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Books : The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
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The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by: Carlo Ginzburg List Price: $21.00 Vegetarian Books Price: $17.95 You Save: $3.05 (15%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 909 EAN: 9780801843877 ISBN: 0801843871 Label: The Johns Hopkins University Press Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 208 Publication Date: March 01, 1992 Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press Studio: The Johns Hopkins University Press Sales Rank: 32284 Related Items:
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Editorial Review: Product Description: A survey of popular culture in 16th century Italy. Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Nonsense Book with No Evidence and Weak LogicThe Cheese and the Worms has got to be the most ridiculously over-rated academic work of history of the past 3 decades. The author's central argument of the existence of an essentially unchanged Indo-European folk culture that spans both millenia and continents is both completely lacking in evidence and, from a theoretical view, patently ridiculous. You can't simply sit down and find vague similarities between what a 16th century miller says and what some guy 2000 years earlier said in India and then, without any evidence or even a compelling argument of how the expressed ideas would have been transmitted, claim that this is proof positive that a substrata of Indo-European popular culture formed the predominant mentalite of most ... Read More: Rating:  - Fascinating subject, hampered by obscure writing styleItalian historian Carlo Ginzburg traces the story of one Menocchio, a peasant from northern Italy who was put on trial (and eventually burned at the stake) for heresy by the Italian inquisition in the 16th century. He puts forwards parts of the transcription of the trial, and we realize that Menocchio has some quite heterodox (and not totally consistent) views on theology and cosmology, suggesting a number of eclectic sources for his ideas. For example, he viewed the Earth as a sort of giant cheese and the angels as worms coming out of the cheese (hence the book's title). How an Italian peasant, without presumably much access to books, would get such views, Ginzburg asks. He traces the bookshelves of Menocchio, but he is unable to come up with ... Read More: Rating: - Very InterestingResearching within the archives of the Inquisition in northeastern Italy, Ginzburg came across a set of records describing the trials of an obscure miller from the Friuli area. Menocchio, as he was known, repudiated a wide variety of conventional positions on religion, on politics, and even on cosmology. The title of the book reflects Menocchio's unusual and somewhat naturalistic idea about the origin of the universe. In Counter-Reformation Italy, these ideas were not merely unusual, they were regarded as actually dangerous. Following his second trial, in which Menocchio was found to be backsliding, he was executed. Ginzburg presents Menocchio as an autodidact synthesizing ideas from a variety of sources. Menocchio may have acquired ... Read More: Rating: - A rare view into the mind of a 16th century millerIt is rare that we can see how common people thought 500+ years ago (another source is the Icelandic Sagas). This book shows that books were read by common people, not just the leaders. In this case, this miller got into a lot of trouble by reading. Lets hope that our current freedom of thought is not restricted in the future. Rating: - Microhistory of the massesBorne of the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" provides a glimpse into the life of a miller in medieval Italy. No ordinary miller is 'Menocchio', however, as he is inquisitioned for his radical religious philosophies. In a time and place where Catholicism was undoubtedly the religion of Europe, Menocchio harbored unique ideas about religious doctrine, the teachings of the Catholic Church, and man's purpose. Although some of his many ideas contradict others that he had, he was well-read and surprisingly well-educated for a man of his station. As Ginzburg says, though, we must look to the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press as being major catalysts for such learning and religious evolution. Within the microhistory ... Read More: |
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