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

Chapter 12 is comprised of the list of books Menocchio is known to have read in his lifetime, based on the information in the trial records. They are as follows: the vernacular Bible, Il Fioretto della Bibbia, Rosario della Gloriosa Vergine Maria by Alberto da Castello, a translation of Legenda Aurea by Jacopo de Voragine, Historia del giudicio, a translation of Mandeville’s Travels, Il sogno dil Caravia, Supplementum supplementi delle croniche compiled by Jacopo Filippo Foresti, Lunario al modo di Italia calculato composto nella città di Pesaro dal ecc. mo dottore Marino Camilo de Leonardis, a censored copy of Boccaccio's Decameron, and a mysterious book alleged to be the Koran. This list should not be taken as an exhaustive account of Menocchio’s reading materials, since it is possible that many texts went unmentioned over the course of his testimony (27).

Before turning to textual analysis, Ginzburg attempts to trace the book-trading community within Montereale in order to understand how Menocchio accessed the books that informed his thinking. Nearly all the books on the list were borrowed from unexpected community members—Menocchio’s uncle, a female neighbor, a local priest, to name a few—illustrating that even within remote peasant villages, thriving communities of readers existed (29).