threat to the faith of his fellow villagers. In January 1599, at one of its congregations, the Holy Office of the Friuli decided to summon the "offender," namely Menocchio. But even this resolve was dropped.
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And yet, the conversation reported by Lunardo suggests that Menocchio's outward obedience to the rites and sacraments of the Church disguised a stubborn loyalty to his old ideas. At about the same time, a certain Simon, a converted Jew who wandered about subsisting on charity, turned up in Montereale and was given shelter by Menocchio. The two talked about religious questions all through the night. Menocchio said "enormous things concerning the faith": that the Gospels had been written by priests and monks "because they have nothing better to do," and that the Madonna before marrying St. Joseph "had borne two other creatures, and because of this St. Joseph did not want to accept her as his bride." Basically, these were the same subjects that he had brought up with Lunardo on the square at Udine: an attack against the parasitism of the clergy, the rejection of the Gospel, the denial of Christ's divinity. In addition to this, however, that night he had also talked of a "most beautiful book," which unfortunately he had lost, and which Simon "judged was the Koran."
It may have been Menocchio's rejection of the central dogmas of Christianity—and principally that of the Trinity—that had led him, like other heretics of this period, to turn with curiosity to the Koran. Unfortunately, Simon's identification isn't definite, and in any case we don't know what Menocchio took from that mysterious "most beautiful book." Certainly, he was convinced that eventually his heresy would be discovered: "he knew that he would die because of it," he had confided to Simon. But he didn't want to flee since a man who had stood as godfather with him, Daniele de Biasio, had offered surety for him with the Holy Office fifteen years before: "otherwise he would have fled to Geneva." So he had decided to stay in Montereale. He was already looking ahead to the end: "at his death, some Lutherans will learn of it, and will come to collect the ashes."
Who knows what "Lutherans" Menocchio had in mind? Perhaps a group with which he had maintained clandestine ties—or some individual he might have met many years before and who had then dropped out of sight. The aura of martyrdom in which Menocchio envisioned his own
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death makes one think that all this talk was nothing more than the pathetic fancies of an old man. After all, he had nothing left. He was alone now: his wife and his closest son were dead. He must not have been on good terms with his other children: "And if my children want to go their own way, good luck to them," he declared disdainfully to Simon. But that mythical Geneva, the home (or so he thought) of religious freedom, was too far away; this, and his tenacious loyalty to a friend who had stood by him in a moment of difficulty, had kept him from flight. Evidently, on the other hand, he couldn't repress his passionate curiosity about things pertaining to the faith. So he lingered there awaiting his persecutors.
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In fact, a few months later a new denunciation against Menocchio ^* reached the inquisitor. It appears that he had uttered a blasphemy that traveled from mouth to mouth, from Aviano to Pordenone, provoking scandalized reactions. An innkeeper of Aviano, Michele del Turco, called Pignol, was questioned: seven or eight years before (he had been told) Menocchio had exclaimed: "if Christ had been God he would
have been a ... to have allowed himself to be put on the cross____" "He did
not express what Christ would have been," the innkeeper added, "but I gathered that he meant to say that Christ would have been an ass (coglione), to use that ugly word. . . . When I heard such words, my hair stood on end, and I changed the subject immediately so as not to hear such things, because I consider him to be worse than a Turk." He concluded that Menocchio "still persisted in those old opinions of his."
By now it was no longer just the inhabitants of Montereale who told one another the things Menocchio had said: the fame of this miller, whom not even the prisons of the Holy Office had succeeded in leading back to the straight and narrow, had gone beyond the small circle of the village. His provocative questions, his blasphemous jests were repeated sometimes after the lapse of years: "Oh, how can you believe that Christ or God Almighty was the son of the Virgin Mary if the Virgin Mary was a whore?" "How can it be that Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit if he was borne by a whore?" "Saint Christopher is greater than God since he carried the whole world on his back." (Curiously, the same sally occurs in a book that Menocchio certainly never saw, the collection of emblems, riddled with heretical overtones, by the Bolognese humanist Achille Bocchi.) "I believe that he was wrong-headed, and that he did not dare to speak out because he was afraid," said Zannuto Fasseta of Montereale
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who had heard Menocchio "make music." But the usual impulse again drove Menocchio to talk about religious questions with the other villagers. One day, while returning from Menins to Montereale, he had asked Daniel lacomel: "What do you think God is?" Embarrassed or taken aback, the other replied, "I don't know." "He is nothing but air," Menocchio instantly interjected. He was turning his old ideas over and over in his mind; he hadn't given up. "Can't you understand, the inquisitors don't want us to know what they know." He, however, felt capable of standing up to them: "I'd like to say four words of the Pater Noster before the father inquisitor, and see what he would say and answer."
This time the inquisitor must have thought that Menocchio had gone too far. Toward the end of June 1599, he was arrested and confined in the prison at Aviano. A little later he was transferred to Portogruaro. On 12 July he appeared before the inquisitor, fra Gerolamo Asteo, the vicar of the Bishop of Concordia, Valerio Trapola, and the mayor of the place, Pietro Zane.
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"After having led a certain old man from prison ..." the notary began. Fifteen years had passed since Menocchio had been questioned by the Holy Office the first time. In the interval there had also been the three years spent in prison. He was an old man by now: thin, his hair had turned white, his beard was gray and turning white, and, as always, he was dressed as a miller with a garment and cap pale gray in color. He was sixty-seven years old. He had had many jobs after his condemnation: "I have been a sawyer, miller, innkeeper, I have kept, a school for children to learn the abacus and reading and writing, and I also play the guitar at festivals." In other words, he had tried to get along by making use of his skills—including knowing how to read and write, which had helped to get him into trouble. In fact, to the inquisitor who asked him if he had ever been tried by the Holy Office, he replied: "I was summoned . . . and was interrogated on the Creed and about other fantasies that had come into my head because I had read the Bible and because I have a keen mind. But I have always been a Christian, and remain so."
His tone was submissive—"fantasies"—accompanied, however, by the usual prideful awareness of his own intellectual capacities. He explained in detail how he had fulfilled the penances imposed upon him,
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how he had gone to confession and had taken communion, how he had occasionally left Montereale but always with the inquisitor's permission. He apologized only in regard to the habitello: "I swear upon my faith that on feast days sometimes I wore it and sometimes not; and on work days in winter when it was cold I always wore it, but underneath," since by showing it, "I lost a lot of money not being called to do assessments and other jobs .. . because men considered me excommunicated when they saw that garment, and so I did not wear it." In vain he had begged the father inquisitor but "he would not give me permission to remove the habit."
When they asked him if he had continued to have doubts about those questions for which he had been condemned, Menocchio couldn't lie. Rather than uttering an outright denial, he admitted, "many fantasies came into my head, but I never wanted to pay attention to them, nor have I ever taught anyone bad things." And to the inquisitor who pressed him, asking if he had ever "discussed articles of the faith with anyone, and who were they, and on what occasion and where," he replied that he had spoken "jokingly with some about the articles of the faith, but truthfully I do not know with whom, or where, or when." It was an imprudent reply. The inquisitor rebuked him severely: "How is it that you were joking about matters of the faith? Is it proper to joke about the faith? What do you mean by this word 'jokingly'?" "Saying some lie," Menocchio replied lamely. "What lie were you saying? Come, speak up clearly!" "I truthfully cannot say."
But the inquisitor pressed on with his questions. "I don't know," Menocchio said, "someone may have misinterpreted it, but I have never believed anything that is against the faith." He tried to return blow for blow. He hadn't said that Christ had been incapable of descending from the cross: "I believe that Christ had the power to descend." He hadn't said that he didn't believe in the Gospel: "I believe that the Gospel is the truth." And here he took another false step: "I did indeed say that priests and monks who have studied made the Gospels pretending that it came from the Holy Spirit." The inquisitor pounced on this: Had he really said this? When, where, to whom? And who were those monks? Exasperated, Menocchio replied: "How do you expect me to know? Truthfully, no, I don't know this." "Why did you say it if you do not know it?" "Sometimes the devil tempts us to say certain words...."
Once again, Menocchio was trying to attribute his doubts, his anger, to diabolical temptation—only, however, to promptly reveal his belief in their rational basis. He had read in Foresti's Supplementum that "various persons such as St. Peter, St. James, and others have written Gospels, which justice has suppressed." Here, too, the corrosive influence of
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analogy had worked on Menocchio's mind. If some of the Gospels are apocryphal, human and not divine, why aren't they all? This brought to light all the implications of what he had maintained fifteen years before, namely that Scripture could be reduced to "four words." In all that time, evidently, he had continued to pursue the thread of his old ideas. And now, once more, he had the opportunity of expressing them to those (so he thought) who were in a position to understand them. He blindly cast aside all prudence and caution: "I believe that God made all things, that is earth, water, and air." "But what about fire?" interjected the vicar of the Bishop of Concordia with ironic superiority, "who made that?" "Fire is everywhere, just as God is, but the other three elements are the three persons: the Father is air, the Son is earth, and the Holy Spirit is water." And then Menocchio added: "This is how it seems tome; but I don't know if it is the truth; and I believe that those spirits that are in the air fight among themselves, and that the lightning flashes are their anger."
Thus, in his laborious journey backwards into time, Menocchio had unwittingly rediscovered, beyond the Christian image of the universe, the universe of the ancient Greek philosophers. This peasant Heraclitus had recognized the primordial element in fire, utterly mobile and indestructible. For Menocchio, all of reality was permeated with it ("it is everywhere"): a coherent reality, yet in its many manifestations it was full of spirits, permeated with divinity. For this reason he stated that fire was God. It's true that Menocchio had also devised a captious, detailed correspondence between the other three elements and the persons of the Trinity: "I believe that the Father is air, because air is an element higher than water and earth; next I say that the Son is earth because the Son is produced by the Father; and since water comes from air and earth, so the Holy Spirit comes from the Father and from the Son." But behind these relationships, which he immediately rejected in a belated and useless burst of caution ("but I do not want to believe these things"), Menocchio's most deeply-held conviction emerged: God is one, and he is the world. The inquisitor concentrated his attack on this point: did he believe then that God has a body? "I know that Christ had a body," Menocchio replied evasively. To get the upper hand with someone who argued like this wasn't easy. From his scholastic armory the inquisitor drew forth a syllogism. "You say that the Holy Spirit is water; water is a body; thus, would it not follow that the Holy Spirit is a body?" "I say these things as similitudes," Menocchio replied. Perhaps there was a trace of complacency: he too knew how to reason, how to use the tools of logic and rhetoric.
Then the inquisitor returned to the offensive: "It appears in the records that you said God is nothing other than air." "I do not know that I
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said this, but I did really say that God is all things." "Do you believe that God is all things?" "My lords, yes indeed I do believe it." But in what sense? The inquisitor couldn't grasp this. "I believe that God is everything that he wants to be," Menocchio explained. "Can God be a stone, a serpent, a devil and such things?" "God can be everything that is good." "Then God could be a creature, since there are good creatures?" "I do not know what to say," replied Menocchio.
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Actually, the distinction between creator and creatures, the very idea of a creator God, was totally foreign to him. He knew perfectly well that his ideas were different from those of the inquisitor: but now he found himself without the words to express this difference. Certainly fra Gerolamo Asteo's logical snares couldn't convince him that he was in the wrong, no more than could the judges who had tried him fifteen years before. For that matter, he promptly tried to seize the initiative, actually overturning the mechanism of the interrogation. "I beg you, sir, listen to
me----" Through the telling of the legend of the three rings, Menocchio,
as we have seen, bolstered that doctrine of tolerance that he had already expounded at his first trial. At that time, however, the argument had been a religious one: all faiths (including heresies) were of equal value since "God has given the Holy Spirit to all." Now, instead, the emphasis was on the equivalence of the various churches inasmuch as they were entities linked to the life of society: "Yes sir, I do believe that every person considers his faith to be right, and we do not know which is the right one. But because my grandfather, my father, and my people have been Christians, 1 want to remain a Christian and believe that this is the right one." The entreaty to remain within the sphere of the traditional religions was supported by the appeal to the legend of the three rings: but it is difficult not to see in these words the bitter fruit of Menocchio's experience after the condemnation by the Holy Office. It was better to dissemble, better to observe externally rites that he inwardly recognized as "merchandise." This withdrawal was leading Menocchio to give less importance to the question of heresy, to the question of the open, conscious break with traditional religion. At the same time, however, he ended up by considering religion pureh/ as a worldly reality much more than he had in the past. To insist that we are Christians only by chance, because of tradition, involved a critical disjunction of serious proportions—of the sort that in these same years led Montaigne to write: "Nous
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sommes Chrestiens ä mesme titre que nous sommes ou Perigordins ou Alemans." Both Montaigne and Menocchio, each in his way, had made the disturbing discovery of the relativity of beliefs and institutions.
But this adherence—conscious and not passive—to the religion of his ancestors was, nonetheless, only external. Menocchio attended Mass, went to confession, and received communion: but inside he kept turning over thoughts that were both old and new. He told the inquisitor that he considered himself "a philosopher, astrologer, and prophet," adding modestly in his own defense that "even the prophets err." And he explained: "I thought I was a prophet, because the evil spirit made me see vanities and dreams and convinced me that I knew the nature of the heavens, and such things: and I believe that the prophets spoke what angels dictated to them."
In the first trial, as we recall, Menocchio had never mentioned supernatural revelations. Now, instead, he was alluding to experiences of a mystical sort, even though he disavowed them vaguely as "vanities"and "dreams." What may have influenced him was a reading of that Koran (the "most beautiful book" identified by the converted Jew Simon), which the archangel Gabriel had dictated to the prophet Mohammed. Menocchio may have thought that he could discover "the nature of the heavens" in the apocryphal dialogue between the rabbi Abdullah ibn Sallam and Mohammed, inserted in book one of the Italian translation of the Koran: "He said, go on, and tell me why the sky is called sky. He answered, because it is created of vapor, vapor from the steam of the sea. He asked, whence comes its green? He replied, from Mount Caf, and Mount Caf received it from the emeralds in paradise. This is the mountain that girdles the circle of the earth and holds up the sky. He asked, does the sky have a door? He replied, it has doors that hang down. He asked, and do the doors have keys? He replied that they have keys that are to God's treasure. He asked, of what are the doors made? He answered, of gold. He asked, you, tell me the truth, but tell me, this sky of ours from what was it created? He replied: the first of green water, the second of clear water, the third of emeralds, the fourth of the purest gold, the fifth of hyacinth, the sixth of a shining cloud, the seventh of the splendor of fire. He said, and in this you speak the truth, But what is there above these seven skies? He replied, a life-giving sea, and above it a nebulous sea, and proceeding in this way in order, there is the aereal sea, and above it the sorrowful sea, and above it the somber sea, and above it the sea of pleasure, and above that the Moon, and above that the Sun, and above that the name of God, and above it supplication ..." and so forth.
These are merely conjectures. We don't have proof that the "most beautiful book" about which Menocchio had spoken enthusiastically was indeed the Koran; and even if we did, we couldn't reconstruct the way in
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which Menocchio read it. A text so totally foreign to his experience and culture would have been incomprehensible to him—and would have led him for this very reason to project his own thoughts and fantasies onto the page. But we know nothing about this projection (if it actually occurred). And in general, it's very difficult to penetrate this final phase of Menocchio's intellectual life. Unlike fifteen years before, fear drove him little by little to deny almost everything that the inquisitor brought out against him. But once again, it was an effort for him to lie: only after remaining "briefly lost in thought" did he assert that he had never "doubted that Christ was God." Subsequently he contradicted himself saying that "Christ did not have the power of the Father, since he had a human body." "This is a confusion," the judges protested. To this Menocchio replied, "I do not remember having said this and I am an ignoramus." Humbly he affirmed that when he had said that the Gospels had been written by "priests and monks who had studied," he had the evangelists in mind "whom, I believe, all studied." He tried to tell them everything that he thought they wanted to know: "It is true that inquisitors and our other superiors do not want us to know what they know; and so we should remain silent." But every now and then he couldn't restrain himself: "1 did not believe that paradise existed, because I did not know where it was."
At the end of the first interrogation Menocchio submitted a piece of paper on which he had written something about the words of the Pater Noster, "et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo," explaining, "with this I ask to be freed from these tribulations of mine." Then, before being led back to prison, he signed it with an old man's trembling hand.
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This is what he had written:
t?v" "In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of his mother the Virgin Mary and of all the saints in paradise I appeal for help and counsel.
Oh great, omnipotent, and holy God, creator of heaven and earth, I beg you, in the name of your most saintly goodness and infinite mercy, to enlighten my spirit, and my soul, and my body so that it will think, and say, and do everything that is pleasing to your divine majesty: and so be it in the name of the most holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and Amen. I the wretched Menego Scandella who have fallen into disgrace with the world and with my superiors resulting in the ruin of my house, of
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my life, and of my entire poor family, no longer know what to say or do except to speak these few words. First: 'Set libera nos a malo et ne nos inducas in tentazionem et demite nobis debita nostra sicut ne nos dimitimus debitoribus nostris, panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie': and so I pray our Lord Jesus Christ and my superiors that out of their mercy they give me some help with little harm to themselves. And wherever I Menego Scandella shall go I will beg all faithful Christians to observe everything commanded of them by our Holy Mother Catholic Roman Church and her officials, that is, inquisitors, bishops, vicars, priests, chaplains, and curates of her dioceses, so that they should profit from my experience. I Menego also thought that death would free me from these fears, so I would not bother anyone, but it has done just the opposite, it has taken away a son of mine who was able to keep every trouble and suffering from me; and then it has wanted to take my wife who looked after me; and the sons and daughters who remain to me consider me crazy because 1 have been their ruination, which is only the truth, and if only I had died when I was fifteen, they would be without the bother of this poor wretch.
And if I have had some evil thought or said some word falsely, I never believed them or ever even acted against the Holy Church, because our Lord God has taught me to believe that everything I thought and said was vanity, not wisdom.
And this I hold to be the truth, because I do not want to think or believe except what the Holy Church believes and to do what my priests and superiors will command of me."
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At the foot of the page there were a few lines written by the priest of I*v*f Montereale, Giovan Daniele Melchiori, at Menocchio's request and dated 22 January 1597. They declared that "if the internal can be judged by the external" Menocchio's life was "Christian and orthodox." His caution, as we know (and which perhaps the priest also knew), was well founded. But the willingness to submit expressed in Menocchio's "writing" was certainly sincere. Rejected by his children who considered him a burden, a disgrace in the eyes of the village, a ruin for his family, he passionately longed to be restored to that church that had once separated him from herself, and even had marked him visibly as a reprobate. Because of this he was making a pathetic gesture of homage to his "superiors": "inquisitors" (understandably in first place) and then in succession
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"bishops, vicars, priests, chaplains, and curates." It was a useless act of submission, in a sense, because when he wrote this, the investigation of Menocchio by the Holy Office hadn't yet resumed. But the uncontrollable yearning "to seek exalted things" tormented him, filled him with "anxiety," made him feel guilty "and in disgrace with the world." And then he desperately cried out for death. But death had bypassed him: "It has done just the opposite, it has taken away a son of mine . . .; and
then it has wanted to take my wife____"At that moment he cursed himself:
"if only I had died when I was fifteen"—before growing up and becoming the man he was, to his disgrace and that of his children.
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After another interrogation (19 July) Menocchio was asked if he wanted a lawyer. He replied, "I do not want to make any other defense, except to ask for mercy; yet, if I could have a lawyer I would accept him, but I am poor." At the time of the first trial Ziannuto had struggled hard for his father and had found a lawyer for him: but Ziannuto was dead and Menocchio's other children hadn't lifted a finger. A court-appointed defender, Agostino Pisensi, was assigned to Menocchio, and on the 22nd of July he presented a long brief to the judges in defense "of the poor Domenico Scandella." In it he declared that the evidence had been secondhand, contradictory, and defective because of its obvious animosity; it clearly demonstrated the "pure simplicity and ignorance" of the accused, whose acquittal was requested.
On 2 August the members of the Holy Office met: unanimously it was decreed that Menocchio was a relapsus, a backslider. The trial was over. Nevertheless, it was decided to interrogate the offender under torture to obtain the names of his accomplices. This took place on the 5th of August; the previous day Menocchio's house had been searched. In the presence of witnesses, all his chests had been opened and "his books and writings" confiscated. Unfortunately, we don't know what these "writings" were.
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They asked him to reveal the names of his accomplices so that torture might be avoided. He replied, "Sir, I do not remember having discussions with anyone." He was undressed and examined to determine—as Holy Office regulations prescribed—whether he was fit to undergo torture. Meanwhile, they continued questioning him. He replied, "I have discussed things with so many people that now I cannot remember who they were." Then they ordered him to be tied, and asked him one more time to state the truth about his accomplices. Again, he repeated, "I do not remember." They conducted him to the torture chamber, continually insisting on the same question. "I have tried to think and imagine," he said, "to try to remember with whom I talked, but have not been able to remember." They prepared him for the strappado. "Oh Lord Jesus Christ, mercy, Jesus mercy, I don't remember having spoken with anyone, may I die if I have either followers or companions, but I have read on my own, oh Jesus mercy." They gave a first jerk on the rope: "Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh poor me, oh poor me." "With whom have you had discussions?" they asked him. He replied, "Jesus, Jesus I know nothing." They urged him to tell the truth: "I would say it willingly, let me down and I'll think about it."
Then they ordered him to be lowered. He thought for a moment and then said, "I don't remember having talked with anyone, nor do I know that anyone shares my ideas, and I certainly know nothing." They ordered that he be given another pull with the cord. While they were raising him, he cried out, "Alas, alas martyr, oh Lord Jesus Christ." And then, "Sir, let me be and 111 say something." When he was on the ground once more, he said, "I spoke to signor Zuan Francesco Montareale and told him we don't know what the true faith is." (The next day he specified: "The aforesaid lord Gio. Francesco reproached me for my lunacies".) That's all they could get out of him. Then he was unbound and led back to his cell. The notary recorded that the torture had been applied "with moderation." It had lasted half an hour.
We can only imagine the judges' state of mind resulting from the monotonous repetition of the same question. They may have felt the same combination of annoyance and disgust that the nuncio Alberto Bolognetti had written about in these very years. On the subject of the Holy Office he complained of "the nuisance, for anyone who isn't a model of patience, of having to listen to the inanities uttered by so many, especially during torture, that have to be written down word for word." The obstinate silence of the old miller must have been incomprehensible to them.
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Thus, not even physical pain had succeeded in bending Menocchio. He hadn't named names, or, more precisely, he had named only one— that of the lord of Montereale—which seems to have been done intentionally to deter the judges from probing too deeply. Doubtless, he had something to hide: but probably he wasn't too far from the truth when he declared that he had "read on [his] own."
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By his silence Menocchio had wanted to underscore for his judges, I^-/*r to the very end, that his ideas had been conceived in isolation, strictly through contact with books. But as we saw, he projected onto the written page, elements taken from oral tradition.
It is this tradition, deeply rooted in the European countryside, that explains the tenacious persistence of a peasant religion intolerant of dogma and ritual, tied to the cycles of nature, and fundamentally pre-Christian. In many cases, it was a matter of actual estrangement from Christianity, as with those herdsmen in the rural areas around Eboli who in mid-seventeenth century appeared to some astonished Jesuits as "men who had nothing human about them except their form, not very different in their capacities and knowledge from the beasts that they tended: totally ignorant not only of prayers, or of the other special mysteries of the holy faith, but also of the very knowledge of God." But one can discover traces of this peasant religion, which had assimilated and reshaped elements— not the least of which were Christian elements—from without even in situations of lesser geographical and cultural isolation. The old English peasant who thought of God as "a kindly old man," of Christ as "a handsome youth," of the soul as "a big bone stuck in the body," and of the hereafter as "a beautiful green field" where he would go if he had behaved well, certainly wasn't ignorant of Christian doctrines: he simply translated them into images that corresponded to his experiences, to his aspirations, to his fantasies.
We witness a similar process in Menocchio's confessions. Of course, his case is much more complicated. It involves both the mediation of the printed page and the disintegration of much of traditional religion under the blows dealt by the more radical currents within the Reformation. But the pattern is the same, and it isn't an exceptional case.
Some twenty years before Menocchio's trial, an unknown rustic in the Lucchese countryside who hid behind the pseudonym Scolio spoke
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of his visions in a long, still unpublished poem, the Settennario, rich in religious and moral overtones, here and there punctuated with Dantean echoes. It hammers away at its central argument that the various religions have a common base in the Ten Commandments. Appearing in a cloud of gold God explains to Scolio:
Many prophets have I already sent
Diverse, because varied were those.
To whom I directed my prophets
And I also gave them different laws
Just as various were the customs I found,
Just as the physician various purgatives
Prescribes according to the nature of one's constitution.
The emperor sends out three captains
Into Africa, into Asia, and into Europe:
To the Jews, to the Turks, and to Christians
Each one makes a copy of his law,
And depending on the variety and strangeness of the customs Dispenses to each people a different and appropriate version of it: But gives Ten Commandments to each of them The same, but which they comment on separately. But God is one, and only one is his faith...
Thus, among the "captains" sent out by the "emperor" there is also Mohammed, "Reputed by criminals to be wicked amidst the good/Yet he was a prophet and a great warrior of God," named at the end of a list that includes Moses, Elias, David, Solomon, Christ, Joshua, Abraham, and Noah. Turks and Christians are exhorted to stop their fighting and become reconciled:
You Turk and you Christian by my decree Do not go on as you have in the past: Turk take a step forward And you Christian take a step backward.
All this is attainable since the Ten Commandments are the basis not only of the three great Mediterranean religions (we recall the tradition of the fable of the three rings) but also of religions that have appeared and that are yet to come: the fourth, not specifically named; the fifth, which "God gave to us in our time" and which is identified with Scolio's prophecy; and the two in the future that will complete the prophetic number seven.
As we see, Scolio's religious message is very simple. It suffices to obey the Ten Commandments, "nature's great precepts." Dogmas, beginning with the Trinitarian one, are rejected:
Do not adore or believe but in one God Who has neither companion, friend nor son: Everyone is his son, servant, and friend
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Who obeys his precepts and what has been said and I say. Neither worship others nor a Holy Spirit If I am indeed God, God is everywhere.
