The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976) is a historical study by Carlo Ginzburg examining the 1599 trial of Menocchio, a Friulian miller accused of heresy by the Roman Inquisition. Ginzburg, a historian known for helping to found the field of microhistory, close-reads Menocchio’s testimony in the trial to understand his religious ideology, finding traces of popular peasant materialism that is largely invisible in other written sources from the period. Key themes include Relationships Between “High” and “Low” Culture in the 16th Century, Community and Marginalization, and The Problems of Textual Interpretation. The Cheese and the Worms has proven to be highly influential, serving as the inspiration for a 2002 play by Lillian Groag and a 2018 film by Alberto Fasulo.

This guide uses the 2013 paperback edition, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press and translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi.

Content Warning: The source text for this guide contains discussion of historical torture methods and religious intolerance.

Summary

Ginzburg introduces Menocchio, a financially stable miller from Montereale with eleven children, respected enough in his community to have held the offices of mayor and church administrator. Besides these innocent details, however, Menocchio also had the socially dangerous habit of blaspheming openly, engaging in heretical conversations with his community members, seemingly without shame. In February 1584, the town priest (with whom Menocchio had a personal conflict) brought an anonymous complaint against Menocchio for this behavior to the office of the Roman Inquisition. When arrested and interrogated, Menocchio revealed a series of extraordinary beliefs that Ginzburg endeavors to explain throughout the course of his study.

Despite overwhelming legal advice to the contrary, Menocchio reported his heretical ideas almost gleefully to the Inquisition: He believed in extending tolerance to people of all faiths (even heretics); that the church engaged in pervasive exploitation of the peasant class with false “merchandise” such as sacramental proceedings; that Christ had allowed himself to be crucified; that Mary was not in fact a virgin; that the Bible was a manmade product; and, most bizarrely, a cosmogeny that likened the universe to cheese and angels to worms. The book takes its name from this final belief.

To explain this highly unique heretical belief system, Ginzburg entertains several possible theories for how Menocchio formed his ideas, including influence from the Protestant Reformation and the Anabaptist heresy. Ultimately, however, he finds answers in the books Menocchio cited during his testimonies to the Inquisition. 11 titles are known with some degree of certainty, and it is reasonable to assume that the miller read even more titles that he never revealed explicitly. In close reading the contents of these texts, and Menocchio’s corresponding interpretations (or, frequently, misinterpretations) of them, Ginzburg discerns an invisible personal filter with which Menocchio read. This filter, he further argues, is symptomatic of popular peasant culture that has gone otherwise unrecorded because of its oral nature.

Ginzburg characterizes peasant culture as materialistic, egalitarian, and pre-Christian in many regards. He understands the particular social and technological conditions of the 16th century—an era defined by religious reformation and the introduction of printing—as allowing this culture to reach the historical record via conduits such as Menocchio. When ordinary villagers encountered printed literature, they interpreted such products of “high culture” with a peasant gaze, and these readings were in turn recorded by institutions such as the Inquisition, which sought to maintain its monopoly on theological ideas, through trial records.

By May 1584, Menocchio sensed that the trial was not going to be resolved in his favor and, at the request of his son, he wrote a letter to the Inquisition begging for merciful treatment. Ginzburg offers the letter to his readers in full, and finds that Menocchio used a clever set of rhetorical tactics to convey his remorse without fully admitting to any religious wrongdoing. The same day, the Inquisition found Menocchio guilty of being a heresiarch, and sentenced him to indefinite imprisonment. This punishment lasted for two years, until Menocchio’s family submitted a successful petition for his release. Out of prison, Menocchio was ordered to remain in Montereale, to cease his heretical speech, and to wear a habitello at all times to indicate his heretical status.

13 years later, however, Menocchio was found to have relapsed, and was tried by the Inquisition once more. Ginzburg theorizes that at this point, the miller was unfearful of execution; his most beloved family members had died, and he was living in oppressive isolation from his community, unable to discuss his ideas with anyone. The author also senses in his speech from the second trial key developments in his ideology; he had seemingly formed a self-image with prophetic, mystical underpinnings. Ginzburg thus finds some similarities between Menocchio and other self-proclaimed peasant prophets from Northern Italy in this time period: Scolio and Pellegrino Baroni (the latter of whom was also a miller). He cites these similarities as evidence of a common radical peasant culture, especially among millers. He believes millers to have been particularly prone to heretical ideating due to their working conditions.

Menocchio was found guilty once more, and this time he was executed for his heresy. Sometime in the late months of 1599, he was burned at the stake. Ginzburg ends his study by remarking on the existence of other such victims of the Inquisition who remain unknown because of their absence from the written record.