comments of the inquisitors. These
records proved to be extremely valuable sources for not
only Menocchio’s individual story but also for the greater
picture Ginzburg is attempting to paint. However, there are
naturally gaps in the knowledge they provide. To his
credit, the author freely admits where these occur and
attempts neither to paper over them, nor to reach
conclusions that run counter to the evidence he has
presented. Instead, he keeps to the evidence he has,
reached his conclusions with a clear methodology and deep
analysis.
From the text, it is clear that Ginzburg also has a
broad working knowledge of medieval literature and
theology. Menocchio himself read works like Boccaccio’s
Decameron, the Fioretto del Bibbia and the Travels of Sir
John Mandeville as well as the Bible in the vernacular.1
Knowing these texts allows Ginzburg to better evaluate
Menocchio’s understanding of them as well as better
convey to the reader their importance. Indeed, one of the
most important points Ginzburg makes in his work is that
Menocchio operated in a liminal zone between full reliance
upon oral transmission of knowledge and upon written
work. By comparing the real meaning of a text with what
Menocchio was able to glean from it, it becomes clear that
there was a wide disparity between the two. Ginzburg
proposes that Menocchio was not getting his ideas from
the texts themselves. Instead, his ideas came from deeply
rooted oral traditions that Ginzburg proposes was common
to the peasant class in the region, triggered by the books he
read. When the miller read his books, he read them to
provide him with confirmation of his established ideas,
taking from them only snippets and distorted versions of
the actual text. Ginzburg thus makes a case that Menocchio
used an “interpretive filter” informed by the oral tradition
to read the written word.
2
Given the religious turmoil in 16th Europe in the
wake of Martin Luther and his followers, at first glance it
might appear that the reformation might have influenced
some of Menocchio’s ideas. However, Ginzburg contends
that this is unlikely to be the case. Although Menocchio
may have had contact with religious rebels and heretics,
those of his idea that do coincide with the beliefs of
Lutherans or of the Anabaptists do so only in a piecemeal
basis, suggesting a coincidence rather than a deliberate
intent on Menocchio’s behalf. From this, Ginzburg
deduces that peasant faith in Friuli might not have been so
closely orthodox to the Catholic Church as the inquisitors