The Cheese and the Worms
Ahern, John
In Brief The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century MILLER by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi, Johns Hopkins Univ., $14, 177pp. Losers don't write history...
...Ginzburg looks at his miller from a considerably more interesting perspective...
...His earlier works, especially the as yet untranslated / Benandanti, focused on present religion and agricultural cults in the Friuli, relating them to the vast, ancient body of unrecorded beliefs of European farmers...
...JOHN DOEBELE Ireland, too Staten Island, NY To the Editors: In J. Bryan Hehir's article, "Mr...
...Running on Empty, will be published in September by Doubleday...
...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance of being published...
...Today many historians fight that bias and try to write books about the losers, or the vast majority that never wins...
...confessions...
...RONALD Christ is the editor of Review, published by the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York...
...13], he says, "From Seoul to San Salvador, from Poland to Pretoria and from Sao Paulo to Salisbury, the Catholic church, often through its bishops, has been a voice and a force influencing war and peace, human rights and human needs in a world scarred by injustice and oppression...
...Losers don't write history books...
...that there have been instances of brutal treatment of individuals picked up for questioning on suspicion...
...that defendants were not permitted solicitors during the period in police custody...
...John and Anne Tedeschi's translation of Ginzburg's precise, lively Italian is exemplary...
...We know that the French publisher Cerf now has 270 volumes in his series, Christian Sources...
...Ginzburg is uniquely well qualified to read this text...
...A century ago a less perspicacious historian would have presented Menocchio as a rustic Giordano Bruno, and written a tract against the murderous intolerance of the church...
...The advice, however, is surely short-sighted...
...Has not Amnesty International in its, "Mission to Northern Ireland," published June 1978, admonished that there have been human rights violations in the detention centers...
...J. BRYAN HEHIR...
...JACK HOLLAND is the author of Too Long a Sacrifice (Dodd, Mead) and a new novel due in September, The Prisoner's Wife...
...They don't even leave much documentation for those who do, which is why History seems to some a high kind of imaginative literature, rather than the reliable chronicle of a religious or scientific force...
...By specifying the strategic debate in terms of its medical consequences, the physicians may touch the moral consciousness of citizens as a first step toward a more political address to the issues...
...J. BRYAN HEHIRin their debt...
...At Hiroshima the pope called upon scientists to lead the public debate on moral and technological issues...
...He shows how Menocchio would have read (or misread) his learned texts by placing him in the peculiar world of the sixteenth century when the wide diffusion of printed texts permanently altered everybody's ideas about authority, and also allowed oral tradition to emerge, becoming perceptible to those who had lived in its confines so unselfconsciously...
...More traditional historians would have tracked Menocchio's deeply felt, articulate and often inconsistent ideas to some bookish source, such as the humanists in nearby Padua...
...Continued from page 285) Menocchio, twice tried by the Inquisition for heresy and at last, at the insistence of Pope Clement VIII, executed for that "crime...
...The deepest truth of the nuclear age is that adversaries share as common ground the danger of destruction...
...and that maltreatment was undertaken in order to induce defendants to make incriminating statements or confessions...
...Ginzburg turns to high culture and popular culture, whose relationship he describes as symbiotic...
...JOHN AHERN Correspondence (Continued from page 258) interest in Christian sources...
...Ginzburg happily applies to Gramsci's model of dominant and subordinate classes many of the insights of mainly Anglo-American scholarship on oral and popular culture and folklore...
...But even if that battle has not been won entirely, the point has been...
...Menocchio's case is a fascinating one because he read, owned and borrowed books...
...that a majority of convictions in the non-jury courts are based on Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...Reagan and Catholic Apprehensions" [Feb...
...that due process is abridged...
...if they use it in opposition to the arms race, we will all be in their debt...
...While researching another book in a diocesan archive in Udine, north of Venice, he found the complete record of Menocchio's interrogation by the Inquisition...
...JOHN BRANIGAN Church/worldwatch (Continued from page 265) of the political climate in which the arms race is debated...
...JOHN AHERN teaches Italian literature at Stanford University...
...ROBERT PHILLIPS's third collection of poems...
...This is all to the good, but should not Northern Ireland be included among those areas where there is "injustice and oppression...
...We have lived through and, one hopes, learned from a period when not talking to others was regarded as a sign of political wisdom or strategic determination...
...Ginzburg expertly reconstructs his reading, and analyzes its intricate relation with the oral culture lived in...
...In the wake of Le Roy Ladurie, Braudel and the whole school of the Annales, and writing with the prophetic fervor of the best Italian Marxists, Carlo Ginzburg has given us a minor classic about an otherwise forgotten loser...
...and has not Cardinal O'Fiaic, Primate of Ireland, spoken out forcefully against the inhuman conditions under which Irish political prisoners have been living...
...The physicians do the political arena a service by opposing the argument that talking to the Soviets is inevitably against our best interests...
...FATHER JOHN B. SHEERIN, C.S.P., is a member of the Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington...
...The Cheese and the Worms recreates the inner and outer worlds of a sixteenth-century miller, (Continued on page 286) REVIEWERS A. J. BEITZINGER is a professor of government at the University of Notre Dame...
...The complexity and awesome danger of nuclear war is an obstacle to thinking about it in political or personal terms...
...It is strange that many people of Irish antecedents, religious and lay, interested in civil and human rights in Latin America and elsewhere, seem to avoid including Northern Ireland among areas where there is oppression and a violation of rights...
...John Paul II said at Hiroshima that "the time has come for our society and especially for the world of science to realize that the future of humanity depends as never before on our collective moral choices...
...To refuse to talk about that is not political determination but public deception...
...In the United States physicians are a community with a lot of unspent political capital...
...The third contribution touches the moral dimension of the arms race...
...By carefully noting his every word, they unwittingly provided a loser with documentation...
...It is time to begin a review of the sources of Christian social teaching, if we are really to understand it in order to put it into practice...
...The book he wrote is a complex, canny reading of the examiners' dialogue with their suspect...
...The result is an eloquent minor classic of historical writing, remarkable for the breadth and depth of its range...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 9
