Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

Carlo Ginzburg,

John Tedeschi (Translator),

Anne Tedeschi (Translator)

3.98 · Rating details · 4,080 ratings · 289 reviews

The 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 ...more

Get A Copy

Paperback, 208 pages

Published March 1st 1992 by Johns Hopkins University Press (first published 1976)

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about The Cheese and the Worms, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

Best History Books

3,006 books — 3,305 voters

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

Microhistory: Social Histories of Just One Thing

1,565 books — 2,392 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

Average rating 3.98 ·

Rating details

· 4,080 ratings · 289 reviews

More filters

Sort order

Start your review of The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

Jun 13, 2011 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: early-modern-history, italy, 20th-century, religion, microhistory

Fantastic study based on trial records of a sixteenth century Italian miller charged with heresy. The book offers a glimpse into an alternative (and generally unheard from) world-view that is full of so much imagination on the part of the miller that it should put many a fiction writer to shame.

That really is its strength and virtue, to be a reminder that the masses of people that now we label as Lutheran, Catholic or Anabaptist were a mess of individuals. While the beliefs of the hierarchies ca ...more

flag 44 likes · Like · see review

Apr 02, 2020 Jonfaith rated it it was amazing

Shelves: flat_circle_of_lies_and_despair

As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty.

Largely a detective endeavor of sorts with leanings towards literary analysis. The work itself is an account of a heresy trial in early modern Italy. While the fate of the miller might be grim, this book also offers a startling optimism. As Terry Eagleton once noted the fact that we send our youth to universities where they have a ...more

flag 11 likes · Like · see review

Jul 25, 2011 Karen rated it really liked it

The Cheese and the Worms is a ground breaking exposé into the field of microhistory and remains a foundational work for historians today. Ginzberg used the story of Menocchio, a sixteenth century miller who was twice prosecuted and ultimately condemned by the inquisition for holding and preaching egregiously heretical beliefs. As a miller and a literate man, Menocchio had a greater exposure to people and ideas than the average peasant-farmer, and apparently also a keen intellect which he used to The Cheese and the Worms is a ground breaking exposé into the field of microhistory and remains a foundational work for historians today. Ginzberg used the story of Menocchio, a sixteenth century miller who was twice prosecuted and ultimately condemned by the inquisition for holding and preaching egregiously heretical beliefs. As a miller and a literate man, Menocchio had a greater exposure to people and ideas than the average peasant-farmer, and apparently also a keen intellect which he used to ponder the world, and the Catholic church’s teachings. Ginzberg uses his story to attempt to reveal what ideas were floating around in the general peasant population concerning the reformation and Catholic and protestant doctrine. The tale Ginzberg weaves has tantalizing possibilities, but it suffers from two general flaws. The most grave of which is that he clearly had too much information for a concise paper, but far too little evidence for a satisfying monograph. What information Ginzburg mined from the inquisition records was reduced, reused, and recycled to the point where the reader finds himself continually double checking his page to make sure he isn’t re-reading. Furthermore, making 62 chapters out of 128 pages seems to be little more than the classic and transparent undergraduate technique to fill space. In his defense, the lack of pages comes not from a lack of research, but from a limited information pool – it seems that too many documents have been lost to time. Ginzberg also patents what has become the downfall of microhistories by writing up to chapter 61 on just Menocchio, and then in the next to last chapter attempting to explain (unconvincingly) how this single man illustrates a sampling of the greater picture. He attempted to bolster his claim by introducing a new character (also a miller), but quite frankly it just doesn’t cut it. In this case, Ginzberg’s claim seems particularly odd as he built so much of his argument on the fact that Menocchio was not representative of the average peasant as he was clearly someone who thought for himself, collating authored passages with his own distinctive observations and whimsical notions. While this technique of microhistory is certainly an interesting approach to doing history, I remain as of yet unconvinced that it is a wholly viable method because of the problems it creates for historians when they arrive at the end of the book and find themselves forced to justify their musings by answering the ever-crucial “so what?” factor. When Ginzberg found himself in this said predicament, his resolution was to grasp at straws and attempt to make broad claims for which his work did not lay the proper foundation to support. That said, as the first in its field, and as a highly intriguing study about a most interesting man, the work merits reading and re-reading – once for content and a second for technique. ...more

