Response Paper 6

Bidisha Sengupta

The Cheese and Worms by Italian historian Carlo Ginzberg is a ground-breaking work
in the genre of micro-history. For the purpose of this study, Ginzberg relied on
transcriptions of religious proceedings against a suspected heretic named Domenico
Scandella, as the raw data from which he began his sympathetic archaeology, and
sought to use his microcosm as a vehicle to make more general claims about popular
consciousness in pre-industrial Europe. Quite similar to LeRoy Ladurie’s observation in
his acclaimed Montaillou, wherein an entire village was on trial, Ginzburg relies on the
proceedings against one man, a heretic in an otherwise docilely obedient social milieu.

Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, was a miller in sixteenth-century

Montereale, a small Friulian village. He was a profound thinker, who was put on trial
not just once but twice, first in 1584 and the second in 1599, until his execution when he
was burned at the stake by order of the Holy Office after a life passed in almost complete
obscurity. The records of his trials almost fifteen years apart lend themselves as the
primary source for Ginzberg’s analysis; offer a rich picture of Menocchio’s thoughts and
feelings, his imaginings and aspirations. Interestingly, the book's title comes from
Menocchio's remarkable cosmogony-

... in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water and fire were mixed together,
and out of that bulk a mass formed - just as cheese is made out of milk - and worms
appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these
should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels there was also God, he
too having been created out of that mass at the same.

This version of the universe in which the angels appeared similar to how worms appear
in cheese, was bound to be viewed as heretical by a sixteenth-century Church. Apart
from this, his list of clerical abuses, such as his protest against the use of Latin in canon
law, and his advocacy of religious tolerance put him in disfavour with the religious
authorities for whom it was a threat to their own power rather than those of God.

Without going into the details of the entire content of the book, I would like to highlight
some minor drawbacks to Ginzberg’s otherwise highly influential analysis.

First, is the limited nature of the sources, which is of course an inherent problem that
micro historians have to deal with. Ginzberg’s analysis of Menocchio’s worldview comes
entirely from the transcripts of the two trials (1584 and 1599). Between these years,
Menocchio spent his time in prison as a broken man. Despite these turnabouts,
Ginzburg presents Menocchios' thought as systematic and coherent, "an abstruse and
complicated anthropology" (72), a well-defined and organized body of integrated ideas.

Second, is the issue of generalization. Ginzberg in this book deals with the life of
Menocchio not with a specific focus on him as an individual but to suggest something
more widespread- the society, ideas, circulation of ideas, the role of a miller in the
sixteenth century, and so on. However, even though it limits our ability to compare and
contrast Menocchio with his contemporaries and truly assess the depth of his thoughts,
Ginzburg is able to situate Menocchio in his historical context.