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48 pages 1 hour read

Carlo Ginzburg

The Cheese And The Worms: The Cosmos Of A Sixteenth-Century Miller

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1980

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Chapters 1-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4 Summary

Ginzburg begins by summarizing Menocchio’s life leading up to the trials in 1584 and 1599. He was born in 1532 and lived in the Friulian village of Montereale, was married with 11 children, worked as a miller, and had at various points served as mayor and church administrator for the town. Other details, such as his precise financial circumstances and his educational background, can only be inferred through context clues. In September 1583, a complaint was brought against Menocchio to the Roman Inquisition office, accusing him of habitual heresy. Community members recalled hearing him speak out against the Catholic Church and its teachings on multiple occasions over the course of many years (2).

In Chapter 2, Ginzburg addresses the inherent difficulties in trying to understand community responses to Menocchio’s heretical behavior; widespread fear of the Inquisition ensured that no villager would admit to entertaining Menocchio’s ideas. At the same time, testimonies suggest that few villagers harbored any ill-will towards the miller (3). Rather, he was reported to the Inquisition by Don Odorico Vorai, the town priest, with whom he had an ongoing personal dispute. With this in mind, it seems that Menocchio primarily had bad relations with the clergy, whose authority he repeatedly questioned and mocked. Furthermore, it seems that Menocchio was aware of the danger associated with this conflict, since he sought legal advice from his childhood friend Giovanni Daniele Melchiori, a priest in the next town over who would have been familiar with clerical legal proceedings. In February 1584, Menocchio was arrested and interrogated for the first time.

During the first round of interrogation, Menocchio was unable to hold his tongue regarding his own beliefs, despite receiving legal advice that encouraged relative silence. He admitted to discussing his beliefs with villagers, in effect confirming inquisitorial fears that he was proselytizing to the community (5). Among Menocchio’s most striking heretical beliefs are his assertion that Christ had allowed himself to be crucified and, more importantly, his unusual cosmogony: “[A]ll 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” (5).

Before analyzing more of the interrogation records, Ginzburg turns to the question of Menocchio’s mental state. “There had been the temptation” he writes, “to dismiss Menocchio’s opinions, and especially his cosmogony […] as a mass of impious but innocent fantasies” (6). Along these lines, Menocchio’s son Ziannuto attempted to free his father from the charges on the premise that Menocchio was mentally ill. The inquisitors themselves questioned whether Menocchio was joking, which he firmly denied. As such, Ginzburg moves forward accepting Menocchio’s testimony as that of a sane, lucid man.

Chapters 5-8 Summary

During the earliest stages of Menocchio’s imprisonment, his son Ziannuto hired a lawyer for his defense, and convinced the local priest (the same man who had reported Menocchio) to write a letter to his father outlining his best course of action. Despite the priest’s advice to submit entirely to the church, Menocchio proved unable to restrain his own heretical thoughts when questioned. When confronted with reports of his heretical speech, he refused to deny them outright, and instead attempted clever explanations of what he meant. This often got him into even more trouble, as he inadvertently contradicted even more church teachings (7). When baited, he boasted that he had the capacity to “amaze” church leaders with his ideas and speech, and when pressed further, “threw caution to the wind” (8).

Ginzburg marks the April 28th interrogation as this key turning point where Menocchio gave into his own temptation to astonish the inquisitors with his words. Among the heretical ideas he professed in this session were universal religious tolerance; a condemnation of the sacraments as exploitative “merchandise” marketed by the clergy to the poor; the notion that the Bible was a manmade product of the four evangelists; a refusal to venerate saints’ relics; and a belief that Christ’s death was not a sacrifice made for the benefit of mankind. Throughout, Menocchio remained resolute that his ideas were his own, while simultaneously attempting to maintain an appearance of submission to the church with occasional placations.

In Chapter 7, Ginzburg briefly zooms out to give some historical context that is of use for understanding how Menocchio reached his radical religiosity. Ginzburg points to the antiquated political structures of Friuli in the 16th century as sitting at the root of its fraught class relations. The Venetian government sought to subdue the power of the region’s feudal nobility, while at the same time quelling violent peasant uprisings. In order to do so, it allied itself with the peasant class against the nobility. At the same time, however, back-to-back plagues and a declining Venetian economy lowered the peasant quality of life drastically.

Ginzburg posits that these issues of declining class relations and lower class quality of life are evident throughout Menocchio’s religious worldview, even if the miller’s understanding of local politics was rudimentary (14). Menocchio was keenly aware of hierarchies that defined his society—religious, socioeconomic, and political—and displayed unveiled animosity towards those who exerted power over others, such as the clergy (15). These hierarchies, Ginzburg argues, would have been evident in the proprietary landscape of Montereale; as the century wore on, the Church acquired increasingly high-quality land, some of which bordered Menocchio’s mill. The egalitarian bent of Menocchio’s spirituality, therefore, appears as a direct response to the material inequalities that surrounded him on a daily basis (16).

