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

The Cheese and the Worms is, by necessity, a highly inferential work of history. Are there any inferences about Menocchio’s life or world that Ginzburg makes that you disagree with? Why or why not? What are the strengths and weaknesses of Ginzburg’s inferential approach more generally?

Compare The Cheese and the Worms with another early work of microhistory, such as The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) by Natalie Zemon Davis. What do these studies have in common, and where do they diverge? Do you discern any defining characteristics of early microhistorical research?

What questions can microhistory answer that more traditional methods of historical study cannot, and how does The Cheese and the Worms demonstrate this potential?