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

One of the key questions that Ginzburg sets out to answer in his study is how peasant culture interacted with elite culture in the 16th century. To do this, he must first affirm the existence of a peasant culture distinct from the elite one. This is a difficult task for many reasons, chiefly because there is very little historical record of peasant culture because of its predominantly oral nature, whereas elite culture is documented through a plethora of written sources. In Menocchio, however, Ginzburg finds the proof of a distinct peasant culture he is looking for.

Firstly, Ginzburg discerns discrepancies between the books Menocchio read and how he interpreted them. This disconnect, he argues, “continually leads us back to a culture that is very different from the one expressed on the printed page—one based on an oral tradition” (31). Furthermore, he finds that the inquisitors were completely unable to understand Menocchio’s cultural reference points and reasoning over the course of the trials. The two groups’ inability to understand one another is further evidence that there was a significant “gulf […] separating Menocchio’s cultural world from his inquisitors’” (88). Thus, Ginzburg identifies Menocchio as a microcosmic mouthpiece for the broader landscape of peasant culture, an aspect of cultural history which has been otherwise erased from the written record.