Overview

The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a mysterious book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed--just as cheese is made out of milk--and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. In a thoughtful new preface, Ginzburg offers his own corollary to Menocchio's story as he considers the discrepancy between the intentions of the writer and what gets written. The Italian miller's story and Ginzburg's work continue to resonate with modern readers because they focus on how oral and written culture are inextricably linked.

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Carlo Ginzburg has taught at the University of Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The recipient of the 2010 International Balzan Prize, he is author of The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. John Tedeschi is author, editor, and translator of a number of works on the history of religious intolerance and persecution in Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation. John Tedeschi is author, editor, and translator of a number of works on the history of religious intolerance and persecution in Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation. Anne Tedeschi is the translator of The Cheese and the Worms. Anne Tedeschi is the translator of The Cheese and the Worms. P. J. Ochlan is an Audie Award-winning, multiple Earphones Award-winning, and Voice Arts Award-nominated narrator of hundreds of audiobooks. His acting career spans more than thirty years and has also included Broadway, the NY Shakespeare Festival under Joseph Papp, critically acclaimed feature films, and television series regular roles.

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