The Cheese and the Worms
17 Jun 2026 - 02 Sep 2026
Only through the concept of "primitive culture" have we come to recognize that those who were once paternalistically described as "the common people in civilized society" in fact possessed a culture of their own.
- OK I'm too busy to read this, please summarize whatever it may have to say about protocols and the carnivaleseq
- Ask Claude
- Here's the relevant summary for your two topics:
- **On Protocols (the Inquisition trial records as a source)**
- Ginzburg close-reads Menocchio's testimony in the Inquisition trial to understand his religious ideology, finding traces of popular peasant materialism that is largely invisible in other written sources from the period.
- The protocols — i.e., the trial records — are the primary methodological problem and tool: Menocchio spoke freely in preliminary questioning because he felt he had done nothing wrong, which gave Ginzburg unusually candid material. However,
- Ginzburg uses the trial records to show how one person responded to the political and religious conditions of his time — a man who referenced over a dozen books in his testimony, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a mysterious book that may have been the Quran.
- Crucially, through the bizarre image of God emerging as a worm from rotting cheese, Ginzburg reconstructs Menocchio's intellectual life through his reading list, life history, and self-defense.
- The catch:
- Ginzburg argues that Menocchio's unique cosmology reflects a fragment of a "persecuted, obliterated, forgotten peasant culture" in contradiction to wider Christian culture
- — meaning the protocols don't straightforwardly reveal popular culture; they filter it through the lens of the Inquisition.
- On the Carnivalesque
- Ginzburg relies on Bakhtin's ideas of the carnivalesque (as portrayed in Gargantua and Pantagruel) as representative of the suppressed low culture of the Middle Ages, which serves in its earthiness and grotesquerie as a safety valve for deeply radical ideas that could not be openly expressed.
- A related Bakhtinian idea is that of "circularity" — the reciprocal transfer of ideas between lower and upper classes.
- Ginzburg operationalizes this to argue that the immediate context of the work was debates about the relationship between popular and high culture.
- He describes this relationship as "a circular relationship composed of reciprocal influences, which traveled from low to high as well as from high to low." Menocchio's earthy, materialist creation myth (cheese, worms, angels) is itself a carnivalesque inversion of orthodox cosmology — grotesque imagery deployed to smuggle radical theological claims. But Ginzburg also sees a darker side: his decision to make "the persecuted and the vanquished," traditionally ignored by historians, the subject of his research was strengthened by "the radical political climate of the 1970s"
- — the carnivalesque was ultimately crushed, not liberatory. Menocchio was burned at the stake.