The Cheese and the Worms
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This note belongs under Identity, Culture, and Social Formation because Carlo Ginzburg uses Domenico Scandella, the Friulian miller called Menocchio, to show how religious language, printed books, village talk, occupational standing, and inquisitorial pressure met inside one sixteenth-century life. It is most useful beside notes on Religion and Legitimacy, Informal Institutions, and Moral Economy, especially where the question is how ordinary people translate official doctrines into local, usable, and sometimes dangerous speech.
Detailed overview
Carlo Ginzburg builds the book from an evidentiary accident: the Holy Office preserved enough of the two trials of Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio, to make a Friulian miller’s speech visible across four centuries. Menocchio lived in Montereale, moved through nearby places such as Concordia, Portogruaro, Arba, Maniago, and Pordenone, and was first interrogated in 1584 after neighbors and clergy reported his statements about Christ, the Virgin, sacraments, priests, and the creation of the world. Ginzburg’s opening claim is not that Menocchio represents the average peasant. It is that his exceptionality has limits: his milling, reading, borrowing, tavern talk, kinship network, and local offices make him a traceable person inside a lower-class world that usually left few self-authored records.
The book is also a study of what can and cannot be done with hostile sources. Ginzburg begins by rejecting three easier routes: Robert Mandrou’s treatment of colportage literature as culture imposed on passive readers, Genevieve Bolleme’s tendency to treat similar booklets as the spontaneous voice of the people, and Michel Foucault’s reluctance to interpret excluded voices such as Pierre Riviere. Against those positions, Ginzburg insists that inquisitorial documents distort Menocchio’s words but do not erase them. The trial record becomes useful precisely where Menocchio’s replies do not fit the judges’ categories of Lutheran, Anabaptist, possessed, mad, or merely ignorant.
Menocchio’s famous cosmogony gives the book its title: in the beginning, he said, all was chaos, like milk curdling into cheese, and from that cheese came worms, which were the angels. God was one of those angels and was made lord by the others. Ginzburg does not treat this as a colorful oddity. He follows the statement through Menocchio’s other claims: that the Church had turned sacraments and burials into merchandise, that priests oppressed the poor, that Christ was born like other men, that Mary’s virginity could be explained by her residence among temple virgins, that hell and purgatory were priestly inventions, and that Jews, Turks, and Christians should remain within their own laws rather than convert by betrayal.
The center of the book is Menocchio as a reader. His known books include a vernacular Bible, the Fioretto della Bibbia, the Rosario or Lucidario della Madonna, the Legendario de santi, the Historia del giudicio, Mandeville’s Travels, Il sogno dil Caravia, Foresti’s Supplementum supplementi delle croniche, a Lunario, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and possibly the Koran. Ginzburg carefully refuses the simple idea that these books caused Menocchio’s beliefs. Instead, he shows Menocchio wrenching details from them: taking Joseph’s phrase “my son” in the Fioretto as evidence against Christ’s divine birth, turning Voragine’s Assumption story into proof of Mary’s earthly dishonor, and reading Mandeville’s many peoples, religions, pygmies, cannibals, and Muslim paradise as a challenge to Christian exclusivity.
The narrative logic is cumulative. Ginzburg first lets the inquisitors try to classify Menocchio, then reconstructs the village and book networks around him, then compares Menocchio’s speech against particular printed passages, and only after that places him near larger sixteenth-century currents: Italian evangelism, Luther, Venetian Anabaptism, Padua’s discussions of the soul, Camillo Renato, the benandanti, peasant utopias, the Land of Cockaigne, and the disciplining programs of Catholic and Protestant reform. The point is not that Menocchio secretly belonged to one of these movements. It is that a miller in Friuli could combine oral peasant material, vernacular print, anticlerical anger, and personal reasoning into a coherent enough religion to terrify the Holy Office.
The ending narrows again from broad cultural history to the mechanics of repression. After the first trial Menocchio returned to Montereale, but denunciations resumed, including reports of nocturnal conversation with a Jew and renewed comments about Christ, the soul, and priests. In 1599 Rome took direct interest. Cardinal Santa Severina wrote on behalf of the Congregation of the Holy Office, Clement VIII pressed for punishment, and the old miller was executed while Giordano Bruno’s Roman trial was also nearing its end. Ginzburg’s final comparison is deliberately unequal: Bruno belonged to learned culture, Menocchio to a village world, but both deaths show a Catholic hierarchy imposing Tridentine limits on speech above and below.
