I originally found myself frustrated with The Cheese and the Worms because I felt
as though Ginzburg was making Menocchio’s view on religion out to be absolutely
insane. However, while I think Menocchio’s
analogy of the angels being the worms is a pretty bad one, I still felt like I
knew where he was trying to go with it. It didn’t seem like Menocchio meant the
analogy as literally as Ginzburg initially made it seem. However, I was relieved when Ginzburg later
came to the aid of Menocchio and explained what exactly Menocchio might have
meant through this awkward but not outlandish analogy. I think that Ginzburg laid out the book this
way to make for a better read, which is something that I really appreciated.
Ginzburg not only made the story a really enjoyable read, but he also brought
in details from outside sources in a delightful way. One way in which he did so was by explaining
the “doctrine of the spontaneous generation of life from inanimate matter,
fully accepted by all the intellectuals of the day” (54). I expected this explanation to pop up at some
point during the book since it seems so relevant and fundamental to the entire
story and Menocchio’s analogy, but I didn’t know when this doctrine was
actually held or when it was disproven, which I learned from this book. So, while this explanation was appreciated
but also somewhat expected, Ginzburg really blew me away when he caught an
instance in which Menocchio slightly altered what he read in “chapter 148 of
Mandeville’s Travels” (43). Whereas in Travels the inhabitants of the “island of Dondun” believed that it
was a sin to allow a man to grow thin in his lifetime, Menocchio somehow
twisted this into believing that if a man tasted bad then he had sinned a lot
during life. I think this was my
favorite part of the book. While there’s
obviously no way that I’ll be able to do what Ginzburg has done for my final
paper, I learned a lot about microhistory from this book and will definitely
look to it for inspiration.
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