Baptism and the Eucharist are the only sacraments mentioned. The former is reserved for adults:
Let everyone be circumcised on the eighth day And then be baptized near thirty years of age. As God and the prophets commanded And as was done to Christ by St. John.
The Eucharist is substantially devalued: "And if I told you," Christ declares
That the blessed bread
Was my body, and the wine my blood,
I said it to you because it was pleasing to me
And it was a pious food and sacrifice.
But I did not command it as a precept
But because the bread and wine resemble God.
Now of what importance are your disputes
So long as you observe the Ten Commandments.
This is not simply impatience with theological discussions about the real presence; through the mouth of Christ, Scolio reaches the point of denying any sacramental value to baptism and the Eucharist:
My baptism with sacrifice, My death and the host and my communion. Was not a commandment, but an office To perform sometimes in memory of me.
What counts for the purposes of salvation, once again, is the literal observance of the Ten Commandments, without "gloss or comment of any kind," without interpretations dictated by "syllogisms or strange logic." Religious ceremonies are considered useless; the cult must be very simple:
Let there be neither columns nor figures,
Neither organs, music, nor instruments,
Neither bell towers, bells, nor pictures,
Neither reliefs, friezes, nor ornaments:
Let all things be simple and pure
So that only the Ten Commandments may be heard...
The Word of God is extremely simple, God who asked Scolio to write his book in a language that was not "Puffed up, obscure, pedantic, or affected/But rather open and plain."
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Despite certain similarities (probably independent of direct connections; at any rate they are undocumented) with Anabaptist doctnnes, Scolio's statements seem to spring rather from that underground current of peasant radicalism to which we have also traced Menocchio. For Scolio, the pope isn't the Antichrist (even if, as we shall see momentarily, his figure is destined to disappear in the future); the exercise of authority is not, as it was for Anabaptists, inherently to be condemned. Of course, those in power must govern paternally:
If my Lord made you his steward
And handed administration over to you.
If he made you duke, pope, or emperor,
Endowed you with humanity and discretion.
If he gave you strength, intelligence, good will, honor,
You must be a father and defender to us,
What you have is not yours, it belongs to others and is mine,
Everything beyond your just due is of God.
The society imagined by Scolio was, in fact, the pious and austere one of the peasant Utopias: rid of the useless professions ("Let there be no shops or manual trades/Except the most important and principal ones;/Esteem as vanities all the knowledge/Of physicians and do without doctors"), based on farmers and warriors, governed by a single ruler, who will be Scolio himself.
let gambling, whores, and the inn.
The drunkard and the buffoon be swept away.
And let him who plies the farmer's art
Surpass every art in utility and honor;
And those who fight for the faith
Be worthy of great praise and great reward;
Pride, pomp, debauchery with ostentation,
Superstition and vainglory, let them be swept away...
Let great dinners and great suppers be prohibited
Because they are full of drunkenness and guzzling.
Music and dancing, perfumes, baths, and games;
Dressing and footwear, let them be poor and few;
Let a single carnal man be sole sovereign,
Over the temporal and the spiritual,
Let one man be sole monarch and sole lord
And let there be a single fold and a single pastor.
In this future society injustices will disappear: "the age of gold" will return. The law, "brief, clear, and common to all" shall be:
In everybody's hands
Because through it they will produce good fruits;
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And let it be in the vernacular, thus understood by all, So that they may flee from evil and pursue the good.
A rigid egalitarianism will abolish economic differences:
Man or woman, suffice that it be a mouth
And entitled to its share in life.
It is not fitting for anyone to have more
Than an honest portion of food and clothing,
Or to eat better, dress better, or dwell better.
For, whoever wants to command must first obey.
It is impious and inhuman that you should have a surfeit,
Or that others or I should be made to suffer for you;
God has made us rich and not servants as before:
Why then do you want someone to fatten you up and serve you?
...and whether one is born in city, villa, or castle
And is low or high in birth,
Let there be no difference between one and another And let no one have the least advantage.
But this sober and pious society is only one aspect—the terrestrial one— of Scolio's peasant Utopia. The otherworldly one is very different: "It is only permitted in heaven, not in this world/To be full of abundance and joy." The life of the hereafter revealed to Scolio in one of his first visions is, in fact, a domain of abundance and of pleasure:
God led me on the following Saturday
To such a mountain where the whole world can be seen,
Where there was a paradise, and so beautiful a place
Surrounded by a wall of ice and fire.
Beautiful palaces and beautiful gardens
And orchards and woods, fields, rivers, and ponds,
Celestial foods and precious wines
There were, and dinners and feasts and great wealth;
The rooms of gold, of silk, and linens.
Choice maidens and pages and beds, and great
Trees, and grasses and animals, and all
Renew their fruits ten times each day.
This is an echo of the paradise in the Koran—joined here to a peasant dream of material opulence, characteristically expressed immediately after with features reminiscent of a myth we have previously encountered. The God that appears to Scolio is an androgynous divinity, a "donnhoma" with "its hands open and fingers raised." From every finger, symbolizing one of the Ten Commandments, a river gushes forth from which living beings will drink:
The first river is full of sweet honey,
Hard and liquid sugar the second,
Of ambrosia the third, and nectar the fourth,
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The fifth manna, the sixth bread that in this world
Has never been seen, the whitest and least heavy
That causes the dead to return joyous.
It was well said by a man of a holy place
That the face of bread represents God.
The seventh is of precious waters,
The eighth is fresh and pure butter,
Partridges the ninth, fat and tasty.
No wonder, as they came out of Paradise,
Milk is the tenth; and precious stones
Are their beds where I always wish to be,
The banks of lilies and roses, gold and violet,
Silver and flowers and splendor of the sun.
This paradise (and Scolio was well aware of it) greatly resembled the land of Cockaigne.
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The similarities between Scolio's prophecies and Menocchio's discourses are evident. They can't be explained, obviously, by the existence of common sources—the Divine Comedy, the Koran—that were certainly known to Scolio and probably to Menocchio. The crucial element is a common store of traditions, myths, and aspirations handed down orally over generations. In both cases, it was contact with written culture through their schooling, that permitted this deeply rooted deposit of oral culture to emerge. Menocchio must have attended an elementary school; about his own experiences Scolio wrote:
I was made a shepherd and later a student,
Then made an artisan and later a shepherd
Over all sorts of beasts, and then a student.
And later an artisan and then shepherd again,
I learned the seven mechanical arts
And then became shepherd and later a student again.
"Philosopher, astrologer, and prophet," Menocchio described himself; Scolio calls himself "astrologer, philosopher, and poet," as well as "prophet of prophets." Still, there are some obvious differences. Scolio gives the impression of being confined to a rural environment, without, or virtually without, contacts with the city; Menocchio traveled; he made several trips to Venice. Scolio denies any possible value to books that are not the four sacred books, namely the Old and New Testaments, the Koran and his own Settennario:
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By obeying God you can make yourself wise
And not through books and study.
And let us forbid and remove every doctor,
Who would compose or study,
Every reader, author, and printer
Who would write or print a book,
Every logician, debater, preacher
Who would dispute or preach
On anything but the three holy books I have named. And this book of mine, that is, of God.
Menocchio purchased the Fioretto della Bibbia but was loaned the Decameron and Mandeville's Travels; he declared that Scripture could be contained in four words, but also felt the need to acquire the inherited knowledge of his adversaries, the inquisitors. In the case of Menocchio, in short, we perceive a free and aggressive spirit intent on squaring things with the culture of the dominant classes; in the case of Scolio, we find a more reserved position, which expends its polemical charge in a moralizing condemnation of urban culture and in the longing for an egalitarian and patriarchal society. Even if the outlines of Menocchio's "new world" elude us, we are tempted to suppose that it differs, at least partly, from the one described in Scolio's desperately anachronistic Utopia.
Another miller, Pellegrino Baroni, called Pighino, "the fat," who lived in a village in the Modenese Appennines, Savignano sul Panaro, seems to resemble Menocchio more closely. In 1570 he was tried by the Holy Office in Ferrara; but already nine years before he had been compelled to abjure certain of his errors in matters of the faith. His fellow villagers considered him "a poor Christian," "a heretic," "a Lutheran"; some described him as "an eccentric and weak-minded," or actually "more a fool than anything else." As a matter of fact, Pighino was anything but stupid: during the trial he succeeded in matching wits with the inquisitors showing besides great strength of will, a subtle, almost cunning, intelligence. But it's not hard to imagine the confusion of the villagers or the indignation of the parish priest when faced by Pighino's ideas. He denied the intercession of the saints, confession, the fasting prescribed by the Church—if we stopped here we'd be within the realm of a generic sort of "Lutheranism." He also insisted, however, that all the sacraments, including the Eucharist (but not baptism, apparently), had been instituted by the Church, rather than by Christ, and that they were unnecessary for salvation. He affirmed, moreover, that in paradise "we will all be equal, and grace will be had by the great and the humble alike"; that the Virgin Mary "was born of a serving maid"; that "there is neither hell nor purgatory; they were invented by priests and monks for the sake of money"; that "if Christ had been a worthy man, he would not have been
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crucified"; that "when the body dies the soul perishes with it"; and finally that "all religions were good for those who observed them inviolably." Although he was tortured on more than one occasion, Pighino obstinately denied having accomplices and asserted that his opinions were the result of illumination received while reading the Gospels in the vernacular—one of the four books he had read. The other three were the Psalter, the grammar by Aelius Donatus, and the Fioretto della Bibbia.
Pighino's fate differed from Menocchio's. Condemned to reside for life in the village of Savignano, he fled to escape the hostility of the other villagers; but almost at once he reappeared before the Holy Office of Ferrara, his torturers, to plead for forgiveness. He was a beaten man. The inquisitor, charitably, ended by finding a position for him as a servant with the bishop of Modena. These two millers ended differently; but the similarities in their lives are surprising, probably something more than an extraordinary coincidence.
The primitive state of communications in preindustrial Europe caused even the smallest centers of habitation to have at least one mill powered by water or wind. The occupation of miller, consequently, was one of the most widespread, and their prominence in medieval heretical sects and, in even greater measure, among Anabaptists is not surprising. All the same, when in mid-sixteenth century such a satirical poet as the previously mentioned Andrea da Bergamo asserted that "a true miller is half-Lutheran," he seemed to be alluding to something more specific.
The age-old hostility between peasants and millers had solidified an image of the miller—shrewd, thieving, cheating, destined by definition for the fires of hell. It's a negative stereotype that is widely corroborated in popular traditions, legends, proverbs, fables, and stories. "I descended into hell and saw the Antichrist," so went a Tuscan popular song
And he had a miller by the beard.
And a German under his feet,
Here and there an innkeeper and a butcher:
I asked him which was the most wicked,
And he said to me: "Listen and now I'll tell you.
Look who is grabbing with his hands,
It's the miller of the white flour.
Look who is stealing with his hands.
It's the miller of the white flour.
He passes the quarter off as a full bushel;
The biggest thief of all is the miller."
The charge of heresy was wholly consistent with a stereotype such as this. Contributing to it was the fact that the mill was a place of meeting, of social relations, in a world that was predominantly closed and static. Like the inn and the shop it was a place for the exchange of ideas. The peasants who
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jostled before the gates of the mill, on "the soft ground muddied by the piss of the village mules" (still Andrea da Bergamo speaking) waiting to have their grain ground, must have talked about many things. And the miller, too, must have had his say. It isn't difficult to imagine scenes such as one that took place a certain day at Pighino's mill. Turning to a group of peasants, Pighino had begun to grumble "about priests and monks" until one of the villagers, Domenico de Masafiis, came back and convinced the bystanders to go on their way, saying "Look, boys, you'd better leave the recitation of the Office to priests and monks, and not speak badly about them, and ignore Pelegrino di Grassi" (namely Pighino). Their working conditions made millers—like innkeepers, tavern keepers, and itinerant artisans—an occupational group especially receptive to new ideas and inclined to propagate them. Moreover, mills, generally located on the peripheries of settled areas and far from prying eyes, were well suited to shelter clandestine gatherings. The case in Modena where, in 1192, the persecution of the Cathari led to the devastation of the mills of the Patarines (molendina paterinorum) must not have been exceptional.
Finally, the particular social position of the millers tended to isolate them from the communities in which they lived. We've already mentioned the traditional hostility of the peasants. To this should be added the bond of direct dependence that tied millers to the local feudal lords who, for centuries, had retained possession over the milling privilege. We don't know if this was the situation also in Montereale: the mill to full cloth rented by Menocchio and his son, for example, was privately owned. Nevertheless, an attempt, such as the one to convince the lord of the village, Giovan Francesco, count of Montereale, that "we do not know which is the true faith," on the basis of the story of the three rings, probably had been made possible by the atypical nature of Menocchio's social position. His occupation as miller set him apart at once from the anonymous mass of peasants with whom Giovan Francesco di Montereale would never have dreamed of discussing questions of religion. But Menocchio was also a peasant who worked the land—"a peasant dressed in white," ai he was described by the ex-lawyer Alessandro Policreto who had met him briefly before the trial. All this may help us to understand the complicated relationship between Menocchio and the community of Montereale. Even if no one, except Melchiorre Gerbas, had ever approved of his ideas (but it's difficult to estimate possible reticence in the testimony before the inquisitors), a great deal of time passed, perhaps as much as thirty years, before Menocchio had first been denounced to the religious authorities. And it was the priest of the village, put up to it by another cleric, who finally accused him. To the peasants of
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Montereale, Menocchio's statements, despite their peculiarity, must not have seemed so alien to their existence, to their beliefs and hopes.
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In the case of the miller of Savignano sul Panaro, the connections with cultivated and socially prominent circles had been even closer. In 1565 fra Gerolamo da Montalcino, on a visit of the diocese for the bishop of Modena, met Pighino who was pointed out to him as a "concubine-keeping Lutheran." In his account of the visit, the monk described him as "a poor, ailing peasant, ugly as sin, and short in stature" and he added: "while speaking with him he astounded me, saying things that were false but ingenious, which led me to suppose that he learned them in some gentleman's home." Five years later, when he was tried by the Holy Office in Ferrara, Pighino affirmed that he had been a servant in the homes of several Bolognese gentlemen: Natale Cavazzoni, Giacomo Mondino, Antonio Bonasone, Vincenzo Bolognetti, and Giovanni d'Avolio. When he was asked if religious discussions had taken place in the homes of any of them, he denied it emphatically, even under the threat of torture. He was then confronted with the monk who had met him in Savignano years before. Fra Gerolamo declared that at that time Pighino had said he had learned those "false but ingenious" things in the home of a Bolognese gentleman, from a person who gave certain unspecified "readings" there. The monk's memory had faded: too much time had passed. He had forgotten both the name of the gentleman in question, as well as that of the person—a priest, he thought—who had given the "readings." But Pighino denied everything: "Father, I don't remember at all." Not even the torture of fire to which he was subjected (he was spared the strappado because he had a hernia) induced him to confess.
But there can be no doubt that he was holding back information. There may be a way to see through his reticence, however. The day after his encounter with the monk (11 September 1570) the inquisitors again asked Pighino to name the Bolognese gentlemen in whose homes he had served. He repeated the list, with a variation that went unnoticed: he named Vincenzo Bonini in the place of Vincenzo Bolognetti. This makes us suspect that Bolognetti may indeed have been the gentleman whom Pighino was trying to protect by his silence. If this is so (there's no proof of
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it) who then had given the "readings" that had made such a strong impression on Pighino?
One possibility is the famous heretic Paolo Ricci, better known as Camillo Renato. After arriving in Bologna in 1538, Ricci (who was then going by the humanistic name of Usia Fileno) remained for two years as tutor to the children of various noble families: the Danesi, Lambertini, Manzoli, and Bolognetti. It was to the Bolognetti that he alluded in a passage of the Apologia, which he wrote in 1540 in his own defense before the Holy Office. In it, Fileno, taking as his point of departure the ingenuously anthropomorphic beliefs of the peasants and the masses who attributed to the Madonna power equal or superior to Christ's, proposed a Christocentric religion, free of superstitions: "Again, I have heard with my own ears that most of the peasants and all the masses firmly believe that the blessed Mary is equal to jesus Christ in power and in bestowing grace, and some even believe that she is greater. This is the reason that they give: the earthly mother may not only ask but even compell her son to do something; and so the law of motherhood demands that the mother is greater than the son. They say, we believe it is the same in heaven between the blessed Virgin Mary and her son Jesus Christ." In the margin he noted, "Heard in Bologna 1540 in the home of the knight Bolognetti." This is a specific recollection, as we see. Could Pighino have been one of the "peasants" encountered by Fileno in Bolognetti's house? If this is the case, we would have in the reticent confessions made to the Ferrarese inquisitors by the miller of Savignano, an echo of discussions heard from Fileno thirty years before. It's true that Pighino traced his heretical opinions to a more recent date—first eleven, then twenty or twenty-two years before—coinciding with the first time he read the Gospels in the vernacular. But his uncertainty over this date may have been concealing a deliberate plan to confuse the inquisitors. The fact that Paolo Ricci-Lisia Fileno was a defrocked monk, rather than a priest as fra Gerolamo da Montalcino had stated, doesn't pose a problem since the latter was simply making a conjecture.
Indeed, even the possibility of an encounter and of a discussion between the sophisticated humanist Lisia Fileno and the miller Pighino Baroni, "the fat," is also a conjecture, however fascinating. What is certain, at least, is that in October 1540 Fileno was arrested "in the Modenese countryside, where he was subverting the peasants," as Giovanni Domenico Sigibaldi wrote to cardinal Morone. There was another person with Fileno "performing the same Lutheranizing office": "his name was Turchetto, son of a lurcho or Turcha." In all probability he was Giorgio Filaletto, nicknamed Turca, author of that mysterious Italian translation of Servetus's De Trinitatis erroribus, which Menocchio may have seen at one
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time. In so many different ways we keep running into those delicate threads that in this period tie heretics of humanistic background to the world of the peasants.
But after everything that has been said thus far we shouldn't have to insist on the impossibility of ascribing manifestations of peasant religious radicalism to influences from outside—and above. Pighino's ideas also testify to the fact that he was not just passively receiving motifs that were then current in heretical circles. His most original statements—on Mary's humble birth, on the equality of the "great" and the "small" in paradise— clearly reflect the peasant egalitarianism being voiced in these very years by Scolio's Settennario. Thus, the notion that "when the body dies the soul also dies" has the appearance of being inspired by an instinctive peasant materialism. In this instance, however, the course followed by Pighino was more complicated. First of all, his belief in the mortality of the soul seemed to clash with that of the equality of the blessed in paradise. To the inquisitor who pointed out this contradiction to him, Pighino explained: "I believed that the souls of the saved have to remain in paradise for a long time, but that finally, when it shall please God, they will have to vanish into nothing, and not feel any pain." A little earlier he had admitted believing "that the soul finally has to come to an end and be resolved into nothing: and I thought this was because of our Lord's words, where he said 'Heaven and earth will pass, but my Word will not pass.' So I concluded that if heaven had to end some time, so much more should our soul." All this recalls the doctrine of the sleep of souls after death, which had been taught by Fileno in Bologna, as we know from his Apologia of 1540. This could constitute one more element in favor of identifying Pighino's unknown "teacher" as Fileno. But it's noteworthy that Pighino's position was much more radically materialistic than the doctrines circulating among the heretical groups of the time. In fact, he asserted the final annihilation of the souls of the blessed—and not just of the damned, as did the Venetian Anabaptists, who reserved resurrection for the souls of the just on Judgment Day. It's possible that Pighino misconstrued, especially after such a long interval, the significance of the discussions, undoubtedly packed with recondite philosophical terms, which he had heard in Bologna. But in any case it was a noteworthy distortion, just as was the type of Scriptural argument that he used. Fileno wrote in his Apologia that he had seen with his own eyes references to the doctrine of the sleep of souls not only in patristic writings, but also in Scripture itself, without specifying where. Pighino, instead, didn't appeal to a passage such as the one in which St. Paul comforts the brethren of the church of Thessalonica by speaking to them of the final resurrection of those sleeping in Christ. He cited a much less obvious passage, one in which the
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soul wasn't even mentioned. Why deduce the final annihilation of the soul from the annihilation of the world? Most likely Pighinohad reflected on passages in the Fioretto delta Bibbia—one of the very few books that he had read, as we recall (even if he had said earlier, perhaps out of prudence, that although he owned it, he "hadn't read it").
"And all the things that God created out of nothing," the Fioretto declared, "are eternal and will endure forever. And these are the eternal things, angels, light, world, man, soul." Slightly before, however, a different thesis had been offered: "there are some things that have a beginning and an end: and these are the world, and created things that are visible. There are other things that have a beginning and will not have an end, and these are the angels and our souls that will never have an end." Later on, among the "great errors" held by "many philosophers" regarding the creation of souls, the following were mentioned: "that all souls are one and that the elements are five, the four mentioned above, and in addition one other, which is called orbis: and they say that out of this orbis God made the soul of Adam and all the others And for this reason they say that the world will never end, because when man dies he returns to his elements." The Averroist philosophers refuted by the Fioretto taught that if the soul is immortal, the world is eternal; if the world is to perish (as the Fioretto asserted at one point) the soul is mortal, Pighino "concluded." This radical reversal implies a reading of the Fioretto that, at least in part, resembled Menocchio's: "I believe that the whole world, that is air, earth, and all the beauties of this world are God because we say that man is made in the image and likeness of God, and in man there is air, fire, earth, and water, and it follows from this that air, earth, fire, and water are God." From the identity of man with the world, based on the four elements, Menocchio had deduced ("and it follows from this") the oneness of the world and of God. Pighino's deduction ("I concluded") of the final mortality of the soul from the finiteness of the world implied an identity between man and the world. Pighino, more cautious than Menocchio, didn't mention the relationship between God and the world.
To suggest that Pighino and Menocchio read the Fioretto in a similar manner may seem arbitrary. But it is significant that both should have fallen into the same contradiction, one immediately pounced upon by the inquisitors in both the Friuli and in Ferrara. What sense does it make to speak of paradise if the immortality of the soul is denied, they asked? We've seen how this objection drew Menocchio into an inextricable tangle of new contradictions. Pighino resolved the dilemma by speaking of a temporary paradise followed by the final annihilation of souls.
Truly these two millers, who had lived hundreds of kilometers apart and died without ever meeting, spoke the same language and
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999999999955
shared the same culture. Pighino said: "I have not read any books except those I mentioned above, nor did I learn these errors from anybody; they came from my own imaginings or else the devil put these things into my head, as I believe: because many times he pursued me and I fought him in certain apparitions and visions, night and day, fighting him as if he were a man. In the end I began to realize that he was a spirit." As for Menocchio: "I have never associated with anyone who was a heretic, but I have an artful mind, and I wanted to seek out higher things about which I did not know.... I uttered those words because I was tempted.... It was the evil spirit who made me believe those things. . . . The devil or something tempted me— The false spirit was always after me to make me think what
was false and not true____I thought I was a prophet, because the evil spirit
made me see vanities and dreams____May I die if I have either followers or
companions, but I have read on my own. ..." And Pighino, again: "I wanted to infer that every man is obliged to remain under his own
religion, meaning the Hebrew, the Turkish, and every other faith____" And
Menocchio: "It would be as if four soldiers were fighting, two on each side; and if one from one side went over to the other, wouldn't he be a traitor? So I thought that if a Turk abandoned his law and made himself a Christian, he would be doing wrong, and so I also thought that a Jew was wrong to make himself a Turk or a Christian, and all those who left their own faith— " According to a witness, Pighino had maintained "that there is neither hell nor purgatory, and they were invented by priests and
monks for the sake of money____"He explained to the inquisitors: "I have
never rejected paradise, although I said: 'Oh, God where can hell and purgatory be?' since it seemed to me that underground is packed with earth and water and there can be no hell or purgatory there, but that both are on earth while we live— "As for Menocchio, he said: "Preaching that men should live in peace pleases me, but preaching about hell, Paul says one thing, Peter says another, so that I think it is a business, an invention of men who know more than others. ... I did not believe that paradise existed, because I did not know where it was."
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We have seen cropping up repeatedly, from beneath a very profound difference in language, surprising similarities between basic currents in the peasant culture we have endeavored to reconstruct and those in the most progressive circles of sixteenth-century culture. To explain these similarities simply on the basis of movement from high to
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low involves clinging to the unacceptable notion that ideas originate exclusively among the dominant classes, On the other hand, rejection of this simplistic explanation implies a much more complicated hypothesis about relationships in this period between the culture of the dominant classes and the culture of the subordinate classes.
It's more complicated and also, to some extent, indemonstrable. The state of the documentation reflects, obviously, the state of the relationship of power between the classes. An almost exclusively oral culture such as that of the subordinate classes of preindustrial Europe tends not to leave traces, or, at least, the traces left are distorted. Thus, there is a symptomatic value in a limited case such as Menocchio's. It forcefully poses a problem the significance of which is only now beginning to be recognized: that of the popular roots of a considerable part of high European culture, both medieval and postmedieval. Such figures as Rabelais and Brueghel probably weren't unusual exceptions. All the same, they closed an era characterized by hidden but fruitful exchanges, moving in both directions between high and popular cultures. The subsequent period was marked, instead, by an increasingly rigid distinction between the culture of the dominant classes and artisan and peasant cultures, as well as by the indoctrination of the masses from above. We can place the break between these two periods in the second half of the sixteenth century, basically coinciding with the intensification of social differentiation under the impulse of the price revolution. But the decisive crisis had occurred a few decades before, with the Peasants' War and the reign of the Anabaptists in Munster. At that time, while maintaining and even emphasizing the distance between the classes, the necessity of reconquering ideologically as well as physically, the masses threatening to break loose from every sort of control from above was dramatically brought home to the dominant classes.
This renewed effort to achieve hegemony took various forms different parts of Europe, but the evangelization of the countryside by the Jesuits and the capillary religious organization based on the family, achieved by the Protestant churches, can be traced to a single current. In terms of repression, the intensification of witchcraft trials and the rigid control over such marginal groups as vagabonds and gypsies corresponded to it. Menocchio's case should be seen against this background of repression and effacement of popular culture.
