In reality it reflects a unified culture within which it is impossible to make clear-cut distinctions. It collected a series of tributes based on a so-called "list of hearths," and by means of "lots" organized local peasant militias. The way Menocchio had heard of the story of the three rings made the situation even more paradoxical. The two stages, medieval and modem, must not be understood as a single phenomenon. But in this particular case the function of the text was not at all secondary: 
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The Cheese and the Worms : Carlo Ginzburg : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Saints should be honored, my son, Because they have taken their precepts from Christ [. Friuli-Religious life and customs. God is nothing but a little breath, and whatever else man imagines him to be"; "Everything that we see is God, and we are gods"; "The sky, earth, sea, air, abyss, and hell, all is God"; "What did you think, that Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary? Moreover, the variety of texts that Menocchio later identified as pdg "sources" of his religious beliefs is as far removed as one can imagine from the rigid sectarian exclusiveness of the Anabaptists.
And as the story unfolds, the reader finds him- or herself feeling the same as the Inquisitors whose interroga- tions had brought it to the surface: It no longer consisted only ofMontereale, or Pordenone, or even Venice-the places of his tinzburg as a miller-but rather, India and Cathay and islands inhabited by cannibals, Pigmies, and men with the heads of dogs. I faced a similar problem years ago in the midst of research on witchcraft trials of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The Cheese and the Worms
But what was Menocchio's connection with Reformation groups and their ideas? All this suffices to explain Menocchio's words, even if he had not personally experienced the oppressive effects of Church ownership of land which had always been explicitly exempted from the reduction in rents introduced by the Venetian authorities.
Such institutions as the masnada form of serfdom had persisted until just the previous century, much longer than in neighboring areas. In this popular religion based on Christ's humanity and tthe, the natural and the supernatural, fear of anf and the drive for life, endurance of injustice and revolt against oppression were seen as being harmoniously fused.
The ancient medieval teh had preserved its proper legislative functions, even if actual power had been for some time in the hands of Venetian officials. But it's to these verses, rather than to the biblical text, that Menocchio is referring.
And then he argues and shouts in defense of his opinion. It is true that BoHeme suggested incidentally the existence of a gap between the pamphlet literature and the way in which it was in all probability read by the popular classes. A century or so later Menocchio probably would have been committed to an insane asylum, as someone affected by "religious delirium. The moral as well as gastronomic interchange of these terms good, bad transferred the attribution of sin from the killers to the killed.
To discuss Menocchio's case only within the limits of the history of mentalities would mean downgrading the strong rational element which is not necessarily identifiable with our own rationality in his vision of the world. But what renders Menocchio's case that much more complicated is the fact that these obscure popular elements are grafted onto an extremely clear and logical complex of ideas, from religious radicalism, to a naturalism tending toward the scientific, to utopian aspirations of social reform.
Try to do good and walk in carli path of my ancestors, and follow what Holy Mother Church commands": Oh how dearly I should love to have news Of someone who is in the other world, exclaims Caravia.
The mayor had to be absent from Portogruaro, but the judges were impatient to hear Menocchio again. The one that we have already cited from the Fioretto della Bibbia, however, was much more important.
The Travels, probably originally written in French at Liege, thw mid-fourteenth century, and attributed to a Sir John Mandeville, is basically a compilation based on geographical texts and on such medieval encyclopedias as the Speculum by Vincent of Beauvais.
And indeed, the inquisitor, the vicar general, and the mayor of Portogruaro must have been astonished at a miller who could expound his views with such assurance and force.
One example will illustrate the process of his long and laborious development. Nevertheless, in Menocchio's statements there's an indication of a more discriminating attitude concerning ajd. Significant, however, is Menocchio's scandalized reaction over the Bible that finished in the fire undoubtedly so that it would not be found in a possible search by the Holy Office.
We have seen what books Menocchio read. He dies shortly after; most of the verses of the poem describe the jeweler's dream in which Zanpolo, the buffoon, relates llis journey to paradise where he converses with St.
One need not, Zanpol, be so subtle As to see the membrane of an egg inside the hen [. There, among other things, they uttered "certain nefarious and diabolical words, particularly about cutting to pieces priests, gentlemen, 13 feudal lords, and citizens, and even of holding a Sicilian Vesper and many other filthy words.
Menocchio added immediately afterward: Its printing was concluded in Maywhile the colloquies that seemed destined to restore religious peace between Catholics and Thd were taking place in Regensburg. But the use of the term "culture" to define the complex of attitudes, beliefs, codes of behavior, etc. Because of this notion of a classless "collective mentality," the results of research on a narrow stratum of French society composed of cultivated individuals are extended by implication, with no one excepted, to encompass an entire century.
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