flag 11 likes · Like · see review

Jun 29, 2018 Nick rated it really liked it

We should not let the long tradition of smearing practicing Catholics as the brainwashed servants of a threatening foreign power—in which sensationalist and hyperbolic depictions of the Roman Inquisition play a part—from identifying the Catholic Church of the late sixteenth century for what it was: a repressive, cruel, and (in modern terms) fussily anal-retentive organization. No justification can or should be sought for torture, for the wracking of Menocchio and countless others on the ropes of We should not let the long tradition of smearing practicing Catholics as the brainwashed servants of a threatening foreign power—in which sensationalist and hyperbolic depictions of the Roman Inquisition play a part—from identifying the Catholic Church of the late sixteenth century for what it was: a repressive, cruel, and (in modern terms) fussily anal-retentive organization. No justification can or should be sought for torture, for the wracking of Menocchio and countless others on the ropes of the strappado, or in the flames of the auto-da-fé. Nor will excuses be made here on the basis of torture’s application in a minority of cases, or of the historical—and, sadly, contemporary—commonplaceness of the practice. The human scream cuts readily through such objections. (The transcript of Menocchio's agonies reads: “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh poor me, oh poor me.") It is nevertheless the case that popular visions of pits and pendulums, of sadistic vicars gleefully condemning Christ to die (as in Ivan Karamazov’s famous parable), are not only wrong but do a disservice to the victims, Menocchio among them, of what was in fact a calculating, rational, blandly bureaucratic office.

The Inquisition targeted Menocchio not for arbitrary or merely punitive purposes, but because they rightly ascertained the very real threat he posed to Catholic hegemony in the hills of Friuli. Menocchio’s heresies were especially flamboyant iterations of the largely oral culture of the peasantry, rooted in a deep literalism of religious interpretation (which is not to say non-interpretation) that bore explosive political potential. Carlo Ginzburg is thus at pains at several points in The Cheese and the Worms to illustrate Menocchio’s representativeness of the culture around him. More precisely, Ginzburg claims that by examining the way Menocchio, a man of the oral culture, interprets or in some cases willfully misreads the books he encounters (representatives of the print culture), we can thereby discern certain qualities of the oral culture; or may do so, at least, to the degree that the oral culture is extricable from that of print, and to the degree that separate spheres of culture may be defined along certain media.

Ginzburg makes this case compellingly. One way he does so is by pointing to Montereale’s seeming tolerance of Menocchio and his ideas, without which Menocchio would have been hauled in long before he was for the first time in 1583—and only then after he was ratted on by the village priest. Hence Menocchio’s popularity with the villagers despite his (often despised) profession as miller. Hence also his election as mayor, and one villager’s description of him as “‘a man who is everybody’s friend.'" (Tolerance is not to say acceptance, as Menocchio’s “only confessed follower” in Montereale was “an illiterate carpenter” named Melchiorre.) Possibly this is a result of what Ginzburg calls elsewhere in the text “one of several channels feeding into a popular current—of which so far very little is known—favoring toleration, a few traces of which can be discerned in the course of the sixteenth century." This tolerance of the populace is evidence of a public at sharp odds with the Catholic authorities, one that becomes more interesting in light of the relative literacy of Montereale and environs. Of the eleven books Menocchio certainly read, six of them were loaned to him from friends (certainly not from his priest), which seems to indicate the existence of “a network of readers”; as Ginzburg observes, ““it’s astonishing that so much reading went on in this small town in the hills."

Another tack of Ginzburg’s, less convincing than the first, is to search for similarities between Menocchio’s heresies and those of another Italian miller from a generation prior, known as Pighino “the fat." While such similarities do exist—e.g. the emphasis of both heretics on the simplicity of the Gospel, their disdain for Church corruption and for the sacraments—these similarities are as easily explained as semi-learned peasant distortions of Luther as they are a springing forth from an oral underground. The sheer idiosyncrasy of Menocchio’s theology and cosmogony are enough to dispel accusations of Lutheranism in his case, but the same cannot be said for Pighino, who in fact was denounced as a “‘concubine-keeping Lutheran.'" We are therefore left with the lingering possibility that the coexistence of these cases is only a curious coincidence. Even so, the coincidence itself is striking, especially in light of the more concrete evidence Ginzburg provides in his reading of the Inquisitional record.