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62
Despite the conclusion of the trial, Menocchio's case was not yet closed; in a certain sense, the most extra6rdinary part was about to begin. When evidence had begun to accumulate against Menocchio for the second time, the inquisitor of Aquileia and Concordia had written to Rome, to the Congregation of the Holy Office, to inform £hem of the new developments. On 5 June 1599 the cardinal of Santa Severina, a senior member of the Congregation, replied urging the earliest possible incarceration of "that person from the diocese of Concordia who had denied the divinity of Christ, our Lord," "his case is extremely serious, especially since he has been condemned as a heretic on another occasion." Moreover, he ordered that his books and "writings" be confiscated. The confiscation took place; as we saw, "writings"—we don't know of what sort—also were found. In view of Rome's interest in the case, the Friulian inquisitor sent a copy of three accusations against Menocchio to the Congregation. On '14 August another letter was received from the cardinal of Santa Severina: "that recidivist . . . has revealed himself to be an atheist in his examinations," it was thus necessary to proceed "according to the prescribed terms of the law also to discover the accomplices"; the case "is extremely serious," therefore "Your Reverence must send a copy of his trial or at least a summary of it." The month following, the news reached Rome that Menocchio had been condemned to death, but the sentence had not yet been carried out. The inquisitor in the Friuli was hesitating, perhaps out of a belated impulse toward leniency. On 5 September he wrote a letter (which hasn't survived) communicating his doubts to the Congregation of the Holy Office. The reply of the cardinal of Santa Severina, dated 30 October, written in the name of the entire Congregation, was peremptory: "I inform you by order of His Holiness, Our Lord, that you must not fail to proceed with that diligence required by the gravity of the case, so that he may not go unpunished for his horrible and execrable excesses, but that he may serve as an example to others in those parts by receiving a just and severe punishment. Therefore do not fail to carry it out with all the promptness and rigor of mind demanded by the importance of the case. And this is the express desire of His Holiness."
The supreme head of Catholicism, the pope himself, Clement VIII, was bending toward Menocchio, who had become a rotten member of Christ's body, to demand his death. In these very months in Rome the trial against the former monk Giordano Bruno was drawing to a close. It's a coincidence that seems to symbolize the twofold battle being fought against both high and low in this period by the Catholic hierarchy in an
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effort to impose doctrines promulgated by the Council of Trent. This explains the persistence of the proceedings, which are otherwise incomprehensible, against the old miller. A short time later (13 November) the cardinal of Santa Severina renewed his insistence: "Your Reverence must not fail to proceed in the case of that peasant of the diocese of Concordia, suspected of having denied the virginity of the forever blessed Virgin Mary, the divinity of Christ our lord, and the providence of God, in accordance with what I already wrote to you at the express order of His Holiness. The jurisdiction of the Holy Office over a case of such importance can in no way be doubted. Therefore, manfully perform everything that is required, according to the terms of the law."
It was impossible to resist such powerful pressure; and, shortly after, Menocchio was put to death. We know this with certainty from the depositions of a certain Donato Serotino who told the commissioner of the inquisitor of the Friuli on 6 July 1601 that being in Pordenone not long after "Scandella... had been executed by order of the Holy Office," he had met an innkeeper who told him that "in that town ... there was a certain man named Marcato, or perhaps Marco, who believed that when the body died the soul also died with it."
About Menocchio we know many things. About this Marcato, or Marco—and so many others like him who lived and died without leaving a trace—we know nothing.
128 (158/212)
128
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NOTES
i J
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES
ACAU Archivio delia Curia Arcivescovile, Udine
ACVP Archivio delia Curia Vescovile, Pordenone
ASM Archivio di Stato, Modena
ASP Archivio di Stato, Pordenone
ASVat Archivio Segreto Vaticano
ASVen Archivio di Stato, Venice
BCU Biblioteca Comunale, Udine
BGL Biblioteca Governatíva, Lucca
PREFACE
1
xv. The common man, according to Vicens Vives, "se ha convertido en el principal protagonista de la História," (cited from P. Chaunu, "Une histoire religieuse serielle," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 12 [19651: 9, n. 2). The quote from Brecht is found in "Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters," Hundert Gedichte, 1918-1950 (Berlin, 1951), pp. 107-8. I see now that the same poem has also been used by J. Kaplow, The Names of Kings: The Parisian Laboring Poor in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1973). See also H. M. Enzensberger, "Letteratura come storiografia," U Menabö, no. 9 (1966): 13.
t
2
I use A. Gramsci's term "subordinate classes" because it is broad enough in scope without having the more or less deliberately paternalistic connotations of "inferior
129
129 (159/212)
classes." On the themes elicited by the publication of Gramsci's notes on folklore and subordinate classes, see the discussion among E. De Martino, C. Luporini, F. Fortini, and others (the list of participants is in L M. Lombards Satnar\i, Antropologia culturale e analisi delta cultura subalterna [Rimini, 1974], p. 74, n. 34). For the modern dimensions of the question, many of which were efficaciously anticipated by E. J. Hobsbawm ("Per lo studio delle classi subalteme," Societa 16 [I960]: 436-49), see below.
The trials against Menocchio are preserved in the Archivio della Curia Arcivescovile, Udine (henceforth cited as ACAU), Sant'Uffizio, Anno integro 1583 a n. 107 usque ad 128 ind. Trial no. 126 and Anno integro 1596 a n. 281 usque ad 306 inci, Trial no. 285. The only scholar to mention them (although without having seen them) is A. Battistella, II S. Officio e la riforma religiosa in Friuli: Appunti storici documentor (Udine, 1895), p. 65, who mistakenly states that Menocchio was not executed.
3
XVI. The literature on these issues is obviously vast. For an easily accessible introduction, see A. M. Cirese, "Altenta e dislivelli interni di cultura nelle societa superioři," in Folklore e antropológia tra stortcismo e marxismo, ed. A. M Cirese (Palermo, 1972), pp. 11-42; L M. Lombardi Satriani, Antropológia culturale e analisi della cultura subalterna (Rimini, 1974); P Rossi, ed., II concetto di cultura: I fondamenti teonci delta sctenza antwpologica (Turin, 1970). The concept of folklore as "an incoherent fragmentary mass of theories" etc., was adopted, with some variation, even by A. Gramsci: see Letteratura e vita nazionale (Turin, 1950), pp. 215 ff. Cf Lombardi Satriani, j^nrropoZo^io culturale. pp. 16 ff.
xvii. Largely oral: See, in this regard, C Bermani, "Dieci anni di lavoro con le fonti orali," Pnmo Maggio 5 (spring, 1975): 35-50.
R. Mandrou, De la culture populatre aux 17e et 18e sirfffs La Bibliothěque bleue de Troyes (Paris, 1964) emphasizes that "culture populaire" and "culture de masse" are not synonymous. (It may be noted that "culture de masse" and the corresponding Italian term are equivalent rather to the Anglo-American expression "popular culture"—a source of great confusion.) "Culture populaire," which is an older term, designates in a "populist" perspective, "la culture qui est l'oeuvre du peuple." Mandrou uses the same term with a "broader" (actually different) meaning: "la culture des milieux populaires dans la France de I'Ancien Regime, nous l'enten-dons ..., ici, comme la culture acceptée, digéree, assimilee, par ces milieux pendant des siěcles" (pp. 9-10) In this way. popular culture almost ends up being identified with mass culture. This is anachronistic since mass culture in the modern sense presupposes a cultural industry that certainly did not exist in the France of the Ancien Regime (see also p. 174). Even the term "superstructure" (p. 11) is equivocal. From Mandrou's point of view it would have been better to speak of a false consciousness. For the literature of colportage as escapist literature, and simultaneously as a reflection of a view of the world held by the popular classes, see pp. 162-63. In any case Mandrou is well aware of the limitations of his pioneering study, which, as such, is indeed praiseworthy. See by G. Bolleme, "Litterature populaire et littěrature de colportage au XVlIIe siěcle," in Livrt et societě dans la France du XVIIIe Steele, 2 vols. (Paris and The Hague, 1965) 1:61-92; idem. Les Almanacks populaires aux XVIIe et XVUIesiede, essaid'histoiresociale (Parisand The Hague, 1969); an anthology, idem, La Bibliothěque bleue: La littěrature populaire en France du XV!Ie au XlXe siěcle (Paris, 1971); "Représentation religieuse et thémes ďespérance dans la 'Bibliothěque bleue:' Litterature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe siecle," in La societa religtosa nelieta moderna. Atti del convegno di studí di stoná sociale e religiosa, Capaccic—Paestum. 18-21 maggio 1972 (Naples, 1973), pp. 219-43. The studies contained in this volume
130
130 I (160/212)
are of uneven quality. The best is the one introducing the anthology of the Btblwtheque bleue (at pp. 22-23 are remarks on the type of use that was probably made of these texts), which, however, contains statements such as these: "ä la limite,
l'histoire qu'entend ou lit le lecteur n'est que celle qu'il veut qu'on lui raconte____En
ce sens on peut dire que 1'ecriture, au méme litre que la lecture, est collective, faite par et pourtous, diffuse, diffusee, sue, dite, échangée, non gardée, et qu'elle est en quelque sortě spontanée. . . . "(ibid). The unacceptable distortions in a popuIistic-Christian direction contained, for example, in the essay "Representation religieuse," are based on sophistry of this kind. Impossible as it seems, A. Dupront has criticized Bolléme for having attempted to characterize "Itiistorique dans ce qui est peut-etre l'anhistorique, maniére de fonds commun quasi 'indatable' de traditions.... ("Livre et culture dans la societě Francaise du 18e siécle," in Livre et societě 1:203-4).
xviii. On "popular literature" see the important essay by N. Z. Davis, "Printing and the People," in her Society and Culture in Early Modem France (Stanford, 1975), pp. 189-206, which is based on premises in part similar to those in this book.
Among the works that deal with the period after the industrial revolution, see L James, Fiction for the WorkingMan, 1830-1850 (1963; reprint ed., London, 1974); R. Schenda, Volk ohne Buch: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe (1770-1910) (Frankfort, 1970) (in a series devoted to Triviallitteratur); J. J. Darmon, Le colportage de librairie en France sous le second Empire: Grands colporteurs et culture populaire (Paris, 1972).
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). In a similar vein, see the comment by A. Berelovic in the symposium volume Niveaux de culture et groupes sociaux (Paris, 1967), pp. 144-45.
. See E. LeRoy Ladurie, Les pay sans de Languedoc, 2 vols. (Paris, 1966) 1:394 ff. {English translation, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day [Urbana, 1974], pp. 192 ff.). See also by E. I* Roy Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans: De la Char.deleur au mercredi des Cendres (1579-1580) (Paris, 1979); and the English translation. Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York, 1979); N. Z. Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France," Past and Present, no. 50 (1971): 41-75; E. P. Thompson, " 'Rough Music:' Le Charivari anglais," Annates: ESC 27 (1972): 285-312 (and now, on the same subject, C. Gauvard and A. Gokalp, "Les conduites de bruit et leur signification a la fin du Moyen Age: Le Charivari," Annates: ESC 29 (1974): 693—704). These works are cited simply as illustrations. On the somewhat different question of the persistence of preindustrial cultural models among the industrial proletariat, see E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present, no. 38 (1967): 56-97, and idem, The Makingof the English Working Class (2nd enlarged ed., London, 1968); by E. J. Hobsbawm see especially Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, 1959) and "Les classes ouvrieres anglaises et la culture depuis les debutsde la revolution industrielle," in Niveaux de culture et groupes sociaux (Paris, 1967), pp. 189-99.
a number of scholars: See M. De Certeau, D. Julia, and J. Revel, "La beaute du mort: Le concept de 'culture populaire,'" Politique aujourd'hui (December 1970), pp. 3-23 (the phrase quoted is on p. 21).
131
131 (161/212)
In Folie et děraison: Histoire de la folie o iage classique (Paris, 1961), p. vii, M. Foucault states that: "faire l'histoire de la folie, voudra done dire: faire une etude structurale de l'ensemble historique—notions, institutions, mesures juridiques et policiéres, concepts scientifiques—qui tient captive une folie dont 1'état sauvage ne peut jamais étre restitué en lui-méme; mais a défaut de cette inaccessible pureté primitive, l'etude structurale doit rémonter vers la decision qui lie et séparé á la fois raison et folie." All this explains the absence of madmen from the pages of his book— an absence that isn't due solely, or even primarily, to the difficulty of access to the necessary sources. The deliria, recorded over thousands of pages and preserved in the Bibliothéque de PArsenal, of a servant living at the end of the seventeenth century who was semi-literate and "dement furieux" don't have, according to Foucault, a place in "the universe of our discourse," and are something "irreparably less than history" (p. v). It's difficult to say if evidence such as this could throw light on the "pureté primitive" of madness—which, after all, is perhaps not totally "inaccessible." In any case, Foucault's logic in this frequently irritating but brilliant book is undoubted (despite an occasional contradiction: see, for example, pp. 475-76). For an opinion concerning Foucault's regression from the Histoire de la Folie (1961) to Les mots et les choses (1966) and L'archeologie du savoir (1969), see P. Vilar, "Histoire marxisté, histoire en construction," in Faire de l'histoire, 3 vols., ed J. Le Goff and P. Nora (Paris, 1974) 1:1SS—89. On Derrida's objections, see D. Julia, "La religion-histoire religieuse," in ibid., 2:145-46. See now, M. Foucault et al., eds., Moi, Pierre Riviere, ayant égorgé ma mere, ma soeur, et mon frere (Paris, 1973). On the "stupor," "the silence," the refusal to interpret, see pp. 11, 14, 243, 314, 348 n. 2. For Riviere's readings, see pp. 40, 42, 125. The passage about wandering through the forest is at p. 260, the suggestion of cannibalism at p. 249. As for the populist distortion, see especially Foucault's "Les meurtres qu'on raconte," pp. 265-75. In general, see G. Huppert, "Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault,",Hisfory and Theory 13 (1974): 191-207.
6
xxi. By J. Le Goff see "Culture clericale et traditions folkloriques dans la civilisation mérovingienne," Annates: ESC 22 (1967): 780-91; idem, "Culture ecclesiastique et culture folklorique au Moyen Age: Saint Marcel de Paris et le dragon," in Ricerche storiche ed economtche m memoria di Corrado Barbagallo, 3 vols., ed. L De Rosa (Naples, 1970) 2:53-94.
acculturation: See V. Lanternan, Antropologia e imperialisme (Turin, 1974), pp. 5 ff. and N. Wachtel, "L'acculturation," in Faire de l'histoire, 3 vols., ed J Le Goff and P. Nora (Paris, 1974) 1: 124-46.
research on witchcraft trials: See C. Ginzburg, / benandanti: Stregonena e culti agrari tra '500 e '600 (1966; reprint ed., Turin, 1979).
7
xxii. quantitative history of ideas or . . . serialized religious history: For the first, see Livre et sociěté; for the second, P. Chaunu, "Une histoire religieuse sérielle," Revue d'histoire modeme et ccntemporaine 12 (1965), and now also M. Vovelle, Pietě baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVUle siecle (Paris, 1973). In general, see F. Furet, "L'histoire quantitative et la construction du fait historique," Annales: ESC 26 (1971): 63-75, who, among other things, properly notes the ideological implications of a method that tends to reabsorb the discontinuities (and revolutions) over a long period and in the equilibrium of the system. In this regard, see Chaunu's work and the essay by A. Dupront, "Livre et culture dans la societě Francaisedu 18e siěcle," in Livre et sociétédans la France du XVIHe Steele, 2 vols. (Paris and The Hague, 1965) 1:185 ff), which, after several hazy digressions on "the collective spirit," concludes by
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■
boasting of the virtues of a method that allows one to study the French eighteenth century and ignore its revolutionary outcome—which would be equivalent to freeing oneself "from the eschatology of history" (p. 231).
those who, like Francois Furet, have maintained: See F. Furet "Pour une definition des classes inferieures a l'epoque moderne,"Annates. ESC 18 (1963): 459-74,esp. p. 459. Histoire evenementielle (which is not only . . . political history): See R. Romano, "Ä propos de l'edition italienne du livre de F. Braudel ..." Cahiers Vilfredo Panto 15 (1968): 104-6.
the Austrian nobility or the lower clergy: I'm referring to O. Brunner, Adeliges Landleben und europäischer Geist (Salzburg, 1949); (cf. C. Schorske, "New Trends in History," Daedalus, no. 98 [1969): 963); A. Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge, 1970) (but see the critical remarks by E. P. Thompson, "Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context," Midland History 1, no. 3 [1972]: 41-45).
As with language, culture: See the observations by P. Bogatyrev and R. Jakobson, "II folclore come forma di creazione autonoma," Strumenti critici 1 (1976): 223-40. The' celebrated pages by G. Lukacs on a possible consciousness (see his History and Class Consciousness [London, 1971 J, p. 79) although originating in a totally different context, are applicable here.
xxiii. In conclusion, even a limited case: See D. Cantimori, Prospettive di storia ereticale italiana del Cinquecento (Bari, 1960), p. 14.
"archives of the repression": See D. Julia, "La religion-histoire religieuse," in Faire de VHistoire, 3 vols., ed. J. Le Goff and P. Nora (Paris, 1974) 2:147.
On the connection between quantitative and qualitative research, see the remarks by E. Le Roy Ladurie, "La revolution quantitative et les historiens francais: Bilan d'une generation (1932-1968)," in his le territoire de I'historien (Paris, 1973), p. 22. Among the disciplines "pionnieres et prometteuses" that remain steadfastly and quite properly qualitative, Le Roy Ladurie cites "psychologie historique." The quotation from E. P. Thompson is in "Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context," Midland History 1, no. 3 (1972):50.
An Italian scholar: See F. Diaz, "Lestanchezzedi Clio," Rivista storica italiana 84 (1972): esp. 733-34, and also by the same author, "Metodo quantitativo e storia delle idee," Rivista storica italiana 78 (1966): 932-47 (on Boll erne's work, pp. 939-41). See also the critical observations by F. Venturi, Utopia e riforma nell'illuminismo (Turin, 1970), pp. 24-25. On the question of reading, see the literature cited below at p. 149.
8
xxv. On the history of mentalities, see J. Le Goff, "Les mentalites: Une histoire ambigue," in Faire de l'histoire, 3 vols., ed. J. Le Goff and P. Nora (Paris, 1974), 3:76-94. The passage quoted is at p. 80. Le Goff observes characteristically: "Eminemment collective, la mentalite semble soustraite aux vicissitudes des Kittes sociales. Ce serait pourtant
une grossiere erreur que de la detacher des structures et de la dynamique sociale____
II y a des mentalites de classes, a cote de mentalites communes. Leur jeu reste a etudier" (pp. 89-90).
In a fascinating but mistaken book: See L. Febvre, Le probleme de l'incroyance au XVIesiecle: La religion de Rabelais (1942; reprint ed., Paris, 1968). As is well known, Febvre's argument, from a circumscribed theme—the confutation of A. Le Franc's thesis that Rabelais proved himself a champion of atheism in Pantagruel (1532)—expands in ever-widening circles. The third part of his work, on the limits of sixteenth-century incredulity, is certainly the newest from the methodological point of view, but also
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133   (163 / 21 2)
the most general and inconsistent, as Febvre himself seemed to have been aware (p. 19). The unjustified inferences about the collective mentalities of "sixteenth-century men" owe too much to the theories about primitive mentalities of Levy-Bruhl ("notre maitre/' p. 17). It's curious that Febvre should be ironic concerning such a phrase as "les gens du Moyen Age," and yet himself speak, perhaps only a few pages later, of "hommes du XVIe siecle," and of "hommes de la Renaissance," although adding in the second instance that this is a formula "clichee, mais commode": cf. pp. 153-54, 142, 382, 344. The allusion to the peasants is at p. 253. Bakhtin had already noted (Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky [Cambridge, Mass., 1968], p. 132) that Febvre's analysis is based exclusively on circles representing official culture. For the comparison with Descartes, see pp. 393,425, and passim. On this last point, see also G. Schneider, Der Libertin: Zur Geistes-und Sozialgeschichte des Biirgertums im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1970); Italian translation, // libertino: Per una storia sociale delta cultura borghese nel XVI e XVII secolo (Bologna, 1974), and the (not entirely acceptable) remarks at pp. 7 ff. (Italian ed.). On the danger, in Febvre's historical writings, of falling into subtle forms of tautology, see D. Cantimori, Storki e storia (Turin, 1971), pp. 223-25.
xxvi. marginal groups: See B. Geremek, "II pauperismo nell'eta preindustriale (secoli XIV-XVIII)," in Storia d'ltalia, vol. 5, Idocumentt. ed. R. Romano and C. Vivanti (Turin, 1973), pt. 1, pp. 669-98; P. Camporesi, ed., 11 Ubro dei vagabondi (Turin, 1973).
specific analyses: The publication of Valerio Marchetti's important research on artisans in Siena during the sixteenth century is eagerly awaited.
9
For what has been said in this section, see below pp. 58—60.
10
xxvii. taking note of a historical mutilation: Obviously, this shouldn't be confused either with a reactionary nostalgia for the past, or with an equally reactionary rhetoric about an assumed immobile and ahistorical "peasant civilization."
The quotation from Benjamin is found in his Angelus novus: Saggi e frammenti, which appears in Test di filosofia delta storia, ed R Solmi (Turin, 1962), p. 73.
TEXT 1
1. Menocchio: This is the name that recurs in the inquisitorial documents. Elsewhere he is also called "Menoch" and "Menochi." Today, the Italian transcription of his name's pronunciation would be "Menocio."
at his first trial: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 15 v.
Montereale: Today known as Montereale Cellina, a hill town (317 meters above sea level) locatedat the mouth of the Val Cellina. In 1584 the parish had a population of 650. See ACVP, "SaLrarum Visitationum Noresabanno 1582 usque ad annum 1584," fol. 168 v.
following a brawl: See ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 20 r.
the traditional miller's costume: "indutus vestena quadam et desuper tabaro ac pileo
134
134 (164/212)
aliisque vestimentis de lana omnibus albo colore" (Ibid., foi. 15 v.). This manner of dress was still used by Italian millers in the nineteenth century. See C. Canhi, Portafoglio d'un operaio (Milan, 1871), p. 68.
A couple of years later: See ACAU, "Sententiarum contra reos S. Officii liber H,"fol. 16
two fields in perpetual lease: On perpetual leases in this period, see G. Giorgetti, Contadini e proprietari nell'ltalia moderna: Rapporti di produzione e contratti agrari dal secolo XVJaoggi (Turin, 1974), pp. 97 ff. We don't know if they were "perpetual" leases or for shorter periods (for example, twenty-nine or, more probably, nine years). On the lack of precision in the terminology surrounding contracts in this period, which makes it difficult at times to distinguish among emphyteusis, perpetual lease, and lease, see the observations by G Chittolini, "Un problema aperto: la crisi della proprieta ecclesiastica fra Quattro e Cinquecento," Rivista storica italiana 85 (1973): 370. The probable location of these two fields appears in a later document: an assessment prepared in 1596 at the request of the provincial Venetian governor (see ASP, Notarile, b. 488, no. 3785, fols. 17 r.-22 r). Among the 255 parcels of land located in Montereale and Grizzo (a neighboring village) there appear (fol. 18 r.): "9. Aliam petiam terrae arativae positam in pertinentis Monteregalis in loco dicto alia via del'homo dictam la Longona, unius iug. in circa, tentam per Bartholomeum Andreae: a mane dicta via, a meridie terrenum ser Dominici Scandellae, a sero via de sotto et a montibus terrenum tentum per heredes q. Stephani de Lombarda"; (fol. 19 v.): "Aliam petiam terrae unius iug. in circa in loco dicto ... il campo del legno: a mane dicta laguna, a meridie terrenum M. d. Horatii Montis Regalis tentum per ser Jacomum Margnanum, a sero terrenum tentum per ser Dominicum Scandelle et a montibus suprascriptus ser Daniel Capola." It hasn't been possible to verify the place names with any great degree of precision. The identification of these two parcels of land with "the two fields in perpetual lease" mentioned by Menocchio twelve years before (1584) is not absolutely certain. Moreover, only the second plot is specifically described as "terrenum tentum," meaning, presumably, in perpetual lease. It should be noted that in a 1578 assessment (ASP, Notarile, b. 40, no. 332, fols. 115 r. ff.) Domenico Scandella's name doesn't appear, while that of a Bernardo Scandella (we don't know if they were related; Menocchio's father was called Giovanni) is mentioned several times. The name Scandella, incidentally, is still common today in Montereale.
rent (probably in produce): See A. Tagliaferri, Struttura e politico sociale in una comunita veneta del '500 (Udine) (Milan, 1969), p. 78 (rent of a mill with dwelling in Udine in 1571, for example, amounted to sixty-one bushels of wheat and two hams). See also the contract for the rent of a new mill to which Menocchio bound himself in 1596 (see at p. 97).
banished to Arba: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, interrogation of 28 April 1584 (unnumbered leaves).
2. When his daughter Giovanna: See ASP, Notarile, b. 488, no. 3786, fols. 27 r.—27 v., 26 January 1600. The groom's name was Daniele Colussi. For a comparison with other dowries, see Ibid., b. 40, no. 331, fols. 2 v. ff.: 390 lire and 10 soldi; Ibid., fols, 9 r. ff.: c. 340 lire; Ibid., b. 488, no. 3786, fols. 11 r.-l 1 v.: 300 lire; Ibid., fols. 20 v.-21 v.: 247 lire and 2 soldi; Ibid., fols. 23 v.-24 r.: 182 lire and 15 soldi. The modesty of the last dowry must certainly have been due to the fact that the bride, Maddalena Gastaldione of Grizzo, was marrying a second time. Unfortunately, we are in the dark about the social standing or the occupations of the persons named in the contracts. Giovanna Scandella's dowry consisted of the following items: One bed with a new mattress with a pair of linen sheets of half-length, and new pillow cases, pillows and cushions; with a bed cover, which the aforesaid ser Stefano promises to buy her new I- 69 s. 4
A new undershirt 5 10
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An embroidered shawl, with folds 1.  4 s.—
A gray dress 11 —
A new linsey-woolsey with the bodice of reddish cloth 12 —
Another linsey-woolsey similar to the above 12 —
A gray dress of half-length 10 —
A white linsey-woolsey, bordered with white cotton and linen, with fringes at the feet 12 10
A blouse of half wool 8 10
A pair of cloth sleeves, light orange in color, with silk ribbons 4 10
A pair of sleeves of silver colored cloth 1 10
A pair of lined sleeves of heavy cloth 1 —
Three new sheets of flax 15 —
A light sheet of half-length 5 —
Three new pillow cases 6 —
Six shawls 4 —
Four shawls 6 —
Three new scarfs 4 10
Four scarfs of half-length 3 —
One embroidered apron 4 —
Three shawls 5 10
One drape of heavy cloth 1 10
One old apron, one shawl, one of heavy cloth 3 —
One new embroidered kerchief 3 10
Five handkerchiefs 6 —
One mantle for the head of half-length 3 —
Two new bonnets 1 10
Five new undershirts 15 —
Three shirts of half-length 6 —
Nine silken ribbons of every color 4 10
four belts of various colors 2 —
One new apron of thick cloth — 15
A chest without lock _5 —
256 9
I haven't been able to consult L D'Orlandi and G Perusini, Antichi costumi friulam— Zona di Maniago (Udine, 1940).
