The peasant oral culture and how Menocchio read

When I first read Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, I was struck by his incredibly close reading of the books Menocchio referenced to understand how Menocchio read them. Ginzburg’s method allowed him to demonstrate through this self-taught miller that reading was not simply a passive act, but that the reader could at times or, perhaps, “as usual, … aggressively distort the text” (47). Since my research focuses a lot on French perceptions of the Ottomans and (at that time at least) used 16^th- and 17^th-century non-fictional literature on Ottoman Empire, I was inspired by his approach. It opened my eyes that the books themselves tell us nothing of how they were received. As Ginzburg shows, Menocchio’s reading often forced the messages of the books to conform to his already held ideas and convictions (36). Ginzburg's method revealed the definitive gulf that can exist between the text itself and contemporaries' interpretation of it. 

After reading The Cheese and the Worms again for this class, the sources of these ideas and convictions—the peasant oral culture that has since been lost to history—were most striking. His argument is persuasive, but it sits uneasily with me. Much of his evidence is negative: the source of many of Menocchio’s ideas that merged with those from the books cannot be found in the literature, so they must have been drawn from some oral culture. This is a perfectly reasonable conclusion. Ginzburg even provides some evidence in the form of Scolio’s prophecy that shows similar discourses unavailable in the contemporary literary culture (117). Resorting to an oral culture lost to history seems to be a very convenient argument (the only option due to the lack of others), but I must remind myself that its convenience does not make it wrong. Indeed, it is difficult to dispute. So, no matter how uneasy I might be with the lack of available evidence, I am persuaded by his conclusions and inspired by his methods.