The Cheese and the Worms, by Carlo Ginzburg,

 

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The history contained in this book is unique in that it is about the ideas, thoughts and actions of an insignificant and unimportant person who lived 450 years ago in rural northern Italy. The only reason this information is accessible to historians today is because he got on the wrong side of the local priest who turned him into the Inquisition, and the Inquisition kept detailed records of the arguments he made before the judges.

The individual upon whom this book is focused is Menocchio(1532–1599), also known as Domenico Scandella, who was an Italian miller and jack of many trades. Through the transcripts of two trials fifteen years apart we can perceive influence from books he read and a glimpse of popular culture and pre-Christian naturalistic peasant religions.

He was first tried for heresy in 1583, and initially he spoke freely because he didn’t think he had done anything wrong. (He was probably happy that somebody was interested in what he had to say.) At the end of that trial in 1584 he was forced to abjure his statements and spent another twenty months in prison. Released in 1586 he promised to uphold the teachings of the Church. He continued to carry on with life subject to some parol terms for a number of years, but apparently he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He would share his ideas with anybody who would listen. 

His ideas seem harmless to a modern reader. Most people apparently considered him to be a harmless talker, and there’s no indication that he was convincing anybody to think like him. He was arrested again as a lapsed heretic in 1598, and in 1599 he was declared a heresiarch and was burned at the stake.

The title of this book comes from Menocchio’s cosmology about the creation of the earth as indicated in the following quotation. 
… in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed — just as cheese is made out of milk — and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. 
His ideas seemed to be his own, and didn’t fit into any of the other schisms that were prevalent at the time. He certainly wasn’t a Lutheran, and though he had no respect for the authority of a State Church much as the Anabaptists, he didn’t believe in baptism (or any of the sacraments). In general he believed in moral living in this life and that the Church was guilty of oppression of common people.

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