Book description
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…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Cheese and the Worms as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I love books that dig into how strange people were in the Middle Ages. They weren’t more or less like people today only with different clothes and feudalism, any more so than people in the US are just like Indonesians but with a different language and toilet paper. No book I have read brings this home better than Ginzburg’s history. Layer by layer, he peels back the mental world of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller who believed that the world began as a cheese-like mass in which angels appeared, like maggots emerging from rotting meat. This book literally changed my…
From Jack's list on The best books to get inside the heads of medieval men and women.
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