These records are the foundation of Ginzburg’s book. They are living documents, in that they present a theology that evolves before our eyes, in response to the attacks of his interrogator. See, for example, Menocchio’s distinction between a mortal soul that dies with the body and an immortal spirit that will be reunited with God at the end of time through apocatastasis. This distinction is not found in the trial records of 1583 or the first half of those from 1599, but under the pressure of the inquisitor, Menocchio begins splitting this particular hair. On other more crucial points, though, Menocchio remains steadfast, as in his bold claim that “‘it’s more important to love our neighbor than to love God’”, his denial of the divinity of Christ, and the apparent pantheism in his statement that “everything is God."

The danger of these beliefs to the power of the Church, should they be widely adopted, is self-explanatory. The question is whether there was a real risk that they would be, and here the evidence is twofold. First, Menocchio displays through his testimony about several books, especially the “parascriptural” chronicle Il Fioretto della Bibbia, a “manner of reading [that] was obviously one-sided and arbitrary—almost as if he was searching for confirmation of ideas and convictions that were already firmly entrenched”. These ideas and convictions, or at least the soil in which they grow, come from the oral culture. Second, the Inquisitor’s acrimonious sentence of 1584 emphasizes the sin of Menocchio’s decision to share his belief “‘not only with men of religion, but also with simple and ignorant people’”, putting their salvation at risk. The implication of this statement—and the cascade of vitriol that follows it—is that the peasantry are more susceptible to spiritual seduction than the elite, who are armed with their educations. The stated cause of this quality is the ostensible stupidity (“simplicity and ignorance”) of the peasant mind, but this is an evasion by the inquisitor. If peasants are in fact more open to Menocchio’s ideas, it is not because of their unintelligence per se, but because their “unintelligence” (in Inquisitorial eyes) leads them to hold common beliefs—that is, a peasant culture—which may then be stoked by Menocchio, and brought to light.

All of which is to say that the Church saw a threat in Menocchio because he was not an isolated case, and because his beliefs threatened the Inquisition’s goal of heretical containment and its emphasis on the value of theological purity and consistency. This emphasis, in contrast to the localization and syncretism of late medieval Christianity, was implicitly a validation of Protestant criticisms of the Church—that it practiced sloppy sacerdotalism rather than properly educating its members, or for that matter its clergy—and was an attempt to rectify these faults. This was done for reasons both moral (the genuine desire for spiritual improvement) and political (the destruction of Protestantism), and there is often much overlap between these categories. The renewed vigor, and consequent cruelty, of the Church during the Counter-Reformation meant that, barring overly literal counter-factuals (i.e. what if Menocchio hadn’t run into that tattletale flutist in 1598?), Menocchio’s death at the stake was for all intents inevitable. The immovable object that was the early modern church met the unstoppable force of Menocchio’s endless stream of words: earthy, evocative, by turns strident and simpering, and always painfully human, even across the chasm of centuries. Few of us have the courage or quixotic folly to stare up at an inquisitor asking us to explain ourselves and respond: “I thought you’d never ask.” For this the miller deserves not just our scholarly attention, but our respect and our love. ...more

flag 8 likes · Like · see review

Jan 06, 2013 Jen rated it liked it

As a medievalist, I run across this book all the time, which is funny considering it's not really a medieval book (it's more Renaissance/early modern). It's made a huge splash in The Study of Old Things, though, so I'm not surprised it finally showed up in a class of mine on the reading list.
So, the gist of the story (and it really does read like a story, which is kind of neat) is Ginzburg following the trials by the inquisition (no, not the one you didn't expect, another one) of a miller for be ...more

flag 8 likes · Like · see review

Oct 15, 2018 Lobstergirl rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: prawns

Shelves: european-history, own

This is an insightful book for all of us who assume European peasants were illiterate, uneducated, non-thinking folk. Our hero, the miller Menocchio, could read and write, owned a few books, borrowed a few more, had read the Decameron and dipped into the Koran, and combined the ideas he got from books with the oral tradition of 16th century rural Friuli to form his own slightly odd, very creative, para-Catholic religious notions. His discussions of these notions with others brought him to the at ...more

flag 9 likes · Like · see review

Jan 18, 2010 Elizabeth rated it liked it

Shelves: 2010

This book is so hyped in academic circles, that it was perhaps setting itself up as a disappointment before I even cracked it open. I'm sure for the right type of history major (that is, one that's interested in actual events in history rather than their theoretical importance) this is a revelation. For me, it was more boring than I care to admit. I couldn't care about the miller Menocchio anymore than I care about any other random individual on the street. Sure, he was uncommonly literate, and ...more

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Apr 22, 2014 Rana rated it did not like it

