What I Am Reading: "The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller" by Carlo Ginzburg

This is a short academic book investigating popular culture in early modern Europe through the case of an Italian miller, Domenico "Menocchio" Scandella, who was investigated by the Inquisition on two separate occasions. A pushy, garrulous peasant, Menocchio was reported for his controversial theological opinions. Ginzburg, an Italian academic who focuses on such "microhistories," traces Menocchio's intellectual influences to show that at this time, popular culture was not (as some theorized) merely handed-down or degraded high culture, but was rather the product of a reciprocal, circular exchange between the ideas of contemporary intellectuals and a longstanding oral folk tradition. Such oral traditions are naturally difficult to excise from the secretive grip of history, so the opinions of Menocchio (and a few other peasants at the time) are used to sneak a glimpse, in a time period between when the Reformation brought these traditions into the open and the Counter-Reformation targeted them as an effort to re-instill elite-dominated consensus.

Menocchio, born in 1532 and executed in 1599, was a miller. Millers occupied a station in peasant society that made them particularly susceptible to participation in Lutheran, Anabaptist, or other heresies: they interacted with the peasants who patronized them, yet were apart from them and viewed with suspicion, as they were always a possible source of perfidy when it came to grain processing. They ran a social gathering places, similar to innkeepers and the like, that gave plenty of opportunity for exchange and propagation of ideas within the enclosed world of peasant society; and these gathering places were isolated geographically from both larger urban centers and from their own peasant villages, making them ideal spots for clandestine gatherings. Finally, they often had some level of connection to local lords (and thus high culture), who often possessed a legal milling monopoly. Peasants in Menocchio’s area, Friuli, were comparatively socially empowered in the era, as the controlling Venetians backed them politically to decrease the power of local nobles. Menocchio was an obvious chatterbox, with records and testimony showing that he constantly engaged others to expound on his conceptions of god, the church, and the universe.

These conceptions, Menocchio would later stress to his interrogators, were entirely "from his own head," not passed down to him from either a teacher or proclaimed as divine revelation, though some had elements in common with contemporary Lutheran or Anabaptist doctrines. Without making an exhaustive list, he believed that God was simply the most powerful of the angels who had appeared on the world after it was created naturally; it had congealed from the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) just as cheese congeals from churning, and the men and angels had appeared on it just as worms appear in cheese. He believed that Christ was simply a prophet the same as many others, not divine, and that the church had built up an edifice of ritual in order to enrich itself and ensconce itself in power. All god wanted, Menocchio claimed, was essentially for humanity to live by the golden rule, and it was only a sin to harm others, not to do things like blaspheme. He expounded this to Christians, Jews, and "Turks" on their own turf, and there was no reason for efforts at conversion.

Ginzburg traces some elements of this thought to a peasant egalitarianism that appears in other utopian peasant writings and primary sources at the time, combined with ideas from the books Menocchio had acquired through (occasional) purchase and (more commonly) a network of borrowers spanning other peasants, local lords, and local clergy, men and women alike. The Inquisition’s record preserves this list of a dozen or so books that Menocchio had read, including the Bible in the vernacular, the Decameron (a mainstay of the humanities pandemic reading list), and the Italian translations of the works of Sir John Mandeville, a fantastical travelogue that included a depiction of the kingdom of Prester John and increasingly fabulous peoples and societies encountered as the traveler increased distance from Europe. Ginzburg cross-references some of Menocchio's statements in his trials to quotations from these books, and interestingly these quotations are sometimes misremembered, stressed differently (with a minor detail as the miller's main takeaway), or even reversed from their original use, in order to provide backing for Menocchio's positions.

The peasant had always hoped to pass along his positions to those in authority, and in his first trial in 1583 he only spent some time in CYA mode before expounding his beliefs fully to the members of the Inquisition who debated with him. Though he did his best to argue that his beliefs were within the Christian belief system and ask to be taught where he had interpreted wrong, he was condemned as a heresiarch. Despite his son's retention of an attorney, he spent a couple of years in prison after this, and was under the watch of local authorities for many years after. Despite the hardships of his life, as he fell upon hard times, his wife and eldest son died and his other children moved on with their lives, he went back to argumentation and propagation of his beliefs, including as he worked as an itinerant musician. He told one witness that he expected to find himself back before the Inquisition, and was indifferent to this fate. He was arrested again in 1598, and after some debate, some interrogation, and a small amount of torture, the central Inquisition office insisted on making an example out of him. He was burned at the stake in 1599.

Menocchio is a fascinating character to be rescued from obscurity in the vastness of history, and while his intellect ruled his life, it seems to be a combination of courage, resignation, and pig-headed stubbornness that sent him to his demise. The Catholic Church was trying to reestablish its primacy in the face of Lutheranism, and this extended to control of culture, especially in the case of peasants after the siege of Münster earlier in the century. Menocchio was not a particularly important person, not a leader who brought others into his ideological or intellectual framework. Most of his peasant neighbors were annoyed with his argumentation, but otherwise carried on as normal; he was even a local church official and village mayor. Regardless, his example shows that intellect can come from anywhere, and is not monopolized by movers and shakers in royal courts or large cities.