Menocchio's place: M. Berengo's observations (Nobih e mercanti ntlla Lucca del Onquecento [Turin, 1965]) concerning the Lucchese countryside should be borne in mind: in the smallest villages "every actual social distinction is eliminated since all earn their livelihood through the exploitation of collectively held land And even if here, as elsewhere, people will continue to speak of rich and poor... there will indeed not be anyone who couldn't be suitably described as a rustic or even as a peasant." The miller's case was a special one: "They could be found in any place of some importance ... frequently creditors of both the town and of private individuals, not participating in the cultivation of land, richer than most...." (Ibid., pp. 322,327). On the social position of the miller see pp. 119-21.
In 1581 he had been mayor; See ASP, Notanle, b. 40, no. 333, fol. 89 v.: an order issued by Andrea Cossio, a nobleman of Udine, "potestati, iuratis, communi, hominibus Montisregalis" requiring payment for rents owed to him for certain lands. On 1 June the order is transmitted "Dominico Scandellae vocato Menochio de Monteregali .. potestati ipsius villae " In a letter of Ziannuto, a son of Menocchio (see above, p. 7), the latter is referred to as having been "mayor and warden (rector) in the five hamlets" (for their names, see Leggi per la Patria e Contadinanza delFriuli (Udine, 1686), Introduction, fol. d 2 r.) and "administrator" ("camararo") of the parish.
the old system of rotating offices: See G. Perusini, "Gli statuti di una vicinia rurale
136
136 (166/212)
friulana del Cinquecento," Memorie storiche forogiutiesi 43 (1958-59): 213-19. The vicinia, namely the assembly of heads of families, is that of Bueris, a tiny village near Tricesimo. Six family heads belonged to it in 1578.
"read": See ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 15 v.
Administrators: See G. Marchetti, "I quaderni dei camerari di S. Michele a Gemona," CeFastu?3S (1962); 11-38. Marcherti observes (p. 13) that the camerari didn't belong to the clergy or to the notariate, namely to the 'literate" class; usually they were "bourgeois or plebeians who had frequented the public school of the town" and he cites the probably exceptional case of an illiterate blacksmith who had served as cameraro in 1489 (p. 14).
Schools of this type: See G. Chiuppani, "Storia di una scuola di grammatica dal Medio Evo fino al Seicento (Bassano)," Nuovo archwio veneto 29 (1915): 79. The humanist Leonardo Fosco, who was originally from Montereale, is thought to have taught at Aviano. See F. Fartorello, "La cultura del Friuli nel Rinascimento," Atti dell'Accademia di Udine 6th series, 1 (1934-35): 160. But this information doesn't appear in the biographical sketch of Fosco by A. Benedetti in H Popolo, a weekly published by the diocese of Concordia-Pordenone, in the issue for 8 June 1974. Study on the municipal schools of this period would be extremely useful. They existed even in very small towns. See, for example, A. Rustici, "Una scuola rurale della fine del secolo XVI," La Romagna n.s. 1 (1927): 334-38. On the spread of education in the Lucchese countryside, see Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, p. 322.
denounced: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, unpaginated: "fama publica deferente et clamorosa insinuatione producente, non quidem a malevolis orta sed a probis et honestis viris catolicaeque fidei zelatoribus, ac fere per modum notorii devenerit quod quidam Dominicus Scandella. ..." (this is the usual formula).
"Preaching and dogmatizing shamelessly": "praedicare et dogmatizare non erubescit."
"He is always arguing'" See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 2 r.
"He will argue": Ibid., fol. 10 r.
"he knew": Ibid., fol. 2 r.
the village priest: Ibid., fols. 13 v., 12 r.
In the public square: Ibid., fols. 6 v., 7 v., unnumbered leaf (interrogation of Domenico Melchiori), fol. 11 r., etc.
3. "he usually: Ibid., fol. 8 r.
"Menocchio, please": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 10 r.
Giuliano Slefanut: Ibid., fol. 8 r.
The priest Andrea Bionima: Ibid., fol. 11 v.
Giovanni Povoledo: Ibid., fol. 5 r. It's well known that in this period the term "Lutheran" was employed in a very general way.
some for thirty or forty years: Ibid., fol. 4 v. (Giovanni Povoledo); fol. 6 v. (Giovanni Antonio Melchiori, not to be confused with Giovanni Daniele Melchiori, vicar of Polcenigo); fol. 2 v. (Francesco Fasseta).
Daniele Fasseta: Ibid., fol. 3 r.
"many years": Ibid., fol. 13 r. (Antonio Fasseta); fol. 5 v. (Giovanni Povoledo, who first said that he had known Menocchio for forty years, and later changed this to twenty-five or thirty.) The only recollection that can be dated precisely is the following,
137
137   (167 /212)
pertaining to Antonio Fasseta (fol. 13 r.): "Coming down from the mountain one day with Menocchio at the time that the empress was passing through, speaking about her, he said: "This empress is greater than the virgin Mary.'" Now, the empress Mary of Austria entered the Friuli in 1581. See G. F. Palladio degli Olivi, Historic delta Provincia del Friuli, vol. 2 (Udine, 1660), p. 208. people repeated it: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 6 r.
"/ see him having dealings'" Ibid., Trial no. 285, interrogation of the priest Curzio Cellina, 17 December 1598. unnumbered leaf.
4. For four years Menocchio: Ibid., Trial no. 126, fol. 18 v. "1 don't remember": Ibid., fol. 14 r.
it had been Vorai: He himself recalled this to the Holy Office during the interrogation of 1 June 1584 (Ibid., Trial no. 136), regretful that he hadn't done so sooner.
by another priest, don Ottavio: Ibid., Trial no. 284, unnumbered leaf (session of 11 November 1598).
"What popes": Ibid., Trial no. 126, fol. 10 r.
practically setting himself up against: See a similar Friulian case cited by G. Miccoli, "La storia religiosa/'inStorifld'/tiiZifl, vol. 2, Dalla caduta dell'lmpero romanoalsecoloXVUl, ed. R. Romano and C. Vivanti (Turin 1974), pt. 1, p. 994.
"beyond measure": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 10 r.
"Everybody has his calling": Ibid., fol. 7 v.
"The air is Cod": Ibid., fol. 3 r. (Daniele Fasseta); fol. 8 r. (Giuliano Stefanut); fol. 2 r. (Francesco Fasseta); fol. 5 r. (Giovanni Povoledo); fol. 3 v. (Daniele Fasseta).
"He is always arguing": Ibid., fol. 11 v. (the priest Andrea Bionima).
5. Giovanni Daniele Melchiori: Ibid., Trial no. 134, interrogation of 7 May 1584. On the trial held earlier against Melchiori, and on his relationship to Menocchio, see above p. 73. Both Melchiori and Policreto were tried by the Holy Office (in March and May 1584, respectively) after having been accused of attempting through their suggestions to influence the outcome of Menocchto's case. See Ibid., Trials nos. 134 and 137 Both claimed they were innocent. Melchiori was ordered to remain at the disposal of the court, and the case ended there; Policreto was made to undergo canonical purgation. The mayor of Pordenone, Gerolamo de'Gregori, and such members of the local nobility as Gerolamo Popaiti testified in behalf of Policreto. It appears that Policreto was attached to the Mantica-Montereale family, to which the lords of Montereale also belonged. In 1583 he was appointed arbiter (succeeding his father, Antonio, in this function) in a lawsuit between Giacomo and Giovan Battista Mantica on one side, and Antonio Mantica on the other (see BCU, ms. 1042).
"conducted in handcuffs": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 15 v.
3
"It is true that" See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 16 r.-v. "/ have said": Ibid., fols. 17 r.-v. 6.   "he might have said: Ibid., fol. 6 r. (Giovanni Povoledo).
4
"in earnest": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 2 v.-3 r. Manifestations of heresy by the uneducated frequently were interpreted as the fruit of madness. See,
138
138 (168/212)
for example, G Miccoli, "La vita religiosa," in Storia d'ttalia, vol. 2, Daila cadula dell'ImperoromanoalsecoloXVIU, ed. R. Romano and C. Vivanti (Turin, 1974), pt. l,pp. 994-95.
"sane": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 6 v.
Ziannuto: Ibid., Trial no. 136, interrogations of 14 May 1584, unnumbered leaves.
A century or so later: See M. Foucault, Folk et deraison: Histoire de la folie a I'age classique (Paris, 1961), pp. 121-22 (case of Bonaventure Forcroy); p. 469 (in 1733 a man was confined as a madman in the hospital Saint Lazare because he was affected by "sentiments extraordinaires").
5
7. The letter from Ziannuto to the lawyer Trappola and the letter written by the priest at Ziannuto's suggestion are both contained in the dossier of Menocchio's first trial (ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126). The explanations of the circumstances in which the letter to Menocchio was written, furnished by Ziannuto and the priest (foreseeably different but not contradictory), instead are among the records of the trial against the priest himself (Trial no. 136). The charges against Vorai, besides the one of having written to Menocchio suggesting a line of defense, were the following: having waited ten years to denounce Menocchio to the Holy Office, although he considered him a heretic; stating, while conversing with Nicolo and Sebastiano, counts of Montereale, that the church militant, even though governed by the Holy Spirit, may err. The very brief trial ended with the canonical purgation of the defendant. During the interrogation of 19 May 1584 the priest had declared, among other things: "I was moved to write this letter because I feared for my life. The sons of this Scandella used to pass near me and showed themselves to be angry. They didn't greet me as they had been accustomed to do. In fact, friends warned me to be on my guard because it was rumored that I had denounced the aforesaid ser Domenego and they could have done me some harm...." Among those who had accused Vorai of being an informer was that Sebastiano Sebenico who had advised Ziannuto to spread the word that Menocchio was mad or possessed (see above p. 6).
Instead he attributed them to a Domenego Femenussa: The attribution had been suggested, it appears, by Ziannuto See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 38 v.
"Sir": Ibid., fol. 19 r.
8. "It would appear from the trial records": Ibid. According to Giuliano Stefanut: Ibid., fol. 8 r. "/ meant": Ibid., fol. 19 r.
"Do not try to talk too much": Ibid., Trial no. 134, proceedings of 7 May 1584.
Fra Felice da Montefalco: See C. Ginzburg, / benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra '500 e '600 (1966; reprint ed., Turin, 1979), index.
The conflict between the two jurisdictions: See P. Paschini, Venezia e Vlnquisizione Romana da Giulio III a Pio IV (Padua, 1959), pp. 51 ff; A. Stella, Chiesa e stato nelle relazioni dei nunzi pontifici a Venezia (Vatican City, 1964), esp pp. 290-91.
"He said to me": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 3 r.
"Domenego said": Ibid., fol. 4 r.
9. "It's true I said": Ibid., fol. 27 v.
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139 (169/212)
"1 think": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 27 v.-28 v.
10. "you want to become gods on earth": See Psalm 81:6.
About marriage: Here Menocchio shows his impatience with the matrimonial regulations introduced by the Council of Trent. See A. C. Jemolo, "Riforma tridentina nell'ambito matrimoniale,"in Contributi alia storia del Concilia di Trento e della Controriforma (Florence, 1948), pp. 45 ff. (Quaderni di Belfagor, 1).
About confession: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 11 v.
"If that tree": Ibid., fol. 38 r.
"By the Virgin Mary": Ibid., fol. 6 v.
"1 do not see anything": Ibid., fol. 11 v,
11. "I did say": Ibid., fol. 18 r.
"/ like this about the sacrament": Ibid., fols. 28 r.-v. "J believe that sacred Scripture": Ibid., fols. 28 v.-29 r.
12. "[Menocchio] also told me": Ibid., fol. 2 v. "1 believe that saints": Ibid., fol. 29 r.
"He has been beneficial": Ibid, fol. 33 r. (I have corrected a slip: "Christ" rather than
"God.")
"of the very same nature": Ibid., fol. 17 v.
"// a person has sinned": Ibid. fol. 33 r.
"J would say enough": Ibid. fol. 4 r.
"J have never associated": Ibid. fols. 26 v.-27 r.
"to speak out". Ibid., fol. 3 r
"My lords, I beg you": Ibid., fols. 29 v-30 r.
13. "In the previous examination": Ibid., fol. 30 r.
On the Friuli in this period, besides P. Paschini (Sforw del Fnuli, 2 vols. [Udine, 1953-54) vol. 2, 2nd rev. ed.), who concerns himself exclusively with political events, see especially the numerous studies by P. S. Leicht: "Un programma di parte democratica in Friuli nel Cinquecento," in Studi e frammenti (Udine, 1903), pp. 107-21; "La rappresentanza dei contadini presso il veneto Luogotenente della Patria del Friuli," in Studi e frammenti, pp. 125—44; "Un movimento agrario nel Cinquecento," in Scritti van di storia del diritto italiano 2 vols. (Milan, 1943), 1:73-91; "II parlamento friulano nel primo secolo della dominazione veneziana," Rivista di storia del diritto italiano 21 (1948): 5-50; "I contadini ed i Parlamenti dell'eta intermedia," IXe Congres International des Sciences Historiques . . . Etudes presentees ä la Commission Internationale pour I'histoire des assemblies d'etats (Louvain, 1952), pp. 125-28. Among more recent works, see above all A. Ventura, Nobilta e popolo nella societa veneta del '400 e '500 (Bari, 1964), especially pp. 187-214. See also A. Tagliaferri, Struttura e politico sociale in una comunita veneta del '500 (Udine) (Milan, 1969).
the masnada/orm of serfdom: See A. Battisteila, "La servitu di masnada in Friuli," Nuovo archivio veneto 11 (1906), pt. 2, pp. 5-62; 12 (1906), pt. 1, pp. 169-91, pt. 2, pp. 320-31; 13 (1907), pt. 1, pp. 171-84, pt. 2, pp. 142-57; 14 (1907), pt. 1, pp. 193-208; 15 (1908), pp. 225-37. The last traces of this institution disappeared about 1460. But in Friulian
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statutes of a century later such provisions remained as De natoex libero ventre pro libero reputando (with the corresponding declaration "Quicumque vero natus ex muliere serva censeatur et sit servus cuius est mulier ex qua natus est, etiam si pater eius sit liber") or De servo communi manumissio. See also G. Sassoli De Bianchi, "La scornparsa della servitii di masnada in Friuli," Ce Fastu? 32 (1956): 145-50. in the hands of Venetian officials: See Relazioni dei rettori veneti in Terraferma, vol. 1 La patria del Friuli (luogotenenza di Udine) (Milan, 1973). (About this edition see the review by M. Berengo in Rivista storica ilaliana 86 (1974): 586-90.)
As early as 1508: See G. Perusini, Vita di popolo in Friuli: Patti agrari e consuetudini tradizionali (Florence, 1961), pp. xxi-xxii (Biblioteca di "Lares," 8).
14. On the events of 1511, see Leicht, "Un movimento agrario" and Ventura, Nobilta e popolo.
the Contadinanza: See Leicht, "La rappresentanza dei contadini." We lack a modern study on this subject.
the statutes of the Patria: See Constitutiones PatrieForiuliicum additionibus noviter impresse (Venice, 1524), fols. lx v., Ixviii v. The same provisions reappear in the 1565 edition.
the legal fiction: See Leicht, "1 contadini ed i Parlamenti" who emphasizes the exceptional quality of the Friulian case. In no other part of Europe, in fact, did a representative body of the peasantry stand alongside a parliament or assembly of the states.
The list of measures: See Leggi per la Patria, pp. 638 ff., 642 ff., 207 ff.
15. attempted to transform the long-term leases: See Perusini, Vita di popolo, p. xxvi, and, in general, G. Giorgetti, Contadini e proprietari nell'ltalia moderna: Rapporti di produzione e contratti agrari dal secolo XVI a oggi (Turin, 1974), pp. 97 ff.
the total population ... declined: See Tagliaferri, Struttura, pp. 25 ff. (with bibliography). The reports of the Venetian officials: Relazioni, pp. 84, 108, 115.
the decline of Venice: See AspetH e cause della decadenza economica veneziana nel secolo XVII (Venice and Rome, 1961); B. Pullan, ed.. Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1968).
8
16. a totally dichotomous view: See the translation of the important book by S. Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, trans. Sheila Patterson (New York, 1963).
"It also seems to me": See ACAU, SanfUffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 27 v.-28 r.
"Everything belongs to the Church": Ibid., fol. 27 v.
From an assessment made in 1596: See ASP, Notarile, b. 488, no. 3785, fols. 17 r. ff., especially fol. 19 v. Unfortunately, for this period we lack an inventory of ecclesiastical property in the Friuli such as the extremely detailed one compiled in 1530 by order of the governor, Giovanni Basadona (see BCU ms. 995). At fols 62 v-64 v. of this manuscript there is a listing of the lessees of the church of Santa Maria di Montereale, among which the name Scandella doesn't appear.
17. At the end of the sixteenth century: See A. Stella, "La proprieta ecclesiastica nella Repubblica di Venezia dal secolo XVal XVII," Nuova rivista storica 42 (1958): 50-77; A. Ventura, "Considerazioni sull'agricoltura veneta e sull'accumulazione originaria del capitale nei secoli XVI e XVII," Studi storici 9 (1968): 674-722; and now, in general, the important essay by G. Chittolini, "Un problema aperto: la crisi della proprieta ecclesiastica fra Quattro e Cinquecento," Rivista storica italiana 85 (1973): 353-93.
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141 I (171 /212)
18. "/ believe a Lutheran": See ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 27 r.
"some Lutherans will learn of it": Ibid., Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves.
In the complex religious picture: Obviously, the bibliography on the subject is endless. On radical tendencies in general, see G. H. Williams, The Radical .Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962). On Anabaptism, see C.-P. Clasen, Anabaptism, a Social History (1525-1618): Switzerland, Austria, Moravia, South and Central Germany (Ithaca and London, 1972). For Italy, see the rich documentation gathered by A. Stella, Dall'A nabattismo al socinianestmo nel Cinquecento veneto (Padua, 1967) and A nabattismo e antitrinitarismo in Italia nel XVI secolo (Padua, 1969).
"I believe that ss soon as we are born": See ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 28 v.
broken in mid-sixteenth century: See Stella, Dall'Anabattismo, pp. 87 ff.; idem, Anabattismo e antitrinitarismo, pp. 64 ff. See also C. Ginzburg, / costituti di don Pietro Manelfi, Corpus Reformátorům Italicorum: Biblioteca (De Kalb and Chicago, 1972).
19. But a few dispersed conventicles: On the religious situation in the Friuli in the sixteenth century, see P. Paschini, Eresia e Riforma cattolica al confine ortentale d'ltalia, Lateranum, n.s. 17, nos. 1-4 (Rome, 1951); L. De Biasio, "L'eresia protestante in Friuli nella seconda metá del secolo XVI," Memorte stonche Forogiuliesi 52 (1972): 71-154. On the artisans of Porcia, see Stella, Anabattismo e antitrinitarismo, pp. 153-54.
an Anabaptist . . could never have spoken: See, for example, what Marco, a dyer, a repentant Anabaptist, wrote in 1552: "and they |the Anabaptists] preached to me that we shouldn't have faith in the forgiveness of the pope because they say that they are lies. ..." (ASVen, SantVffizio, b. 10).
"/ believe that they are good": See ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 29 r.
"aside from this": See Stella, Anabattismo e antitrinitarismo, p. 154. See also the statement made by Ventura Bonicello, a vendor of rags, who was tried as an Anabaptist: "any other books besides the Holy Scriptures are an abomination to me" (ASVen, SantVffizio, b. 158, "libro secondo" fol. 81 p.),
a typical exchange: See ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 37 v.-38 r.
20. The porter: See Andrea da Bergamo (P. Nelli), // primo libro delle satire alia carlona (Venice, 1566), fol. 31 r.
Neapolitan tanners: See P. Tacchi Venturi, Slona delia Compagnia di Gesu in Italia, 2 vols. (Rome, 1910-51), 1: 455-56.
in a prostitute's appeal: See F. Chabod, "Per la storia religiosa dello stato di Milano" in Chabod's Lo stato e la vita religiosa a Milano nell'epoca di Carlo V (Turin, 1971), pp. 335-36.
almost all have an urban setting: Evidence such as the following, contained in a letter from the Venetian ambassador in Rome, M. Dandolo (14 June 1550) is quite rare: "some monkish inquisitors . . . here are relating fantastic happenings in Brescia and perhaps even stranger ones in Bergamo, including about some artisans who during holy days go about in the villages and climb trees from which they preach the Lutheran sect to the people and to the peasants. ..." (P. Paschini, Venezia e ľlnquisizione Romana da Giulio 111 a Pio IV [Padua, 1959) p. 42).
The religious conquest: This is a theme that I touched upon in an earlier study ("Folklore, magia, re'igione," in Storia d'ltalia, vol. 1, / caratteri origináli, ed. R Romano and C. Vivanti [Turin, 1972], pp. 645 ff., 656 ff.) and that I intend to develop further elsewhere.
Tilts doesn't mean: What follows is an attempt to define more closely and, in part to
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correct, what I wrote in "Folklore," p. 645.
21. an autonomous current: Although I distrust disquisitions on terminology, 1 think I should explain why I have preferred the expression "peasant radicalism" to "popular rationalism," "popular Reformation," or "Anabaptism." 1) the term "popular rationalism" has been used by M. Berengo (Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinquecento [Turin, 1965], pp. 435 ff.) to describe phenomena basically similar to those studied here. Nevertheless, it doesn't appear to be wholly appropriate for attitudes that only in part are traceable to our concept of "Reason"—beginning with the visions of Scolio (see pp. 112 ff). 2) The peasant radicalism that I am trying to reconstruct is certainly one of the basic elements in the "popular Reformation" described by Macek ("autonomous movements that accompany European history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and that may be understood as a popular or radical Reformation": J. Macek, La Riforma popolare [Florence, 1973], p. 2; my italics). It should be remembered, however, that it predates the fifteenth century (see the following note) and that it can't be reduced to a popular equivalent of the official Reformation. 3) The term "Anabaptism" as a comprehensive label for all manifestations of sixteenth-century religious radicalism was proposed by D. Cantimori (Eretici italiani del Cinquecento [Florence, 1939], pp. 31 ff) and abandoned by him in the face of G. Ritter's criticism. It has been newly proposed by A. Rotondó to designate "the mixture of prophetism, anticlerical radicalism, antitrinitarianism, and social egali-tarianism diffused among notaries, physicians, and teachers of grammar, among monks and merchants, among artisans in the city, and peasants in the country in sixteenth-century Italy" ("I movimenti ereticali nell'Europa del Cinquecento," Rivista storica italiana 78 [1966]: 138-39). This extension of the term seems inappropriate because it tends to minimize the deep-seated differences that existed between popular religion and the religion of the educated classes as well as between the radicalism of the countryside and the radicalism of the cities. Certainly, vague "typologies" and "sensibilities" such as those suggested by A. Olivieri ("Sensibilita religiosa urbana e sensibilita religiosa contadina nel Cinquecento veneto: suggestioni e problemi," Critica storica, n.s. 9 (1972]: 631-50) are not very helpful, subsuming under the banner of Anabaptism phenomena that are totally extraneous to it— including processions in honor of the Madonna. Research should have as its object, instead, the reconstruction of the still obscure connections that existed between the various components of the "popular Reformation," giving due consideration especially to the religious and cultural substratum not only of the Italian but also of the European countryside of the sixteenth century—that substratum that comes through in Menocchio's confessions. In defining it, I have spoken of "peasant radicalism," not so much with Williams's Radical Reformation in mind (on which see Macek's critical comments) as with Marx's phrase, according to which radicalism "grasps things at the roots," an image that, after all, is singularly appropriate in the present context.
but which was much older: See the important essay by W. L Wakefield, "5ome Unorthodox Popular Ideas of the Thirteenth Century," Medievalia el humanistica, n.s. 4 (1973): 25-35, based on inquisitorial documents from the area of Toulouse that contain "statements often tinged with rationalism, skepticism, and revealing something of a materialistic attitude. There are assertions about a terrestrial paradise for souls after death and about the salvation of unbaptized children; the denial that God made human faculties; the derisory quip about the consumption of the host; the identification of the soul as blood; and the attribution of natural growth to the qualities of seed and soil alone" (pp. 29-30). These statements are convincingly traced, not to the direct influence of Cathar propaganda, but rather to a current of autonomous ideas and beliefs. (If anything Catharism may have contributed to bringing them to light, directly or indirectly, by provoking the inquisitors' investigations.) It's significant, for example, that a proposition attributed to a Cathar notary at
143
143 (173/212)
the end of the fourteenth century, "quod Deus de celo non facit crescere fructus, fruges et herbas et alia, quae de terra nascuntur, sed solummodo humor terre," should have been echoed almost to the letter by a peasant of the Friuli three centuries later: "that the blessings that priests lay over fields, and the holy water that they sprinkle over them on the day of Epiphany, in no way help vines and trees to bear fruit, but only manure, and man's industry" (see respectively A. Serena, "Fra gli eretici trevigiani," Archivio veneto-tridentino 3 (1923): 173 and C. Ginzburg, / benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra '500 e '600 (1966; reprint ed., Turin, 1979], pp. 38-39, to be corrected in the above sense). Obviously, Catharism isn't an issue here. Instead, we are faced with statements that "may well have arisen spontaneously from the cogitation of men and women searching for explanations that accorded with the realities of the life in which they were enmeshed" (Wakefield, "Some Unorthodox," p. 33). Other examples similar to those cited here could be found. It is to this cultural tradition, which reemerges centuries later, that we alluded with the expression "peasant (or "popular") radicalism." To the elements listed by Wakefield—rationalism, skepticism, materialism—one should add egalitarian utopianism and religious naturalism. The joining together of all, or almost all, of these elements produces the recurrent phenomena of peasant "syncretism"—which could be defined more precisely as latent phenomena. See, for example, the archeological material collected by J. Bordenaveand M. Vialelle, Aux racinesdu mouvement cathare: La mentalitě religieuse des paysans dt I'Albigeois medieval (Toulouse, 1973).
