48 pages • 1 hour read
Carlo GinzburgThe Cheese And The Worms: The Cosmos Of A Sixteenth-Century Miller
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 12-14 Summary
Chapter 12 is comprised of the list of books Menocchio is known to have read in his lifetime, based on the information in the trial records. They are as follows: the vernacular Bible, Il Fioretto della Bibbia, Rosario della Gloriosa Vergine Maria by Alberto da Castello, a translation of Legenda Aurea by Jacopo de Voragine, Historia del giudicio, a translation of Mandeville’s Travels, Il sogno dil Caravia, Supplementum supplementi delle croniche compiled by Jacopo Filippo Foresti, Lunario al modo di Italia calculato composto nella città di Pesaro dal ecc. mo dottore Marino Camilo de Leonardis, a censored copy of Boccaccio's Decameron, and a mysterious book alleged to be the Koran. This list should not be taken as an exhaustive account of Menocchio’s reading materials, since it is possible that many texts went unmentioned over the course of his testimony (27).
Before turning to textual analysis, Ginzburg attempts to trace the book-trading community within Montereale in order to understand how Menocchio accessed the books that informed his thinking. Nearly all the books on the list were borrowed from unexpected community members—Menocchio’s uncle, a female neighbor, a local priest, to name a few—illustrating that even within remote peasant villages, thriving communities of readers existed (29). In Montereale, this culture may be attributed to the presence of an elementary school nearby.
Ginzburg notes that the Fioretto della Bibbia is the only one of Menocchio’s books we know him to have purchased. He argues that the list of books, therefore, “reflects chiefly the books Menocchio might have had at his disposal, but certainly not a picture of intentional preferences and choices” (30). Furthermore, he argues that the book selection is relatively predictable, with the exception of the Koran (30-31). This conclusion leaves open the question of how Menocchio arrived at such unusual religious beliefs from what appears to have been a normal reading list.
Chapters 15-18 Summary
Chapter 15 is a key turning point in the book, as Ginzburg reflects on the possible explanations he has put forward for Menocchio’s ideology, all of which, to his mind, have been insufficient. Having disproven these counterarguments, he establishes his own theory, one of the book’s central claims: Menocchio’s heretical beliefs were the product of an encounter between written and oral tradition during his reading process, as the miller applied an invisible “filter” based on his popular peasant culture to the pages he read (31).
Ginzburg sets out to characterize Menocchio’s particular reading “filter,” and indicates that he will do so through a set of three examples, each with building complexity. The first, relayed in Chapter 16, has to do with his interpretation of Rosario della Gloriosa Vergine Maria by Alberto da Castello. Menocchio used this text to justify his belief that the Virgin Mary could not have possibly been an actual virgin. This interpretation, Ginzburg argues, can be boiled down to a misinterpretation of an episode of the text in which Mary was accompanied by other virgins; Menocchio understood this as an indication that “virgin” was a title conferred upon all the women in this group, rather than recognizing the text’s attempts to distinguish Mary as special amongst the lot (32).
The second example is in regards to his reading of Legenda Aurea by Jacopo de Voragine, which Menocchio referred to in his rejection of Mary’s virginity. Ginzburg provides the passage Menocchio recounted, a narration of Mary’s funeral procession, in which a priest insults the body, but is quickly proven wrong by a miracle. Rather than understanding the story as a condemnation of the blasphemous priest, Menocchio took his insults as evidence for his own beliefs regarding Mary’s virginity (33).
Before turning to the third, and final, example, Ginzburg considers the significance of the first two. He finds the first misinterpretation to be more significant than the second, since the passage from Rosario della Gloriosa Vergine Maria also seemingly confirmed to Menocchio that Christ was the son of Joseph. With this in mind, he characterizes Menocchio’s manner of reading as “obviously one-sided and arbitrary” (34), theorizing that the miller sought confirmation for his preexisting ideas.
Chapters 19-21 Summary
Ginzburg finds the origins of Menocchio’s belief that duty to one’s neighbor was equally important as duty to God in a passage from Historia del giudicio. He notes that theologians of the same century had anticipated this misinterpretation in works such as Tullio Crispoldi’s Alcune ragioni del perdonare, which sought to dispel overly-political, worldly interpretations of Christian teachings. Though Crispoldi was responding to ideas put forward by high-brow thinkers such as Machiavelli, Ginzburg perceives a similarity between such upper-class intellectualism and Menocchio’s peasant ideology, combatted by middling clergymen from both ends (39).
The author then turns his attention to Mandeville’s Travels, a text which Menocchio reported himself to be profoundly impacted by; he frequently reported Mandeville as his only accomplice when pressed by inquisitors. He pays particular attention to Menocchio’s terminology of being “deeply troubled” by Mandeville’s account of various cultures, and seeks to pinpoint the part of the text that would have troubled the miller. He rejects the notion that it would have been the first half of the Travels, an account of pilgrimage to the holy land, and instead decides that it must have been in the second half, a fabricated account of travels to the Far East.
