The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg

Abstract

In our last issue we published Carlo Ginzburg’s article, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things I know about it,” and in this edition we are publishing the foreword to the Italian edition of his masterwork, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller , which is considered one of the finest examples of microhistory. In his foreword, Ginzburg raises the issue of writing the history of subjugated classes and individuals, and the challenges confronting the historian, which go beyond the paucity of documentary sources and evidence. These include theoretical and methodological problems, such as the relationship between the culture of the dominant classes and popular culture; the extent to which sources that depict popular culture are distorted; how independent popular culture is of the dominant culture and how this independence or authenticity is manifest, the difference between “the collective mentality” and “popular culture”, and the relationship between the individual and the collective and between quantitative and qualitative research in this field.