The Cheese And The Worms: The Cosmos Of A Sixteenth-Century Miller

The internal conflict outlined by Ginzburg is this: Menocchio was deeply inclined to believe in a spiritual afterlife, even if he simultaneously believed in the materiality of the soul (72). This paradox might explain his decision to distinguish between a mortal soul and an immortal spirit. Indeed, Ginzburg finds that Menocchio was far more concerned with Paradise than with hell, and that his formulations of Paradise were also materialistic in nature, potentially derived from Islamic imagery he encountered in the Koran (72-73).

Ginzburg finds Menocchio’s ideals of Paradise to be intrinsically tied to his vision of religious reform, and asserts that these ideas were derived in large part from the words he read in Foresti’s Supplementum supplementi delle croniche. In particular, Menocchio’s self-image throughout the trial seems to mirror Foresti’s account of Martin Luther in the chronicle, yet another point of connection between peasant and elite intellectual culture within Menocchio’s worldview (75). Although it is unclear whether Menocchio was aware of these connections, and though he attempted to convince other villagers of his ideas, this effort seems to have been largely futile. Even within his own family, Menocchio seems to have recognized that his ideas had little traction (76).