The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller Book

This English translation of Carlo Ginzburg's popular history 'Il formaggio e i Vermi,' is a lively and ingenious attempt to reconstruct the intellectual world of a 16th century miller who lived out his days in a remote Friulian village. Menocchio was a simply family man..a miller by trade, the father of 11 children, briefly the mayor of his village. But he was also a voracious reader, a man who, possessed of an extraordinary curiosity, constructed a radical cosmology and dared to present it to the world. In 1599 he was burned at the stake as a heretic. This book has been rightly hailed as one of the most significant recent contributions to a burgeoning field of study, the popular culture of early-modern Europe. Ginzburg combines Inquisition transcripts (which, like modern screenplays, record gesture and tone as well as dialogue) with his own scholarly detective work to animate the stubborn miller's confusing, colorful personality.Read More