Product Description

A survey of popular culture in 16th century Italy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #128631 in Books
• Published on: 1992-03-01
• Original language: Italian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review

"A wonderful book... Ginzburg is a historian with an insatiable curiosity, who pursues even the faintest of clues with all the zest of a born detective until every fragment of evidence can be fitted into place. The work of reconstruction is brilliant, the writing superbly readable, and by the end of the book the reader who has followed Dr. Ginzburg in his wanderings through the labyrinthine mind of the miller of the Friuli will take leave of this strange and quirky old man with genuine regret." -- J. H. Elliott, New York Review of Books

Customer Reviews

A miller's tale ...
One of my favorite books of all time. An account of the worldview of a medieval miller based on Inquisition records may not sound promising, but the evocation of how strange and different, yet how similar medieval men were is astonishing. In an age which thinks it has invented "pick and mix" religion, this acts as an important corrective. Ginzburg never abandons his miller completely, and you will be touched by his humanity as well as surprised by his views.
As a history graduate, I can honestly say that I have never enjoyed a history book more than this.

Historiography at its best!
Carlo Ginzburg was one of the first historians to put into practice anthropological ideas about culture as a historically transmitted system of meaning. These ideas were developed by Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and ultimately, Michel Foucault. In using Menocchio, Ginzburg makes a statement about making history from the point of view of the excluded, the liminal characters of society. In this sense, Menocchio's story ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a reflection and a statement about the way Italian society was constructed in the 16th century. All this from the point of view of those upon whom power was imposed.

Interesting, hampered by obscure writing style
Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg traces the story of one Menocchio, a peasant from northern Italy who was put on trial (and eventually burned at the stake) for heresy by the Italian inquisition in the 16th century. He puts forwards parts of the transcription of the trial, and we realize that Menocchio has some quite heterodox (and not totally consistent) views on theology and cosmology, suggesting a number of eclectic sources for his ideas. For example, he viewed the Earth as a sort of giant cheese and the angels as worms coming out of the cheese (hence the book's title). How an Italian peasant, without presumably much access to books, would get such views, Ginzburg asks. He traces the bookshelves of Menocchio, but he is unable to come up with a clear answer. For example, even though his cosmology seems to have been influenced by a reading of the Koran, that was not among the books he possessed. Ginzburg finally suggests that Menocchio was a recipient of an ancient oral tradition, perhaps going back to the prechristian past, that was not totally suppressed by the church in rural areas. The book deals with an interesting subject, but is unfortunately hampered by Ginzburg's deliberately obscure writing style. A more conventional storytelling would have helped.