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Section-by-section notes
Prefaces and method
Summary: Ginzburg frames the book as a response to the difficulty of recovering lower-class culture when most sixteenth-century peasants and artisans left oral traces only through hostile literate institutions. He names Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio, a Friulian miller burned by the Holy Office, and sets his trial records beside Robert Mandrou on colportage, Genevieve Bolleme on popular religious pamphlets, Mikhail Bakhtin on Rabelais and carnival, Michel Foucault on exclusion, Jacques Derrida on madness and language, Pierre Riviere, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie Zemon Davis, Edward P. Thompson, the benandanti, and Francois Furet’s preference for number and anonymity. The prefaces argue that Menocchio is not statistically typical but that his literacy, village standing, and unusual stubbornness open a passage into the relationship between dominant culture and subordinate culture. Source anchors: Menocchio; Holy Office; Mandrou; Bakhtin; Foucault; benandanti; number and anonymity.
Analysis: Menocchio, the Holy Office, Mandrou, Bakhtin, Foucault, the benandanti, and number and anonymity establish the rules for reading the rest of the book. The inquisitorial files create a compromised form of Knowledge Preservation: hostile clerks classify and distort Menocchio's speech, yet their questions, repetitions, and recorded mismatches preserve a lower-class voice that ordinary village life would not have archived. Mandrou and Foucault mark the two errors Ginzburg avoids—treating cheap print as simple downward imposition or treating archival violence as a reason to surrender interpretation.
Chapters 1-11. Menocchio, Montereale, and the first interrogations
Summary: The opening chapters introduce Menocchio in Montereale as a miller, sometime village officeholder, reader, talker, and defendant whose neighbors had heard him mock priests, sacraments, Latin ceremonies, images, confession, purgatory, and Church wealth. Ginzburg follows the denunciation from Concordia to Portogruaro, shows the inquisitors testing whether Menocchio is possessed, mad, Lutheran, Anabaptist, or simply arrogant, and records his claims that priests oppress the poor, that everything belongs to the Church, that Christ was a man born of Joseph and Mary, and that his opinions came from his own head. Figures around him include don Ottavio Montereale, Nicola da Porcia, Nicola de Melchiori, the painter of Porcia, Melchiorre Gerbas, Andrea Bionima, and the vicar general who keeps trying to translate village talk into heresy categories. Source anchors: Montereale; Portogruaro; possessed; Lutherans; Nicola da Porcia; own head; priests oppress the poor.
Analysis: Montereale and Portogruaro give the book its first institutional contrast: a small Friulian town where Menocchio’s words circulate for years, and a tribunal where those words have to become charges. Possessed and Lutherans show the inquisitors searching for known labels, while Nicola da Porcia complicates Menocchio’s insistence that everything came from his own head. The phrase priests oppress the poor makes his anticlericalism social rather than merely doctrinal, because attacks on confession, Latin, images, and Church property all return to the same local experience of clerical extraction.
Chapters 12-24. Books, readers, and Menocchio's reading practices
Summary: Ginzburg reconstructs Menocchio’s partial library from interrogation fragments: a vernacular Bible, the Fioretto della Bibbia bought in Venice for two soldi, the Rosario or Lucidario della Madonna, the Legendario de santi, the Historia del giudicio, Mandeville’s Travels, Il sogno dil Caravia, Foresti’s Supplementum, a Lunario, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and perhaps an Italian Koran. He maps a reading network that includes Anna de Cecho at Arba, Giorgio Capel, Domenico Gerbas, Bastian Scandella, Fior burning a Bible in an oven, Andrea Bionima finding Mandeville among notarial papers at Maniago, Nicola da Porcia lending Caravia, and Tita Coradina burning the Fioretto after priestly warning. The chapters then show Menocchio’s active misreadings: Mary’s temple companions become an explanation of virginity, Voragine’s Assumption tale becomes evidence of Mary’s dishonor, Joseph’s words in the Fioretto become proof of Christ’s human father, Mandeville’s pygmies, cannibals, Muslim paradise, and many peoples loosen Christian monopoly, and the Decameron’s three rings support tolerance among Christians, Jews, and Turks. Source anchors: Fioretto della Bibbia; Mandeville; Decameron; three rings; Anna de Cecho; Bible in the oven; Koran.
Analysis: Fioretto della Bibbia, Mandeville, Decameron, the three rings, Anna de Cecho, the Bible in the oven, and the Koran move the book from a heresy case into a study of Language and Ideology under pressure. Menocchio does not absorb doctrine intact: he detaches Joseph's phrase "my son," Mandeville's many peoples, and the three-rings story from their books and recombines them into arguments against Christ's divinity and forced conversion. Anna de Cecho and the burned Bible show the material network through which those words circulate, disappear, and acquire danger.