Recommends it for: idiots

this guy goes on for 150+ pages about ALL the possible explanations for this random peasant thinking that the world was formed from chaos like the way cheese coagulates. then he's like the collective unconscious is an "unacceptable" explanation like wtf this whole book is dumb and this guy wasted his time writing it and the translators wasted their time translating it. it's literally written like "well the miller may have gotten his ideas from THIS SMALL, FAR OFF CHRISTIAN EXTREMIST GROUP becaus ...more

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Aug 22, 2020 Barnaby Thieme rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: history, religion-mythology

Ginzburg's classic microhistory The Cheese and the Worms begins with a penetrating theoretical essay that sets out at length the necessity of carrying out historiography with theoretical sophistication informed by recent developments in critical theory in literature and the human sciences.

Unfortunately, his work suffers from a severe deficiency commonly evidenced by such theorists. While his critique of the naive approach taken by his putative opponents is devastating, he utterly fails to apply Ginzburg's classic microhistory The Cheese and the Worms begins with a penetrating theoretical essay that sets out at length the necessity of carrying out historiography with theoretical sophistication informed by recent developments in critical theory in literature and the human sciences.

Unfortunately, his work suffers from a severe deficiency commonly evidenced by such theorists. While his critique of the naive approach taken by his putative opponents is devastating, he utterly fails to apply similarly-rigorous critical standards to their own writing. Like so many others, he instead succumbs to the intoxication induced by the wide, free vista he has opened out to champion a revolutionary approach that fails on the level of argumentation and evidence.

This bad habit clings perniciously to critical theorists, and has unfortunately marred the legacy of their collective undertaking. I have read many works by Foucault, for example, and benefited greatly from his penetrating analytical powers and his style, but many of his actual arguments are factually untenable. It is widely known, for example, that the "ship of fools" he describes in his study of madness never really existed, and that his historical arguments and theories are interesting, and even illuminating, but generally false.

I will confess I do not understand what it is about critical theory that leads so many of its chief proponents to abandon basic standards of reason and evidence. It is not theoretically required by their own arguments, and there is simply no necessity in it. One merely need apply the same standards of critique to oneself that one applies to one's opponent.

Ginzburg's work is interesting but unpersuasive, and the core value I derived from it is the human story at its core - the story of a stubborn and free-thinking Italian in the early modern period who made the fatal mistake of speaking truthfully to the Inquisition at the wrong historical moment, and, largely on the basis of ideas that are widely-held today, was burned alive. This far, Ginzburg is on solid ground.

Unfortunately, he refuses to take Ginzburg at his word, who repeatedly proclaimed during his trial that he developed his basic ideas himself. Rather, Ginzburg seeks to reconstruct a nebulous substrate of "peasant culture," one that can only be indirectly observed and characterized by its effects and products, which maintained antique cosmological traditions resembling the ones Menocchio espoused.

Perhaps nothing should raise more red flags to a scientist of conscience than the positing of an unobserved substrate on the basis of its supposed theoretical necessity. We need think no further than the putative luminous ether that was presumed to serve as the medium in which light waves propagate, until it was disproved by the findings of Michelson and Morely.

Like the proponents of the luminous ether, Ginzburg does not believe that things can exist unless they are inscribed within some kind of medium. That is, religious and cosmological similarities may only be explained by diffusion or coincidence.

I would recommend that he carefully study Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen, which meticulously describes a complete and functional religious system, with rituals and a subtending elaborate mythology, which was the spontaneous creation of a heterogeneous group of peoples brought to Haiti from the four corners of the earth, and which includes key recognizable archetypal figures such as the shining lady, the lord of the waters, and the trickster figure of the crossroads who mediates between the worlds of the living and the dead.

It is an empirical fact that the human mind carries within itself the capacity to spontaneously create symbols and ideas of certain recognizable types, and it requires no metaphysical speculation to explain them, any more than we need to posit the soul to explain the ubiquity of language or music in human cultures. Human brains are largely similar, and humans are biologically and historically confronted with similar sets of compelling concerns, such as maturation, reproduction, and the deaths of friends and family. No further explanation is necessary.

Because Ginzburg insists that all religious forms must be the result of diffusion, he would rather impute an invisible structure to serve at its base than to take Menocchio at his word. I find that a bizarre and uncompelling approach, and believe it has been inadequately worked out or justified. I must reject it because he ultimately argues for it on the basis of his theoretical commitments and assumptions, not with the historical facts and statements before him. ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

May 21, 2020 Dante rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites, pagliacci, history-perhaps-from-below

''...But what had Menocchio actually read?''
''... This peasant Hereaclitus had recognised the primordial element in fire...

