In 1976, Historian Carlo Ginzburg published Il Formaggio e i Vermi in Italian. Four years later, Ginzburg published its English translation (translation: John and Anne Tedeschi): The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller in 1980.
The book was very unlike the historical text produced then. Only a few years earlier, the Italian school of historiography—called Microstoria (or microhistory)—had emerged as a counter to the macroscopic and thickly quantitative Annales school, led by Fernand Braudel during the mid-1950s and 1970s.[1] Annales school told big stories, such as how capitalism developed in historical epochs.
Unlike Macrohistory and its long-term social historiography, microhistory focuses on small events—quotidian and banal. Its proponents focused on the minute analysis of documentation tied to individuals in history and reduced their focus from telling big stories to understanding how small things told their own history. In this sense, Richard Tristano wrote: Microhistorians focused on the “thick description” of little things of “little people” or “lost people” and sought to interpret them in the context of social discourse. It is, in a sense, close to the subaltern studies that focus on the “history from below”.
Against this backdrop, The Cheese and the Worms tells the story of ideas and attitudes of a sixteenth-century miller (among other things he did), Domenico Scandella, or as he was also called, Menocchio, in the Friulian village close to Montereale in Italy. Menocchio was put on trial for heretical ideas (that reject Christian values) by the Italian Inquisition.
In Carlo Ginzberg’s brilliance, the book takes us to Menocchio’s world. His heresy. The rhetorical and often contradictory claims he would make about Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Church. Ginzburg uses inquisition files and documents, meticulously accounting for the arguments the miller made before judges. Inquisition documents provide us with a sense of the kinds of ideas that floated around, how they were banished, and what punishments were inscribed onto the ordinary people.
Menocchio, in the first inquisition trial, lashed out at priests and monks: “You priests and monks, you too want to know more than God, and you are like the devil, and you want to become gods on earth, and know as much as God, following in the footsteps of the devil. In fact, the more one thinks he knows, the less he knows”.[2] About marriage: “God did not establish it, men did. Formerly a man and a woman would exchange vows, and this sufficed; later these human inventions followed”.[3]
Menocchio had elsewhere claimed that the Virgin Mary was no virgin—and it was humanly impossible for her to be a virgin. In another encounter, Menocchio spoke of Jesus being a human just like every other human—and that there was no way he could be crucified if he was God. When pressed upon who God is, at once, he pointed to something called the Holy Spirit. In another instance, he backtracked to claim everything as God—the air, water, earth, and fire. And later on, again, he suggested that it is only air, water, and earth—and not fire. But, most of all, he spoke of a certain something called a “new world” and the “new way of life”.[4]
In Menocchio, we see an inordinate individual whose views wholly differ from those of others in Friuli. Importantly, whenever asked where he got these crazy ideas from, Menocchio brandished their originality—as them being made up in his head, or the devil put them in his head. He once declared: “Sir, I have never met anyone who holds these opinions; my opinions came out of my own head”.[5]
But what was Menocchio’s worldview? Menocchio said: “In the beginning this world was nothing, and that it was thrashed by the water of the sea like foam, and it curdled like a cheese, from which later great multitudes of worms were born, and these worms became men, of whom the most powerful and wisest was God, to whom the others rendered obedience…”[6]
This was pure blasphemy in the world in which Menocchio existed. But he reasoned: “To blaspheme is not sinful ‘because it only hurts oneself and not one’s neighbour, just as if I have a cloak and tear it, I injure only myself and no one else, and I believe that he who does no harm to his neighbour does not commit sin; and because we are all children of God, if we do not hurt one another, as for example, if a father has several children, and one of them says ‘damn my father,’ the father may forgive him, but if this child breaks the head of someone else’s child he cannot pardon him so easily if he does not pay: therefore have I said it is not sinful to blaspheme because it does not hurt anyone”.[7]
After the first trial, Menocchio was clearly found guilty of blasphemy and was imprisoned. But, after two years and after an illustrious mercy letter was dispatched to the Inquisition officers, he was let go. In the letter, he noted that he was poor and weak and could not afford to go on in the dark cell he was put in and that since he had fully repented, he should be let go. Ginzburg notes, quite meticulously, all the rambles and all the contradictions that flow from the mouth of Menocchio throughout his life.
His favourite son dies soon after. And very soon, in a few years, Menocchio goes back to his old habits: to blaspheme (with caution). Again, Menocchio was found guilty and put in prison. But, ultimately, with Pope’s interest in the case, he was put to death later on.
What is interesting in Ginzburg’s account of Menocchio is how the ideas of reformation—along with the print culture—had allowed the protagonist to create an absurd worldview. Although Menocchio’s ideas were not wholly from one book or many books, they certainly represented the ways in which he selected texts, read them, nit-picked terms, and created coherence in them.
It is this attempt, one of the earliest in it, that makes Carlo Ginzburg’s history compelling. Ginzburg’s characters are not elite—but ordinary people—in their everyday quotidian lifestyles, thinking, reading, writing, and preaching stuff to each other.
As a personal aside, I began thinking about this book for my own research on postcolonial societies. It gave me things to think about, introduced me to a bit of history (that I was oblivious to), and helped me structure logic for my research.
Ginzburg keeps you engaged all throughout.
Carlo Ginzburg’s lucid writing—in the sense of everyday speech-like English—makes it all the more accessible to those who wish to read it like a text or a storybook. Importantly, he does not assert his claims but rather gently allows us to think with him. So, there are so many ‘maybe’ statements in this text. In essence, this book is worth reading for all those who want to understand how to tell a story that does not put one to sleep. I hope to come back to this book again.
References:
[1] Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, and Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 10–35.
[2] Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Penguin, 1992), 10.
[3] Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 10.
[4] Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 13.
[5] Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 21.
[6] Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 53.
[7] Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 39.