The Cheese And The Worms: The Cosmos Of A Sixteenth-Century Miller

Microhistory is a field of historical research that adopts a small scale of study, whether it be an individual event, a small community, or one person’s life experience. This method of research is a counterpoint to more traditional studies, which tend to focus on large-scale questions, trends, and high-impact events. Though such studies previously existed, most notably George R. Stewart’s 1959 work, Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory on the Final Attack at Gettysburg, the microhistorical method did not congeal into a coherent scholarly movement until roughly two decades later in the late 1970s.

In Northern Italy, a group of scholars, including Giovanni Levi and Edoardo Grendi, began to articulate the characteristics and aims of microhistory. Carlo Ginzburg is widely recognized as one of these Italian pioneers of the method; The Cheese and the Worms is one of microhistory’s earliest triumphs, and in 1979 he coauthored an article with Carlo Poni that “outlined a program for microhistory” (Tristano, Richard M. “Microhistory and Holy Family Parish: Some Methodological Considerations.” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 14, no. 3, Summer 1996, page 26).

At the time of writing The Cheese and the Worms, the term microhistory was not yet commonplace, and Ginzburg did not use it to describe his own work.