Perhaps crudely reproducing the great Miller's own exegetical idiosyncracies as explored in the book, I'll take Ginzburg's short text as primarily political - while his epistemological and methodological provocations are clearly sharp interventions into the field of 'social history', one seemingly rid of vitality by his contemporaries and near-predecessors in the Annales sch ''...But what had Menocchio actually read?''
''... This peasant Hereaclitus had recognised the primordial element in fire...

Perhaps crudely reproducing the great Miller's own exegetical idiosyncracies as explored in the book, I'll take Ginzburg's short text as primarily political - while his epistemological and methodological provocations are clearly sharp interventions into the field of 'social history', one seemingly rid of vitality by his contemporaries and near-predecessors in the Annales school and the like, the reader can sincerely read The Cheese and The Worms as an attempt to valorise the militant singularity of its central character, and to affirm the potency of subaltern cultures - with minimal speech on their behalf.

Menocchio, a peasant of many trades but predominantly a miller, is treated in a way not disimillar to Ned Ludd in Peter Linnebaugh's brief study of early 19th century Ludditism - as 'a mythological figure...who opens the gates to history from below'. Menocchio's broad, radical and fatally agitational commitments - a fervent anti-clericalism, simple materialism, a passionate egalitarianism, a creative cosmology, an insistence on the primacy of ethics - appear with great force in Ginzburg's rendering, and he's painted as a sympathetic, and energising, figure of revolt and antagonism, but one who meets a tragic end.

Ginzburg's inability, and committed unwilingness, to tie Menocchio down to any socio-cultural determination, or to reduce his views to simple mirrors of various Reformation sects or as an index of the texts that he read (or may have read), is articulated well through the book's almost literary form - repetition, re-articulation, and re-expression shape the text's development toward a purposeful inconclusivity, which is all the more revelatory than some attempt at a reductive assesment.

Ginzburg's presentation of the socio-historical context is fairly limited (a charitable reading may be that he's simply reproducing the opacity of the institutions and movements that Menocchio himself had to navigate, and endure) and elements of his account are annoyingly under-theorised; primarily, fragments of Menocchio's subversive preaching are argued to be echoes of 'the 'obscure, almost unfathomable, layer of remote peasant traditions'; what these traditions might be, and in what way Menocchio is drawing on them when he fuses them with his own studyies, is never fully established.

I'll happily copy Christopher Hill in his reflection that The Cheese and The Worms is 'enthralling reading' and not attempt to further distill any specific political lessons from Ginzburg's text, but simply urge all my Goodreads friends to read this book! ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Feb 01, 2010 Siria rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: religious-history, history, italian-history, nonfiction

This is a microhistory of a sixteenth century Italian miller, whose heretical beliefs brought him to the attention of the Inquisition. Ginzburg uses the records of his trial to examine his personal theology and cosmology, and to examine to what extent we can recover a pre-modern "popular culture." I thought it was a more sophisticated attempt at a microhistory than The Return of Martin Guerre; Ginzburg approaches his sources with more subtlety and with more awareness of the dangers of pre-concei ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Feb 18, 2021 Emily Wood added it

Only reading for school is turning my goodreads into a pretentious prison

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Dec 04, 2019 Sandhya rated it really liked it

The Italian Renaissance baby!!! And even better the Italian inquisition!!! Shout to Menocchio for being a real one even back in the 1600s.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Oct 02, 2017 Barbara rated it liked it

Shelves: history-medieval, on-literature, university-read, 2017-read

Ok, I'm leaving the rating at 3,5 stars. I really enjoyed this book, the first half of it especially. We had Mijail Bajtin and Rabelais, the juxtaposition between popular culture and high-dominant culture. The only reasonable explanation, in my opinion, is that Menocchio was: either from the future a la Outlander or, he was Socrates resuscitated. Who knows? I don't. But if I ever have a dog I'm naming him Menocchio, I bet he'll be a pain in the ass, judging everything I say. Or perhaps I'll name ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jun 12, 2009 Alex rated it it was amazing

Replace the theology department with 'Cheese and Worms' studies. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Apr 29, 2018 Matt McCormick rated it really liked it · review of another edition