10
"had spoken sincerely": ACAU, Sant'Uffizw, Trial no. 126, fols. 2 v.—3 r. "Sir": Ibid., fol. 21 v.
don Ottavio Montereale: Ibid., Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (11 November 1598). had emerged even during the first trial: Ibid., Trial no. 126, fol. 23 v. No Nicola da Porciais mentioned in the studies of sixteenth-century Friulian painting that are known to me. Antonio Forniz, who is conducting research on painters born in Porcia, kindly informed me with a letter dated 5 June 1972 that he had not turned up any trace of either a "Nicola da Porcia" or of a "Nicola de Melchiori" (see below). It should be noted that the meeting between the painter and the miller could have been connected to relations that were professional, as well as religious. In fact, in the registers of Venetian patents it isn't unusual to find painters, sculptors, and architects applying for licenses to construct mills. Occasionally, such prominent names are encountered as those of the sculptor Antonio Riccio and of the architect Giorgio Amadeo, or of Jacopo Bassano, who obtained licenses for certain mills in 1492 (the first two) and in 1544 (the third) respectively: See G. Mandich, "Le privative industriali veneziane (1450-1550)," Rivista del diritto commercial 34 (1936): 1, 538, 545. But see also p. 541.1 have been able to discover similar cases for a later period on the basis of photocopies of documents in ASVen, Senato Terra, graciously put at my disposal by Carlo Poni.
22. "It may be": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizw, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (interrogation of 19 July 1599).
a couple of weeks later. Ibid., unnumbered leaves (interrogation of 5 August 1599).
We don't know: No Nicola appears in the trial against the group of Porcia (see ASVen, Sant'Uffizio, b. 13 and b. 14, dossier Antonio Deloio).
"a great heretic": See ASVen, Sant'Uffizio, b. 34, dossier Alessandro Mantica, interrogation of 17 October 1571. Nicola had gone to Rorario's house "to take some headboards for painting."
"I know": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 23 v.
23. II sogno dil Caravia: Colophon: "In Vinegia, nelle case di Giovanni Antonio di Nicolini
144
144 (174/212)
da Sabbio, ne gli anni del Signore, MDXLI, dil mese di maggio." There Is no study specifically devoted to this work, but see V. Rossi, "Un aneddoto della storia della Riforma a Venezia," in Scritti di critica letteraria, vol. 3, Dal Rinascimento al Risorgimento (Florence, 1930), pp. 191-222, and the Introduction to Novelle dell'altro mondo: Poemetto buffonesco del 1513, Nuova scelta di curiosita letterarie inedite o rare, vol. 2 (Bologna, 1929) which illustrate in an exemplary manner the person of Caravia and the literary current to which the Sogno, at least in part, belongs. On journeys into hell by buffoons and other popular comic figures, see M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), ch. 6.
"You appear to me to be melancholia": See U sogno, fol. A iii r. The iconography on the title page is the customary one for "the melanchonic": but its dependence on Durer's engraving, which was well-known in Venetian circles, seems certain. See R. Klibansky, F. Saxl, and E. Panofsky, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art {London, 1964).
"Oh how dearly": See // sogno, fol. B ii v. "I know that Tarfarel": Ibid., fols. G v.-G ii r.
24. "sgnieffi": Ibid., fol. G iii r. "showing him": Ibid., fol. G ii v.
"A certain Martin Luther": Ibid., fols. F iv r.-v. (here and below the italics are mine).
25. "The first cause": Ibid., fol, B v. "Many fools": Ibid., fol. B iii v.
26. "They make a business": Ibid., fol. B iv r.
There's an implicit denial: Zanpolo doesn't describe Purgatory. At one point there's an ambiguous allusion to "the punishment of hell down there, or purgatory" (Ibid., fol.
ivr.).
"Purposefully": Ibid., fol. C ii v.
"sumptuous churches": Ibid., fol. E r. Caravia stresses this point in particular, criticizing, among other things, the grandiosity of the School of San Rocco.
"Saints should be honored": Ibid., fol. D iii v.
"Every faithful Christian": Ibid., fol. E r.
"the papists": Ibid., fol. B iv v.
For men like Caravia: On his productivity after the Sogno, see Rossi, Un aneddoto. In 1557 Caravia underwent an inquisitorial trial, in the course of which the Sogno was also brought out against him, inasmuch as it had been composed "in derision of religion." Ibid., p. 220; Caravia's characteristic testament, dated 1 May 1563, is reprinted in part on pp. 216-17.
27. Long before the date: It's impossible, as we've seen, to date the onset of Menocchio's heresy. At any rate, it should be noted that he once declared he hadn't observed Lent for twenty years (ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 27 r.)—a date that coincides approximately with his banishment from Montereale. Menocchio could have had contacts with Lutheran groups during his sojourn in Carnia—a border area where penetration by the Reformation was particularly successful.
11
"Would you like me to teach you": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 16 r.-v. "What I said": Ibid., fol. 19 r. "The devil": Ibid., fol. 21 v.
28. from the prophets: See F. Chabod, "Per la storia religiosa dello stato di Milano" in Lo
145
145   (175 /212)
stato e la vita religiosa a Milano neli'epoca di Carlo V (Turin, 1971), pp. 299 ff.; D. Cantimori, Ereniri italiani del Cinquecento (Florence, 1939), pp. 10 ff; M. Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969); and now G. Tognetti, "Note sul profetismo nel Rinascimento e la letteratura relativa," Bullettino deli'lstituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, no. 82 (1970), pp. 129-57. On Giorgio Siculo, see Cantimori, Eretici, pp. 57 ff; C. Ginzburg, "Due note sul profetismo cinquecentesco," Rivista storica italiana 78 (1966): 184 ff. "On confessing": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 16 r.
12
At the moment of his arrest: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, fol. 14 v., 2 February 1584: "inveni (the notary is speaking] quosdam libros qui non erant suspecti neque prohibiti, ideo R. P. inquisitor mandavit sibi restitui." 29. The Bible: Judging from G. Spini's bibliography, this would not appear to be Antonio Brucioli's translation (see La Bibliofilia 42 [1940]: 138 ff).
II fioretto della Bibbia: See H. Suchier, ed., Denkmaler Provenzalischer Literatur und Sprache (Halle, 1883), 1: 495 ff; P Rohde, "Die Quellen der Romanische Weltchronik," in Suchier, ed., Denkmäler, pp. 589-638, F. Zambrini, Le opere volgari a stampadeisecoli XIII e XIV (Bologna, 1884), col 408. As has been noted, editions vary in scope: some stop with the birth, others with the infancy or passion of Christ Those known to me (and I haven't made a systematic search) date from 1473 to 1552, and almost all are Venetian. We don't know when precisely Menocchio purchased the Fioretto The work long continued to circulate, the Index of 1569 lists a Flores Bibliorum et doctorum (see F. H. Reusch, Die Indices librorum prohibitorum des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts [Tübingen, 1886], p. 333). In 1576 the Commissioner of the Sacred Palace, fra Damiano Rubeo, replying to certain questions raised by the inquisitor of Bologna, ordered him to remove the Fioretti della Bibbia from circulation (see A. Rotondo. "Nuovi document* per la storia dell' Indice dei libri proibiti' (1572-1638)," Rinascimento, 14 [1963): 157).
II Lucidario: Menocchio first spoke of a Lucidario della Madonna; later he corrected himself: "I do not remember exactly whether that book was called Rosario or Lucidario, but it was printed" (see ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 18 r., 20 r). I have found at least fifteen editions of the Rosario by Alberto da Castello printed between 1521 and 1573. In this case, as in the preceding, I haven't made a systematic search If the book read by Menocchio really was the Rosario (as we shall state below, the identification isn't certain), the "Lucidario" would still have to be explained Was it an unwitting recollection of a Lucidario derived in some way from that of Honorius of Autun? On this literature, see Y. Lefevre, L'Elucidarium et les lucidaires (Paris, 1954).
II Lucendario: Even in this lapsus we should probably see the echo of the reading of a Lucidarius (see above) There are endless editions of the Legenda aurea in the vernacular. Menocchio, for example, could have seen a copy of the edition published in Venice, 1565.
Historia del giudicio: See A Cioni, ed., La poesia religiosa: I cantari agiografici e le rime di argomentosacro, Biblioteca bibliografica italica, vol. 30 (Florence, 1963), pp. 253 ff. The text read by Menocchio was part of the group in which the cantare (songster) on the story about the Judgment is preceded by a briefer one on the coming of the Antichrist (which begins: "To you I appeal eternal Creator"). I know of four copies, of which three are preserved in the Biblioteca Trivulziana, Milan (See M. Sander, Le livre ä figures Halten depuis 1467jusqu'ä 1530, vol.2 (Milan, 1942), nos. 3178,3180,3181); the fourth is in the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna (Opera nuova del giudicio generale, auat tratta della fine del mondo, printed in Parma, and reprinted in Bologna, by Alexandro Benacci, with permission of the Holy Inquisition, 1575; about this copy, see below p.
146
146 (176/212)
149). These four imprinls contain the passage, paraphrased from the Gospel of Matthew, remembered by Menocchio (see pp. 38 ff.); it's lacking instead in the briefer versions preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice (see A. Segarizzi, Bibtiografia dellestampe popolari italiane della R. Biblioteca nationale diS. Marco di Venezia, 1 [Bergamo, 1913], nos. 134, 330).
II cavallier: There is a vast literature on this work. See the most recent edition known to me (M. C. Seymour, ed., Mandeville's Travels [Oxford, 1967]) and the opposing interpretations by M.H.I. Letts (Sir John Mandevitle: The Man and His Book [London, 1949]) and of J. W. Bennett (The Rediscovery of Sir }ohn Mandeville [New York, 1954]) who seek to demonstrate with unpersuasive arguments that Mandeville existed historically. The Travels, which was translated into Latin and into all the European vernaculars, circulated widely in both manuscript and printed form. In the British Library alone there are twenty editions of the Italian version, which appeared between 1480 and 1567.
Zampollo: On the Sogno di! Caravia, see the studies by V. Rossi cited above, p. 145. II Supplimento: I know of at least fifteen vernacular editions of Foresti's chronicle printed between 1488 and 1581. On the author, see E. Pianetti, "Fra Iacopo Filippo Foresti e la sua opera nel quadro della cultura bergamasca," Bergomum 33 (1939): 100-09, 147-74; A. Azzoni, "I libri del Foresti e la biblioteca conventuale di S. Agostino," Bergomum 53 (1959): 37-44; P. Lachat, "Une ambassade ethiopienne aupres de Clement V, a Avignon, en 1310," Annali del pontificio museo missionary etnologico giä lateranensi 31 (1967): 9, n. 2.
Lunario: Sander (Le livre a figures, vol. 2 nos. 3936-43) lists eight editions issued between 1509 and 1533.
the Decameron: On the fact that Menocchio read a copy free of Counter-Reformation censorship, see above, pp. 50 ff. On this question see F. H. Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher (Bonn, 1883), 1: 389-91; A Rotondö, "Nuovi document!," pp. 152-53; C. De Frede, "Tipografi, editori, librai italiani del Cinquecento coinvolti in processi d'eresia," Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 23 (1969): 41; P. Brown, "Aims and Methods of the Second Rassettatura of the Decameron," Studi secenteschi 8 (1967): 3-40. In general, see A. Rotondö, "La censura ecclesiastica e la cultura," in Storia d'ltalia, vol. 5,1 documents, ed. R. Romano and C. Vivanti (Turin, 1973), pt. 2, pp. 1399-1492.
30. The Koran: See C. De Frede, La prima traduzione italiana del Coranosullo sfondodei rapporti tra Cristianitä e Islam nel Cinquecento (Naples, 1967).
13
"which , . . I bought": See ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 20 r.
Supplementum: Ibid., Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (interrogation of 12 July 1599).
Lucidario; Ibid., Trial no. 126, fols. 18 r„ 20 r.
Her son, Giorgio Capel: Ibid., unnumbered leaves (interrogation of 28 April 1584).
The Bible: Ibid., fol 21 v.
The Mandeville: Ibid., fols. 22 r., 25 v.
The Sogno dil Caravia: Ibid., fol. 23 v.
Nicola de Melchiori: Ibid., Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (interrogation of 5 August 1599).
Menocchio... had loaned: Ibid., Trial no. 126, unnumbered leaves (interrogation of 28 April 1584).
147
147   (177 /212)
31. We know that in Udine: See reference to A. Battistella, in A. Tagliaferri,Sfruffura e politico sociale in una comunita veneta del '500 (Udine) (Milan, 1969), p. 89. Elementary schools: See G. Chiuppani, "Storia di una scuola di grammatica dal Medio Evo hno al Seicento (Bassano)," Nuovo archivio veneto 29 (1915): 79. On these questions, given the lack of modern studies, still useful is the old work by G. Manacorda: Storia delta scuola in Italia, vol. 1, // Medioevo (Milan, Palermo, Naples, 1914).
it's astonishing: We should remember, however, that the history of literacy is in its infancy. The rapid general survey by C. Cipolla (Literacy and Development in the West [London, 1969]) is already outdated. Among the recent studies, see L Stone, "The Educational Revolution in England, 1560-1640," Past and Present, no. 28 (1964), pp. 41-80; idem, "Literacy and Education in England, 1640-1900," ibid., no. 42 (1969), pp. 69-139; A. Wyczanski, "Alphabetisation et structure sociale en Pologne au XVIe siecle," Annates: ESC 29 (1974): 705-13; F. Furet and W. Sachs, "La croissance de 1'alphabetisation en France—XVHIe-XIX* siecle," ibid., pp. 714-37. Wyczanski's study is especially appropriate for comparison with the case we are presently examining. From the analysis of a series of financial documents from the region about Cracow during the biennium 1564-65, it appears that 22 percent of the peasants mentioned knew how to write their own signatures. The author warns that the figure must be accepted with caution, since it deals with a very small sample (eighteen persons), consisting, moreover, of peasants who were well off and who frequently held offices in the village (as was precisely Menocchio's case) He concludes, nevertheless, that "instruction at an elementary level existed among peasants" ("Alphabetisation," p. 710). We await with interest the results of research by B. Eonnin ("Le livre et les paysans en Dauphine au XVlIe siecle") and J Meyer ("Alphabetisation, lecture et ecriture: Essai sur 1'instruction populaire en Bretagne du XVle siecle au XIXe siecle").
14
32. Menocchw knew little more Latin: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizto, Trial no. 126, fol. 16 r.: "He replied: I know how to say the Credo, and also I have heard the Credo that is recited in the Mass, and I have helped sing it in the church of Monte Reale.' Interrogated: 'Since you know the Credo, what do you have to say about that article, 'et in lesum Christum filium eius unicum dominům nostrum qui conceptus est de Spiritu santo, natus ex Maria virgine,' what did you say and believe about it in the past, and what do you believe now?' And when it was said to him: 'Do you even understand these words, "qui conceptus est de Spiritu santo, natus ex Maria virgine"?' he replied: 'Yes sir I understand.' " The course of the dialogue recorded by the notary of the Holy Office seems to indicate that Menocchio comprehends only when the words of the Credo are being repeated to him, perhaps more slowly. The fact that he also knew the Pater Noster (ibid., Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves, interrogation of 12 July 1599) doesn't contradict what we've suggested. Less obvious, instead, are the words of Christ to the thief which Menocchio cites ("hodie mecum eris in paradiso": see Trial no. 126, fol. 33 r.). But to conclude on this basis alone that he knew Latin well would be hazardous indeed.
various social levels: Unfortunately, systematic research doesn't exist on books that circulated among the lower classes in sixteenth-century Italy—more precisely, among the minority of the members of these classes able to read An investigation carried out on wills, post mortem inventories (such as those pursued by Bee especially on mercantile circles), and inquisitorial trials would be very useful. See also the evidence gathered by H.-J. Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et societě a Paris au XVUe siécle (1598-1701), 2 vols. (Geneva, 1969), 1: 516-18 and, for a later period, J. Sole, "Lecture et
148
148   (178 / 21 2)
■
classes populaires a Grenoble au dix-huitieme siecle: Le temoignage des inventaires apres deces," Images du peuple au XVIIIe siecle—Colloque d'Aix-en-Provence, 25 et 26 Octobre 1969 (Paris, 1973), pp. 95-102.
The Foresti and the Mandeville: For Foresti, see Leonardo da Vinci, Scritti letterari, ed. A. Marinoni, new enlarged ed., (Milan, 1974), p. 254 (it's a conjecture, but plausibly founded). For Mandeville, see E. Solmi, Le fonti dei manoscritti di Leonardo da Vinci (Turin, 1908), p. 205, supplement, nos. 10-11 of the Giornale storico delta letteratura italiana. On Leonardo's reaction to Mandeville, see esp. p. 54. In general, besides the Marinoni edition just cited, pp. 239 ff., see E. Garin, "II problema delle fonti del pensiero di Leonardo," in La cultura fitosofica delRinascimento italiano (Florence, 1961), pp. 388 ff., and C. Dionisotti, "Leonardo uomo di lertere," Italia medioevale e umanistica 5 (1962): 183 ff. (which we have tried to keep in mind, especially in terms of methodology).
Hist oria del Giudicio: This is the copy of the Opera nuova delgiudiciogenerate preserved in the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna (Aula V, Tab. I, JL vol. 51.2). On the title page there is a note: "Ulyssis Aldrovandi et amicorum." Other notes on the title and on the last leaf don't appear to be in Aldrovandi's hand. On the latter's encounters with the Inquisition, see A. Rotondo, "Per la storia dell'eresia a Bologna nel secolo XVI," Rinascimento 13 (1962): 150 f., with bibliography.
"fantastic opinions": See ACAU, SantTJffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 12 v.
15
33. how did he read them: On the question of reading—almost always surprisingly neglected by students of these questions, see the legitimate observations by U. Eco ("II problema della ricezione," in A. Ceccaroni and G. Pagliano Ungari, eds.. La critica tra Marx e Freud [Rimini, 1973J, pp. 19-27), which in large part agree with what has been said here. Some very interesting material emerges from the investigation by A. Rossi and S. Piccone Stella, La fatica di leggere (Rome, 1963). On "error" as a methodologically crucial experience (which is demonstrated even in the case of Menocchio's readings) see C. Ginzburg, "A proposito della raccolta dei saggi storici di Marc Bloch," Studi medievali, ser. 3, 6 (1965), pp. 340 ff.
"opinions": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 21 v.
16
34. "was called a Virgin": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 17 v.-18 r.
"Contemplate": I quote from the 1575 Venetian edition ("appresso Dominico de'Franceschi, in Frezzaria al segno della Regina"), fol. 42 r.
Calderari: See J. Furlan, "11 Calderari nel quarto centenario della morte," IlNoncello, no. 21 (1963), pp. 3-30. The painter's real name was Giovanni Maria Zaffoni. I don't know if it has been noticed that the feminine group on the right, in the scene of Joseph with the pretenders, resembles a similar group painted by Lotto at Trescore, in the fresco that depicts Saint Clare taking the veil.
17
"I believe": See ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 29 v.
35. "Yes sir": Ibid.
"And the angels": I quote from the Venice edition of 1566 ("appresso Girolamo Scotto"), p. 262. Incidentally, it should be noted that among the scenes painted by Calderari at San Rocco there is also one of Mary's death.
149
149 (179/212)
18
36. "because many men": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 16 r.
in chapter 166 of the Fioretto: I quote from the 1517 Venetian edition ("per Zorzi di Rusconi milanese ad instantia de Nicolo dicto Zopino et Vincentio compagni"), fol.
Ov v.
"Christ was born a man": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 9 r. "if he was God": Ibid., fol. 16 v.
19
37. "he is always arguing": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 11 v. "I say": Ibid., fols. 22 v.-23 r.
"Oh, you who have": I quote, in the process correcting a couple of material errors, from the ludizio universal overo finale "in Firenze, appresso alle scale di Badia," n.d. (but 1570-80), a copy preserved in the Biblioteca Trivulziana. The 1575 Bologna edition (see above p. 146) has minor variants.
38. Even the Anabaptist Bishop: See A. Stella, Anabattismo e antitrinUerismo in Italia nel XVI secolo (Padua,  1969), p. 75.
39. "because it only hurts": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no 126, fol 21 v. "/ teach you": Ibid., fol 9 r
But during the interrogation: Ibid., fols. 33 v-34 r.
40. Alcune ragioni del perdonare: "In Vinegia per Stephano da Sabbio, 1537." On Crispoldi, see A. Prosperi, Tra ei'angeltsmo e Controriforma: G. M. Gtberti (1495-1543) (Rome, 1969), index. On the booklet, see C Cinzburg and A. Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza: Un seminario sul 'Beneficw di Crista' (Turin, 1975).
"The prescription ": [Crispoldi| Alcune ragioni, fols. 34 r.-v.
He is familiar with: Ibid., fols. 29 ff„ especially fols. 30 v-31 r : "And to be sure they |soldiers and men of rank] and every state and condition of person and each and every republic and reign deserve perpetual war and never to enjoy peace, where there are so many who hate forgiving, or speak badly and have a low esteem of those who pardon. They deserve to have every person take the law into his own hands and have a private accounting, and that there should be neither judge nor public official, so that with a multitude of ills they may see how great an evil it is when everyone takes the law into his own hands; how vendettas, for the sake of the common good, are entrusted to public officials even by the laws of the pagans, and that even among them to pardon was the correct thing to do, especially when this was done for the good of the republic or even of some private person, as in the case where a father was pardoned so that his little children might not be deprived of his support. And think how much more important it is to do it because God wishes it so. This question of the common good is discussed at length elsewhere and by many." Cf. chapters 11-15 of book 1 of the Discorsi (first published in 1531).
not the Machiavelli diminished: See the Introduction by G Procacci to N. Machiavelli, // Principe e Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Milan, 1960), pp. lix-lx.
20
41. all his accomplices": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 27 r.
42. in a letter to his judges: See p. 89.
150
150 I (180/212)
i
The Travels, probably . .. written: See the essential bibliography cited above, p. 147. It's well known: See G. Atkinson, Les nouveaux horizons de la Renaissance francaise (Paris, 1935), pp. 10-12.
"the different manners of Christians": I quote from the 1534 Venice edition (Joanne de Mandavilla, Qual tratta ielle piü maravigliose cose), fol. 45 v.
"They say that a man": Ibid., fol. 46 r.-v.
43. "If that tree": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizb, Trial no. 126, fol. 38 r. "among all the prophels": Mandavilla, Qual tratta, fol. 51 v.
"/ doubted that": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 16 v.
"but he was never crucified": Mandavilla, Qual tratta, fol. 52 r.
"it is not true that Christ": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 13 r.
"it seemed a strange thing": Ibid., fol. 16 v.
44. "they [the Christians}": Mandavilla, Qual tratta, fols. 53 r.-v.
21
"the peoples": Joanne de Mandavilla, Qua! tratta delle piü maravigliose cose (Venice, 1534), fol. 63 r. "Channe" isThana.a place located on the island of Salsette, northeast of Bombay (for the identification of geographical names in Mandeville, I've used Seymour's commentary to the edition [M. C. Seymour, ed., Mandeville's Travels (Oxford, 1967)1).
45. "they are people short in stature": Mandavilla, Qual tratta, fol. 79 v. On the possibility that this passage served as a source for Swift, see J. W. Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (New York, 1954), p. 255-56.
"So many kinds": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, unnumbered leaves; Mandavilla, Qual tratta, fol. 22 r.
Michel de Montaigne: On the limits of Montaigne's relativism, see S. Landucci, / filosofi e i selvaggi, 1580-1780 (Bari, 1972), pp. 363-64 and passim.
"In this island": Mandavilla, Qual tratta, fols. 76 v.-77 r. Dondina (Dondun) maybe one of the Andaman islands. Chapter 148 of the Italian edition of Mandeville corresponds to chapter 22 of the English version (translators' note).
46. as it had Leonardo: See E. Solmi, Le fontidei manoscritti di Leonardo da Vinci (Turin, 1908), p. 205, supplement, nos. 10-11 of the Giornale storico delta letteratura italiana.
"Tell me": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 21 v.-22 r.
22
47. "And you should know": Joanne de Mandavilla, Qual tratta delle piü maravigliose cose (Venice, 1534), fol. 63 v.
48. "the holiest beast": Ibid. fols. 63 v.-64 r.
"the heads of dogs": Ibid., fol. 75 r. The description of the Cynocephales is taken from the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais.
"you should know that in all that country": Mandavilla, Qual tratta, fols. 118 v.-19 r. "Et metuent": Ps. 66:8; "Omnes gentes": Ps. 71:11.
"although": Mandavilla, Qual tratta, fols. 110 r.-v. For the Scriptural citations, see Hos. 8:12; Song, of Sol. 8:14; John, 10:16.
151
151 (181/212)
Mesidarata and Genosaffa: These are two places mentioned in the classical tradition, Oxydraces and Gymnosophistae. To these passages from Mandeville one can compare the depictions of men with large ears or enormous feet who are among the saved on the portal of the church of the Madeleine in Vezelay (see E. Mále, L'art religieux du XI!e siěcle en France [Paris, 1947], p. 330 and see also the iconography of St. Christopher dog-faced in L. Réau, Uiconographie de l'art chrétien [Paris, 1958], vol. 3, pt. 1, 307-8; these references have been graciously communicated to me by Chiara Settis Frugoni), where the emphasis, however, is on the diffusion of Christ's Word even among distant and monstrous peoples.
