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

In Chapter 25, Ginzburg turns his attention back to Menocchio’s baffling “cheese and worms” cosmogony. He focuses particularly on the implication of the cheese metaphor that creation could not have occurred ex nihilo, and finds the origins of this idea in Supplementum supplementi delle croniche. Chapter 26 is raw primary source material, an exchange between Menocchio and the Inquisitor, discussing the miller’s cosmogony and theogony. Menocchio asserts several things: Among them, that God existed in an unconscious, pseudo-fetal state within chaos prior to creation, that God’s will and power are distinct phenomena, and that chaos “moves itself.”

Having addressed the “cheese” aspect of the cosmogony, Ginzburg turns to the “worms.” He proposes that such imagery is reminiscent of a passage from Dante’s Divine Comedy, although it is unclear whether Menocchio ever read Dante. Setting this connection aside, he suggests that the worms may be nothing more than an illustrative analogy; just as he believed God to have spontaneously spawned from chaos, Early Modern cheesemakers would have perceived maggots to spontaneously generate from rotting curd (55). Ginzburg remarks on the similarity of this imagery to that of creation in the Hindu Vedas and the Kalmuck creation stories of Central Asia, and theorizes that the metaphor is evidence of orally-transmitted peasant spirituality (55).