Product Description

A survey of popular culture in 16th century Italy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #134872 in Books
• Published on: 1982-01-28
• Original language: Italian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review

"A wonderful book... Ginzburg is a historian with an insatiable curiosity, who pursues even the faintest of clues with all the zest of a born detective until every fragment of evidence can be fitted into place. The work of reconstruction is brilliant, the writing superbly readable, and by the end of the book the reader who has followed Dr. Ginzburg in his wanderings through the labyrinthine mind of the miller of the Friuli will take leave of this strange and quirky old man with genuine regret." -- J. H. Elliott, New York Review of Books

Language Notes
Text: English, Italian (translation)

Customer Reviews

Groundbreaking historiographical analysis...
Having read the reviews already listed here, I believe the one major facet of this book has been downplayed. Dr. Ginzburg's approach is to utilize and interesting story scraped from the otherwise monotonous and one-sides Inquisitorial records from the Roman Inquisition. What is most important about this book, is that it demonstrates a separation of culture, call it "high" culture and "low" or "peasant" culture. We follow the great thinkers of the past two millenia from grade school through graduate studies, never fully attempt to delve into a concurrently extant peasant "history of ideas." What Dr. Ginzburg has displayed through this fascinating yet sad tale is that the great thinkers we know of, i.e., Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, Galileo, etc., are a representation of a literate educated class which by no means excludes a secondary ideology which flourished mostly thorugh an oral culture. Dr. Ginzburg seeks merely to bring our attention to this fact and more or less demonstrate the wealth of knowledge and study that has yet to be done in light of the fact. Menochio merely highlights the existance of long standing ideas which otherwise would have been lost to history were it not for "high" society's interest in synchretism. This book is therefore an eye-opener to anyone who believes that the great thinkers speak for everyone and that only they should be reserved for study.

Reconstructing the reconstuction
This is a spectacular application of the clue-based evidentiary paradigm, in which Ginzburg pursues lead after lead in an effort to reconstruct the world view of an outspoken miller dragged in front of Roman inquisitors in 16th-century Italy -- and then to reconstruct the origins of this world view in, simultaneously, peasant oral culture, secular philosophy, and Reformationist thought. One might, of course, quibble with particularities, and Ginzburg seems a little too sure of many of his speculations, a confidence which he attempts to slip by his readers with words like "clearly" and "undoubtedly." But for anyone interested in the way in which big pictures are inferred from small clues, this is exquisite reading.

Historiography at its best!
Carlo Ginzburg was one of the first historians to put into practice anthropological ideas about culture as a historically transmitted system of meaning. These ideas were developed by Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and ultimately, Michel Foucault. In using Menocchio, Ginzburg makes a statement about making history from the point of view of the excluded, the liminal characters of society. In this sense, Menocchio's story ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a reflection and a statement about the way Italian society was constructed in the 16th century. All this from the point of view of those upon whom power was imposed.