A review by inept_scholar
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg
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.