Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

Borne of the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" provides a glimpse into the life of a miller in medieval Italy. No ordinary miller is 'Menocchio', however, as he is inquisitioned for his radical religious philosophies. In a time and place where Catholicism was undoubtedly the religion of Europe, Menocchio harbored unique ideas about religious doctrine, the teachings of the Catholic Church, and man's purpose. Although some of his many ideas contradict others that he had, he was well-read and surprisingly well-educated for a man of his station. As Ginzburg says, though, we must look to the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press as being major catalysts for such learning and religious evolution. Within the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" is most fascinating when we ask the question: Was this an isolated phenonmenon or was this a reflection of many people's views? The answer, I suppose, lies with Menocchio, but there is still much to be gleaned from this book.

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.

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. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980. 177 pp. paperback $21.00.
The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg specifically examines a 16th Century miller named Domenico Scandella generally known as Mennochio. Ginzburg attempts to utilize Mennochio as an example of larger popular trends within 16th century Italy and the Counter-Reformation. Ginzburg asserts that Mennochio's belief systems were indicative of a larger undercurrent of popular peasant thought and that "Bakhtin's hypothesis of a reciprocal influence between lower class and dominant cultures is much more fruitful" method to understand trends within a society. (p. xix) Ginzburg mainly analyzes the records of Mennochio's trials by the Holy Office to uncover his belief systems and attitudes toward religion. Mennochio astonishingly had many contemporary thoughts about religion. Unfortunately, he lived during a time period where voicing these opinions was not accepted but rather an open invitation to be persecuted. Ginzburg also asserts that the popular media of books that were made more readily available due to the invention of the printing press, the Reformation which changed long-standing concepts about religion, and the oral tradition of peasants combined together to shape Mennochio's world view and belief system. Mennochio could be considered a rebel, but a rebel with a cause, his own cause to state his honest beliefs.
Mennochio throughout his life challenged the status quo with regard to religious belief and took the risk to voice those opinions regularly to anyone who would listen. As Mennochio stated himself, `Everybody has his calling, some to plow, some to hoe, and I have mine, which is to blaspheme." (p. 4) Blaspheme was to denounce the Catholic Church and Mennochio felt the institution overall including the leadership such as priests, bishops, cardinals, monks, and the Pope were in it not for the spiritual interests of the people, but as a business to gain power and profit. This was only one of Mennochio's `blasphemous" statements which ultimately resulted in him being put on trial by the Holy Office to answer the allegations of blaspheme twice in his lifetime. The first trial resulted in a prison term of almost two years and the second resulted in Mennochio's execution.
During both trials, specific books were referenced as influential factors in Mennochio's thinking. The books ran the gamut from the Bible in the vernacular to travel stories. Ginzburg proposes that Mennochio was influenced by the concepts within these books and then utilized these ideas to form his own personal world view, which did not fit into any particular neat category such as being Lutheran, Anabaptist, Catholic, Muslim, or Jew. Mennochio extrapolated what he found meaningful from all these sources to come to his own unique ideology that is akin to what today is more a humanist perspective of the world.
In addition, Ginzburg highlights that Mennochio was not the only peasant questioning religion which seems to be the most prevalent ideology that influenced the everyday lives of peasants. Ginzburg also uses another miller named Pellegrino Baroni, known as Pighino, as a corroborating example of the overarching cultural place of a miller within peasant culture and as evidence that Mennochio was not an enigma. As Ginzburg states, "The occupation of miller, consequently, was one of the most widespread, and their prominence in medieval heretical sects and, in even greater measure, among Anabaptists is not surprising" and "moreover, mills, generally located on the peripheries of settled areas and far from prying eyes, were well suited to shelter clandestine gatherings." (pp. 119, 120) The position of miller within the peasant community may have been a place to speak of unaccepted freethinking thoughts; however, this tidbit seems to be added in as an aside. Furthermore, giving two examples of progressive minded millers does not prove solidly this was an overall trend among other millers or peasant culture at large.
Overall, the book does illustrate, especially to a reader not familiar with 16th century European history, that modern world view thoughts did exist with some during a time in which it was very dangerous to have such viewpoints. Ginzburg attempted to illustrate a larger social trend of changing thought within 16th century peasant culture and that both lower and dominant culture influenced one another instead of a one-way stream of influence from the dominant classes to the lower. However, ultimately the book does a better job of describing an anomaly within 16th century peasant culture. It seems that the lower classes were afraid to mention heretical statements for the most part, if they even held these beliefs at all. In the end, Mennochio and the handful of others that challenged the dominant religious ideology in 16th century Italy were just interesting oddities within the overall culture.