Chapters 22-24 Summary
Ginzburg continues his analysis of Mandeville’s Travels by pointing to its theory of rationalism as a key idea that influenced Menocchio. In its treatment of foreign cultures and peoples, the text searches for and identifies the rationality that underpins its unfamiliar beliefs and practices (45). In doing so, “Mandeville urged a boundless tolerance towards these people” (46) for Christian European readers like Menocchio.
Along these same lines, Ginzburg cites the medieval legend of The Three Rings as an essential force behind Menocchio’s conviction in religious tolerance (47). The legend goes that a king forged three rings for his three sons, and dictated that the true heir to his kingdom would be the one who possessed the proper ring. Although all three heirs believed their ring to be the correct one, none could be absolutely sure. The same logic is then applied to the three Abrahamic faiths, all of which are convinced of their own belief system, but cannot rule out the possibility that the other two are actually correct. Menocchio recounted this legend to his judges, attempting to justify his tolerance of Muslims and even heretics, though where exactly he encountered the story is unclear. Ginzburg thus finds in his affinity for the legend traces of peasant popular culture which cannot be directly attributed to the books he read (48).
Having completed an immense amount of textual analysis, Ginzburg once again senses that there is some “hidden key” that explains how Menocchio consumed and interpreted his reading materials. He furthermore concludes that peasant popular culture must be this key, writing, “it was […] the encounter between printed page and oral culture that formed an explosive mixture in Menocchio’s head” (49). With this in mind, Ginzburg feels equipped to reach an understanding of Menocchio’s bizarre cosmogony, from which the book takes its name.
Chapters 12-24 Analysis
With the revelation of which texts Menocchio is certain to have read, Ginzburg is able to begin his analytical project in earnest. In these chapters, a core argument emerges: Menocchio did not read his books in the way a member of the elite classes would have, thus invoking the theme of the Relationships Between “High” and “Low” Culture in the 16th Century. Indeed, the fact that members of the community at Montereale read to the extent that they did is presented as a historical revelation in and of itself: The book-loaning community in town “was a lively network involving not only priests (which was foreseeable), but women as well” (29).
Ginzburg’s subsequent, more central argument is that readers such as Menocchio applied a “filter” to the texts they read based on their peasant culture, which has profound implications for modern historians’ understandings of 16th-century reading culture. It suggests that not only are contemporary researchers largely unaware of the demographic makeup of readers at the time, but that the field has not nearly begun to comprehend how such mysterious readers might have approached their reading materials. By raising these profound questions from previously disregarded documents about an obscure town in Friulia, Ginzburg points to the potential of the microhistorical method to generate vast impact across the entire field of history.
Even as he builds his analytical argument, Ginzburg maintains his close focus on Menocchio’s personal experience, which at times has vivid emotional tones. The miller’s relationship to Mandeville’s Travels is a prime example of this dynamic, as Ginzburg writes “there were some texts that had really meant a lot to Menocchio: and first among them, by his own admission was ‘the knight Zuanne de Mandavilla’” (39). In Ginzburg’s estimation, The Challenges of Textual Interpretation faced by Menocchio do not correspond to an emotional disconnect between the miller and his books. Rather, Menocchio placed great pride in his interpretation of the books, and in the ideas that were generated by his encounters with them. This is evident in Menocchio’s vehement defense of his own ideas against the Inquisition’s challenges, and in his attempts to share his ideas with community members.
In Chapter 23, this proselytizing instinct is examined more closely, as Ginzburg addresses a portion of the interrogation transcript in which Menocchio attempts to teach his inquisitors the legend of the three rings. Ginzburg argues that this moment is an “extraordinary” subversion of prescribed Inquisition power dynamics: Menocchio assumes the role of spiritual teacher to the clergymen who are supposed to be questioning him. This moment is emblematic of Ginzburg’s investigation of the Relationships Between “High” and “Low” Culture in the 16th Century more broadly. This one moment in the trial is its own microcosm of religious ideology and power, one which Ginzburg expands upon in order to challenge widely-accepted notions of 16th-century society that are based purely on macrohistorical evidence. In Menocchio’s world, inquisitors can unexpectedly become subjects of the inquisition themselves, even if only for a moment.
16th-century Catholic social life thus appears more flexible and varied than one might initially expect, thanks to Ginzburg’s meticulous, microcosmic reading of Menocchio’s case. Having established that no assumptions can be safely made about the trial proceedings, and that macrohistorical analyses are insufficient for explaining Menocchio’s worldview, Ginzburg has prepared his readers to return to the miller’s most enigmatic beliefs.
