TEHRAN – “The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller” by Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has been published by Now.

The book originally published in 1976 has been co-translated by Abuzar Fattahizadeh and Mohammad-Javad Abdollahi. 

“The Cheese and the Worms” is a study of the popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. 

Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time.

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 Quran. 

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.”

The scholarly work is a notable example of cultural history, the history of mentalities and microhistory. It is “probably the most popular and widely read work of microhistory.”

Photo: Front cover of the Persian edition of Carlo Ginzburg’s book “The Cheese and the Worms”.

MMS/YAW