The Cheese and the Worms has got to be the most ridiculously over-rated academic work of history of the past 3 decades. The author's central argument of the existence of an essentially unchanged Indo-European folk culture that spans both millenia and continents is both completely lacking in evidence and, from a theoretical view, patently ridiculous.

You can't simply sit down and find vague similarities between what a 16th century miller says and what some guy 2000 years earlier said in India and then, without any evidence or even a compelling argument of how the expressed ideas would have been transmitted, claim that this is proof positive that a substrata of Indo-European popular culture formed the predominant mentalite of most of the population of Europe throughout the latter ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. That's nonsense.

Besides the obvious paucity of evidence, the author has a seriously deficient understanding of how popular culture works. Popular culture, whether modern or ancient, is simply NOT static over millenia of time and over thousands of miles of geography. Did premodern popular culture evolve more slowly than culture today? Yes, it probably did, and it also long retained certain features (particularly features tied to technology constraints and the natural world) -- but it did change. In fact, careful historical analysis of popular culture during the early modern period, based on extensive use of archival material, has shown that pre-modern popular culture actually seems to evolve quite a bit more quickly than was previously thought. The notion of an unchanging rural European culture, developed by late 19th century intellectuals, simply doesn't hold up when confronted with the actual evidence. Economic patterns change, elements of elite culture sift down and are adopted/incorporated by the populace, different foods are introduced, marriage and family patterns shift, devotional practices evolve, and so on -- and here I am talking only of diachronic issues, let alone geographic diversity.

One cannot simply do as Ginzburg has done and find some aspect of early modern European popular culture and then, with no evidence whatsoever to support one's supposition, assume that this feature extends indefinately into the medieval past. When thinking about history, it is always of great importance never to assume that trends move in a straight progression -- they don't, they go up and down and this way and that. Heresy is a great example. There is always a certain amount of popular heresy present in medieval Europe, but the nature of the beliefs, the organization of the heretics, their geographic foci, etc. all changes over time.

The Cheese and the Worms was a success because it fit the Baby Boom generation of academics anti-hierarchical ideology, not because it was good scholarship. There was an element of that generation that wanted to believe that the 'true' popular culture of Europe had nothing to do with the church or literature or anything else. Instead, they wanted to believe that the 'true' culture consisted of some eternal Indo-European folkloric belief system and that peasants merely gave superficial lip service to the 'impositions' of the elites (Christian faith in particular). The Cheese and the Worms told them what they already wanted to believe, so they believed it.

If you want a book on medieval popular culture that A) was written by someone with both intelligence and common sense and B) actually has genuine evidence for what the author claims (imagine that!), read Medieval Popular Culture, by Aron Gurevich. Giovanni and Lusanna by Gene Brucker is also a good, light little book that provides a window into the culture of Renaissance townsfolk in Italy.

Don't waste your time with Ginzburg. He's not an historian -- he's an idealogue.

Researching within the archives of the Inquisition in northeastern Italy, Ginzburg came across a set of records describing the trials of an obscure miller from the Friuli area. Menocchio, as he was known, repudiated a wide variety of conventional positions on religion, on politics, and even on cosmology. The title of the book reflects Menocchio's unusual and somewhat naturalistic idea about the origin of the universe. In Counter-Reformation Italy, these ideas were not merely unusual, they were regarded as actually dangerous. Following his second trial, in which Menocchio was found to be backsliding, he was executed.
Ginzburg presents Menocchio as an autodidact synthesizing ideas from a variety of sources. Menocchio may have acquired some ideas from Anabaptist radicals who had been active in the Friuli. Other ideas seem to have come from an eclectic, though limited, array of books. As Ginzburg points out, this is an example of the impact of printing. It brought such books as Mandeville's travels and possibly even the Koran into the hands of a lowly miller. Most controversially, Ginzburg argues that many of Menocchio's ideas result from or were influenced by a common European peasant world view whose nature has been largely lost to us. This is an interesting hypothesis which Ginzburg defends very well but it can only be a hypothesis. Neither Ginzburg nor anyone else has the data to evaluate this idea properly. It may be simply that Menocchio was a village crank; an intelligent man with relatively unique ideas.
Regardless of the final interpretation, this well written book provides an interesting view of life in Counter-Reformation Italy.

It is rare that we can see how common people thought 500+ years ago (another source is the Icelandic Sagas). This book shows that books were read by common people, not just the leaders. In this case, this miller got into a lot of trouble by reading. Lets hope that our current freedom of thought is not restricted in the future.

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.