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