Carlo Ginzburg

The Cheese and the Worms

1. IDEA 1

   A miller imagined creation differently

   Ginzburg tells the story of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century miller in northern Italy who developed unusual ideas about the universe. He claimed that the world formed like cheese from chaos, and that angels appeared within it like worms in cheese.

2. IDEA 2

   The Inquisition put him on trial

   Menocchio's ideas brought him before the Inquisition, the church's court for heresy. Ginzburg uses the detailed trial records to reconstruct his thoughts. Ginzburg shows that the court's questions and Menocchio's own answers give a rare view of what a peasant thought.

3. IDEA 3

   Books shaped his thinking

   Menocchio read a range of printed books, interpreting them in his own way. Ginzburg shows how printing allowed ordinary people to encounter new ideas. Ginzburg suggests that printed books let readers like him question what they had been taught.

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