| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £3.40
Trade in The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £3.40, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
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 )Ginzburg has excavated a marvelous and melancholy tale. Lay readers know that historical work of this order requires formidable skills and dogged research... Ginzburg's discovery of Menocchio is a dazzling entry into the historical world of popular culture.
(Lauro Martines )Product Description
The Cheese and the Worms is a study of the popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time.
For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
As frequently happens, this research, too, came about by chance. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
As frequently happens, this research, too, came about by chance. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
Format:Paperback
Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian historian of the early-modern period, first published The Cheese and the Worms in 1976. The book is an early example of the emerging and now ubiquitous cultural history, but it is also credited with having started micro-history. Micro-history, a movement more specifically popular in Italian academia, consists of the interpretation of ultra-specific subjects, of ordinary events and individuals, for the light they might shed on broader historical subjects. Another example might include Robert Darnton's Great Cat Massacre, dealing with French popular culture in the ancien régime.
Here Ginzburg goes through the records of two Inquisition trials of the late sixteenth-century. The individual on trial is Domenico Scandella, a miller from a small village in Venetia. Scandella was in many ways special. He was literate, to begin with. And he had very set and unorthodox notions about the cosmos, creation, the Trinity, the soul, and many other things. He preached to fellow villagers and strangers alike, and on occasion defied the clergy. His story is fascinating in its own right: Ginzburg takes us through the books the miller read, what he appears to have taken away from them and how, his social views, what can be known of his private fate. And it also resonates with broader contemporary change: the Reformation and counter-Reformation, the growth and repression of heretical movements in Italy, social and political upheaval in the region. (The book, abundantly footnoted, is nevertheless accessible to the non-academic reader and is moreover an excellent yarn). Yet Ginzburg makes even more ambitious claims. According to him, Scandella's ideas were derived from a long-held peasant oral tradition, a tradition that had for centuries survived and adapted to Christianity but was finally being threatened by the diffusion of print. This credo, according to Ginzburg, was pagan in origin and pan-European. Each reader will be left to judge whether the miller's story can sustain such claims, and micro-history its own, bold aspirations.
Here Ginzburg goes through the records of two Inquisition trials of the late sixteenth-century. The individual on trial is Domenico Scandella, a miller from a small village in Venetia. Scandella was in many ways special. He was literate, to begin with. And he had very set and unorthodox notions about the cosmos, creation, the Trinity, the soul, and many other things. He preached to fellow villagers and strangers alike, and on occasion defied the clergy. His story is fascinating in its own right: Ginzburg takes us through the books the miller read, what he appears to have taken away from them and how, his social views, what can be known of his private fate. And it also resonates with broader contemporary change: the Reformation and counter-Reformation, the growth and repression of heretical movements in Italy, social and political upheaval in the region. (The book, abundantly footnoted, is nevertheless accessible to the non-academic reader and is moreover an excellent yarn). Yet Ginzburg makes even more ambitious claims. According to him, Scandella's ideas were derived from a long-held peasant oral tradition, a tradition that had for centuries survived and adapted to Christianity but was finally being threatened by the diffusion of print. This credo, according to Ginzburg, was pagan in origin and pan-European. Each reader will be left to judge whether the miller's story can sustain such claims, and micro-history its own, bold aspirations.
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Terrific insight!
In the cheese and the worms, ginzburg gives terrific insight into how ones social status defines their belief system. Read more
Published on 11 July 1999
phenomenal
expertly intriguing, unparalleled, and remarkably spell-binding.........."The Cheese and The Worms" is a must-read book for everyone and anyone who loves great... Read more
Published on 19 Nov 1998
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > History > Britain & Ireland > Ireland
- Books > History > Britain & Ireland > Norman and Medieval 1001-1500
- Books > History > Cultural History
- Books > History > Europe > Italy
- Books > History > Europe > Reformation In Europe
- Books > History > Europe > Vikings, Dark Ages, Medieval Europe 501-1500
- Books > History > Religious History > Christianity
- Books > History > Social & Economic History
- Books > History > World History > 1501-1750
- Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
