1. Brianna Barcena
11/13/15
The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller
Domenico Scandella, also known as, Menocchio, was a man of little
recognition for the majority of his life until he fell victim to his own opinions and
appetite to express them. In The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg lays out the
story of Menocchio’s prosecution while exploring the history of heresy and
recreating the peasant popular culture of the Friuli in Northern Italy. Ginzburg
combines the written manuscripts of Menocchio’s interrogations and testimonies of
his peers with a study of the culture, particularly the oral culture, of the region in
order to reconstruct the environment, which led to Menocchio’s two imprisonments
and execution over a span of about fifteen years.
Up until the Holy Office’s first inquiry into Menocchio and his beliefs,
Menocchio had lived a fairly respectable life for a miller of the Friuli peasant class.
He had a large family, and made more than enough to provide for and secure a
decent future for his children. Although the peasant class often resented the millers
because they had opportunities to obtain more money or grains, the mills were a
center for socializing, trade, and exchanges of ideas and thoughts. Starting in 1581,
aside from his milling work, Menocchio held many local offices, which was a result
of his ability to read, write, and add, having possibly attended an elementary public
school in Aviano or Pordenone. His ability, and desire, to read, however, would
prove to be a dangerous talent when his knowledge of heretical books led him to the
opposite ends of an inquisitor’s table.
There are eleven books that Menocchio is said, or believed, to have read, and
Ginzburg puts a focus on how these books can be translated into Menocchio’s
individual belief set. At both of Menocchio’s interrogations the books mentioned or
found in Menocchio’s possessions that seemed to shock the Holy Office most were
Travels by Sir John Mandeville, the Decameron, the Bible in the vernacular, and the
Koran, although it was never accurately proved that he read the Koran. Ginzburg
spends dozens of pages transcribing the intimate conversations between the
interrogator and Menocchio, in which his entire cosmos is revealed. Based on the
books he read, Menocchio devises his own set of beliefs taken from a shallow
understanding of the concepts he comprehends. Above all, he believes that the God
and the angels where created out of chaos, from this chaos, they were able to create
mankind, he believes that the Gospels are not the precise words of God, only
translations obscured over time, that being kind to ones neighbor is the single most
important action in God’s eyes, and lastly, that every religion is equal in God’s eyes.
Although these beliefs proved to be Christian in nature, due to the belief in God, they
are contradictory to the orthodox doctrine of the Catholic Church.
The time Menocchio spent between inquiries was marked by penance,
insecurities, but also a return to the norms of every day life. He spent approximately
two years in prison before being released after repenting and claiming that it was
demons that made his mind unhealthy. He was forced to wear the habitello, a
garment decorated with a cross to expose his heresies to the public, and was not

2. allowed to leave the walls of his village for the remainder of his life. His reputation
appeared to remain untarnished. After an uneasy return to life, he was once again
being voted to local offices and worked in the mills as he did before. It was not until
1599 when he could no longer hold his tongue that another inquiry was imposed
upon him. This time, after being accused of reading and spreading ideas similar to
those within the Koran, he was tortured into revealing any accomplices or patrons
who aided his heretical ideas. He was unable to provide any information, proving
that his ideas were his own. After spending months in prison, by orders of Pope
Clement VIII, Menocchio was burned at the stake for being a heretic, ending any
possible chance for his ideas to spread.
It is important to understand how and where Menocchio came across the
books he read in order to understand where his ideas came from in a geographical
sense. These books he read not only represented the widespread movement of
books following the printing press, but also, the types of books and information that
the church found unacceptable or heretical. Although Ginzburg mentions the
possibilities that the books may have come through Venice, he does not explain the
environment of Venice in comparison with the rest of the duchies that made up
Italy. It was in Venice that Menocchio purchased Fioretto della Bibbia, which
Ginzburg believes he derived his idea that out of chaos “a mass formed-just as
cheese is made out of milk-and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.”1
This heretical view that chaos, not God, formed life and angels, was one in which the
Church worked tirelessly to censor. Perhaps due to its distance from Rome, Venice
was often home to exchanges of non-secular ideas, such as these, in which
Menocchio could have heard, and most definitely read, and which he took to mean a
literal explanation of how earth and the heavens were formed. This idea that
Menocchio only absurd the surfaces of the books he read is a continuing study
throughout Ginsburg’s study and Menocchio’s arrogance, and perhaps excitement to
speak to men of knowledge, led him to freely express his thoughts in a situation that
was obviously threatening to his life.
Ginzburg also falls into a habit of presenting the discourses in The Cheese and
the Worms in obvious and elementary ways, as a black and white argument. Within
the dialogue there is a suppressor, the inquisitor, and an oppressed, the prosecuted,
in this case Menocchio. Another discursive theme would be that which is orthodox
and that which is unorthodox. Although he uses this methodology to understand the
complex relationships between religion and society, particularly when dissecting
the conversations between the inquisitor and Menocchio, he maintains a very black
and white depiction of the discourses. By not extending his study in detail, especially
in regards to Venice, he does not allow for an exchange of ideas and recognition of
individuality of the Inquisitor as a human being, and Menocchio as an equally
devout believer in God. It appears, as Ginzburg writes, that the Inquisitor was
nothing more than an occupation of need, there is no personality or purpose to this
individuals role in history than that of convicting Menocchio.
1 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century
Miller (Baltimore Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 5.

3. Lastly, although Ginzburg mentions social tensions in terms of the peasants’
views of the millers, there are other examples of social hierarchy and their uses that
are not extended upon. It is made obvious that those lucky men who were fortunate
enough to work in a miller, or even better, rent or own one, had the opportunity to
obtain more pay and more grains or their family in a time when money and food
was scarce among the peasant class. The peasants often felt jealous and uneasy
about the fortunate opportunities the millers were able to come by. In turn,
Menocchio might not have been questioned had it not been for a feud with a local
priest, when the authority of clergy was questioned, who submitted Menocchio’s
case to the Holy Office. With tensions running high at a time where Lutherism and
Anabaptism was spreading fairly close to the borders of Italian states, a threat to the
clergy could be morphed into a full heresy trial. Also, the eagerness for the peasants
and drifters, even those whom Menocchio showed kindness too, to testify against
Menocchio and his wild theories, show that there was a sense of fear, fear of being
prosecuted for listening to the heretical views, but also of jealousy, as millers were
in a position to be envied by peasants, despite peasants often having an oral culture
that extended from ancient beliefs that were not far off from being as wild as
Menocchio’s.
Carlo Ginzburg makes an excellent reconstruction of the types of inquisitions
that occurred in sixteenth century Italy at a time when reformations and heretical
thoughts were spreading at a rapid pace. The Pope’s attempt to suppress the spread
of any heretical voices during the Counter-Reformation led to many individuals
being tried and executed, however, those who remained faithful, or at least
appeared to be, were never accounted for and have been lost in history, mostly due
to the inability to discover oral culture and history. Local and overlooked incidents
are equally important to understand a national or global history, because they
portray the attitude of the localities that make up the whole of the situation. Just as
the invention of the printing press and the Reformation made it possible for
Menocchio’s story to be heard, it is equally important, as Ginzburg quotes Walter
Benjamin, “Nothing that has taken place should be lost to history.”2
2 Ibid., xxxi-xxxiii.