"Preaching that men should live in peace pleases me..about hell..I think it's an invention of men" So said a simple miller in very late sixteenth century rural Italy. The answer of the Roman church to this and so much more that the miller would think and say was death by immolation, as it would be for so many others who dared to question the theocratic power of the times.
Ginzburg's concise study was a fine read for a number of reasons. First it was unique. It's so easy to access books about the "Preaching that men should live in peace pleases me..about hell..I think it's an invention of men" So said a simple miller in very late sixteenth century rural Italy. The answer of the Roman church to this and so much more that the miller would think and say was death by immolation, as it would be for so many others who dared to question the theocratic power of the times.
Ginzburg's concise study was a fine read for a number of reasons. First it was unique. It's so easy to access books about the rich and powerful in Renaissance Italy; seldom can one get a detailed presentation of person living a fairly common life. Next, he inherently connects the concepts of a peasant culture developed through the oral transmission of concepts to the brand new mechanism of diffusing ideas through books. The fact that Mennochio, our miller, had access to books, was able to read and write (very unusual for a rural peasant) coupled with an inquisitive mind could produce someone who questioned the established views. Finally, there are a number of little tidbits that cause the reader to pause a moment with an audible, "hmmm". Who knew (OK a lot of scholars but not someone like me) grain grinding mills where the Starbucks of their day where people would gather, talk and debate. The fact that the mills where, by necessity, on the edges of town meant they could be used as a rendezvous location for anti-establishment types and that the profession of the miller was often disliked by the rest of the peasantry similar to how people today talk disparagingly of the used care salesman.
Ginsburg culled the ancient records of Mennochio's two trials and presented his finds in a compelling and easy read narrative. The author makes connections and offers assumptions, clearly labelled them as such, that are reasonable and thought provoking.
It's easy to recommend this book to my friends who share an interest in the period of the Renaissance and share the worry that our societies all too often want to destroy (not just silence) dissent. As an aside, I heard of the book from a YouTube speech by saint Christopher Hitchens who has a great record with me for book recommendations. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

May 27, 2019 Joshua rated it really liked it

I didn't enjoy this book the second time around, thus making me wonder if Frank Sinatra really understood what he was talking about when he wrote that song that I'm referencing. Moving on.

Carlo Ginzburg is an author that, regardless of what historical period you study, you probably know his name and it's priobably because of this book. The Cheese and the Worms has become a landmark text largely because it's credited with either founding or establishing the structure of Microhistory, the mode of ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Aug 13, 2019 Revanth Ukkalam rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historiography, hermeneutics-exegesis, christianity, biography

Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms is the story of a heretic - but one who is completely forgotten. But going by the church records, the inquisition gave him a lot of attention. They were forced to - by the peculiar intersection of intuition, oral tradition, and an eclectic reading test that played out in the character of Menochio. Menochio is a true antic. He did not read thoroughly but the way he wanted, and apparently he worked with what pleased him. At the point of the trial he was a miller ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Aug 30, 2014 Mark Bowles rated it really liked it

Blind Alley?: The books meanings were distorted by Menocchio. His oral culture was the filter for all of his reading
* Temple of the Virgins: Example of a detail in a book becoming the central issue for Menocchio
* Funeral of the Madonna: Again Menocchio overemphasizes the dishonor of Mary and misinterprets the story
* The Father of Christ: Menocchio focuses of Joseph being the father of Christ.
* Judgment Day: Menocchio believes that mans relationship to man is more important than his relationship ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jun 26, 2020 Victor Custódio rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The most superb historigraphic work I've read! Carlo Ginsburg was able to enter inside the peasant world of 16th century Italy using the eyes of this peculiar miller called Menocchio and thus understand the cultural mechanisms themselves. Besides that, what caught my attention the most is the didactic way the author presents the subject and therefore how he makes the important scientific matter understandable and interesting for everyone. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Apr 11, 2019 Charlie Huenemann rated it it was amazing

Fascinating examination of the case of Menocchio, a 16th-century Miller with his own way of looking at the religious cosmos. Ginzburg uses what scraps of evidence he can to tell the story of a man history would have otherwise forgotten. Not a popular, easy read, but a careful, thoughtful, academic work.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Oct 13, 2018 Sarah rated it liked it

Shelves: historical-writing

3.5 stars

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Feb 24, 2020 Nick Bernstein rated it it was amazing

the year was 1599 but menocchio was out here living in the year 2030. RIP gone too soon

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Feb 04, 2021 Esme Yayla rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

