The Cheese and the Worms essays

The Cheese and the Worms essays Not much is known of the popular (peasant) culture of the western world during the sixteenth century. There are virtually no records regarding how they lived their daily lives or what their religious beliefs were. Historians are therefore forced to piece together as much information as possible in order to make an educated guess of what life was like for the 16th century peasant. One historian, Carlo Ginzburg, took an original approach to shedding a new light on this ever intriguing issue. In his book The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, 1976, Ginzburg analyzes the court inquisition and elite book collection of a very religiously opinionated miller, Domenico Scandella (more commonly referred to as Menocchio). He finds that Menocchios ideas are a mix of the texts he had read and the oral tradition of which he is a part. Ginzburg argues that a glimpse of the ideas of the general peasant culture can be found by analyzing Menocchios statements and sub tracting the knowledge Menocchio had acquired from reading the elite text books. It can be argued that Ginzburgs thesis and the methodology behind it are inappropriate, irresponsible, and ineffective; however, I propose to the contrary. Ginzburg presents his thesis in a very appropriate, very responsible, and very effective way with a great deal of examples backing it. One of Ginzburgs main objectives is to compare Menocchios statements to the books that were found in his possession at the time of the trial. Nearly all of Menocchios religious ideas have a corollary in one of the works noted. Ginzburg is also trying to derive a picture of the peasant culture by analyzing the difference between Menocchios statements and the texts. He does this in several ways: 1) Ginzburg makes note that Menocchios statements are both contorted and awkward, and 2) he addresses from where these contorted and awkwar...