afreema3's review against another edition
Read for my History Workshop Course I'm taking, which is a requirement for my major. I also do not rate books I had to read for class
My Prof. said that every time he teaches this book he has students who either really love the book, or students who hate the book and don't understand it. I feel a little bit in the middle. This book is just meh to me, I think Ginzburg takes a lot of liberties with his interpretations and assumptions regarding Menocchio. Ginzburg's method of writing and organizing chapters is also a little strange, because as my Prof. pointed out before we started reading, this book isn't written from just point a to z, it twists and turns.
If I ever read The Cheese and the Worms again I feel like my opinion may change because I don't have 5 days to read the book. I read 30 pages a day and honestly I barely made it, and I could not really give this book justice if I summarized it.
My Prof. said that every time he teaches this book he has students who either really love the book, or students who hate the book and don't understand it. I feel a little bit in the middle. This book is just meh to me, I think Ginzburg takes a lot of liberties with his interpretations and assumptions regarding Menocchio. Ginzburg's method of writing and organizing chapters is also a little strange, because as my Prof. pointed out before we started reading, this book isn't written from just point a to z, it twists and turns.
If I ever read The Cheese and the Worms again I feel like my opinion may change because I don't have 5 days to read the book. I read 30 pages a day and honestly I barely made it, and I could not really give this book justice if I summarized it.
joanna77_'s review against another edition
informative
reflective
very interesting story but I wanted a little more analysis and I didn’t like how choppy it was
vonmustache's review against another edition
5.0
Excellent. Ginzburg uses the case of Menocchio (and a few others) to suggest the existence of an oral culture of peasant traditions, materialist, intolerant of dogma, tied to natural cycles, and pre-Christian. Peasants, he argues, contributed their own thought and culture to the early modern world; they, no less than “high cultural” thinkers of the period, defined the cosmic and terrestrial worlds.
Menocchio thought that the rituals of the 16th century Catholic Church and the Bible were man-made creations, designed to enrich the Church. His understanding of theology - and of the texts he read - suggests a materialist emphasis that Ginzburg sources to his peasant status. The book demonstrates the difficulty of microhistory - it is at once deeply entertaining and engaging, and at the same time unfortunately thinly sourced - it is impossible to know how widespread ideas like Menocchio’s were; it is tragic that we are left without it.
I wish that more could have been done to dive into the oral culture itself - Menocchio’s case could be a result of peasant traditions, or it could be his own brain. Using more examples to suggest the three claims about peasant culture (pre-Christian, intolerant of dogma, tied to natural cycles, materialist) would have been nice. Extremely enjoyable, but thin on the ground, as microhistory must, unfortunately, always be.
Menocchio thought that the rituals of the 16th century Catholic Church and the Bible were man-made creations, designed to enrich the Church. His understanding of theology - and of the texts he read - suggests a materialist emphasis that Ginzburg sources to his peasant status. The book demonstrates the difficulty of microhistory - it is at once deeply entertaining and engaging, and at the same time unfortunately thinly sourced - it is impossible to know how widespread ideas like Menocchio’s were; it is tragic that we are left without it.
I wish that more could have been done to dive into the oral culture itself - Menocchio’s case could be a result of peasant traditions, or it could be his own brain. Using more examples to suggest the three claims about peasant culture (pre-Christian, intolerant of dogma, tied to natural cycles, materialist) would have been nice. Extremely enjoyable, but thin on the ground, as microhistory must, unfortunately, always be.
inept_scholar's review against another edition
4.0
This wonderful classic by historian Carlo Ginzburg was a slightly expensive buy for me. Nevertheless I am glad to have finally read this book which I had earlier only heard of in academic conversations and read as a citation to many other historical texts.
Ginzburg takes the reader through the mental and imaginative world of a sixteenth century Italian miller called Mennochio, who after reading a bunch of provocative texts (derided by the Catholic authorities of Rome) begins to preach the origin of the world as similar to the curdling of cheese and insisting that the angels were created just like the way maggots appear in the making of cheese. Naturally he is brought by the religious authorities for questioning and eventually executed for his heresies.
But what's fascinating for an amateur historian is the way Ginzburg explores not only the books that Mennochio read but also the many ways on how he read and interpreted them as per his own ideas and understanding. What is presented is a unique interaction of written culture of the elites (popularized further by the then recent invention of the printing press) and the oral cultures of the peasants, within a tumultuous political and religious environment of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in 16th century Italy.
When one thinks of micro-histories, this book pops first into any history student's mind. And i think it is important that books like these give us rare glimpses into the pasts of simply ordinary people who would easily be absent in many big historical narratives. However exceptions like Mennochio with their 'exceptional' ideas and actions, somehow manage to find a little corner in these institutional records and force us to ruminate over their stories and their complicated worlds.
Ginzburg takes the reader through the mental and imaginative world of a sixteenth century Italian miller called Mennochio, who after reading a bunch of provocative texts (derided by the Catholic authorities of Rome) begins to preach the origin of the world as similar to the curdling of cheese and insisting that the angels were created just like the way maggots appear in the making of cheese. Naturally he is brought by the religious authorities for questioning and eventually executed for his heresies.
But what's fascinating for an amateur historian is the way Ginzburg explores not only the books that Mennochio read but also the many ways on how he read and interpreted them as per his own ideas and understanding. What is presented is a unique interaction of written culture of the elites (popularized further by the then recent invention of the printing press) and the oral cultures of the peasants, within a tumultuous political and religious environment of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in 16th century Italy.
When one thinks of micro-histories, this book pops first into any history student's mind. And i think it is important that books like these give us rare glimpses into the pasts of simply ordinary people who would easily be absent in many big historical narratives. However exceptions like Mennochio with their 'exceptional' ideas and actions, somehow manage to find a little corner in these institutional records and force us to ruminate over their stories and their complicated worlds.