''But I do believe that God is the father of the whole world, and can do and undo.'' I wish God revive Menocchio, and he lives simultaneously in both of the worlds , at least just for a moment. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jan 24, 2021 JC rated it it was amazing

Shelves: water, religious-history

This book was completely delightful to read, even if the ultimate endpoint of its protagonist (Menocchio) was a very tragic one. I believe I first heard about this book in an episode of CBC Ideas back in 2017. The ideas of Menocchio that were discussed in that CBC Radio program reminded me of the tehomic theology of Catherine Keller, especially the creation of the universe out of some primordial chaos. Ginzburg actually explains how such an idea might have reached Menocchio, mentioning an August ...more

flag Like · see review

Jul 13, 2019 Sachin Bhatia rated it it was amazing

EXTRAORDINARY

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Dec 19, 2014 Seward Park Branch Library, NYPL rated it liked it

Shelves: adult-picks

This mirco-history concerns the life and times of one Domenico Scandella, a miller known as 'Menocchio', who was put on trial during the Inquisition for conceiving of and promulgating a blasphemous cosmos in a town of the north-eastern Italian state of Friuli. The central metaphor of his cosmic fantasy is 'the cheese and the worms', or, more to the point, the relationship between the cheese and its 'spontaneous generation' of worms.

Menocchio was a literate peasant (a rarity) so it's tempting to This mirco-history concerns the life and times of one Domenico Scandella, a miller known as 'Menocchio', who was put on trial during the Inquisition for conceiving of and promulgating a blasphemous cosmos in a town of the north-eastern Italian state of Friuli. The central metaphor of his cosmic fantasy is 'the cheese and the worms', or, more to the point, the relationship between the cheese and its 'spontaneous generation' of worms.

Menocchio was a literate peasant (a rarity) so it's tempting to delineate his cosmogenic fancies to his booklearnin'. Though such a simple explanation that would provide a neat sense of closure on the subject is tempting to adopt, one can't help but notice the empirical make-up of his metaphors. According to our Miller and his materialistic conception of creation, in the beginning the Angels were produced by nature as worms are produced from cheese, so on and so forth, *without divine intervention*. Cheese served to illustrate some sort of 'chaos', or productive nature prior to divine inspiration... a 'nature' whose causal position in the story of creation is prior to God himself.

What makes Ginzburg's history so interesting is the reciprocity between the individual (in this case, Menocchio), their class (in this case, his being a miller), their locality, (Friuli, in Italy), and grander narratives in Europe during the Sixteenth Century (Printing, the Reformation, Counter Reformation, Anabaptism, the Inquisition, &c.). In such a way, within the study of history Ginzburg wishes to, among other things, discard such crude yet gospel figurations as 'high culture', 'popular culture', and even a sweeping and all encompassing notion of 'dominant culture'.

Again, in Menocchio we have a unique case of a literate peasant. As a result, the reader is witness to a collision between two worlds, that of the oral culture of the peasant and the literate culture of the aristocracy. By way of reading works such as Boccaccio's 'The Decameron', 'The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, The Bible in the vernacular, and quite possibly an Italian translation in The Koran. The literature blends in strangely with much of the lore unique to this miller and his locale... you'll find that he's quite a selective reader!

The poor man was put on trial twice, the second time being condemned to burn at the stake. While many things were said by Menocchio during the trial, perhaps his greatest fault was his statement (so many muddled statements!) that the soul died with the body... that and his seeming equation of religion with morality.

Now, if only I had more of an interest in Baroque Italian history. I'd might've tore through this one! Quite frankly, the subject is not in my wheelhouse... I have to admit I was looking for something a little more heavy on theory. Alas, I found some of Menocchio's musings to be a little tedious—I wish I could share my fellow readers' fascination on the subject. Though the history's content itself may not have addressed my personal intellectual compulsions, it was very interesting nonetheless.

—AF ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Nov 20, 2016 Charlie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reformation, early-modern

This book, emblematic of the sub-genre of microhistory, is actually two stories simultaneously playing out on two levels. On the most obvious level, it follows the life and troubles of an early-modern Italian miller, Menocchio. Menocchio spent most of his life as both an idiosyncratic heretic and a well-respected member of his community. He came up against the Roman Inquisition multiple times, resulting in several imprisonments and eventually his execution.

