6 ideas
Ginzburg argues that in preindustrial Europe peasant culture and high culture influenced each other in a circular relationship, with influences traveling from low to high as well as from high to low. He supports this through convergences between Menocchio's ideas, those of other 'heretical' commoners, and some learned figures who also departed from Counter-Reformation norms.
Menocchio's accounts of the books he read differ considerably from what those books actually say. Ginzburg concludes that he did not simply absorb ideas from print but pulled out fragments and reworked them to articulate views he already held. The gap between source and paraphrase is treated as evidence of the reader's own interpretive frame.
Ginzburg argues that the printing revolution made books available to a village miller and so brought his oral peasant culture into contact with literate culture. Print did not supply his core ideas, on this account, but gave him vocabulary and material with which to express them.
Ginzburg argues that the Reformation's challenge to traditional authorities and doctrines gave Menocchio the courage to voice his views openly. He holds that the views themselves did not derive from Reformation theology but from a substratum of peasant beliefs, perhaps centuries old, that had never been wholly wiped out.
Interrogated by the Inquisition, the Friulian miller Menocchio described the origin of the world as a chaos that coagulated like cheese curdling from milk, with worms appearing in it that became the angels. Ginzburg reads this materialist cosmogony, built from everyday rural experience, as an expression of a persistent peasant religious current rather than mere personal eccentricity. Menocchio was tried twice and eventually executed.
Inquisition trial transcripts, produced by the authorities who suppressed Menocchio, are read against their purpose to reconstruct the worldview of an otherwise undocumented peasant. A single deeply examined individual is used as a window onto a wider popular culture, while Ginzburg acknowledges that such a case is exceptional. He also treats the case as illustrating the suppression of peasant culture from the mid-sixteenth century, after which he suggests exchange between popular and high culture declined.