‘The Cheese and the Worms’ by Carlo Ginzburg review

In 1599 the poet Edmund Spenser died. Buried at Westminster Abbey, he was lauded in his own day as a man of brilliance and he was soon seen as a canonical figure in 16th-century culture. In the same year, the death of a miller from the tiny Italian village of Montereale inspired no such lamenting verses. Indeed, the miller Menocchio was executed for heresy after the Inquisition found that he had ‘denied the virginity of the forever blessed Virgin Mary, the divinity of Christ our lord, and the providence of God’. Unlike Spenser, he was then essentially forgotten. It was only in the early 1960s that a young researcher, Carlo Ginzburg, chanced upon Menocchio’s trial records. And it was only 50 years ago, in 1976, that Ginzburg published a book showing that Menocchio’s distinctive intuition and imagination were just as worthy of study as those of men like Spenser. Ginzburg’s book, translated into English as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller and now republished with a revised translation and new postscript, tells the story of this extraordinary, ordinary man. In one sense, Menocchio was little different from the millions of other peasants who lived and died with no more than a line in a parish register to record their existence. He had enough local status to participate in village administration but was far from wealthy, and he spent most of his life in his rural district. Yet he was also far from typical. Unlike the vast majority of his peasant neighbours, he could read and write. He was intensely curious about the world and relentlessly vocal in his beliefs, speaking to whoever would listen about cosmology and theology. It was this combination of literacy, imagination, and strong philosophical opinions that allowed him to leave a significant mark on the historical record – and got him killed. As Ginzburg shows, Menocchio’s views were so unusual as to be practically unique, startling to his 16th-century interrogators and perhaps to modern readers too. For him, the universe emerged from chaos through a process akin to putrefaction. God and the angels, in his words, ‘were produced by nature, just as worms are produced from a cheese’. The Church and its priests ‘oppress the poor’ and the sacraments were ‘all a matter of business’. In contrast, God gave everyone the possibility of salvation, offering it equally ‘to Christians, to heretics, to Turks, and to Jews’. Such a heady mix of materialism, relativism, and social critique had some overlaps with the radical religious ideas of the Anabaptists and the semi-fictional worlds of Renaissance travelogues such as ‘the island of Dondun’ described by John Mandeville, where ‘cannibals’ believed in the mortality of the soul. But it was not simply a regurgitation of other people’s words. Instead, Ginzburg argues, this unruly collage of beliefs was the product of the explosive encounter between Menocchio’s inherited peasant worldview, his eclectic reading material, and what he described as his ‘artful mind’. For example, he declared ‘it is a greater rule to love one’s neighbour than to love God’ based on a well-known religious poem that he read through the ‘filter’ of a peasant culture which valued neighbourliness over religiosity. The Cheese and the Worms is a ‘microhistory’, using the worldview revealed through Menocchio’s trial records to help us understand the wider world in which he lived. Ginzburg placed a seemingly insignificant individual under the microscope and through intense examination he was able to address huge historical questions, such as the impact of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation on ordinary people and the complex relationship between the oral culture of the peasantry and the literary Renaissance of the educated classes. Ginzburg argued that the rise of print and religious debate sparked a new social and cultural dynamic. The ideas that emerged – including Menocchio’s – were not simply the result of a top-down imposition or bottom-up emulation, but were sparked by a creative dialogue between ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ cultures. The reader will have to decide for themselves how persuasive this is, but the book’s importance goes far beyond its specific claims about 16th-century Europe. The Cheese and the Worms was the foundation of what has come to be known as ‘microhistory’, which has inspired numerous exciting histories in the years since its publication. This was, in part, a response to the quantitative social science methods popular among the French Annals historians and many others at the time. Ginzburg called it ‘a return to handweaving in the age of power looms’. Yet the idea of zooming in to examine a seemingly unimportant but exceptional individual resulted in many later influential histories, including Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale (1990). Ginzburg’s text was translated into 28 languages over the last 50 years, a testament to its impact. This new edition – the publication of which shortly and sadly pre-dated Ginzburg’s death on 17 June this year – is therefore invaluable, both as an engaging history in its own right and as a ‘classic’ of microhistory. The new translation by Stephen Twilley is excellent, correcting numerous small mistakes and infelicities in the 1980 English edition. It also includes the author’s previously untranslated afterword and a new postscript, which together provide insightful and moving reflections on how Ginzburg’s experiences as a Jew in the 1940s shaped his commitment to studying individuals in all their complexity rather than as merely part of the anonymous masses. In recent years, authors such as Saidiya Hartman and Julia Laite have shown that Ginzburg’s approach – with its focus on the ideas and beliefs of a single individual – is not the only way to use ‘small stories’ to get at big questions. This new edition is, however, a welcome chance for a new generation of readers to meet Menocchio. In an age when digital models spew out an endless supply of dehumanised confections of text, encountering the strange cosmos of this 16th-century miller is a powerful and delightful experience. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller Carlo GinzburgJohns Hopkins University Press, 224pp, £23Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link) Brodie Waddell is Reader in Early Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London.