Today I finished the Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg. A unique book about Domenego Scandella, nicknamed Menocchio, a 16th century Italian peasant who read many books banned by the Church and developed strange ideas which got him in trouble with the Italian Inquisition. The title refers to his take on genesis: the world wasn't created by God- instead, matter coalesced from chaos like milk curdling into cheese. Just as maggots (worms) appear spontaneously in cheese (spontaneous generation of life wasn't debunked until the 19th century), so angels appeared in the cheese-matter, and one of them was God. Needless to say, the Church was not happy.
I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in religious history, peasant culture, and the spread of ideas. Ginzburg does an incredible job tracing where each of Menocchio's ideas likely came from (i.e. which books he probably read, and how he may have interpreted or misinterpreted individual passages to come up with his strange theology). Where he slightly goes overboard is in asserting that Menocchio was expressing ideas from peasant culture which had lain dormant since before Christianization. A claim like that needs evidence, and Ginzburg doesn't really supply any. But the rest of the research is excellent.
My favorite section has to be pages 54-56, in which Ginzburg reproduces, word for word, an interaction between Menocchio and one of his inquisitors as recorded in the Inquisition file itself. The inquisitor is trying to pin down Menocchio's conception of the nature of God, his agency and intellect, and how exactly he came into being and then created the world. This is incredible because it doesn't read like an interrogation- it's more like two friends discussing metaphysics in a pub. You can tell the inquisitor was genuinely fascinated by what Menocchio had to say.
This is a classic work of microhistory for a reason.
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