The Cheese and the Worms Book Review Essay

Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller explores the trials of supposed heretic Domenico Scandella. Better known as Menocchio, The Cheese and the Worms details his extensive beliefs about mistruths in religion and is written as a micro history of the events of his trial. At a time when religion and God were thought of as pure fact, Menocchio doubted their supreme existence and this lead to his death by burning. When reviewing Ginzburg’s account of the trials, the sources of his many ideas come to light and these ideas show that the Catholic Church and its members were scared the most by Menocchio’s ideas about the origins of earth.

The 16th century was a time of creativity, discovery, exploration, and invention. The Cheese and the Worms, written by Carlo Ginzburg, tells the story of Domenico Scandella. The book explores Scandella’s, otherwise known as Menocchio, world-view at the time. Menocchio was a miller who was tried for his unorthodox religious views and eventually burnt at the stake for heresy in 1599. During this time, Menocchio was seen as special as he was a peasant who could read, a peasant who had an education. Ginsburg’s display of Menocchio’s views gives the reader an insight into peasant culture. The peasant culture experienced many grievances as they suffered in their daily lives with little opportunity for survival. Their only opportunity of survival was working for landlords on the land. Peasants had little to no money and it did not help that they were being controlled by the church. The people were unaware that history was occurring but the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Inquisition, and other historical moments during the time were all relevant to the typical European peasant Menocchio as most of his ideas were caught in the currents of the 16th century.

Faith operates in a unique way by providing the average, the noble, or the distasteful with a means to understand the world we inhabit. However, our worldly experiences also operate as a means to understanding the complexities of our faith. For St. Augustine, faith provides more questions than answers, but consequently leads to his life as a bishop and eventually sainthood. For some, however, the Bible provides the answers to all the questions that go unanswered by common sense. In St. Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine is able to further understand himself and his faith in Christ by reflecting on anecdotes of his past. Conversely, the Bible’s use of etiology provides spiritual justification for physical realities.

As a text written in the early middle ages, the Canon Episcopi by Regino of Prüm was revolutionary in the fact that it exemplified a growing skepticism for magic within the Christian community, and most importantly, it served as a strict call to arms for church officials to identify and eliminate practices of magic within parish communities. As a major theological text in the time where Christianity is finally solidifying doctrine, the Canon Episcopi should both draw upon existing ideas of its predecessors and shape the theological works of its successors. While the works of other theological minds show evidence of a common theme or influence, there is still extreme variability and sometimes even direct opposition to Regino’s themes. While

If you were at a university at this time, you would follow the religious standards, just as I could never get out of going to Friday mass at HGA. Nowadays, religion is a touchy topic. It is left to the discretion of the individual whether or not he or she wants to follow the practices and how closely. Church and state are now separated as to avoid major conflicts. Peter Abelard questions the theological teachings of medieval universities and is criticized for it. He says “Is God one, or no?” At this time scriptures were not to be questioned and were considered to be true. As we know now, science has become a major source of answers in society. Anyway, Abelard brings a whole new dimension to the table when he questions god’s existence and some of the things that the church stands for. The whole basis is to use logic and reason to ponder things in a philosophical fashion. This faith vs. reason debate involved Abelard and others who felt that god was in a persons being, or heart. Academia took up most of the students daily and weekly lives. Scholars took full advantage of down time to relax and enjoy themselves.

“About that time the depravity of the heretics called Albigenses, who dwelt in Gascony, Arumnia, and Albi, gained such power in the parts about Toulouse, and in the kingdom of Aragon, that they not only practiced their impieties in secret as was done elsewhere, but preached their erroneous doctrine openly, and induced the simple and weak-minded to conform to them.”

