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.
Index of Terms
Anabaptists
Anabaptism is a Christian movement, deemed heretical by the Catholic Church, best known for believing that baptism should not be performed until an individual can decide to participate in the sacrament. This belief is in conflict with the popular Christian practice of baptizing babies at a young age. The Anabaptist movement can be traced back to the Protestant Reformation in the early- to mid-16th century; various subgroups across Central Europe pushed for more radical religious reform than even Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli were enforcing. By 1527, Swiss Anabaptists put their beliefs into writing, composing the Schleitheim Confession, which remains the most comprehensive account of Anabaptist teachings across denominations.
As the movement gained traction, the Roman Catholic Church began persecuting Anabaptism as heresy, and this is the context in which Anabaptists appear within The Cheese and the Worms. Ginzburg speculates that Menocchio may have had contact with Anabaptist painters who had gone into hiding, but cannot confirm this theory with complete certainty.
Circularity
In the Cheese and the Worms, the term “circularity” is used to refer to the feedback loop that exists between upper and lower-class cultures within a society, though it can be used to mean many different things in other contexts. Though Ginzburg rarely uses the term in the body of the book, it is invoked in his introduction as shorthand for his key argument that cultural influence does not run along a monodirectional class gradient, as has been widely accepted by elitist thinkers of the past. This term is thus an essential component of Ginzburg’s analysis of the Relationships Between “High” and “Low” Culture in the 16th Century.
Cosmogony
A Cosmogony is a theory of the origin of the universe. These theories can be either religious or scientific in nature, ranging from creation myths to the Big Bang theory. The Cheese and the Worms takes its name from the cosmogony Menocchio personally formulated, which he communicated to others using a metaphor that likened chaos to milk, the universe to cheese forming out of it, and God and the angels to worms who spontaneously appear in the cheese. Ginzburg spends a significant portion of the book explaining this initially-imperceptible idea to his readers, and then attempting to determine its origins within Menocchio’s mind. Ultimately, he determines that Menocchio intended the cheese metaphor to be taken in its most literal sense, but that it nonetheless had revolutionary religious implications.
Heresiarch
A heresiarch (also called an arch-heretic) is an individual who conceives of and enacts a new heresy. This is the sentence that was handed to Menocchio by the Roman Inquisition, and it goes farther than the initial charges of simple heresy. The inquisitors’ decision to condemn Menocchio as a heresiarch, Ginzburg argues, speaks to the severity of the crime as they understood it (86). Other individuals considered heresiarchs by the Catholic Church include Martin Luther, John Calvin, Arius, and Mani, all of whom were far more impactful and well-known historical figures (on a macro scale) than Menocchio. For an obscure miller from a small village in Friulia to have received this label from the Inquisition, then, is one of the most extraordinary components of the story related in The Cheese and the Worms.
Peasant Materialism
Peasant materialism is one of the key characteristics of popular oral culture in 16th-century Europe, as determined by Ginzburg. In this context, materialism does not carry the negative connotations of greed and vanity that it does in modern vernacular settings. Instead, it should be understood as a literal concern amongst the peasant class with their physical surroundings and daily existence, as opposed to the highly abstracted spirituality of the clergy. In Ginzburg’s model, this materialism extended to all aspects of peasant life, but was especially notable in terms of religion: Menocchio, for instance, could not accept the Church teaching of Mary’s virginity, which seemed physically impossible to him.
Furthermore, Ginzburg asserts that this materialism translated for Menocchio into a practical, politically-oriented religiosity, one that prioritized social good over mysterious ritual. In this sense, the materialism that Ginzburg writes of is not exclusively limited to a fixation on objects. It also extends to concern about mundane realities—how one’s neighbor is feeling, and whether people in one’s community have enough to eat, for instance.