Chapters 25-36. Chaos, cheese, worms, metaphors, and the soul
Summary: These chapters examine Menocchio’s most startling cosmology and the intellectual machinery behind it. He says the beginning was chaos, like cheese made from milk, and worms appeared in that cheese; the worms were angels, God was also made from that mass, and the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water were bound up with the world, man, and divinity. Ginzburg follows this through the monopoly over knowledge, the Fioretto’s words, Menocchio’s metaphors of master, steward, and workers, his denial of creation from nothing, his refusal of Christ’s divinity, his uncertainty before “I don’t know,” and his anthropology of two spirits, seven souls, intellect, memory, will, thought, belief, faith, hope, and the body’s four elements. Source anchors: chaos; cheese; worms; four elements; monopoly over knowledge; seven souls; two spirits.
Analysis: Chaos, cheese, worms, four elements, monopoly over knowledge, seven souls, and two spirits are where Ginzburg most carefully separates Menocchio from a passive borrower of books. The cheese image gives a material model for creation that neither the Fioretto nor the inquisitors can absorb, while four elements lets Menocchio connect man, world, and God without orthodox creation. Seven souls and two spirits show him trying to preserve some kind of survival after death while still holding to a material account of body and mind, and monopoly over knowledge names the clerical control he believes keeps such matters away from common people.
Chapters 37-48. Contradictions, paradise, reform, and the first sentence
Summary: Ginzburg follows Menocchio’s contradictions after the soul doctrine becomes difficult under questioning. Menocchio moves between a mortal soul, an immortal spirit, Christ as a man with a terrestrial spirit, paradise as a feast where one sees fish in the sea, no bodily resurrection because bodies would fill heaven and earth, hell as a priestly invention, and indulgences or prayers for the dead as somehow still useful. These chapters connect his wish for a new world and way of life to Foresti’s Supplementum on Martin Luther, the primitive Church without pomp, Amerigo Vespucci’s Mundus novus, Erasmus writing to Martin Bucer, the Land of Cockaigne, Anton Francesco Doni’s Un mondo nuovo, Melchiorre Gerbas repeating that God is air, Menocchio’s threat to kill priests and burn churches, his letter to the judges, and the first sentence that confines his speech after the 1584 trial. Source anchors: mortal soul; paradise as a feast; new world; Foresti; Luther; Melchiorre Gerbas; first sentence.
Analysis: Mortal soul, paradise as a feast, new world, Foresti, Luther, Melchiorre Gerbas, and first sentence show why Menocchio’s religion cannot be reduced to isolated disbelief. Mortal soul and paradise as a feast expose a peasant materialism that still longs for relief from work, while Foresti and Luther give Menocchio a printed model of religious revolt joined to criticism of clerical wealth. Melchiorre Gerbas proves that Menocchio’s words did not remain wholly private, and the first sentence marks the point where the Holy Office tries to turn a talkative miller back into a silent villager.
Chapters 49-62. Second trial, comparison, and execution
Summary: The final chapters begin after Menocchio returns to town and denunciations resume. Witnesses report new statements, including a nocturnal dialogue with a Jew, more talk about Christ, priests, the soul, fantasies, vanities, dreams, and his prayer beginning “Oh great, omnipotent, and holy God,” while the second trial presses him toward confession, torture, and condemnation. Ginzburg widens the comparison through Scolio, Pellegrino Baroni of Savignano, Paolo Ricci or Camillo Renato, Lisia Fileno, the Bolognetti household, Anabaptist sleep-of-the-soul doctrines, Padua, Pietro Pomponazzi, Giovanni Daniele Melchiori of Polcenigo, and the repeated similarities between two millers who both speak of ideas coming from their heads. The conclusion returns to power: Cardinal Santa Severina, the Congregation of the Holy Office, Clement VIII, letters from Rome in 1599, Giordano Bruno, and Donato Serotino’s later testimony confirm that Menocchio was executed by order of the Holy Office. Source anchors: nocturnal dialogue; Pellegrino Baroni; Camillo Renato; sleep of the soul; Cardinal Santa Severina; Clement VIII; Giordano Bruno.
Analysis: Nocturnal dialogue, Pellegrino Baroni, Camillo Renato, sleep of the soul, Cardinal Santa Severina, Clement VIII, and Giordano Bruno give the ending its force. Pellegrino Baroni prevents Menocchio from looking like an isolated curiosity, while Camillo Renato links village reasoning to wider radical circuits without becoming its sole source. Cardinal Santa Severina and Clement VIII defend Religion and Legitimacy by making doctrinal uniformity a condition of Catholic authority: executing Menocchio while Bruno's trial closes shows Rome policing challenges from village taverns and learned philosophy as threats to the same Tridentine order.