It may be possible, if the monstrous rhetoric could be traced to its origin, to establish a type of meta-structure by which to identify uses of language and metaphor which rely on the monstrous to create difference or marginality. A brief look into the European origins of cannibalism, not as a practice but as a metaphorical construction, leads back to the Saturn myth. Again, Zika notes the use of the Saturn myth as the “explicit basis for [the] association between witch and cannibal,” and notes the similarity between depictions of the god who ate his own kind and depictions of both witches and cannibals. Sociologically, marginalized classes of people tended to be associated with Saturn throughout the Middle Ages, including “criminals, cripples, beggars, the elderly and low-born, the poor, and those involved in vulgar and dishonorable trades”; by the time of Columbus, the category of “Saturn’s children” had been expanded to include “the dead, magicians, and witches.” It is also easy to see how the fear of consumption, so plainly manifested in the Saturn myth, also manifested in blatantly similar ways in a variety of Christian metaphors from the sixteenth century. For instance, hell was often depicted as an all-devouring mouth that opened as a cleft in the earth, and many popular representations of Satan, including Dante’s in the Inferno, depict him as a figure who consumes the bodies of sinners, often with limbs still hanging from his slavering jaws. Such imagery

Running for elected office is a daunting task, for every candidate. Criticism is a huge part of the job. Hearing your perspective “flaws” from residents you’re fighting to represent is a humbling experience & not for the faint hearted. Reading something negative about you, is like taking a punch in the throat. However, it can be an amazing tool to learn from, no matter how painful. Being uncomfortable is good.

Theology in the middle ages, was the leading fascination to the human minds especially the theologians or more specifically the scholastics. Some of the scholastics who were fascinated by God are well known and those people are St. Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas. Thus far, the two scholastics have interesting theories on knowing god but only one is better than the other to prove that god exists. Thomas Aquinas (while disliking the idea) and St. Bonaventure try to establish this by pointing out reason, revelation and eventually knowing god.

Many modern views stem from the development of Christianity and its articulation in the Middle Ages.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time of great controversy for medieval scholars. New systems of thought were being developed and implemented that challenged the accepted teachings of the church. Some fought to preserve tradition, others fought to destroy it, while still others sought to find a common ground between the two. The greatest controversy of the times, it can be said, was that of faith and reason. Most philosophical debate revolved around these and to a lesser extent the opposition of realists and nominalists on the question of universals. The type of philosophy that was being taught in the Christian schools of the time has been given the

Discussing the constitution’s declaration on understanding the mysteries of faith, Lonergan writes, “Out of the Augustinian, Anselmian, Thomist tradition, despite an intervening heavy overlay of conceptualism, the first Vatican council retrieved the notion of understanding.” Lonergan affixes a footnote to the word conceptualism; it reads, “The key issue is whether concepts result from understanding or understanding results from concepts.” Lonergan’s reference to conceptualism is intriguing for two reasons. First, Joseph Kleutgen, a chief author of the constitution, is the recipient of the charge of conceptualism in the writings of some philosophers, such as Étienne Gilson. It is noteworthy, then, that Lonergan does not find conceptualism to be operative in at least one of the constitution’s key declarations: the possibility of some understanding of the mysteries of faith. Second, although Lonergan’s emphasis here is on the overlay of conceptualism preceding the council, I must note that in other texts he speaks of its prevalence following the council.

During the medieval period in philosophy, the existence of God was a philosophical topic that was shared by most of the well-known philosophers and theologians of the time. The very name "medieval" (meaning, "the in-between time") philosophy suggests the tendency of modern thinkers to go directly from Aristotle to the Renaissance era. What seems to justify this attitude is the tendency of philosophers during this period to seek truth along with orthodoxy.

The early theologians were leaders of a Christian audience who came to be known as the “apostolic fathers”—some were men believed to have known an apostle and were trusted as being reliable and truthful teachers. Many of these apostolic fathers fought for the faith up to their deaths as martyrs. According to Roger Olson, they created Christian theology by protecting the faith; they came to be that bridge between “Christian thinkers who argue the faith reasonably and even philosophically, and Christian thinkers who saw doing so as a dangerous endeavor.” Numerous church fathers attempted to show the similarities

Scholasticism, which experienced its height around 1250, was the conjunction of faith and reason directed toward understanding the contradictions in the bible and Church teachings. The goal was to strengthen the Church’s teachings by validating them against argument and critical analysis (at least more critically than previously had been allowed with the sole goal of producing results positive toward the Church.) There were warnings made by Anselm of Canterbury that reason and religious studies don’t blend well since religious studies should be based on faith and not reason. It is important to note that the majority of scholars, philosophers and thinkers were theologians ecclesiastically employed, and that the educational institutions