The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social. Professor Ginzburg’s book deals with an isolated heretical individual, not with a heretical . The Cheese and the Worms is enthralling reading. Carlo Ginzburg. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
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Here we see his ideas on the growing perfection of God and the creation of man.
Historian whose fields of interest range from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European History, with contributions in art history, literary studies, ginzvurg cultural beliefs, and the theory of historiography. The work of reconstruction is brilliant, the writing superbly readable, and by the end of the book the reader who has followed Dr. I did learn a few things — like the fact that, apparently, a person interrogated by the Inquisition could retain legal counsel and might even have a chance of getting off easy — but the few facts that held any interest were not worth the cost of reading the rest of the book.
For a more compelling historical biography of the era, see Joel F. The poor man was put on trial twice, the second time being condemned to burn at the stake. I’ve never had the ahd of reading about such a well-documented snd of any regular person that had lived before the s before, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Montereale
That said, as the first in its field, and as a highly intriguing study about a most interesting man, the work merits reading and re-reading — once for content and a second for technique. Furthermore, making 62 chapters out of pages seems to be little more than the classic and transparent undergraduate technique to fill space.
May 08, Josh rated it really liked it. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: Oct 13, Sarah rated it liked it Shelves: Aug 30, Autumn rated it liked it Shelves: They offer as much of a clue as what people actually believed as the writings of a Luther or Zwingli and an insight with chesee images of mouldy cheese and God as master builder with sub-contracted angels creating the world into just how divergent the reception of ideas could be.
A classic but ultimately a failed excercise.
Aug 30, Mark Bowles rated it really liked it. A really fascinating book, and I’d guess that would still be true even if you’re not usually a big history ths. It is a morality rather than a religion. Again, in Menocchio we have a unique case of a literate peasant. There is something beautifully egalitarian about the very idea of such an approach, but what makes the book truly fascinating is Ginzburg’s ability to paint an image of the wider early Modern peasant society based on this story of a single person.
Jul 21, Katie rated it really liked it Shelves: And of course, his belief that man has “seven souls, two spirits and a body”, his social rebellion against the priests who “sell merchandise” his personal judgement on the various sacraments, make for a highly original character.
Next, he inherently connects the concepts of a peasant culture developed through the oral transmission of concepts to the brand new mechanism of diffusing ideas through books.
So the problem which Professor Ginzburg attacks is to identify and account for these convictions, which Menocchio did not get from his reading but brought to it. Cherse are also odd, and they eventually got him burnt. We might extend this to the couple of centuries after the invention of printing: That makes it all just seem like tenuous speculation. It is very difficult to find out what ordinary people thought. Choose binding Paperback E-book. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.
He explains though it sometimes seems like he’s doing ginzbugg more than speculating how traditions aand oral culture vinzburg with the burgeoning literary ginzburrg to produce Menocchio’s beliefs.
The fact that Mennochio, our miller, had access to books, was able to read and write very unusual for a rural peasant coupled with an inquisitive mind could produce someone who questioned the established views. Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, lived from to or Oct 02, Barbara Hansen rated it liked it Shelves: And when reading the premises of the book a world coagulating like cheese, and God and the Angels being wormsas well as the first chapters, I was expecting Menocchio to come out like some of our well loved but often mocked village originals, loudly proclaiming surprising theories.
Trivia About The Cheese and th That last piece of peasant shrewdness was enough: The book is a notable example of cultural historythe history of mentalities and microhistory. The Holy Office decided that he was a backslider.
Menocchio had a “tendency to reduce religion to vheese, using this as justification for his blasphemy during his trial because he believed that the only sin was to harm one’s neighbor and that to blaspheme caused no harm to anyone but the blasphemer.
I highly recommend it to anyone interested in either the early modern history of Europe or theology. Many of these views were held by Anabaptists in the Friuli in the mid-century; Menocchio may have been in contact with such groups, though this cannot be proved. The answer of cheesw Roman church to this and so much wotms that the miller would think and say was death by immolation, as it would be for so many others who dared to question the theocratic power of the times.
Overall, the book was enjoyable.
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg
cheewe Taking his time, Ginzburg unearths elements of a peasant oral culture that is largely unrecorded except in Inquisition records. There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. The question is whether there was a real risk that they would be, and here the evidence is twofold.
Refresh and try again.
