48 pages • 1 hour read
Carlo GinzburgThe Cheese And The Worms: The Cosmos Of A Sixteenth-Century Miller
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Relationships Between “High” and “Low” Culture in the 16th Century
One of the key questions that Ginzburg sets out to answer in his study is how peasant culture interacted with elite culture in the 16th century. To do this, he must first affirm the existence of a peasant culture distinct from the elite one. This is a difficult task for many reasons, chiefly because there is very little historical record of peasant culture because of its predominantly oral nature, whereas elite culture is documented through a plethora of written sources. In Menocchio, however, Ginzburg finds the proof of a distinct peasant culture he is looking for.
Firstly, Ginzburg discerns discrepancies between the books Menocchio read and how he interpreted them. This disconnect, he argues, “continually leads us back to a culture that is very different from the one expressed on the printed page—one based on an oral tradition” (31). Furthermore, he finds that the inquisitors were completely unable to understand Menocchio’s cultural reference points and reasoning over the course of the trials. The two groups’ inability to understand one another is further evidence that there was a significant “gulf […] separating Menocchio’s cultural world from his inquisitors’” (88). Thus, Ginzburg identifies Menocchio as a microcosmic mouthpiece for the broader landscape of peasant culture, an aspect of cultural history which has been otherwise erased from the written record. Projecting such vast cultural significance onto a single man is a tenuous historical argument, and this is why Ginzburg invokes Scolio and Baroni at the end of the book as evidence of a common cultural trend across the peasant population.
Although Ginzburg identifies a distinct peasant culture that existed in the 16th century, he also finds that it was highly interrelated with the elite culture documented in written sources. The pipeline of ideas from highbrow books to Menocchio’s heresy, and then a mirrored pipeline from Menocchio’s words to the ears of the inquisitors, is indicative of a circular flow of cultural influence. Ginzburg’s argument for circularity shatters elitist paradigms in the field that have posited monodirectional influence from elite culture down to peasant culture. He argues that continuing to insist on this paradigm “involves clinging to the unacceptable notion that ideas originate exclusively among the dominant classes” (119). Ultimately, therefore, the relationship he discerns between “high” and “low” culture is one of mutual influence. Mapping the particular currents of influence, however, quickly becomes impossible, as the paper trail for popular culture is highly limited.
Community and Marginalization
Microhistory is a method that is highly concerned with historical margins: Obscure groups, eclectic figures, and uninfluential communities all take center stage within the field. Ginzburg presents Menocchio as one such marginal individual, but over the course of The Cheese and the Worms, he struggles to define Menocchio’s marginal status. In a community as small as Montereale, everyone appears to have known each other, and the gap between marginal and central community members is very subtle.
At the outset of the book, at least, Menocchio actually appears to have been an integrated member of his community: At various points he held the position of mayor and church administrator. Furthermore, Ginzburg notes that even in villagers’ testimony against him during the first trial, “one doesn’t discern real hostility towards Menocchio, at most disapproval” (3). Before the intrusion of the Inquisition into village affairs, therefore, it is not fair to label Menocchio an “outcast” in any common sense of the word. Nevertheless, as Ginzburg continues to observe, no villagers would admit to aligning themselves with Menocchio’s heretical beliefs. In this sense, he might be considered ideologically marginal. Even this definition runs into a major issue, however, since Ginzburg treats Menocchio’s ideas as emblematic of the broader popular culture.
By the time of his second conviction, Menocchio self-reported his own sense of isolation: “the sons and daughters who remain to me consider me crazy because I have been their ruination, which is only the truth, and if only I had died when I was fifteen, they would be without the bother of this poor wretch” (103). The difference between Menocchio’s social situation during the first and second trials can be seen as evidence that the Inquisition was itself a force of marginalization. Rather than discovering an already-isolated Menocchio, the inquisitors instead brought about his isolation with a humiliating sentence and punishment. Their use of the habitello as a visual indicator of Menocchio’s shame speaks to their intentions to alienate him from his own community.
If the parameters of Menocchio’s marginality are murky, perhaps Montereale’s lack of macrohistorical significance is sufficient for labeling The Cheese and the Worms a history of margins. A tiny village in Friulia, whose residents have remained almost entirely absent from the pages of history, Ginzburg’s decision to highlight the historical goings-on in Montereale is in itself a boldly microhistorical decision. That Menocchio was a marginal figure within this already-marginal setting only heightens the book’s peripheral scope.
The Challenges of Textual Interpretation
A focal point of The Cheese and the Worms is Ginzburg’s meticulous itemization of every instance of Menocchio misinterpreting his books. The gap between source material and interpretation, though intangible, constitutes his key body of evidence for Menocchio’s distinct peasant culture. He calls this gap the “hidden key” to understanding Menocchio’s heretical beliefs, characterizing the process of reception and reinterpretation as “the encounter between the printed page and oral culture that formed an explosive mixture in Menocchio’s head” (49).
For modern readers, such as Ginzburg himself, coming across Menocchio’s heresy for the first time, his ideas seem inaccessible and imperceptible. However, as Ginzburg’s key metaphor suggests, this problem can be easily remedied by reading the texts from Menocchio’s perspective. Ginzburg’s quest to decode this cultural filter is thus one of cultural empathy spanning centuries. Though both modern readers and the inquisitors struggle to understand his strange words, Ginzburg and his audience lend Menocchio compassion by attempting to understand in a way the inquisitors did not.
Conversely, Ginzburg also accounts for the cultural biases that modern readers bring to their encounter with Menocchio’s words. In the approximately four centuries since Menocchio was executed, layers of meaning have been added to words and phrases in the popular vernacular. “New world” is the clearest example of one such phrase explored in the book, as Ginzburg argues that its modern geographic connotation did not exist when Menocchio used it (77). Ginzburg thus serves as the translator of two cultural language filters: that of the 16th-century miller and that of the modern reader.
Once again, although this analytical thread takes place on a tiny scale, it has massive implications for the field of history as a whole. As historians increasingly take up the challenge of considering how general populations interacted with written materials across both geography and time, Ginzburg’s argument suggests that they must consider class as an essential aspect of reception. Not only that, they must also attempt to account for how such popular filters would have manifested in the class relations of various societies. In the case of 16th-century Friulia, Ginzburg finds that Menocchio’s misinterpretations were simultaneously generative and destructive: His readings empowered him to formulate an entire religious belief system, but they also led to his eventual demise at the hands of the Inquisition. As such, Ginzburg’s analysis also points to the social reverberations that can be produced through the simple act of reading.