The second level of this book is Ginzb This book, emblematic of the sub-genre of microhistory, is actually two stories simultaneously playing out on two levels. On the most obvious level, it follows the life and troubles of an early-modern Italian miller, Menocchio. Menocchio spent most of his life as both an idiosyncratic heretic and a well-respected member of his community. He came up against the Roman Inquisition multiple times, resulting in several imprisonments and eventually his execution.

The second level of this book is Ginzburg's quest to reconstruct how Menocchio came to his bizarre cosmology, which at various points seem to correspond to other movements—Lutheranism, Venetian Anabaptism, Socinianism, radical humanism, and even Hinduism, shamanism, and ancient Greek philosophy—but in its entirety cannot be identified with any of them. Exhaustive analysis of Menocchio's library reveals a highly creative and individual reading of the few texts at his disposal, raising the question to what extent they can be understood as "sources transmitting" ideas in any straightforward way. Ginzburg's best explanation posits a peasant oral culture, pre-Christian and never entirely eliminated during the Middle Ages, catalyzed by Menocchio's reading and brought to light by the Counter Reformation's keen nose for heterodoxy. Yet even Ginzburg is unable to sketch the contents of this oral culture in any detail.

The Cheese and the Worms is ultimately a demonstration of our own limitations when we attempt to reconstruct the views of marginally-literate dissidents from previous centuries. The fact that it is so difficult and that our attempts so often end in failure is no accident; this was the intention of cultural elites who worked tirelessly and almost completely successfully to extirpate all memory of this dissent. We know enough, however, to look more closely at the cathedral of Western Christendom, to notice the cracks in its foundation and in its stained glass, cracks that seemed to (but did not really) appear and suddenly crumble in the Enlightenment. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Dec 26, 2017 Gilles Candotti rated it it was amazing

Aside from very positive reviews, one of the reasons I read this book is that Menocchio (the book's central character) lived about 30 kilometers from my hometown (which could logically be the "unknown place in Carnia" where he was exiled).

And when reading the premises of the book (a world coagulating like cheese, and God and the Angels being worms), as well as the first chapters, I was expecting Menocchio to come out like some of our well loved but often mocked village originals, loudly proclai ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Aug 30, 2012 Autumn rated it liked it

Shelves: 18th-century, nonfiction-history

Though not my typical pick, this book (read for my Honors class) demonstrates the immense hypocrisy of the Catholic Church during the Baroque Period. As a miller in an isolated village in Italy (Montereale), a literate peasant explores the elements of Christianity with an unwittingly pantheistic bend. His conclusions range from being considered Lutheran, Anabaptist, atheist, Muslim, pantheist, and pagan. Despite his anomalous approach to religion his village finds him an amiable personality, fai ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

topics	posts	views	last activity
Goodreads Librari...: Missing book details	2	14	Feb 02, 2019 12:07AM

Readers also enjoyed

See similar books…

Genres

History

462 users

Nonfiction

130 users

Cultural > Italy

36 users

Religion

35 users

History > European History

26 users

Academic

20 users

History > Microhistory

20 users

Academic > Grad School

17 users

Academic > School

16 users

Historical > Medieval

12 users

See top shelves…

About Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg

126 followers

Born in 1939, he is the son of of Italian-Ukranian translator Leone Ginzburg and Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. Historian whose fields of interest range from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European History, with contributions in art history, literary studies, popular cultural beliefs, and the theory of historiography.

Books by Carlo Ginzburg

The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath

Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance

More…

News & Interviews

Power, Sister! 20 New Books on Women’s History

Happy Women's History Month! One of the undisputedly good things about modern scholarship is that women’s history is finally getting its due....

Trivia About The Cheese and th...

9 trivia questions
1 quiz

More quizzes & trivia...

Quotes from The Cheese and th...

“As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty.” — 4 likes

“We can readily see the function of nature, how it reconciles discordant things in such a fashion that it reduces all the differences to unity and combines them into one body and one substance: and also it combines them in plants and in seeds, and by the joining of male and female engenders beings according to the natural course.' —Fioretto della Bibbia” — 3 likes

More quotes…

See a Problem?

Preview — The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Genres

About Carlo Ginzburg

Books by Carlo Ginzburg

News & Interviews

Trivia About The Cheese and th...

Quotes from The Cheese and th...

See a Problem?

Preview — The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Genres

About Carlo Ginzburg

Books by Carlo Ginzburg

News & Interviews

Trivia About The Cheese and th...

Quotes from The Cheese and th...

new topic
Discuss This Book