Chapters 9-11 Summary

One possible explanation for Menocchio’s ideas, tackled by Ginzburg in Chapter 9, is the widespread influence of the Protestant Reformation during his lifetime. Near the time of his execution, Menocchio claimed to have associations with unspecified “Lutherans,” but Ginzburg asserts that this claim should not be accepted at face value. Instead, he argues that Menocchio’s ecclesiology adheres more closely to that of the Anabaptists (17). Furthermore, he theorizes that it would have been possible that Menocchio was in personal contact with Anabaptists who practiced covertly throughout Friulia in the mid-16th century.

However, despite his ideological similarities with the Anabaptists, Ginzburg asserts that there are some key differences: Menocchio approved of indulgences (special payments to the church for remission of sins), and he displayed an exploratory attitude towards reading that Anabaptists did not (17-18). Similarly, Menocchio expressed unfamiliarity with key Protestant terms such as “justification” and “predestination” during the interrogations, indicating that he did not belong to a preexisting Lutheran group (18). Unable to use Anabaptist or Protestant teachings to explain Menocchio’s ideas, Ginzburg proposes that they belong instead to an “autonomous current of peasant radicalism” (19).

Returning to the question of Menocchio having personal relationships with Anabaptists, Ginzburg examines his testimony about conversations shared with M. Nicola, a painter from Porcia (many Anabaptists were working as painters at the time). Ginzburg identifies this man as both Nicola de Melchiori and Nicola de Porcia, and he appears to have loaned Menocchio his copies of both the Decameron and Il sogno dil Caravia. The rest of Chapter 10 consists of Ginzburg analyzing the content of Il sogno and Menocchio’s interpretations of it (this methodology previews one of the books key themes of The Challenges of Textual Interpretation). Ultimately, Ginzburg concludes that the discrepancies between the raw content of Il sogno and how it was incorporated into Menocchio’s worldview illustrate that the miller was an active reader, rather than a passive consumer (26).

At this point, Ginzburg remarks on the immense fortitude required of Menocchio to remain true to his own religious ideas in the face of the Inquisition. He seeks to identify the source from which Menocchio drew his own sense of authority: The miller’s conviction that his ideas were his own, rather than visionary gifts or prophetic revelations from God, distinguishes Menocchio from prior individuals who had been tried for heresy (26). Other than Menocchio’s personality, Ginzburg identifies the books he read as this source. Such a conclusion demands the identification and analysis of these texts.

Chapters 1-11 Analysis

The first 11 chapters of the book contain its most essential exposition, and are therefore the most narratively dense. The parameters of Ginzburg’s storytelling are established early: Menocchio is his so-called “protagonist,” the inquisitors are the antagonists, and a cast of murky supporting characters emerge in the form of community members who had relationships with Menocchio. In the manner of a clever fiction writer, Ginzburg aims to entice readers by establishing the most mysterious aspects of his case study early on, promising to return to them later. In Chapter 3, the most notable of these narrative hooks is brandished—Menocchio’s belief in the titular cheese and worms: “[A]ll 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” (5). Other details, such as Menocchio’s possible possession of the Koran, are also floated as a preview of what is to come in the study.

As Ginzburg embarks on his quest to understand the baffling case of Menocchio, he adopts a more scholarly, analytical voice, aimed at guiding readers through his complex findings with clarity. Signposting is a key aspect of this voice. For example, in Chapter 7, he writes, “First, we must try to understand how this Miller of the Friuli could have expressed ideas of this kind” (12). In his use of the plural first person, Ginzburg imbues readers with the sense that they are having analytical revelations alongside him, while simultaneously presenting his ideas in palatable portions for readers who are unfamiliar with Menocchio’s world. In this sense, Ginzburg’s method caters towards both expert and non-expert audiences.

Along these lines, the counterarguments he explores in this portion of the book tackle more familiar alleys of Early Modern history than the obscure topics he will eventually turn to, namely the Protestant Reformation and the Anabaptist movement. He adopts the perspective of a researcher with fresh eyes, writing, “It would seem, even at first glance, that all this can be explained by the great blow dealt to the principle of authority by the Protestant Reformation, not only in the area of religion but also in the political and social realms” (16). Beyond its implausibility, however, this theory (and that which credits the Anabaptists) is incompatible with Ginzburg’s microhistorical method. To attribute Menocchio’s ideology to the vast movement of the Reformation would be to erase his individual significance, and the unique nuances of his particular heretical thought.

Towards the end of the section, Ginzburg begins to preview his microhistorical method in his analysis of Il sogno dil Caravia and Menocchio’s relationship with The Challenges of Textual Interpretation. This is the first of numerous close readings throughout the book, and it contains some of Ginzburg’s signature analytical strategies. The text of Il sogno is presented one stanza at a time, with the author offering his analysis in between. These interpretive paragraphs simultaneously narrate and characterize the primary source for unfamiliar readers. He calls Il Sogno “a typical voice of Italian evangelism,” by which he means that it displays a religious attitude pervasive of the time, one that Menocchio would have recognized and resonated with as he read. Cultural context such as this forms the backbone of Ginzburg’s argument moving forward, as he aims to characterize the intangible Italian Relationships Between “High” and “Low” Culture in the 16th Century.

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