49. a popular current... favoring toleration: See, for example, C. Vivanti, Loíía politico e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento (Turin, 1963), p 42
legend of the three rings: Besides M. Penna, La parabola dei tre anelli e la tolleranza nel Medio Evo (Turin, 1953), which is unsatisfactory, see U. Fischer, "La storiadei tre anelli: Dal mito all'utopia," Annali della Scuola Normále Superiore di Pisa-Classe dt Lettere e Filosofia ser. 3, 3 (1973): 955-98.
23
Gerolamo Asteo: See C. Ginzburg, 1 benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra '500 e '600 (1966; reprint ed., Turin, 1979), index.
"/ beg you, sir": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizto, Trial no. 285, interrogations of 12 July, 19 July, 5 August 1599.
50. fallen under the scissors: See above p. 147. The novella ("Melchizedek the Jew, with a story of three rings, escapes the great danger set for him by Saladin," the third of the first day) lacks any reference to the three rings in the Giunti edition corrected by Leonardo Salviati (Florence, 1573, pp. 28-30; Venice, 1582, etc.). In the edition "riformata da Luigi Groto cieco d'Adria" (Venice, 1590, pp. 30-32) not only has the most explosive passage disappeared ("And so I say to you, my lord, of the three Laws to the three peoples given by God the Father, about which you question me: each one believes to have directly received and need carry forward His inheritance, His very Law and His commandments; but who actually has them, even as with the rings, the question is still pending": G. Boccaccio, II Decamerone, ed. V. Branca [Florence, 1951), 1: 78), but the entire novella has been rewritten beginning with the title "The youthful Polifilo with a story of three rings escapes a great danger set for him by three women."
51. Castellio: See D. Cantimori, "Castellioniana (et Servetiana)," Rivista stonca italiana 67 (1955): 82.
24
that possible relations with one heretical group: In general, see the methodological suggestions regarding "contracts" and "influences" in L Febvre, "Une question mal posée: les origines de la Reformě francaise et le probléme des causes de la Reformě," in Au coeur religieux du XVIs si'ecle (Paris, 1957).
52. "1 have said that": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio. Trial no. 126, fol. 17 r. "if this book": Ibid., fol. 22 r.
"As it is said, in the beginning God made a great substance": Fioretto della Bibbia, fol. A iiii r. "and it is said in the beginning God made heaven and earth": See Foresti, Supplementum, fol. I v. (of the Venice 1553 ed.).
152
152   (182 /212)
53. "I heard him say": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 6 r.
"/ have said that": Ibid., fol. 17 r. The italics, here and below, are mine.
54. "What was this": Ibid., fol. 20 r.
"that most holy majesty": Ibid., fol. 23 r.
"I believe that the eternal God": Ibid., fols. 30 r.-v.
"This God": Ibid., fol. 31 v.
26
"/(appears that": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 36 v.-37 v. The transcription is complete. I have only substituted the names of the two interlocutors for the formula "lnterrogatus . . . respondit."
27
57. "Angelic, that is to say divine": See Dante con Vespositioni di Christoforo Landino et d'Alessandro Vellutello (Venice, 1578), fol. 201 r. Paradise 30, 134 ff. also alludes to the thesis of the creation of man as reparation for the fall of the angels. On this question see, B. Nardi, Dantee lacultura medievale: Nuovisaggidi filosofiadantesca (Bari, 1949), pp. 316-19.
"And this God": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 17 v.
had read Dante: For an example of the reading of Dante in a popular (but urban and, moreover, Florentine) environment, see V. Rossi, "Le lettere di un matto," in Scritti di critica letteraria, vol. 2, Studi sul Petrarca e sul Rinascimento (Florence, 1930), pp. 401 ff., especially pp. 406 ff. Even closer to Menocchio's case is that of the commoner of the Lucchese countryside who called himself Scolio. For echoes of Dante in his poem, see below p. 168.
Actually, Menocchio: There's no evidence that Menocchio had read any of the contemporary vernacular translations of Diodoro Siculo's Biblioteca storica. In the opening chapter of this work, at any rate, there is no mention of cheese, even if there is a reference to the generation of living beings from putrefaction. I shall return in another essay to the history of this passage. On the other hand, we know with certainty that Menocchio had had Foresti's Supplementum in his hands. Here he could have encountered, in a hasty summary, certain cosmological doctrines traceable to antiquity or the Middle Ages: "Briefly then all these things have been taken from the book of Genesis, so that by means of them any one of the faithful may come to understand that the theology of pagans is totally useless; in fact by comparing it (with Genesis) he may understand that it is impiety rather than theology. Of these pagans some said there was no God; others believed and said that the stars fixed in the sky were fire, or actually fire that girated and was moved about, and they adored it in the place of God; others said that the world was governed not by any divine providence, but by a rational nature; some say that the world never had a beginning but was from eternity, that in no way was it begun by God, but rather was ordained by chance and fortune; some finally, that it was composed of atoms and sparks and minute animated bodies. ..." (Supplementum, fol. II r.). This allusion to "the world ordained by chance" recurs (unless it's an echo of/n/erno IV, 136, which is unlikely) in a conversation mentioned by the priest of Polcenigo, Giovan Daniele Melchiori, when he went to testify before the Holy Office of Concordia (16 March). Fifteen years before, a friend—most likely the priest himself—had exclaimed, walking in the country: "Great is the goodness of God in having created these mountains, these plains, and this beautiful machine that is the world." And Menocchio who was with
153
153 (183/212)
him had asked: "Who do you believe created this world?" "God." "You're fooling yourself, because this world was made by chance, and if I could talk I would, but I don't want to talk." (ACAU, SanfUffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 24 v.-25 r.).
"From the most perfect": Ibid., fol. 37 r.
Francesco Redi's experiments: Redi demonstrated in 1688 that in organic substances removed from contact with air, putrefaction did not occur, and thus not even "spontaneous generation."
Walter Raleigh: Quoted from H. Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1960), p. 209.
58. ancient and distant myths: U. Harva, Les representations rehgteuses des peuples altaiques (Paris, 1959), pp. 63 ff.
"In the beginning": See ACAU, SanfUffizio, Trial no. 126, fol 6 r. (and see pp. 52 ff,), /(can't be excluded: See G. De Santillana and H. von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill (London, 1970), pp. 382-83, who declare that an exhaustive study of this cosmogonic tradition would require a book in itself. Who knows if, after having written a fascinating one on the mill wheel as the image of the heavenly vault, they might not perceive more than a casual occurrence in the restatement of this ancient cosmogony by a miller Unfortunately, I lack the competence to judge such a work as Hamlet's Mill. Its presuppositions, as well as the audacity of some of its passages, obviously inspire suspicion. But only by daring to question certainties that have been lazily acquired does the study of such persistent cultural continuities become possible
Paola Zambelli has recently argued against "the concept of the absolute autonomy of peasant culture," which I am supposed to have maintained in The Cheese and the Worms (see "Uno, due, tre, mille Menocchio?" Archwio stonco italiano 137 (1979): 59, 51-90 passim) It seems to me that the hypothesis around which this book is constructed, one that moreover has been frequently explicitly confirmed—that of the "circularity" between dominant and subordinate cultures—signifies exactly the opposite But. according to Zambelli, the notion of circularity doesn't correspond to the thesis of the book (p 61, n, 19) The phrase "complex relationship, made up of reciprocal exchanges (Zambelli's italics], in addition to repression operating in one direction only," which I have used elsewhere, appears to her endowed with "notably different nuances," and more acceptable (even if, however, they don't correspond to my research) —without noticing that in a passage from the introduction to this book, which she herself cited (p. 63), I had already spoken of "a reciprocal influence (my italics) between the cultures of subordinate and ruling classes." Undoubtedly more carefully written, and more useful, are Zambelli's observations on the diffusion of the notion of spontaneous generation in Italian philosophical (Neoplatonic and Aristotelian) circles in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Still, it doesn't seem to me that the references cited by Zambelli furnish convincing precedents with which to explain the origins of Menocchio's ideas. It should be noted first of all that either they talk of the putrefaction of cheese (Pomponazzi, p. 74, n. 24), but without connecting this to the origin of the cosmos; or they talk of the origins of angels and of men from chaos, but without mentioning the putrefaction of cheese or putrefaction in general (Tiberio Russilliano Sesto, and the vernacular translation of Pimander, pp. 78-79). Now in a culture tied to daily experience, as was Menocchio's, the separation of the "image" (better: of the "experience") from the "idea" of the fermentation (p. 74) was neither taken for granted nor obvious. The repeated appearance, in Menocchio's cosmological talk, of the allusion to the putrefied cheese in an analogical-explicative key persuades us decisively to exclude the bookish mediation hypothesized (and not proven) by Zambelli. Actually, an argument in favor of her thesis presupposes an extreme permeability, which would have to be demonstrated, between upper class culture and peasant culture, (To avoid misunderstandings I'd like to emphasize that here too I'm not proposing the "concept of the absolute autonomy of peasant
154 (184/212)
culture.") It is absurd to suppose that for a miller in contact with heretical circles "acquaintance, mediated of direct," with Ficino's writings was "infinitely easier" than with Servetian texts, "since they [Ficino's| were extremely widespread" (p. 69). As we've already said, a Mantuan goldsmith could try to read Servetus (without understanding a thing); but the hypothesis that Ficino's writings were among Menocchio's books recalls C. Dionisotti's quip about the "truly marvelous identification," confuted by Garin, of a De immortatita d'anima, mentioned in the list of books owned by Leonardo (who, after all, was Leonardo) with Ficino's Theologia platonka: "thinking about it always gave me the impression of a giraffe in a hen house" (C. Dionisotti, "Leonardo uomo di lettere," Italia medioevale e umanistica 5 (1962): 185). Really surprising is Zambelli's observation (pp. 79-80) regarding the term terrigenae used by Ficino, and later by Pomponazzi's disciple, Tiberio Russilliano Sesto— "indeed when a theme is so familiar as to cause a special word to be coined in their Latin, it isn't necessary to have to suppose a direct and purely oral descent from India." That Latin would have been incomprehensible to Menocchio, in the highly unlikely assumption that those texts has actually fallen into his hands. In short, we are in the presence of two cultures, linked, however—and this is the point—by circular (reciprocal) relationships that will have to be analytically demonstrated, case by case. However, if we accept the assumption of circularity, we have to admit that it imposes on the historian standards of proof different from the usual. This is due to the fact that dominant culture and subordinate culture are matched in an unequal struggle, where the dice are loaded. Given the fact that the documentation reflects the relationship of power between the classes of a given society, the possibility that the culture of the subordinate classes should leave a trace, even a distorted one, in a period in which illiteracy was still so common, was indeed slim. At this point, to accept the usual standards of proof entails exaggerating the importance of the dominant culture. In the present instance, for example, to assume that every scrap of written evidence— even a still unpublished lecture of Pomponazzi's or a text of Tiberio Russilliano Sesto published clandestinely and destined to remain virtually unknown—is of greater validity in the reconstruction of Menocchio's ideas than a "purely" oral tradition (the tell-tale adverb is Zambelli's) means deciding the issue in advance in favor of one (the more privileged) of the contenders on the field. In this way we inevitably finish by "demonstrating" the traditional thesis that ideas by definition originate always and only in educated circles (perhaps out of radical positions: but that doesn't concern us here)—in the heads of monks and university professors, certainly not of millers or of peasants. An absurd example of this type of distortion, oblivious even to the most basic chronological precautions, is furnished by G. Spini, "Noterelle libertine," Rivisla storica italiana 88 [1976): 792-802: see Zambelli's remarks, pp. 66-67.) It's legitimate to object that the hypothesis that traces Menocchio's ideas about the cosmos to a remote oral tradition is also unproven—and perhaps destined to remain so (see G. C. Lepschy, "Oral Literature," The Cambridge Quarterly 8 [1979]: 136*87) even if, as I've stated above, I intend in the future to demonstrate its possibility with additional evidence. In any case, it would be advisable to develop new criteria of proof specifically suited to a line of research based on so thoroughly a heterogeneous, in fact unbalanced, documentation. That a new field of investigation alters not only the methods but the very criteria of proofs in a given discipline is shown, for example, in the history of physics: the acceptance of atomic theory has necessitated a change in the standardsof evidence that had developed within the sphere of classical physics.
the English theologian Thomas Burnet: "Telluremgenitam esseatqueortum olim traxisse ex Chao, ut testatur antiquitas tarn sacra quam profana, supponamus: per Chaos autem nihil aliud intelligo quam massam materiae exolutam indiscretam et fluidam... Et cum notissimum sit liquores pingues et macros commixtos, data occasione vel libero aeri expositos, secedere ab invicem et separari, pinguesque innatare tenuibus; uti videmus in mistione aquae et olei, et in separatione floris lactis a lacte tenui, aliisque
155
155 (185/212)
plurimis exemplis: aequum erit credere, hanc massam liquidorum se partitám esse in duas massas, parte ipsius pinguiore supematante reliquae ..." (T. Burnet, Telluris theoria sacra, originem et mutationes generates orbis nostri, quas aut jam subiit, aut oiim subiturus est, complectens [Amsterdam, 1699], pp. 17, 22; I heartily thank Nicola Badaloni for bringing this passage to my attention.) For the reference to Indian cosmology, see ibid., pp. 344—47, 541-44.
a cult with shamanistic undercurrents: See C. Ginzburg, / benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agraritra '500 e'600 (1966; reprint ed., Turin, 1979), p. xiii. I shall deal with this theme more fully in a future work.
28
59. The Reformation and the diffusion of printing: On the relationship between the two phenomena see E. L. Eisenstein, "L'avenement de rimprimerie et la Reformě," Annates: ESC 26 (1971); 1355-82 and most recently, idem. Trip Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979), esp. pp 367 ff.
the historic leap: On all this see the fundamental essay by J. Goody and J. Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1962-63): 304-45, which, however, curiously ignores the break constituted by the invention of printing. E. L Eisenstein ("The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance," Past and Present, no. 45 [1969]: 66-68) quite properly insists on the possibilities for self-education that it offered.
"a betrayal of the poor": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 27 v. It should be noted that in 1610 the provincial Venetian governor, A Grimani, ordered that all Friulian trials involving peasants should be written in the vernacular: Leggi per la Patria e Contadinanza del Fnuh (Udine, 1686), p. 166.
"Can't you understand": See ACAU. Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (6 July 1599).
"to seek exalted things": Ibid., Trial no. 126, fol. 26 v.
29
60. "How God cannot": See Ftoretto della Bibbia, fols. A iii v.-A iv r.
61. "Now many philosophers": Ibid., fols. C r.-v.
But the linguistic and conceptual tools: Here I'm making use (although with a different perspective, as I indicated in the preface) of I_ Febvre's concept of "outillage mental"; Le probléme de I'incroyance au XVle siěcie: La religion de Rabelais (1942; reprint ed., Paris, 1968), pp. 328 ff
30
62. the images that adorn the Fiorerto: See, for example, pp 69-70.
31
"We are all children": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 17 v. "they are all dear to him": Ibid., fol. 28 r. "He claims all": Ibid., fol. 37 v.
156
156 I (186/212)
I
"only hurts oneself": Ibid., fol. 21 v.
63. But besides being a father: The two images were traditional. See K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), p. 152.
"most high majesty": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 20 r.
"Great captain": Ibid., fol. 6 r.
"he who will sit": Ibid., fol. 35 v.
"/ said that if Jesus Christ": Ibid., fol. 16 v.
"as for indulgences": Ibid., fol. 29 r.
"is like a steward of God": Ibid., fol. 30 v.
by "the Holy Spirit": Ibid., fol. 34 r.
"by means of the angels": Ibid.
"Just as someone": Ibid., fol. 37 r.
64. "where there is will": Ibid. "carpenter": Ibid., fol. 15 v. "1 believe": Ibid., fol. 37 r. "Has this God": Ibid., fol. 31 v. "God alone": Ibid., fol. 29 r.
As for the angels: It should be noted that if Menocchio had had in his hands, as we've supposed (see above p. 57), Dante con I'esposilioni di Christoforo Landino el d'Alessandro Vellutello, he could have read among Landino's glosses to canto 9 of the Inferno: "Menandrians take their name from Menander magus, disciple of Simon. They say the world was not made by God, but by the angels" (fol. 58 v.). A confused and distorted echo of this passage seems to recur in these words of Menocchio: "In this book by Mandeville it seems to me that I read there was a Simon magus who took the form of an angel." Actually, Mandeville doesn't even mention Simon Magus. The slip probably resulted from a moment of confusion for Menocchio. After having said that his ideas originated from a reading of Mandeville's Travels that had occurred "five or six years" before, the inquisitor had objected: "It is known that you have held these opinions for about thirty years" (ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 26 v.). With his back to the wall Menocchio had tried to get out of his fix by attributing to Mandeville a phrase he had read elsewhere—most likely a long time before—and changing the subject at once. These, however, are simply conjectures.
"they were produced": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 37 r.
"the angels were the first creatures": See Fioretto delta Bibbia, fol. B viii r.
"And so you see": Ibid., fol. A iii v.
"/ believe that the entire world": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 17 r.
32
65. "What is this Almighty God": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 11 i "what do you imagine": Ibid., fol. 8 r. "what is this Holy Spirit": Ibid., fol. 12 r. "You will never find": Ibid., fol. 24 r. "// I could speak": Ibid., fol. 25 r.
157
157   (187 /212)
66. "I said": Ibid., fol. 27 v.
the now lost Italian translation: See A. Stella, Anabattismo e antitrinitarismo in Italia net XVI secolo (Padua, 1969), pp. 7, 135-36.
At the heart: On Servetus, see D. Caniimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento (Florence, 1939), pp. 36-49; B. Becker, ed., Autour de Michel Servet et de Sebastien Castellion (Haarlem, 1953), R. H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic: The life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511-1553 (Boston, 1953).
"I doubted that": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 16 v. "/ think that he is a man like us": Ibid., fol. 32 r.
"For by Holy Spirit": M. Servetus, De Trinitatis erroribus (1531; reprint ed., Frankfort, 1965), fol. 22 r. The English translation is from The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity ... Translated into English by Earl Morsf Wilbur. Harvard Theological Studies, 16 (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), p. 35. "Nam per Spiritum sanctum nunc ipsum Deum, nunc angelum, nunc spiritum hominis, instinctum quendam, seu divinum mentis starum, mentis impetum, sive halitum intelligit, licet aliquando differentia noterur inter datum et spiritum. Et aliqui per Spiritum sanctum nihil aliud intelligi volunt, quam rectum hominis intellectum et rationem."
"1 believe... he is Cod": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio. Trial no 126, fols. 16 v., 29 v., 21 v. For the interpretation of "spirit" in the last quotation, see above at p. 71. "As though Holy Spirit": Servetus, De Trinitatis, fol. 28 v.; TheTwo Treatises, p. 44. "Quasi Spiritus sanctus noil rem aliquam separatam, sed Dei agitationem, energiam quandam seu inspirationcm \irtulis Dei designet."
"In speaking of the Spirit": Servetus, De Trinitatis, fols 60 r.-v ; The Two Treatises, p. 94. "Sufficiebat mihi si tertiam illam rem in quodam angulo esse anteiligerem. Sed nunc scio quod ipse dixit: 'Deus de propinquo ego sum, et non Deus de longinquo ' Nunc scio quod amplissimus Dei spintus replet orbem terrarum, continet omnia, et in singulis operatur virtutes; cum propheta exclamare libet 'Quo ibo Domine a spiritu tuo?' quia nee sursum nec deorsum est locus spiritu Dei vacuus.'
"What do you think Cod is": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio. Trial no. 126, fols. 2 r„ 5 r.
"Again, all that is made": Servetus, De Trinitatis, fols 66 v.-67 r., 85 v.; The Two Treatises, p 103 (see also Cantimori, Eretia, p. 43, n. 3) "Omne quod in virtute a Deo fit, dicitur eius flatu et inspiratione fieri, non enim potest esse prolatio verbi sine flatu Spiritus. Sicut nos non possumus proferre sermonem sine respiratione, et propterea dicitur spiritus oris et spiritus labiorum. .. Dico igitur quod ipsemet Deus est spintus noster
inhabitans in nobis, et hoc esse Spiritum sanctum in nobis____Extra hominem nihil est
Spiritus sanctus. ..."
"What do you imagine": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fols 8 r, 3 r. (and 10 r., 12v„ etc.), 2 r, 16 v., 12 r.
Servetus's writings: See the pseudo-Melanchthon letter addressed to the Senate of Venice in 1539 discussed bv K. Benrath, "Notiz über Melanchtons angeblichen Brief en den venetianischen Senat (1539)," Zeitschrift f. Kirchengeschichte 1 (1877): 469-71, the case of the Mantuan goldsmith Ettore Donato who, after having had in his hands the De Trinitatis erronbus in the Latin version, declared: "it was in a style so that I didn't understand it" (Stella, Anabattismo e antitrinitarismo, p. 135); on the circulation of Servetian writings in the Modenese area see J. A. Tedeschi and J. Von Henneberg, "Contra Petrum Antonium a Cervia relapsum et Bononiae concrematum," in Italian Reformation Studies m Honor of Laelius Socmus, ed. J. Tedeschi, (Florence, 1965), p. 252, n. 2.
158
158 I (188/212)
33
68. "it's a betrayal-': See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio. Trial no. 126, fol. 11 v. "1 believe that": Ibid., fol. 34 r. "the devil": Ibid., fols. 38 r.-v.
a peasant religion: "And in the peasants' world there is no room for reason, religion, and history. There is no room for religion, because to them everything participates in divinity, everything isactually, not merely symbolically, divine: Christ and the goat; the heavens above, and the beasts of the held below, everything is bound up in natural magic. Even the ceremonies of the church become pagan rites, celebrating the existence of inanimate things, which the peasants endow with a soul, and the innumerable earthy divinities of the village. ..." (Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, trans. Frances Frenaye (New York, 1947), p. 117.
34
69. "We say": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 17 r.
"and therefore man": See Fioretto delta Bibbia, fols. B viii r.-v. The italics are mine. "When man dies": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 10 v.
the verses in Ecclesiastes: See Eccles. 3: 18 ff.: "Dixi in corde meo de filiis hominum, ut probaret eos Deus et ostenderet similes esse bestiis. Idcirco unus interitus est hominum et iumentorum, et aequa utriusque conditio. Sicut moritur homo, sic et ilia moriuntur. ..." In this connection we would do well to remember that among the accusations lodged against the nobleman Alessandro Mantica of Pordenone ten years before (he was condemned later by the Holy Office as "vehemently suspected" of heresy even though nothing very substantial turned up against him) was that of having propounded the thesis of the mortality of the soul on the basis of these verses: "And mindful," one reads in the sentence dated 29 May 1573, "that it was not proper for the aforementioned Alessandro, since he was a man of letters, to say on more than one occasion to ignorant people 'quod iumentorum et hominum par esse interitus,'
suggesting the possibility that the rational soul is mortal____" (ASVen, Sant'Uffizio, b.
34, fasc. Alessandro Mantica, fols. 21 v.-22 r„ and sentence). That Menocchio might have been among those "ignorant people" is an attractive but indemonstrable conjecture—and, at any rate, unnecessary. At this time the Mantica had intermarried with the Montereale family: A. Benedetti, Documenti inediti riguardanti due matrimoni fra membri del signoři castellani di Spilimbergo e la famiglia Mantica di Pordenone (n.p. n.d.; reprint ed. Pordenone, 1973).
70. "What is your belief": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 18 v.
35
"You say": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 20 r.-v. I have made a faithful transcription; only in the following instances has direct discourse been restored: "It being said to him, if the spirit of God ... and if this spirit of God ..."; "interrogated if he meant that that spirit of God .. . "; "it being said to him that he should confess the truth and resolve. ..."
159
159 (189/212)
36
71. pantheistic: The term "pantheism" was coined by John Toland in 1705 (see P. O. Kristeller, The Classics and Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, Mass. 1955), p. 100.
popular belief: See C. Ginzburg, / bertandanti: Stregoneria t culti agrari tra '500 e '600
(1966; reprint ed., Turin, 1979), p. 92.
"so, tell the truth": ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 21 r
"our spirit": Ibid., to I. 20 v.
"whether he believed": Ibid., fols. 21 r.-v.
72. "I wilt tell you": Ibid., fols. 32 r.-v.
"is separated from man": Ibid., fol. 34 v.
Two spirits: In general, on this question, see the important considerations by L Febvre, Le probleme de l'incroyance au XVle si'ecle: La religion de Rabelais (1942; reprint ed., Paris, 1968), pp. 163-94.
37
"And it is true": See Fioretto della Bibbia, fols. B ii v.-B iii r.
The distinction: See also L. Febvre, Le probleme de l'incroyance au XVI* siede: La religion de Rabelais (1942; reprint ed„ Paris, 1968), p. 178, regarding Posters distinction between immortal animus (in French anime) and amma (in French hme). It should be noted, however, that for Postel the latter is linked to the Spirit, while the anime is illuminated by the mind.
We must go back: On all this, see G. H Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962), in the index sub voce "psychopannychism"; idem,"Camillo Renato (c. 1500?— 1575)," in Italian Reformation Studies in Honor of Laelius Socinus, ed. J. Tedeschi (Florence, 1965),pp. 106 ff, 169-70, passim; A. Stella, Dall'Anabattismoalsoanianesimo net Cinquecento veneto (Padua, 1967), pp. 37-44.
73. Through the direct influence of Renato: See the trial records of one of Renato's followers in the Valtellina (he declared that he held the "same beliefs" as he), Giovanbattista Tabacchino, a friend of the Vicentine Anabaptist Jacometto "stringaro" (lace maker): A. Stella, Anabattismo e antitrinitarismo in Italia nel XVI secolo (Padua, 1969), sub voce "Tabacchino." This overthrows the prudent reservation that had been expressed by Rotondö on this question (C. Renato, Opere, documenti, e testimonianze, ed. A. Rotondö, Corpus Reformatorum Italicorum (De Kalb and Chicago, 1972), p. 324 It should be noted, however, that the pamphlet "La revelatione," preserved in manuscript among the papers of the Venetian Holy Office and previously attributed to Jacometto "stringaro" (see Stella, Dall'Anabattismo, pp. 67-71, who publishes lengthy extracts from it; C Ginzburg, / costituti di don Pietro Manelfi, Biblioteca del Corpus Reformatorum Italicorum [De Kalb and Chicago, 1972], p. 43, n. 22), is actually the work of Tabacchino. See ASVen, SantVffizio, b. 158, "liber quartus," fol. 53 v. This writing, which had been intended for members of the sect who had found refuge in Turkey, merits further study in view of the close relationship of its author to Renato. Antitrinitarian ideas had not previously been attributed to the latter (see Renato, Opere, p. 328) while Tabacchino's "La revelatione" takes an explicitly antitrinitarian direction.
