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 25-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 25-29 Summary
In Chapter 25, Ginzburg turns his attention back to Menocchio’s baffling “cheese and worms” cosmogony. He focuses particularly on the implication of the cheese metaphor that creation could not have occurred ex nihilo, and finds the origins of this idea in Supplementum supplementi delle croniche. Chapter 26 is raw primary source material, an exchange between Menocchio and the Inquisitor, discussing the miller’s cosmogony and theogony. Menocchio asserts several things: Among them, that God existed in an unconscious, pseudo-fetal state within chaos prior to creation, that God’s will and power are distinct phenomena, and that chaos “moves itself.”
Having addressed the “cheese” aspect of the cosmogony, Ginzburg turns to the “worms.” He proposes that such imagery is reminiscent of a passage from Dante’s Divine Comedy, although it is unclear whether Menocchio ever read Dante. Setting this connection aside, he suggests that the worms may be nothing more than an illustrative analogy; just as he believed God to have spontaneously spawned from chaos, Early Modern cheesemakers would have perceived maggots to spontaneously generate from rotting curd (55). Ginzburg remarks on the similarity of this imagery to that of creation in the Hindu Vedas and the Kalmuck creation stories of Central Asia, and theorizes that the metaphor is evidence of orally-transmitted peasant spirituality (55).
Ginzburg posits that the evidence of this undercurrent of oral culture, which certainly dated back to earlier ages, only exists for modern historians because of the invention of printing. However, although printing made a step towards equalizing access to written culture, it did not destroy the cultural hierarchies that Menocchio so frequently bristles against (57). In Chapter 29, Ginzburg finds that, furthermore, this encounter with printed material (containing terminology Menocchio would have been enticed by but unfamiliar with) explains the seeming inconsistencies in Menocchio’s words: “Using terms infused with Christianity, Neoplatonism, and scholastic philosophy, Menocchio tried to express the elemental instinctive materialism of generation after generation of peasants” (58).
Chapters 30-34 Summary
Metaphors are one of the most striking characteristics of Menocchio’s language, but Ginzburg argues that when it comes to Menocchio, readers should perceive his metaphors in their most literal sense (59). He then turns to another series of examples, the metaphors Menocchio used to describe God.
Menocchio described God as a father, literally ascribing family dynamics to the deity’s behavior (59). God was also a member of nobility, in that like a landowner, Menocchio perceived him to designate labor to lower-down workers, namely the clergymen (60). In conversations with villagers, Menocchio was purported to have compared God to a breath of air, an idea which the author attributes to Menocchio’s possible exposure to Servetus’s De Trinitatis erroribus (62). Ginzburg takes these metaphors as further evidence of Menocchio’s peasant materialism, a characteristic which defined his religiosity (61).
Chapters 35-38 Summary
Ginzburg finds that this materialism reached a major obstacle with its conception of the soul, and by extension Menocchio’s discussion of God as the world with his inquisitors, a theological mistake that would have damning consequences for him (66). In a February interrogation, the inquisitors asked Menocchio a question that stumped him, to the point of rendering him silent: “Are the spirit of God and God the same thing?” (66). The inquisitors found his eventual response, a materialistic description of Paradise, insufficient, and pressed him further. At this point, Menocchio was cornered into asserting that the spirit and the soul were distinct components of man, that the soul was capable of dying, and that furthermore, the soul could be divided into two parts, good and bad.
Beginning in Chapter 37, Ginzburg attempts to make sense of this complex anthropology. He traces an intricate genealogy of ideas of a distinct spirit and soul, beginning with professors at the University of Padua, and ending with Menocchio’s good friend, the local priest Giovanni Daniele Melchiori (69). Melchiori was himself tried by the Inquisition, only years earlier, for believing in distinctions between the spirit and soul. He escaped punishment, and likely shared these ideas with Menocchio.
By May, Menocchio had reverted to the position that soul and spirit were synonymous, but Ginzburg argues that this can be attributed to the extreme stress of the interrogation setting, and that his confused ideas actually bely the miller’s fundamental internal religious conflicts (72).
Chapters 25-38 Analysis
This portion of the book is more theologically dense than the prior chapters, as Ginzburg tackles some of the most complex ideas addressed by any religion: the nature of the universe, of God, and of the soul. In the end, his conclusion that the cheese and the worms are “intended to serve simply as an explanatory analogy” (54) is a surprisingly straightforward one given the cosmogony’s initially surreal appearance. The practicality that Menocchio found in this metaphor is proof of the vast gulf between modern and Early Modern popular culture, while also speaking to the Relationships Between “High” and “Low” Culture in the 16th Century.
In order to understand Menocchio’s words, Ginzburg finds that modern people must imagine the material reality of his life: Cheesemaking would have been a familiar aspect of village culture, and the appearance of maggots in milk would have been a regular sight before the invention of refrigeration. Furthermore, the maggots’ presence in the milk would have seemed entirely spontaneous to people before biology became a widely understood field of study. In this sense, the invisible filter of peasant materialism that Ginzburg perceives in Menocchio’s words is proven with only the book’s title: Words that seem mysterious in the modern era would have been highly materially relevant in the 16th century.
Chapter 26 demonstrates, however, that Menocchio’s way of thinking was also imperceptible to the clergymen he faced in trial. Their incredulity is evident in the primary source material Ginzburg provides, as they ask question after question, culminating in the most striking one: “Who moves the chaos?” (53). Of course, it is impossible to know the exact tone with which these questions were delivered, or any other indicative social cues such as facial expressions and body language. All that survives is the written record. Nevertheless, at the very least, it becomes clear that the inquisitors had an equally difficult time parsing Menocchio’s ideas as Ginzburg and his modern readers do. Thus, even though they are the clear antagonists of Menocchio’s life story, there is a key resemblance between the inquisitors and the readers. Both groups struggle to find answers to the same questions about Menocchio. Menocchio clearly has an entirely distinct cultural background from the men who question him, to the point that the latter seem more aligned with an audience born hundreds of years later. Ginzburg will expand upon this cultural gap in later portions of the book.
On a methodological note, Ginzburg’s comparison between Menocchio’s cheese cosmogony and other milk-based creation stories, such as the one in the Hindu Vedas, echoes the global essentialism of works such as The Golden Bough (1890) by James George Frazer and The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell. As with the arguments of those works, this line of inquiry is highly speculative and impossible to draw any concrete conclusions from. Ginzburg acknowledges this issue, writing, “It’s an astonishing coincidence—even disquieting, unless one is willing to go along with quite unacceptable theories, such as the collective unconscious” (55). He does, however, speculate nonetheless. Such a tendency is one of Ginzburg’s argumentative weaknesses throughout the book.
