The Cheese and the Worms
Not much is known of the popular (peasant) culture of the western world during the sixteenth century. There are virtually no records regarding how they lived their daily lives or what their religious beliefs were. Historians are therefore forced to piece together as much information as possible in order to make an educated guess of what life was like for the 16th century peasant. One historian, Carlo Ginzburg, took an original approach to shedding a new light on this ever intriguing issue. In his book The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, 1976, Ginzburg analyzes the court inquisition and elite book collection of a very religiously opinionated miller, Domenico Scandella (more commonly referred to as Menocchio). He finds that Menocchio's ideas are a mix of the texts he had read and the oral tradition of which he is a part. Ginzburg argues that a glimpse of the ideas of the general peasant culture can be found by analyzing Menocchio's statements and subtracting the knowledge Menocchio had acquired from reading the elite text books. It can be argued that Ginzburg's thesis and the methodology behind it are inappropriate, irresponsible, and ineffective; however, I propose to the contrary. Ginzbu
Nearly all of Menocchio's religious ideas have a corollary in one of the works noted. Here Ginzburg gets at the very heart of Menocchio's beliefs and suggests strong evidence from the oral tradition that helped to shape these ideas. To prove his thesis, Ginzburg uses Menocchio's discrepancy with the text as leverage to dive into where the miller's outrageous, not found in text, ideas came from. In fact like the advocates, Menocchio's view was consider to be positive, encompassing every religion, while the supporting text Menocchio had read offered a negative agenda for all religions that were not Christian. Ginzburg states that Menocchio encountered this distinction though a chain of information that linked 16th century philosophers and physicians to a childhood friend of Menocchio's, Giovanni Daniele Melchiori, who was also charged with heresy, however, at an earlier date. Ginzburg presents evidence that is both factual and convincing in presenting the thoughts and lifestyle of 16th century peasants, a culture that has very little record of its existence. This was a view that Menocchio, in addition to the advocates, held in common. At one point in this writing, Ginzburg attributed a statement of Menocchio's to the advocates of tolerance. The similarity between Peghino and Menocchio, two millers who never met and lived hundreds of kilometers apart, is imperative to Ginzburg's argument. Lastly, Ginzburg shows the reader that Menocchio was not all that alone in his beliefs on the soul. In his book, The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg utilizes the court inquisitions and texts possessed by Menocchio at the time of his trial to argue his point: by subtracting the elite texts from Menocchio's extraordinary statements, he can postulate what the peasant culture of the 16th century must have been like. Although not exactly like Menocchio, the general idea remains the same. Another miller, Pighino, was tried the conclusions he made regarding the Fioretto della Bibbia. Ginzburg is also trying to derive a picture of the peasant culture by analyzing the difference between Menocchio's statements and the texts.
Common topics in this essay:
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