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.
Key Figures
Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg is an Italian historian credited as a key founder of the field of microhistory (See: Background). He was born in 1939 in Turin to a Jewish family, the son of Natalia and Leone Ginzburg. His mother was a notable novelist, whose work received widespread recognition in the post-war era for its explorations of life under fascist rule in Italy. His father was a similarly influential writer, and both parents were key members of the anti-fascist movement, collaborating on the publication of L’Italia Libera, a resistance newspaper.
For much of Ginzburg’s early childhood, the family was exiled to a commune in Abruzzo because of antisemitic laws, and his parents were forced to publish under pseudonyms that concealed their Jewishness. In 1943, when Ginzburg was 12 years old, Leone Ginzburg was arrested, tortured, and murdered by the Nazi police for his publication of L’Italia Libera. Emerging from this immense political adversity, Ginzburg credits his parents’ careers as being highly influential in his narrative approach to history.
Ginzburg’s areas of research are highly varied, but tend to center on Early Modern popular religiosity in Northern Italy. He received his PhD in 1961 from the University of Pisa. His first book, The Night Battles (1966), explored the mystical benandanti cult tradition, also of the Friuli region, and trials of its members by the Roman Inquisition in the 16th and 17th centuries. Ultimately, he argued that the benandanti constituted a “fertility cult” whose practices could be attributed to the pre-Christian characteristics of Europe’s peasant class. This line of inquiry laid the groundwork for The Cheese and the Worms, which also seeks to identify the distinct characteristics of peasant culture that have gone unrecorded in written sources through the vehicle of Menocchio’s religious ideology. In fact, Ginzburg first encountered the trial transcripts for Menocchio’s case while completing research for The Night Battles. The two works are therefore highly related, although The Night Battles has proven to be less influential.
After the publication of The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg began receiving recognition as a founder of the new field of microhistory, a methodology that intentionally focuses on historical minutiae, rather than broad trends or high-impact events. He has since held teaching positions at the University of Bologna, the University of California Los Angeles, and the Scuola Normane of Pisa. He was also credited by Pope John Paul II as convincing the Vatican to make Inquisition documents available to scholars for the first time in 1998, based on a letter that Ginzburg sent to the Vatican regarding the matter in 1979. His lasting impact on the field of Roman Inquisition studies, therefore, cannot be overstated, as generations of scholars now have access to invaluable primary source material thanks to Ginzburg. Throughout, The Cheese and the Worms has remained the centerpiece of his illustrious career.
Menocchio
Domenico Scandella, popularly known as Menocchio, was a Friulian miller whose story was relatively obscure until the publication of The Cheese and the Worms in 1976. Ginzburg describes him as the “protagonist” of the book, contributing to the narrative sensibility of his scholarly inquiry.
The details of Menocchio’s life leading up to the Inquisition trials are largely blurry, but it is known that he was born and lived in Montereale for all his life, he had a large family, and that he wore white clothing at his trials (which was customary for his profession). Ginzburg struggles to understand Menocchio’s place within his village community, and this struggle is the driving force behind the book’s efforts at exploring Community and Marginalization. In almost all aspects—social, biographical, physical, and cultural—it is difficult to ascertain the particulars of Menocchio’s external world.
What Ginzburg can achieve with more certainty, however, is a keen understanding of Menocchio’s internal existence: His innermost thoughts, intrinsic character traits, and behavioral tendencies emerge clearly through the author’s interpretations of trial records. The miller emerges as a fantastically confident thinker, obstinate in the fate of religious persecution, who seemingly relished the opportunity to baffle the church officials he resented. At many points, the book reads as a careful character study, akin to that of a novel, rather than a historical analysis. This dynamic can be attributed to Ginzburg’s narrative bent, and the microhistorical method’s tendency to center individuals over broad trends.
Beyond Menocchio’s character traits, however, Ginzburg seeks to understand his ideas. He peers into Menocchio’s subconscious in pseudo-psychoanalytical ways, inferring cultural references that may or may not have influenced the miller’s religious beliefs. Despite occurring on this microscopic level, Ginzburg’s character study has, in his own estimation, macrohistorical implications. He writes, “Using terms infused with Christianity, Neoplatonism, and scholastic philosophy, Menocchio tried to express the elemental instinctive materialism of generation after generation of peasants” (58, emphasis added). Menocchio, then, can be interpreted as a conduit, conveying the contours of his peasant culture to modern readers who cannot access it otherwise. This generalization is seemingly contradictory to Ginzburg’s other understanding of Menocchio as an exceptional figure, but is nonetheless one of his core arguments.
The later portion of Menocchio’s life has a distinctly more tragic undertone than the earlier ones. By the time of the second trial, Menocchio’s most beloved family members had passed away, his financial situation appears to have been dire, and he had spent the years since the first trial on the margins of his community. Ginzburg thus characterizes him as a man with very little to lose, seemingly unbothered by the looming threat of the Inquisitors reopening their case against him. This character development mirrors that of fictional tragic heroes, and reaffirms the narrative underpinnings of Ginzburg’s method. By the end of the book, Ginzburg aims to humanize Menocchio in a way that is often impossible for other figures of his particular historical context.
The Inquisitors
Menocchio’s inquisitors are the most shadowy of the book’s central figures, in large part because Ginzburg does not concern himself or the readers with very much (if any) biographical information about them. Some are explicitly named, such as Fra Felice de Montefalco, Gerolamo Asteo, and Giambattista Maro, but for the most part these names only gesture towards a familiarity with the inquisitors, rather than establishing them as individually important characters. Instead, they are important as antagonistic figureheads of the Inquisition itself, the sociopolitical institution that facilitated Menocchio’s trial and execution. As such, they are primarily characterized in relation to Menocchio, who they in turn indirectly characterize through their ideological opposition to him.
This indirect characterization takes place largely through dialogue, and is at its most transparent in chapters where Ginzburg lets primary source material speak for itself. In Chapter 26, for example, Ginzburg presents a particularly striking exchange between Menocchio and an unspecified inquisitor in full. The inquisitor’s pressing interrogative tone shines through, simultaneously impersonal and historically intimate for readers who have no other ways to hear his voice. Furthermore, the inquisitor's role as questioner aligns him with the position of the reader, as he seeks insights into Menocchio’s innermost thoughts. In this sense, even though the inquisitors serve an antagonistic role in the historical narrative, they are nonetheless sympathetic in their quest to achieve an understanding of Menocchio’s strange ideas. Ginzburg lends a sympathetic treatment to them on more than one occasion, trying to imagine how Menocchio’s heresy would have been terrifying for them (87).
With the transition from the first trial to the second, the character of the inquisitors develops, just as Menocchio develops over this time period. In the second round of questioning, the inquisitors appear more unyielding and ruthless in their treatment of Menocchio. Ginzburg discerns a predatory tone in their line of questioning, writing that they “rebuked” and “pounced,” and utilized rhetoric from a “scholastic armory” (98-99). This language of rhetorical warfare heightens the antagonistic relationship between Menocchio and the inquisitors throughout the text, a simultaneously interpersonal, political, and religious conflict that culminates in the Inquisitors sentencing the miller to death.
By vanquishing the protagonist of the book, the inquisitors subvert traditional heroic narrative structure, reminding the readers that this is not a fictional story. As much as Ginzburg attempts to emulate the compelling narrative structures of his favorite novelists, like Tolstoy, The Cheese and the Worms is bound to historical veracity. As such, the Inquisitors serve as a realistic foil to the fantastical character of Menocchio, dry but believable in their conservative Catholic ideology and motivations.
