The cheese and the worms

Description

The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccios Decameron, Mandevilles Travels, and a mysterious book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed-just as cheese is made out of milk-and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. Ginzburgs influential book has been widely regarded as an early example of the analytic, case-oriented approach known as microhistory. In a tho