"believed that the soul": See Stella, Anabattismo e antitrinitarismo, p. 61. The italics are mine.
"no other hell": See Ginzburg, / costituti, p. 35.
160
160 I (190/212)
the priest of Polcenigo: See ASVen, Sanl'Uffizio, b. 44 (De Melchiori don Daniele), "we go to paradise": Ibid., fols. 39 v., 23 v., etc. "1 remember": Ibid., fols. 66 r.-v.
74. Discorsi predicabili: I quote from the Venetian edition of 1589, fols. 46 r.-v. The first edition appeared in 1562. On Ammiani, or Amiani, who was secretary of the order and attended the Council of Trent, see the sketch by G. Alberigo in Dizionario biograßco degli italiani (Rome, 1960), 2: 776-77. The article underlines Ammiani's attitude, hostile to antiprotestant polemic, and favorable, instead, to the recovery of tradition, especially the patristic. This is evident even in these Discorsi (which were followed by another two parts in a few years), where an explicit attack on the Lutherans is restricted to the fortieth discourse ("What have the wicked Luther and his disciples done," fols. 51 r.-v.).
"ad perfidam": See ASVen, Sant'Uffizio, b. 44, fol. 80 r. The reference to Wyclif in an inquisitorial sentence of this period seems to be quite unusual.
38
75. "/ believe": See above p. 75.
"What was the Son": See ACAU, SanfUffizio, Trial no. 126, fols. 31 v-32 r.
76. "Yes, my lords": Ibid., fol. 32 V. "the seats": Ibid., fol. 33 v.
39
"earlier you affirmed": See above p. 69.
"No sir": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 29 v.
"Preaching": Ibid., fol. 28 v.
"1 think they are good": Ibid., fol. 29 r.
77. "because Cod": Ibid., fol. 35 r. "/ believe it is a place": Ibid. "Intellect": Ibid., fols. 32 r.-v.
"with our bodily eyes": Ibid., fol. 35 v.
"paradise is a gentle place": See Joanne de Mandavilla, Qual tratta delle piit maravigliose cose, fol. 51 r.
"do you believe": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 38 v.
40
"my mind": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 30 r.
In societies: See J. Goody and J. Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1962-63): 304-45; F, Graus, "Social Utopias in the Middle Ages," Past and Present, no. 38 (1967): 3-19; E. J. Hobsbawm, "The Social Function of the Past: Some Questions," Past and Present, no. 55 (1972): 3-17. Still useful is M. Halbwachs, Les cadres sociauxdela memoire (1925; reprinted., Paris, 1952).
78. "When Adam": This famous proverb was already in circulation at the time of the English peasant rebellion in 1381 (seeR, Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 [London, 1973], pp. 222-23).
161
161    (191 / 21 2)
primitive Church: See, in general, G. Miccoli, "Ecclesiae primitivae forma," in Chiesa Gregoriana (Florence, 1966), pp. 225 ft
"I wish that": See ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, (ol. 35 r.
The crisis of ethnocentricity; See S. Landucci, 1 filosofi e i selvaggi, 1580-1780 (Bari, 1972); W. Kaegi, "Voltaire e la disgregazione della concezione cristiana della storia," in Meditazioni storiche, Italian tr. (Bari, 1960), pp. 216-38.
"Martin known as Luther": See Foresti, Supplementum, fols. ccclv r.-v. (but there are mistakes in the numbering).
41
80. "considered": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 132, statement by the priest Odorico Vorai, 15 February 1584.
"in the inns": Ibid., Trial no. 126, fol. 9 r.
"slandered": Ibid See also fols 7 v., 11 r., etc.
"he provides me": Ibid., Trial no   132, unnumbered leaves (interrogation of 18 February 1584).
"working": Ibid., Trial no. 126, fol. 13 v.
81. "TTiis one": Ibid., fol 10 v.
"he says things": Ibid., fol. 12 v
"When you were saying": Ibid , Trial no 132, unnumbered leaves (interrogation of 25 April 1584).
"God forbid": Ibid., Trial no 126, fol. 27 v. "That night": Ibid, fols. 23 v-24 r.
become an outlaw: See E J Hobsbawm, Bandits (London, 1969). A generation before See above p 14.
42
"begins to sin": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no 126, fol. 34 v.
82. "A few days ago": Mundus novus (n.p. n.d., 1500?), unnumbered leaves. The italics are mine. "Superioribus diebus satis ample tibi scripsi de reditu meo ab novis illis regionibus . quasque novum mundum appellare licet, quando apud maiores nostros nulla de ipsis fuerit habita cognitio et audientibus omnibus sit novissima res."
In a letter that Erasmus: See Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi . . . ed. P. S. Allen, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1928), 7: 232-33.
Capitolo; This writing is found as an appendix to the Begola contra la Bizana (Modena, n.d.). I've used the copy in the Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio, Bologna, call no. 8. Lett, it, Poesie varie, Caps. XVII, no. 43.1 haven't been able to identify the printer. At any rate, see R. Ronchetti Bassi, Carattere popolare della stampa in Modena ne\ secoli XV-XVI-XV11 (Modena, 1950).
83. land of Cockaigne: See F. Graus, "Social Utopias in the Middle Ages," Past and Present, no. 38 (1967): 3-19, especially pp. 7 ff., who, however, seriously underestimates the diffusion of this tneme and its popular impact. In general, see M.Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), passim. (It should be noted, incidentally, that in the "nouveau monde" that the author imagines he has discovered in the mouth of Pantagruel, there is an echo of the land of Cockaigne, duly
162
_.
162   (192 /212)
noted by E. Auerbach, Mimesis, the Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), pp. 262 ff. For Italy still fundamental is V. Rossi, "II paese di Cuccagna nella letteratura italiana," in appendix to Le lettere di messer Andrea Calmo, ed. V. Rossi (Turin, 1888), pp. 398-410. There are some useful references in the essay by G. Cocchiara in the collection, 11 paese di Cuccagna e altri studi di folklore (Turin, 1956), pp. 159 ff. For France, see A. Huon, " 'Le Roy Sainct Panigon' dans ľimagerie populaire du XVIe siécle," in Franqois Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrieme centenaire desa morl (1553-1953), ed. M. Francois (Geneva, Lille, 1953), pp. 210-25. See, in general, E. M. Ackermann, 'Das Schlaraffenlanď tn German Literature and Folksong . . . with an Inquiry into Its History in European Literature (Chicago, 1944).
84. These elements: Cocchiara's essay, among others, deals with them without connecting them, however, to accounts of the American natives (on the absence of private property, see R. Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento [Milan, Naples, 1971], pp. 12 ff.). Ackermann touches on this connection briefly: 'Das Schlaraffenlanď, pp. 82 and esp. 102.
Not only serious: It may be useful to recall the Freudian category of witticisms directed against "institutions ..., propositions dealing with morality or religion, conceptions of life so hallowed that any objection leveled against them can only be done in a humorous guise, in fact through a witticism cloaked by a facade" (see the comment by F. Orlando, Toward a Freudian Theory of Literature with an Analysis of Racine's 'Phédre', trans. Charmaine Lee (Baltimore and London, 1978), pp. 153 ff.). Thus, in the course of the seventeenth century More's Utopia was included in collections of frivolous or playful paradoxes.
Anton Francesco Doni: See P. F. Grendler, Critics of the Italian World (1530-1560): Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolb Franco, andOrtensio Lando (Madison, 1969). I have used the 1562 edition of the Mondi (Mondi celesti, terrestriet infernali degli academic! pellegrini,..): the dialogue on the Mondo nuovo is at pp. 172-84.
isn't a peasant utopia: See Graus, "Social Utopias," p. 7, who states that the setting for the land of Cockaigne is never urban. An exception appears to be the História nuova delta citta di Cuccagna, printed in Siena toward the end of the fifteenth century, cited by Rossi, ed. (Le lettere, p 399). Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate this text. "I enjoy": See Doni, Mondi, p. 179.
ancient myth of an age of gold: See A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935); H. Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (London, 1969); H. Kamen, "Golden Age, Iron Age: A Conflict of Concepts in the Renaissance," The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, no. 4 (1974): 135-55.
"a new world different": See Doni, Mondi, p. 173.
to project the model: For this distinction, see N. Frye, "Varieties of Literary Utopias," in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. F. E. Manuel (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), p. 28.
and of property: See Doni, Mondi, p. 176: "Everything was in common, and peasants and city dwellers dressed alike, because each carried down the fruit of his labor and took what he needed. There was no need for anyone to have to sell and resell, buy and rebuy."
85. references in Foresti's Supplementum: See Foresú, Supplementum, fols. cccxxxixv.-cccxl
"Because I have read": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 34 r. urban, sober "new world": On the significance of Doni's urban utopia, see the rather superficial treatment in G. Simoncini, Ciŕffl e societä net Rinascimento, 2 vols. (Turin, 1974), 1: 271-73 and passim.
163
163 I (193/212)
religion lacked rites: See Grendler, Critics, pp. 175-76 (more generally, pp. 127 ff.). Grendler's statements aren't always convincing. For example, to speak of a more or less explicit "materialism" in regard to Doni seems to be a distortion (besides, see the telling wavering at pp. 135 and 176). In any case, Doni's religious restlessness is unquestionable. A. Tenenti ("L'utopia nel Rinascimento [1450-1550]," Studistorici 7 (1966]: 689-707), who speaks of an "ideal theocracy" in connection with the Mondo nuovo (p. 697), doesn't seem to have taken it into account.
"know God": See Doni, Mondi, p. 184. Grendler (p. 176) speaks of an "orthodox religious coda." Actually these words confirm the simplified religion dear to Doni. See also ACAU, SantVffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 28 r.
Tasting": See ACAU, Santllffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 35 r.
Lamento: Lamento de uno poveretto huomo sopra la carestia, con I'universale allegrezza dell'abondantia, dolcissimo intertenimento de spiriti galanti (n.p. n.d.). I've used the copy in the Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio, Bologna, call no. 8. Lett, it., Poesie varie, Caps. XVII, no. 40.
86. Lent and Carnival: Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World, p. 210 and passim) justifiably emphasizes the cyclical vision implicit in popular Utopias. At the same rime, in contradiction, he sees the camivalesque Renaissance view of the world as marking an irreversible rupture with the "old" feudal world (pp. 215, 256, 273-74, 392). This supe rim posit ion of unilinear and progressive time over cyclical and static time is an indication of an overemphasis of the subversive elements in popular culture—an overemphasis that is the most debatable aspect of a book which, nevertheless, remains fundamental. See also P. Camporesi, "Carnevale, cuccagna e giuochi di villa (Anatisi e documenti)," Studi e problemi di cntica testuale, no. 10 (1975): 57 ff.
popular origins of the Utopias: See Camporesi, "Carnevale," pp. 17, 20-21,98-103, and passim (but see the preceding note). The question is raised in the case of Campanella by L Firpo, "La cite ideale de Campanella et le culte du Soleil," in Le soleil a la Renaissance: Sciences et mythes (Brussels, 1965), p. 331.
a core that was ancient: See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 80-82.
renaissance.* Ibid., pp. 218, 462, and especially G. B. Ladner, "Vegetation Symbolism and the Concept of Renaissance," in De artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. M. Meiss (New York, 1961), 1: 303-22. See also by Ladner, The Idea of Reform, Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). Still important is K. Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1926).
It wasn't the Son of Man: See Dan. 7: 13 ff., one of the basic texts of millenarian literature.
43
a long letter: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, unnumbered leaves. asked... in vein: See above p. 7.
45
89. "ultromontanes": See M. Scalzini, U secretario (Venice, 1587), fol. 39.
don Cunio Cellim: There is a fascicle of notarial writings drawn up by him in ASP, Noturile, b. 488, no. 3785.
164
164 (194/212)
alliteration: See P. Valesio, Strutture dell'alliterazione: Grammatica, retorica efolklore verbale (Bologna, 1967), esp. p. 186 on alliteration in religious language.
91. he stated in his trial: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 126, fol. 34 v.
46
to pronounce sentence: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, "Sententiarum contra reos S. Officii liber II," fols. 1 r.-ll v. The abjuration is at fols. 23 r.-34 r.
"not only a formal heretic": non modo formalem hereticum ... sed etiam heresiarcam."
"we find you have fallen": "invenimus te . . . in multiplici et fere inexquisita heretica pra vi rate deprehensum."
"not only with men of religion": "Non tantum cum religiosis viris, sed etiam cum simplicibus et idiotis."
92. the audacity and obstinacy of the offender: "ita pertinacem in istis heresibus," "indurato animo permansisti," "audacter negabas," "profanis et nefandis verbis . . . lacerasti," "diabolico animo affirmasti," "intacta non reliquisti sancta ieiunia," "nonne reperi-mus te etiam contra sanctas conciones latrasse?" "profano tuo iudicio ... damnasti," "eo te duxit malignus spiritus quod ausus es affirmare," "tandem polluto tuo ore ... conatus es," "hoc nefandissimum excogitasti," "et ne remaneret aliquod impollutum et quod non esset a te contaminatum ... negabas," "tua lingua maledica convertendo . . . dicebas," "tandem latrabas," "venenum apposuistt," "et quod non dietu sed omnibus auditu horribile est," "non contentus fuit malignus et perversus animus tuus de his omnibus . . . sed errexit comua et veluti gigantes contra sanctissimam ineffabilem Trinitatem pugnare cepisti," "expavescit celum, turbantur omnia et contremescunt audientes tarn inhumana et horribilia quae de lesu Christo filio Dei profano ore tuo locutus es."
"You brought again to light": "In lucem redduxisti et firmiter affirmasti vera [ml fuisse alias reprobatam opinionem illam antiqui philosophi, asserentis etemitatem caos a quo omnia prodiere quae huius sunt mundi."
"ßnally, you resurrected": "tandem opinionem Manicheorum iterum in luce revocasti, de duplici principio boni scilicet et mali ..."
"You brought again to light Origen's": "heresim Origenis ad lucem revocasti, quod omneš forent salvandi, Iudei, Turci, pagani, Christiani et infideles omnes, cum istis omnibus aequaliter detur Spiritus sanctus ..."
93. "Regarding the creation of the soul": "Circa infusionem animae contrariaris non solum Ecclesiae sanctae, sed etiam omnibus philosophanbbus .... Id quod omnes consentiunt, nec quis negare audet, tu ausus es cum insipiente dicere 'non est Deus'..."
In Foresti's Supplemenrum: See fols. cliii v.-cliv r., dvii r.
"we solemnly condemn you": "te sententialiter condemnamus ut inter duos parietes immureris, ut ibi semper et toto tempore vitae tuae maneas."
47
"Although I": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, "Sententiarum contra reos S. Officii liber II," fol. 12 r. 94. the jailer: Ibid., fols. 15 r.-v.
had Menocchio summoned: Ibid., fols. 16 r.-v.
165
165 (195/212)
95. "And truly": Et vere cum haec dicebat, aspectu et re ipsa videbatur insipiens, et corpore invalidus, et male affectus." The bishop of Concordia: Ibid., fols. 16 v.-17 r.
48
in 1590: ACVP, "Visitationum Personalium anni 1593 usque ad annum 1597," pp. 156-57.
96. There is evidence: ASP, Notarile, b. 488, no. 3785, fols. 1 r.-2 v.
97. The same year: Ibid., fols. 3 r.-v. In 1595: Ibid., fols. 6 v., 17 v.
following the death of the son: ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves.
49
98. During the carnival: See ACMJ, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285. The leaves of this trial are not numbered.
"Beari qui non viderunt": John 20:29.
99. /(emerged that don Odorico: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (11 November 1598, deposition of don Ottavio of the counts of Montereale).
questioned the new priest: Ibid. (17 December 1598).
Don Curzio Cellina: Ibid.
50
101. a certain Simon: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves {3 August 1599).
ft may have been Menocchio's rejection: See A. Stella, Anabathsmo e antitrinitansmo in Italia nel XVI secolo (Padua, 1969), p. 29 and idem "Cuido da Fano eretico del secolo XVI al servizio dei re d'lnghilterra," Rivista di storia delta Chiesa in Italia 13 (1959): 226.
51
102. An innkeeper of Aviano: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (6 May 1599).
"if Christ had been God": This was a blasphemous expression in common use, as we see, for example, from testimony in 1599 against Antonio Scudellario, nicknamed Fornasier, who resided near Valvasone (ACAU, "Anno integro 1599, a no. 341 usque ad 404 incl.," Trial no. 361).
the same sally: See A. Bocchi, Symbolicarum quaestionum . . . libri quinque (Bologna, 1555), fols. Ixxx-lxxxi. I'll return to this emblem on another occasion.
"I believe that he was wrong-headed": ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (6 July 1599).
166
166 (196/212)
52
103. "After having led": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (12 July 1599). "Eductus e carceribus quidam senex ..."
"/ have kept a school": This was the most elementary level of instruction. Unfortunately, there is no other information about this episode in Menocchio's life.
He had read in Foresti's Supplementum: It hasn't been possible to locate the exact page. But see Foresti, Supplementum, fols. 180 r.-v.
53
106. Jf was better to dissemble: See C. Ginzburg, // nicodemismo. Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa neit'Europa del'500 (Turin, 1970). But see, for a different interpretation, Carlos M. N. Eire, "Calvin and Nicodemism: a Reappraisal," Sixteenth Century journal 10 (1979) fasc. 1: 45-69.
"Nous sommes Chrestiens": See M. De Montaigne, Essais, ed. P. Villey (Paris, 1965), p. 445 (book 2, ch. 12, "Apologie de Raimond Sebond").
107. He told the inquisitor: See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (19 July 1599).
"He said, go on": See L'Akorano di Maometto, nelqualsi contienela dottrina, la vita, i costumi et le leggi sue, tradotto nuovamente dall'arabo in lingua italiana (Venice, 1547), fol. 19 r.
108. "briefly lost in thought": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (12 July 1599) "aliquantulum cogitabundus."
Subsequently: Ibid. (19 July 1599).
"It is true that inquisitors": Ibid. (12 July 1599).
54
"In the name": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (12 July 1599).
109. "Consider me crazy": In the original, "me trano ne li chochi" (see G. Boerio, Dizionario del dialetto veneziano [Venice, 1856], ad vocem "cochi").
55
"if the internal": "si interioribus credendum est per exteriora."
110. "ft has done": This personification sheds some light on the lower class attitudes toward death in this period—attitudes about which we still know very little. The rare bits of evidence that we do have have almost all been filtered through a distorting stereotype. See, for example, one that is cited in M. Vovelle, ed., Mourir autrefois (Paris, 1974), pp. 100-102.
56
"of the poor": "pauperculi Dominici Scandella." "pure simplicity": "mera simplicitas et ignorantia."
167
1671 (197/212)
57
111. torture might be avoided: See, in general, P. Fiorelli, La tortura giudiziaria net diritto comune, 2 vols. (Milan, 1953-54).
"I do not remember": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (19 July 1599).
"with moderation": "cum moderamine."
"the nuisance": See A. Stella, Chiesa e Stato nelle relazioni dei nunzi pontifici a Venezia (Vatican City, 1964), pp. 290-91. Bolognetti's report was written in 1581.
58
112. "men who had nothing": See C. Ginzburg, "Folklore, magia, religione," in Storia d'ltaha, vol. 1, / caratteri origináli, ed. R. Romano and C. Vivanti (Turin, 1972), p. 658. For similar cases in England, see K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), pp. 159 ff.
The old English peasant: Thomas, Religion, p. 163 and E. P. Thompson's comment in "Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context," Midland History 1, no. 3 (1972): 43, who is followed here almost to the letter. N. Z Davis has insisted on the active, in fact creative, role of the popular classes in matters of religion against scholars who study popular religion from the point of view of the upper classes (or even of the clergy) and see it thus simply as a simplification or perversion, in the direction of magical practices, of the official religion. See N. Z. Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion," in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. C. Trinkaus and H. A. Oberman (Leiden, 1974), pp. 307 ff. More generally, see the preface to the present book on the current scholarly discussion over the concept of "popular culture."
Scolio spoke: See the important essay by E Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto poema eretico delia seconda metá del Cinquecento di autore lucchese," in Studi di letteratura italtana 2 (1900): 1-142. This study is impaired by its attempt to establish precise connections—badly straining the evidence—between Scolio's poem and Anabaptist doctrines. In his discussion of this study M. Berengo (Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinquecento [Turin, 1965], pp. 450 ff.) attenuated its conclusions, without, however, wholly rejecting them. Thus, on the one hand, he stated that "it would be pointless to attempt to insert this text within the context of a precisely defined religious current," and, on the other, he connected Scolio to the stream of "popular rationalism." Apart from reservations about this phrase (see above p. 143), the connection seems correct. On the author, see Donadoni's suggestive hypothesis which proposes to identify "Scolio" with the huntsman, Giovan Pietro di Dezza, who was forced to abjure before the Holy Office in 1559 ("Di uno sconosciuto," pp. 13-14). The writing of the poem, as the author reveals on the last leaf, took seven years (hence the title "Settennario"), beginning in 1563; polishing it required another three.
113. Dantean echoes: In addition to the explicit reference to Dante (BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 9 r.) see such verses as "The alma Beatrice stands on the stairs" (ibid.) or "they were still on earth in the heat and cold" (see Paradiso, 21, 116). See also Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 4.
"Many prophets": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 10 r.
Mohammed: Ibid., fol. 4 v. (and Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 21). On the last leaf of the poem Scolio inserted an ambiguous disavowal: "because when I was writing it I had been drawn outside of myself, and forced to write, and I was blind, dumb and deaf, and how it really was in fact, I certainly don't remember. . . " (ibid. p. 2). The
168
168   (198 / 21 2)
corrections and marginal glosses added to most of the passages quoted here are the result of this retraction.
"You Turk": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 14 r. (and Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 93). "Godgave to us": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 10 r. (and Donadoni, "Di,uno sconosciuto," p. 28). "nature's great precepts": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 10 r.
"Do not adore": Ibid., fol. 19 r. (and Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," pp. 130 ff.).
114. "Let everyone be circumcised": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 15 r. (and Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 90).
"And ifI told you": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 2 r. (and Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 120).
"My baptism": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 2 r. "gloss": Ibid., fol. 10 r.
"Let there be neither columns": Ibid., fol. 15 r. (in the text "but organs... but bell towers." I've followed Donadoni's emendations, "Di uno sconosciuto," pp. 94-95). "Puffed up": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 1 r.
115. "If my Lord": Ibid., fol. 16 r.
"Let there be no shops": Ibid., fol, 13 r. (and Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p, 99). "letgambling": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 13 r. (and, in part, Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 97).
"the age of gold": See Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 34. "In everybody's hands": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 14 r.
116. "Man or woman": See Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," pp. 102, 97. "It is only permitted": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 19 r.
"God led me": Ibid., fol. 4 r.
"The first river": Ibid., (and, in part, Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 125).
117. This paradise: See Donadoni "Di uno sconosciuto," pp. 128-30. Scolio's consciousness transpires from a note added later in the margin of one of these descriptions of paradise: "I, being the prophet and king of the mad was taken to the great paradise of the mad, the foolish, the clumsy, and the dull witted, in the paradise of delights or of donkeys, and it seems to me that I beheld all these things: but about all this I leave it to your judgment." Thus, once again, we have an ambiguous and not wholly sincere retraction, which actually confirms the hold that the myth of the land of Cockaigne had on the peasant imagination. The "paradise of delights" was synonymous with the terrestrial paradise. For the possible connection between the Mohammedan paradise and the land of Cockaigne, see also E. M. Ackermann, 'Das Schlaraffenlanď in German Literature and Folksong... with an Inquiry into Its History in European Literature (Chicago, 1944), p. 106. (At any rate the discussion is about asses (asini) and not "Urini," as Donadoni has mistakenly read: "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 128).
59
"/ was made": See E. Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto poema eretico della seconda metá del Cinquecento di autore lucchese," Studi di lelteratura italiana 2 (1900): 8.
"Philosopher": See above p. 107; BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 30 r. (and Donadoni, "Di uno sconosciuto," p. 40).
169
169 (199/212)
118. "By obeying God": BGL, ms. 1271, fol. 12 r.
a more reserved position: I'll pass over those elements that are difficult to interpret, such as the repeated and surprising legitimation of cannibalism, both on earth and in heaven: "To the king for pleasure, to others out of necessity/the eating of human flesh is not impious /the worm eats it and fire devours it/one is earthly, the other is not a little heavenly" (ibid., fol. 13 r.); "If the desire to taste / human flesh as he had it on earth should come to someone/or to try some other food/because frequently here one locks his desire within himself/he immediately sees himself presented with it/and he can eat without strife or battle:/everything is permitted in heaven, everything is well done/because the Law is terminated and the Pact broken" (fol. 17 r). Unconvincingly Donadoni interprets this last passage as a slangish allusion to sodomy ("Di uno sconosciuto," p. 127).
Pellegrino Barom: For fuller information on this person, I refer the reader to a forthcoming study promised by A. Rotondo.
In 1570: See ASM, Inquisizione, b. 5b, fasc. Pighino Barom, only partly paginated The dossier contains copies of two testimonies pertaining to the Ferrarese trial (1561).
119 their prominence: See J. Le Goff, ed.. Heresies et sociétés dans l'Europe préindustrielle, (1 le-Wsiécles) (Pans, 1968), pp. 185-S6,278-80; C.-P. Chsen, Anabaptism, a Social History (1525-1618): Switzerland, Austria, Moravia. South and Central Germany (Ithaca and London, 1972), pp. 319-20, 432-35.
a satirical poet: See Andrea da Bergamo (Piero Nelli), Delle satire alia carlona libro
secondo (Venice, 1566), fol. 36 v.
The age-old hostility See especially R Bennett and J Elton, History of Com Milling, 4 vols., vol. 3, Feudal Laws and Customs (London, 1898-1904, reprint ed.. New York, 1966), pp 107 ff and passim See also the collection of texts in G Fenwick Jones, "Chaucer and the Medieval Miller," Modem Language Quarterly 16 (1955): 3-15.
