The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller

Having read the reviews already listed here, I believe the one major facet of this book has been downplayed. Dr. Ginzburg's approach is to utilize and interesting story scraped from the otherwise monotonous and one-sides Inquisitorial records from the Roman Inquisition. What is most important about this book, is that it demonstrates a separation of culture, call it "high" culture and "low" or "peasant" culture. We follow the great thinkers of the past two millenia from grade school through graduate studies, never fully attempt to delve into a concurrently extant peasant "history of ideas." What Dr. Ginzburg has displayed through this fascinating yet sad tale is that the great thinkers we know of, i.e., Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, Galileo, etc., are a representation of a literate educated class which by no means excludes a secondary ideology which flourished mostly thorugh an oral culture. Dr. Ginzburg seeks merely to bring our attention to this fact and more or less demonstrate the wealth of knowledge and study that has yet to be done in light of the fact. Menochio merely highlights the existance of long standing ideas which otherwise would have been lost to history were it not for "high" society's interest in synchretism. This book is therefore an eye-opener to anyone who believes that the great thinkers speak for everyone and that only they should be reserved for study.

This is a spectacular application of the clue-based evidentiary paradigm, in which Ginzburg pursues lead after lead in an effort to reconstruct the world view of an outspoken miller dragged in front of Roman inquisitors in 16th-century Italy -- and then to reconstruct the origins of this world view in, simultaneously, peasant oral culture, secular philosophy, and Reformationist thought. One might, of course, quibble with particularities, and Ginzburg seems a little too sure of many of his speculations, a confidence which he attempts to slip by his readers with words like "clearly" and "undoubtedly." But for anyone interested in the way in which big pictures are inferred from small clues, this is exquisite reading.

Ginzburg weaves a tale of a peasant who could read at the moment boot-legged books of the Reformation trickled 'cross the Tyrolean Alps. He was untrusting of church doctrine, and prefered to invent a vision of the cosmos that was more in tune with the laws and commandments of his world, a world of philosophy born of folk remedy. Ginzburg leads the reader through the labryinthine mind and life of a miller from the town of Fiuli, in the years of the late Renaissance, in Italy. Menocchio's life is reconstructed from original court documents. Ginzburg builds the life of a man,which is a brilliant description of one man's life that challenges the reader to touch the life of one man who lived long ago, and was eventually burned at the stake for his belief that the moon was made of cheese.

Carlo Ginzburg was one of the first historians to put into practice anthropological ideas about culture as a historically transmitted system of meaning. These ideas were developed by Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and ultimately, Michel Foucault. In using Menocchio, Ginzburg makes a statement about making history from the point of view of the excluded, the liminal characters of society. In this sense, Menocchio's story ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a reflection and a statement about the way Italian society was constructed in the 16th century. All this from the point of view of those upon whom power was imposed.