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A survey of popular culture in 16th century Italy.
Nonsense Book with No Evidence and Weak Logic
| Customer Rating:   | The Cheese and the Worms has got to be the most ridiculously over-rated academic work of history of the past 3 decades. The author's central argument of the existence of an essentially unchanged Indo-European folk culture that spans both millenia and continents is both completely lacking in evidence and, from a theoretical view, patently ridiculous.
You can't simply sit down and find vague similarities between what a 16th century miller says and what some guy 2000 years earlier said in India and then, without any evidence or even a compelling argument of how the expressed ideas would have been transmitted, claim that this is proof positive that a substrata of Indo-European popular culture formed the predominant mentalite of most of the population of Europe throughout the latter ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. That's nonsense.
Besides the obvious paucity of evidence, the author has a seriously deficient understanding of how popular culture works. Popular culture, whether modern or ancient, is simply NOT static over millenia of time and over thousands of miles of geography. Did premodern popular culture evolve more slowly than culture today? Yes, it probably did, and it also long retained certain features (particularly features tied to technology constraints and the natural world) -- but it did change. In fact, careful historical analysis of popular culture during the early modern period, based on extensive use of archival material, has shown that pre-modern popular culture actually seems to evolve quite a bit more quickly than was previously thought. The notion of an unchanging rural European culture, developed by late 19th century intellectuals, simply doesn't hold up when confronted with the actual evidence. Economic patterns change, elements of elite culture sift down and are adopted/incorporated by the populace, different foods are introduced, marriage and family patterns shift, devotional practices evolve, and so on -- and here I am talking only of diachronic issues, let alone geographic diversity.
One cannot simply do as Ginzburg has done and find some aspect of early modern European popular culture and then, with no evidence whatsoever to support one's supposition, assume that this feature extends indefinately into the medieval past. When thinking about history, it is always of great importance never to assume that trends move in a straight progression -- they don't, they go up and down and this way and that. Heresy is a great example. There is always a certain amount of popular heresy present in medieval Europe, but the nature of the beliefs, the organization of the heretics, their geographic foci, etc. all changes over time.
The Cheese and the Worms was a success because it fit the Baby Boom generation of academics anti-hierarchical ideology, not because it was good scholarship. There was an element of that generation that wanted to believe that the 'true' popular culture of Europe had nothing to do with the church or literature or anything else. Instead, they wanted to believe that the 'true' culture consisted of some eternal Indo-European folkloric belief system and that peasants merely gave superficial lip service to the 'impositions' of the elites (Christian faith in particular). The Cheese and the Worms told them what they already wanted to believe, so they believed it.
If you want a book on medieval popular culture that A) was written by someone with both intelligence and common sense and B) actually has genuine evidence for what the author claims (imagine that!), read Medieval Popular Culture, by Aron Gurevich. Giovanni and Lusanna by Gene Brucker is also a good, light little book that provides a window into the culture of Renaissance townsfolk in Italy.
Don't waste your time with Ginzburg. He's not an historian -- he's an idealogue. |
Fascinating subject, hampered by obscure writing style
| Customer Rating: | | 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. He is out to show himself a postmodern writer, but a more conventional storytelling would have been better. |
Very Interesting
| Customer Rating: | Researching within the archives of the Inquisition in northeastern Italy, Ginzburg came across a set of records describing the trials of an obscure miller from the Friuli area. Menocchio, as he was known, repudiated a wide variety of conventional positions on religion, on politics, and even on cosmology. The title of the book reflects Menocchio's unusual and somewhat naturalistic idea about the origin of the universe. In Counter-Reformation Italy, these ideas were not merely unusual, they were regarded as actually dangerous. Following his second trial, in which Menocchio was found to be backsliding, he was executed.
Ginzburg presents Menocchio as an autodidact synthesizing ideas from a variety of sources. Menocchio may have acquired some ideas from Anabaptist radicals who had been active in the Friuli. Other ideas seem to have come from an eclectic, though limited, array of books. As Ginzburg points out, this is an example of the impact of printing. It brought such books as Mandeville's travels and possibly even the Koran into the hands of a lowly miller. Most controversially, Ginzburg argues that many of Menocchio's ideas result from or were influenced by a common European peasant world view whose nature has been largely lost to us. This is an interesting hypothesis which Ginzburg defends very well but it can only be a hypothesis. Neither Ginzburg nor anyone else has the data to evaluate this idea properly. It may be simply that Menocchio was a village crank; an intelligent man with relatively unique ideas.
Regardless of the final interpretation, this well written book provides an interesting view of life in Counter-Reformation Italy. |
A rare view into the mind of a 16th century miller
| Customer Rating: | | It is rare that we can see how common people thought 500+ years ago (another source is the Icelandic Sagas). This book shows that books were read by common people, not just the leaders. In this case, this miller got into a lot of trouble by reading. Lets hope that our current freedom of thought is not restricted in the future. |
Microhistory of the masses
| Customer Rating: | | Borne of the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" provides a glimpse into the life of a miller in medieval Italy. No ordinary miller is 'Menocchio', however, as he is inquisitioned for his radical religious philosophies. In a time and place where Catholicism was undoubtedly the religion of Europe, Menocchio harbored unique ideas about religious doctrine, the teachings of the Catholic Church, and man's purpose. Although some of his many ideas contradict others that he had, he was well-read and surprisingly well-educated for a man of his station. As Ginzburg says, though, we must look to the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press as being major catalysts for such learning and religious evolution. Within the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" is most fascinating when we ask the question: Was this an isolated phenonmenon or was this a reflection of many people's views? The answer, I suppose, lies with Menocchio, but there is still much to be gleaned from this book. |
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