"/ descended into hell": See A. D'Ancona, La poesia popolare ttaliana (Livorno, 1878), p. 264
120. "the soft ground:" See Andrea da Bergamo [Piero NelliJ, Delle satire, fol. 35 v
"about prtests and monks": See ASM, inauistzione, b 5b, fasc Pighino Barom, unnumbered leaves (1 February 1571). As early as the 1561 trial a witness had testified that he had heard Pighino in his mill "speak very badly about the Mass."
Their working conditions: R. Mandrou emphasizes this point in Le Goff, ed , Heresies et societes, pp. 279-80.
Vie case in Modena: See C. Violante, ibid., p. 186.
the bond of direc'. dependence: See M. Bloch, "Avenemenl et conquéte du moulin a eau," in his Melanges htstortques. 2 vols. (Paris, 1963), 2: 800-821.
60
121. .'n 1565; See ASVat., Concilia Tndentmo, b. 94, fasc. Visitfl della diocesi di Modona, 1565, fol. 90 r. (and see also fol. 162 v. for a visit occurring four years later, and fol. 260 v.).
Natale Cavazzoni: See ASM, Inquisizione, b. 5b, fasc. Pighino Baróni, fols. 18 v.-19 r.
"readings": "lectiones."
"Father": See ASM, Inquisizione, b. 5b, fasc. Pighino Baroni, fol. 24 r. He repeated the list: Ibid., fol. 25 r.
122. After arriving in Bologna: See A. Rotondó, "Per la storia dell'eresia a Bologna nel secolo XVI," Rinascimento 13 (1962): 109 ff.
170
170 (200/212)
in a passage of the Apologia: See C. Renato, Opere, documents e testimonianze, ed A. Rotondó, Corpus Reformátorům Italicorum (De Kalb and Chicago, 1972), p. 53.
"Heard in Bologna"; "Bononiae audita MDXL in domo equitis Bolognetti."
"in the home of the knight Bolognetti": Rotondó originally identified this individual with Francesco Bolognetti (see "Per la storia," p. 109, n. 3): but the latter became a senator only many years later, in 1555 (see G.Fantuzzi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi (Bologna, 1782], 2: 244). Thus, Rotondó dropped this identification (see index of names) in his edition of Renato's Opere. There is no problem, however, in identifying the person in question with Vincenzo Bolognetti, since he appears after 1534 among the anziani and gonfalonieri: See G. N. Pasquali Alidosi, I signoři anziani, consoli e gonfahnieri di giustizia della citta di Bologna (Bologna, 1670), p. 79.
first eleven: See ASM, Inquisizione, b. 5b, fasc. Pighino Baroni, fols. 12 v., 30 r
What is certain ... is that in October: See Renato, Opere, p. 170.
"řiís name was Turchetto": Ibid., p. 172. His identification with fra Tommaso Paluio d'Apri, nicknamed "il Grechetto," suggested by Rotondó, isn't persuasive. That the person in question may be instead Giorgio Filaletto, known as "Turca" or 'Turchetto" was suggested to me by Silvana Seidel Menchi, whom I wish to thank warmly.
123. "I believed that the souls": See ASM, Inquisizione, b. 5b, fasc. Pighino Baroni, fol. 33 v. the doctrine of the sleep of souls: See Renato, Opere, pp. 64-65 and Rotondó, "Per la storia," pp. 129 ff.
Venetian Anabaptists: See above p. 73.
a passage such as the one: 1 Thess. 4:13 ff.: "Nolumus autem vos ignorare, fratres, de dormientibus, ut non contristemini sicut et ceteri qui spem non habent. Si enim credimus quod lesus mortuus est et resurrexit, ita et Deus eos qui dormierunt per Iesum adducet cum eo — " See also G. H. Williams, "Camillo Renato (c. 1500?-1575)" in Italian Reformation Studies in Honor of Laelius Socinus, ed.J.Tedeschi (Florence, 1965), p. 107.
124. he "hadn't read it": See ASM, Inquisizione, b. 5b, fasc. Pighino Baroni, fol. 2 v.; but cf. fol. 29 v. The Fioretto had been placed on the Index. See above p. 146.
"And all the things": See Fioretto, fol. A vi v.
"there are some things": Ibid., fol. B ii r.
"that all souls": Ibid., fols. C r.-v.
125. "/ have not read": See ASM, Inquisizione, b. 5b, fasc. Pighino Baroni, fol. 30 r. "I have never associated": See above pp. 12, 5, etc.
"I wanted to infer": See ASM, Inquisizione, b. 5b, fasc. Pighino Baroni, fol. 20 v.
"/( would be as if four soldiers": See ACAU, Sant'Uffizio, Trial no. 285, unnumbered leaves (19 July 1599).
Pighino had maintained: See ASM, Inquisizione, b. 5b, fasc. Pighino Baroni, unnumbered leaves (1 February 1571) and fol. 27 r.
"Preaching that men": See above pp. 76, 109.
61
126. that of the popular roots; See M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
The subsequent period: For a general impression, see J. Delumeau, Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, 1971), esp. pp. 256 ff. Interesting research possibilities are
171
171    {201 /212)
suggested by J. Bossy, 'The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe," Past and Present, no. 47 (1970): 51-70.1 see now that a similar periodization has also been proposed by G. Henningsen, The European Witch-Persecution (Copenhagen, 1973), p. 19, who promises to return to this question on another occasion.
with the Peasants' War: It would be very useful to have a comprehensive study of its effects, including those that were indirect and further removed.
the evangelization of the countryside: For this comparison, see Bossy, "The Counter-Reformation."
the rigid control: For vagabonds, see the bibliography cited above at p. 134; for gypsies, see H. Asséo, "Marginalité et exclusion: le trailement administratif des Bohémiens dans la societě francaise du XVTIe siecle," in Problemes socio-culturels en France au XVJ!e siécle, ed. H. Asséo and Jean Vittu (Paris, 1974), pp. 11-87.
62
127. On 5 }une 1599: See ACAU, "Epistolae Sac. Cong. S. Officii ah anno 1588 usque ad 1613 incl," unnumbered leaves. Giulio Antonio Santoro, Cardinal of Santa Severina, barely missed election to the papacy in the conclave that eventually resulted in the elevation of Clement VIII. His reputation for severity was the principal factor that ruined his chances.
"has revealed himself to be an atheist": Not one, thus, who denied Christ's divinity, but something even worse. On this terminology, see, in general, H. Busson, "Les noms des incredulesau XVIe siec\e," Bibtwtheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 16 (1954): 273-
83.
128. shortly after: When, on 26 January 1600, the dowry of Giovanna Scandella was registered with the notary (see above pp. 135-36) the act took place "domi heredum quondam ser Dominici Scandella" (ASP, Notarile, b. 488, no. 3786, fol. 27 v.).
We know this with certainty: See ACAU, "Abanno 1601 usque ad annum 1603 incl. an. 449 usque ad 546 incl.," Trial no. 497. At any rate, P. Paschini (Eresia e Riforma cattohca al confineonentale d'halia, Lateranum, n.s. 17, nos. 1-4 [Rome, 1951), p. 82), who affirmed on the basis of documents actually examined by him that the only person executed by the Holy Office in the Friuli was a German smith in 1568, should be corrected.
172
172   (202 / 212)
INDEX OF NAMES
Abdullah ibn Sallam, 107
Abraham, 12, 113
Ackermann, E. M., 163, 169
Adam, 6, 57, 61, 78, 124, 161
Alberigo, G., 161
Alberto da Castello, 29, 34, 146
Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 32, 149
Alighieri, Dante, 57, 153, 157, 168
Allen, P. S„ 162
Amadeo, Giorgio, 144
Amaseo, Girolamo, 31
Ammiani, Sebastiano, 74, 161
Andrea da Bergamo. See Nelli, Pietro
Andrea da Maren, 46
Anna de Cecho, 30
Anne, Saint, 34
Asseo, H., 172
Asteo, Gerolamo, 49, 50, 98, 99, 103-6, 152
Atkinson, G., 151
Auerbach, E., 163
Augustine, Saint, 52, 78, 147
Averroes, 73
Avolio, Giovanni d', 121
Azzoni, A., 147
Badaloni, N., 156 Bainton, R. H., 158
Bakhtin, Mikhail, xii, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, 131,
134, 145, 162, 164, 171 Baroni, Pellegrino, alias Pighino, 118-25,
170-71
Bartolomeo di Andrea, 3, 39, 135 Basadona, Giovanni, 141 Bassano, jacopo, 144 Bastian de Martin, 96 Battisteila, A., 130, 140, 148 Bec, C, 148
Becker, B., 158 Beelzebub, 24 Benacci, Alessandro, 146 Benedetti, A., 137, 159 Benedetto d'Asolo, 38 Benjamin, W., xxvi, 134 Bennert, J. W„ 147, 151 Bennett, R., 170 Benrath, K., 158 Berelovic, A., 131
Berengo, M., 136, 137, 141, 143, 168 Bermani, C., 130 Biasutti, G., xxvii
Bionima, Andrea, 3, 10, 30, 31, 68, 137, 138 Bloch, M., 149, 170 Boas, G., 163
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 29, 50, 152 Bocchi, Achille, 102, 166 Boerio, G., 167 Bogatyrev, P., 133
Bolleme, G., xvi, xix, xxii, 130, 131, 133
Bolognetti, Alberto, 111, 168
Bolognetti, Francesco, 171
Bolognetti, Vincenzo, 121, 171
Bolognetti family, 122
Bonasone, Antonio, 121
Bonicello, Ventura, 142
Bonini, Vincenzo, 121
Bonnin, B., 148
Bordenave, }., 144
Bossy, J„ 172
Branca, V., 152
Braudel, F., 133
Brecht, Bertolt, xiii, 129
Brown, P., 147
Brucioli, Antonio, 146
Brueghel, Pieter, 126
Brunner, O., 133
173
1731 (203/212)
Bruno, Giordano, 127 Bucer, Martin, 82 Burdach, K., 164 Bumet, Thomas, 58, 155, 156 Busöon, H., 172
Calderari. See Zaffoni, Giovanni Maria, alias
Camillo Renato. See Ricci, Paolo
Campanella, Tommaso, 164
Camporesi, P-, xxii, 134, 164
Cantimori, D., 133, 134, 143, 146, 152, 158
Cantü, C, 135
Capel, Giorgio, 30, 147
Capola, Daniele, 135
Caravia, Alessandro, 23, 24, 26, 79, 145
Castellio, Sebastian, 51, 152
Cavazzoni, Natale, 121, 170
Ceccaroni, A„ 149
Cellina, Curzio, 89, 99, 100, 138, 164, 166
Chabod, F., 142, 145
Chaunu, P., 129, 132
Cherchi, P., x
Chittolini, G., 135, 141
Chiuppani, G., 137, 148
Christopher, Saint, 102, 152
Church, F. F., x
Cioni, A., 146
Cipolla, C, 148
Cirese, A. M„ 130
Clare, Saint, 149
Clasen, C.-P., 142, 170
Clement VII (pope), 24
Clement VIII (pope), 127, 172
Cocchiara, G., 163
Colonnello, A„ xxvü
Columbus, Christopher, xxiii, 82
Colussi, Daniele, 135
Coradina, Tita, 30
Corner, Carlo, 15
Corneto, Bernardo, 96
Cossio, Andrea, 136
Crispoldi, Tullio, 40, 41, 150
D'Ancona, A., 170
Dandolo, Matteo, 142
Danesi family, 122
Darmon, J. J., 131
David (king of Israel), 74, 76, 113
Davis, N.Z., xvii, 131, 168
Day, ]., 131
De Biasio, Daniele, 95, 101 De Biasio, L, 142 De Certeau, M., 131 Dechend, H. von, 154 De Frede, C, 147 Delumeau, )., 171 De Martino, E., 130 Derrida, ]., xviii, 132 Descartes, René, xxiv, 134 Diaz, F., xxi, 133 Diodoro Stculo, 153 Dionisotti, C, 149, 155 Dolan, J„ xxvii Donadoni, E„ 168-70 Donato, Ettore, 158 Donatus, Aetius, 119
Doni, Anton Francesco, 84, 85, 163, 164 D'Orlandi, L, 136 Dupront, A., 131, 132 Dürer, Albrecht, 23, 145
Eco, U, 149 Eire, M. N„ 167 Eisenstein, E. L, viii, 156 Elias, 113 Elliott, J., xxvii Elton, J., 170
Enzensberger, H. M., 129 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 82, 162 Eve, 6, 57, 78
Fantuzzi, G., 171
Fasseta, Antonio, 137-38
Fasseta, Daniele, 3, 8, 137-38
Fasseta, Francesco, 2, 3, 8, 12, 71, 137-38
Fasseta, Zannuto, 102
Fattorello, F., 137
Febvre, Lucien, xxiii, xxiv, 133,134,152,156, 160
Feeney, M., 131
Felice da Montefalco, 5, 8, 139
Femen ussa, Domenego, 7, 139
Ficino, Marsilio, 155
Filaletto, Giorgio, alias "Turca" or "Tur-
chetto." 66, 122, 171 Fiorelli, P., 168 Firpo, L, 164 Fischer, U„ 152 Florito di Benedetto, 97 Forcroy, Bonaventure, 139 Foresti, )acopo Filippo, 29, 30, 32, 52, 53, 78,
79, 86, 93, 104, 147, 149, 152, 153, 162,
163, 165, 167 Forniz, A., 144 Fortini, F, 130 Fosco, l^onardo, 137 Foucault, M, xvii-xix, 132 Franceschi, Domenico de', 149 Francois, M, 163 Frenaye, F., 159 Freud, S, 149, 163 Frye, N, 163
Furet, F„ xx, 132, 133, 148 Furlan, ]., 149
Gabriel (archangel), 6, 107
Galateo, Girolamo, 73
Garin, E., 149, 155
Gastaldione, Maddalena, 135
Gauvard, C, 131
George, T., x
Gerbas, Domenico, 30
Gerbas, Melchiorre, 71, 80, 81, 120
Geremek, B„ 134
Gerolamo da Montalcino, 121, 122 Giberti, Gian. Matteo, 40 Gilbert, F., xxvii
Ginzburg, C, x, 132, 139, 142, 143, 146, 149,
152, 156, 160, 167, 168 Giocondo, Giuliano di Bartolomeo del, 82 Giorgetti, G., 135, 141
174
1741 (204/212)
Giorgio Sicuio, 28, 146
Giovan Battista da Perugia, 97
Giovan Pietro di Dezza. See Scolio
Gokalp, A., 131
Goody, J., 156, 161
Gramsci, A., 129, 130
Grassi, Pellegrino. See Baroni
Graus, F., 161-63
Gregori, Gerolamo de', 138
Grendler, P. F., 163, 164
Grimani, Antonio, 156
Groto, Luigi, 152
Halbwachs, M., 161 Harva, U., 154 Haydn, H., 154 Henneberg, J. von, 158 Henningsen, G., 172 Heraclitus, 105 Hercules, 47 Hilton, R., 161
Hobsbawm, E. J., 130, 131, 161, 162 Honorius of Autun, 29, 52, 146 Huon, A., 163 Huppert, G., 132
Iacomel, Daniel, 59, 103 Iswolsky, Helene, 131, 134
Jacometto "stringaro," 160 Jacopo da Voragine, 29, 35 Jakobson, R., 133 James, U 131 James, Saint, 42, 104 Jemolo, A. C., 140
Jesus Christ, 4,9,11,12,18,25,26,28,35-38, 43, 44, 56, 59, 63, 65, 66,73, 75, 76, 78, 88-90, 92, 95, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 111-14, 118, 122, 123
Joachim, Saint, 34
John the Baptist, Saint, 114
John the Evangelist, Saint, 35, 74
Jones, G. Fenwick, 170
Joseph, Saint, 6, 28, 34, 36, 101
Joseph (son of Jacob), 87, 89, 90, 149
Joshua, 113
Judas Iscariot, 43
Julia, D., 131-33
Julius II (pope), 78
Kaegi, W., 162 Kamen, K, 163 Kaplow, ]., 129 Kubánsky, R., 145 Kristeller, P. O., 160
Lachat, P., 147 Ladner, G. B., 164 Lambertini family, 122 Landino, Christoforo, 153, 157 Landucci, S., 151, 162 Lanternari, V., 132 Lea, Henry Charles, ix
Lee, Charmaine, 163 Lefevre, Y., 146 Le Franc, A., 133 LeGoff, J., xix, 132, 133, 170 Leicht, P. S., 140, 141 Leo X (pope), 78
Leonardis, Marino Camillo de', 29
Leonardo da Vinci, 32, 46, 149, 155
Lepschy, G. C, 155
Le Roy Ladurie, E., viii, xvii, 131, 133
Letts, M. H. 1., 147
Levi, Carlo, 159
Levin, H., 163
Levy-Bruhl, L., 134
Liompardi, Zanpolo, 23-25, 45
Lisia Fileno. See Ricci, Paolo
Lombardi Satriani, L. M., 130
Lombardo, Vincenzo, 30
Lotto, Lorenzo, 149
Louis IX (king of France), Saint, xxiii
Lovejoy, A. Cv, 163
Lucifer, 6
Lukacs, G., 133
Lunardo (priest), 6
Lunardo della Minussa, 30
Luporini, C, 130
Luther, Martin, xxiv, 3,18,24,26, 78,79,161, 162
Macek, J., 143 Macfarlane, A., 133 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 40, 150 Macris, Pietro de, 97 Male, E„ 152 Malermi, Niccolo, 29 Manacorda, G., 148
Mandeville, John, 29, 31, 32, 41-49, 51, 52, 77, 88, 91, 118, 147,149, 151, 152, 157, 161
Mandtch, G., 144
Mandrou, R., xv, xvi, xix, 130, 170
Mantica, Alessandro, 144, 159
Mantica, Antonio, 138
Mantica, Giacomo, 138
Mantica, Giovan Battista, 138, 159
Manuel, F. E., 163
Manzoti family, 122
Marcato, 128
Marchetti, G., 137
Marchetti, V., 134
Marco. See Marcato
Marco (a dyer), 142
Margnano, Giacomo, 17, 135
Marin, A., xxvii
Marinoni, A., 149
Maro, Giambattista, 1, 8, 70
Martin, H.-J., 148
Marx, K., 143, 149
Mary (mother of Christ), 4-6,10, 28, 34-36, 87, 88, 98, 101, 102, 108, 118, 122, 123, 128, 138, 140, 143, 148, 149
Mary Magdalen, 88
Mary of Austria (empress), 138
Masafiis, Domenico de', 120
Masini, Eliseo, ix
Medici, Lorenzo di Pietro de', 82
Meiss, M., 164
175
1751 (205/212)
Melchiori, Domenico, 2-4, 137 Melchiori, Giovanni Antonio, 137 Melchiori, Giovanni Daniele, 5, 73, 95, 99,
109, 137-38, 153, 161 Melchiori, Nicola, 21-23, 25, 27, 30, 31, 50,
144, 147 Menander Magus, 157 Mero, Tomaso, 30 Meyer, J., 148 Miccoli, G., 138-39, 162 Mohammed, 43, 107, 113, 167-68 Mondino, Giacomo, 121 Montaigne, Michel de, 45, 107, 151, 167 Montereale, Giovan Francesco, 96,111,120 Montereale, Nicolö, 139 Montereale, Orazio, 17, 135 Montereale, Ottavio, 4, 21, 22, 144, 166 Montereale, Sebastiano, 139 More, Thomas. See Thomas More, Saint Morone, Giovanni, 122 Moses, 113
Nardi, B., 153
Nelli, Pietro, alias Andrea da Bergamo, 20,
119-20, 142, 170 Niccoli, O., xxvii
Nicola da Porcia See Melchiori, Nicola Nicolinida Sabbio, Giovanni Antonio, 144-45
Noah, 113 Nora, P., 132-33
Obelkevich, J., xxvii Oberman. H. A., 168 Ochino, Bernardino, 20 Ockham. See William of Ockham Olivieri, A., 143 Origen, 92, 93, 165 Orlando, F., 163 Ossowski, S., 141 Ovid, 53
Pagliano Ungari, G , 149 Paleo, Evangelista, 93
Palladio degli Olivi, Giovan Francesco, 95, 138
Paluio ďApri, Tommaso, alias "il Grech-
etto," 171 Panofsky, E., 145 Parvi, Giovan Battista de', 94 Paschini, P., 139, 140, 142, 172 Pasquali Alidosi, G. N., 171 Patterson, S„ 141 Paul, Saint, 20, 74, 76, 123, 125 Paul III (pope), ix, 24 Peleo, Evangelista, 93 Penna, M., 152 Perusini, G., 136, 141 Peter, Saint, 23, 25, 76, 88, 104, 125 Pianetti, E., 147 Piccone Stella, S., 149 Piero della Zuanna, 97 Pisensi, Agostino, 110 Policreto, Alessandro, 5, 120, 138 Policreto, Antonio, 138
Pomponazzi, Pietro, 72, 154-55
Poni, C, 144
Popaiti, Gerolamo, 138
Pordenone, alias Giovanni de' Sacchis, il, 34
Postel, Guillaume, 160
Povoledo, Giovanni, 3, 53, 137-38
Prester John, 42, 46
Priuli, Daniele, 15
Procacci, G., 150
Prosperi, A., xxvii, 150
Pullan, B., 141
Rabelais, Francois, xvi, xvii, xxiii, xxiv, 126
Raleigh, Walter, 57, 154
Reau, L., 152
Redi, Francesco, 57, 154
Reeves, M., 146
Renato, Camillo. See Ricci, Paolo Reusch, F. H., 146-47 Revel,}., 131
Ricci. Paolo, alias Lisia Fileno, Camillo
Renato, 73, 122-23, 160, 171 Riccio, Antonio, 144 Ritter, G., 143 Riviere, Pierre, xviu, 132 Rohde, P., 146
Romano, R., 133-34, 138-39, 142, 147, 168
Romeo, R, 163
Ronchetti Bassi, R., 162
Rorario, Fulvio, 22, 144
Rossi, A., 149
Rossi, P., 130
Rossi, V., 145, 147, 153, 163 Rothkrug, L., xxvii
Rotondo, A., 143, 146-47, 149, 160, 170-71 Rubeo, Damiano, 146 Rusconi, Giorgio, 150 Rustici, A., 137
Sabbio, Stephano da, 150
Saccone, Eduardo, x
Sachs, W., 148
Salviati, Leonardo, 152
Sander, M„ 146-47
Santa Severina (cardinal). See Santoro,
Giulio Antonio Santillana, G. de, 154 Santoro, Giulio Antonio, 127-28, 172 Sanudo. Matteo, 93, 96 Sassoli De Bianchi, G., 141 Saul, 76
Savorgnan, Antonio, 13, 14
Saxl. F., 145
Scalzini, M., 164
Scandeila, Bastian, 30, 31
Scandeila, Bernardo, 135
Scandella, Domenico, alias Menocchio,
passim Scandella, Fior, 30 Scandella, Giovanna, 2, 135, 172 Scandella, Giovanni, 135 Scandella, Stefano, 97 Scandella, Ziannuto, 6, 7,9, 93, 97,110,136,
139
Schenda, R., 131 Schneider, G., 134
176 (206/212)
é
Schorske, C, 133 Schutte, Anne ]., x
Scolio, 112-15, 117-18, 123, 143, 153, 168-69
Scotto, Girolamo, 149
Scudellario, Antonio, alias Fornasier, 166
Sebenico, Sebastiane 6, 139
Segarizzi, A., 147
Seidel Menchi, S., 171
Seigel, )., xxvii
Serena, A., 143
Serotino, Donato, 128
Servetus, Michael, 66, 67, 122, 155, 158
Sesto, Tiberio Russilliano, 154-55
Seymour, M. C, 147, 151
Sigibaldi, Giovanni Domenico, 122
Simon, Lunardo, 98-99, 101-2
Simoncini, G., 163
Simon Magus, 157
Simon of Cyrene, 43
Simon the Jew, 18, 101, 107, 166
Sole, J., 148
Sol mi, E., 149, 151
Solmi, R., 134
Solomon, 113
Spini, G., 146, 155
Stefano de Lombarda, 135
Stefanut, Giuliano, 3, 8, 71, 137-39
Stella, A., 139,141-42,150,158,160,166,168
Stone, L, xxvii, 148
Strassoldo, Francesco di, 13
Suchier, H., 146
Swift, Jonathan, 151
Tabacchino, Giovanbattista, 160
Tacchi Venturi, P., 142
Tagliaferri, A., 135, 140-41, 148
Taiacalze, Domenego, 23-25
Tedesch i, A., xii
Tedeschi, J., ix, 158, 160, 171
Tenenti, A., 164
Terpening, R., x
Tertullian, 67
Thomas, K., 157, 168
Thomas More, Saint, 163
Thomas of Aquinas, Saint, 88
Thompson, E. P., xvii, xxi, 131, 133, 168
Tognetti, G., 146
Toland, John, 160
Torreggiani family, 13
Trapola, Valerio, 103
Trappola of Portogruaro (lawyer), 7, Ě
Trask, W. R., 163
Trinkaus, C., 168
Turco, Michele del, alias Pignol, 102
Valesio, P., 165
Valla, Lorenzo, 67
Vellutello, Alessandro, 57, 153, 157
Ventura, A., 140
Venturi, F., 133
Vespucci, Amerigo, 82
Vialelle, M., 144
Viaro, Stefano, 15
Vilar, P., 132
Villey, P., 167
Vincent of Beauvais, 42, 151 Violante, C., 170 Virtu, J., 172
Vivanti, C, 134, 138-39, 142, 147, 152, 168 Vives, J. V., 129
Vorai, Odorico, 4, 95-96, 99, 139, 162, 166 Vovelle, M., 132, 167
Wachtel, N., 132 Wakefield, W. L., 143-*4 Watt, J., 156, 161 Wilbur, E. M., 158 William of Ockham, 67 Williams, G- H., 142-43, 160, 171 Wilson, B. E., x Wyclif, John, 74, 161 Wyczanski, A., 148
Yeo, E., xxvii Yeo, S„ xxvii
Zaffoni, Giovanni Maria, alias il Calderari,
34, 149 Zambelli, P., 154-55 Zambrini, F., 146 Zane, Pietro, 103 Zoppino, Nicolö, alias, 150
177
177   (207 / 212)