Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms

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

NY: Penguin Books, 1987

This seminal work of microhistory aims primarily to accomplish two objectives: firstly, to tell the story of Domenico Scandella (Menocchio), the eponymous Miller (xi); and secondly, to argue that in preindustrial Europe, culture was not merely unidirectional (i.e. flowing only from lower to upper classes or vice versa), but in fact enjoyed “a circular relationship composed of reciprocal influences” (xii), which he terms “circularity.” The two objectives, naturally, are quite interlocked, although Ginzburg notes that the “general reader” will probably take more interest in the story aspect, and interestingly makes concessions in the book’s structure (specifically using endnotes over footnotes) in order to increase the general reader’s accessibility. The story, however, certainly stands in contrast to what one expects from the term. Told in a rather nonlinear and meandering fashion, Ginzburg spoils the end (Menocchio’s execution) in the introduction (xiii) and so pre-empts any dramatic tension and forces the reader, general or otherwise, to focus on the hows and whys of Menocchio’s journey to the stake rather than wondering how Menocchio will end up, allowing for the freedom from the expectation of a stringently linear narrative and allowing some leeway for the long tangents which Ginzburg sometimes explores.

At any rate, in light of his purpose, of course, stylistic and structural concessions to the average person seems apropos. Eager to move beyond Great Man historiography, Ginzburg’s book maintains a consistent everyman perspective, focusing on seemingly mundane details and people and bringing them to life with passion. Unlike The Corruption of Angels, wherein the inquisitors are full characters and principal players providing the reader his vector of exploration, in this work Ginzburg uses inquisitorial records to examine the life and mentality of Menocchio without ever really describing or discussing the inquisitors themselves. Ginzburg provides much detail on people whom Menocchio names in his testimony, or people who testify about Menocchio (sometimes with a great deal of speculation on Ginzburg’s part, which I will address later), but quite often refers to his interrogators or other church superiors by their titles, like “vicar general” or “the inquisitors,” which keeps them out of our focus and subtly raises up the lower-class folk as more important in this story than the upper-class people setting the investigation in motion. In addition to his recounting and examination of the inquisitorial records, Ginzburg spends much of the book exploring Menocchio’s sociohistorical context and performing detailed analyses of the ideas which Menocchio both espoused and encountered—most especially of the books he read. In these segments, the Cheese shines brightest. He dedicates nearly ten pages (comprising four of his strange chaptrettes) alone to just exploring and explaining one book, the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (41-51), but also weaves references to it throughout and as with all the investigated books continually reminds the reader of it, and its role in Menocchio’s worldview. Moreso than any other contextualization Ginzburg provides, ss we better understand the books Menocchio read, we come to better understand Menocchio—as best we can, at any rate, understand a strange little egotist with a penchant for both utter dishonesty and also painful-to-read over-sharing.

As I said, this work broke new ground in and set the standard for microhistory; his emphasis on class smacks of Marxist historiography, although he avoids speaking too much on economics, and certainly this book ties closely to the contemporaneous German Alltagsgeschichte works.