Ginzburg's Menocchio: Refutations and conjectures

Histoire Sociale

Volumn , Issue 68, 2001, Pages 437-464

  Levine, David ^a   Vahed, Zubedeh ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

^b Peel Board of Education   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 26044434373     PISSN: 00182257     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (129)

1. Keith Luria, "The Paradoxical Carlo Ginzburg", Radical History Review, vol. 35 (1986), p. 85.
2. The Italian original appeared in 1976. In North America this text, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1980; in England the same text was published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, also in 1980.
3. Menocchio's testimony at his two inquisitional trials is now available in English, edited by Andrea Del Col, Domenico Scandella Known as Menocchio. His Trials Before the Inquisition (1583-1599), trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Binghampton, N.Y., 1996), p. 23.
4. Arba is located about 10 kilometres east of Montereale; Cargna (Carnia) is located further afield - about 40 kilometres east and slightly north of Menocchio's home. Carnia is located at the foot of the Alpi Carniche, 40 kilometres north of Udine and close to the Slovenian borderlands. Control over these Slovenian borderlands had been fiercely contested by Venice, in a series of wars with the Ottomans, stretching back into the fifteenth century. Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli During the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 92-93,126-135. Is this a case of Mohammed having come to Menocchio? We shall return to this point.
5. In point of fact, Mennochio had been brought to the attention of the Inquisition several years earlier as a result of an anonymous denunciation, but nothing had come of this. Del Col, "Introduction", Domenico Scandella, p. xii.
6. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, pp. 100-101.
7. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. cxi.
8. Quoted in ibid.
9. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xi. Ginzburg concluded that "every now and then the directness of the sources brings him very close to us: as a man like ourselves, one of us" (p. xi).
10. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Ibid., p. xii.
11. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Ibid., p. 155.
12. Ginzburg writes, "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 even if, as I've stated above, I intend in the future to demonstrate its possibility with additional evidence." To the best of our knowledge, this "additional evidence" has not yet appeared, since Ginzburg's subsequent book, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (New York, 1991),
13. tells us "nothing about possible cultural mediators (be they traders or wetnurses) and relatively little about oral literature, whether magical talcs, fables, or epic poetry. Consequently, Storia notturna, has an eerily disembodied quality, with the various Volke (nomads of the steppes, Scythians, Celts, peasants in the Friuli, and so on) relegated to the status of shadowy protagonists at best. There is little sense of social or cultural differentiation within these societies" (John Martin, "Journeys to the World of the Dead: The Work of Carlo Ginzburg", Journal of Social History, vol. 25 [1992], p. 620).
14. Martin's comments bring to mind Edward Muir's discussion of "narratives [which] were given the form of legends continuously retold over generations on winter nights around the fogolar. In Friuli the fogolar, the large freestanding hearth surrounded by benches on three sides and located in an alcove attached to the kitchen of the great castles and even of modest rural houses, provides the locus for social communication, much as did the piazza in the parts of Italy more urbanized and blessed with a climate hospitable to outdoor life. The intimate, private character of the fogolar, restricted to family, friends, servants, clients, and guests, undoubtedly contributed to the extreme cultural isolation and linguistic stratification of Friuli" around 1500 (Mad Blood Stirring, pp. xxvii-xxviii).
15. Similar domestic organization of warmth and communication are reported by Emmanuel Le Roy Laduric for Montaillou, Languedoc, in the early fourteenth century, as well as for rural Tuscany as recently as 1973. Alessandro Falassi, Folklore by the Fireside: Text and Context of the Tuscan Veglia (Austin, Texas, 1980). In contrast, Menocchio's oral society is essentially decontextualized in terms of both its chronology and the material culture which surrounded such communications.
16. Roger Charlier, "Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories" in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 315-316.
17. Keith Luria and Romulo Gandolfo, "Carlo Ginzburg: An Interview", Radical History Review, vol. 35 (1986), p. 108.
18. Keith Luria and Romulo Gandolfo, Radical History Review, Ibid., p. 104.
19. Portogruaro is the largest and most important town in western Friuli; it is located about 20 kilometres south of Montereale, along the main road to Venice.
20. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, pp. 152-153. For some additional commentary on the difference between Ginzburg's "may have been the Koran" and Del Col's translation of Carboni's testimony to "must be the Koran", see our discussion of this point below relating to its appearance on page 101 of The Cheese and the Worms.
21. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 155.
22. The issue of language and translation is not only particularly difficult but also opens itself to dead-end issues of over-interpretation. Menocchio most likely spoke a local Friulian patois and understood Venetian while his inquisitors spoke the Venetian dialect and probably understood the Friulian speech. The court's scribe transferred these exchanges into Latin; Del Col translated this record into Italian and that text was itself translated into English. Even comparing the translation of the Koran into sixteenth-century Italian with Del Col's translation of the trial record into twentieth-century Italian does little to bridge this gap because we have a convoluted chain of translations that would be obscured, not enlightened, by an obsessive concern with textual analysis. Furthermore - and, in our opinion, much more significantly - the very nature of the trial record is the product of a one-sided, question-and-answer interrogation in which Menocchio's statements arc constructed by and filtered through a judicial sieve that was extraordinarily attentive to heretical utterances that did not square with orthodox Catholic structures of thought. It cannot escape the reader's attention that the trials' purpose was to locate Menocchio's un-orthodoxy on an x/y grid, and then to apply the full knowledge and power of the inquisitors' hammer against him to engineer his abject submission. Menocchio's statements are simply statements; they are frightened utterances, not constructed text. We believe, therefore, that Menocchio's statements are less susceptible to being teased out as rhetorical images than simply being presented as inchoate ideas that were positioned by his attempt to resist the very knowledge/power struggle in which he was an unwilling accomplice. Finally, what is missing from the trial record is the element of fear, engendered by the process itself, that engulfed Menocchio as he came to realize that, no matter what he said, it was going to be translated (so to speak) onto the inquisitors' x/y grid of Catholic orthodoxy. That is why Menocchio's desire to speak truth to power was both hesitant and qualified; and the hesitancy and qualifications became more prominent as he came to realize (in both trials) that the inquisitors did not want to debate with him - they wanted to hammer him into submission. So, beaten and defeated, Menocchio submitted twice. We cannot know, unlike what we know for Galileo, what Menocchio muttered under his breath as he formally submitted by acknowledging the error of his thoughts.
23. Testimony relating to Jews is not what concerns us and so will not be examined.
24. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 106.
25. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Ibid., pp. xvii-xviii.
26. Besides John Martin ("Journeys to the World of the Dead"), a number of the book's reviewers have also remarked upon Ginzburg's failure to identify the contours of this oral popular culture: Paola Zambelli, "From Menocchio to Piero Della Francesca: The Work of Carlo Ginzburg", The Historical Journal, vol. 28 (1985), pp. 983-999;
27. J. H. Elliott, "Rats or Cheese?", New York Review of Books (June 26, 1980), pp. 38-39;
28. Valerio Valeri, "Book Review", Journal of Modern History, vol. 54 (1982), pp. 139-143;
29. Samuel Cohn, Jr., "Book Review", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 12 (1982), pp. 523-525;
30. Dominick LaCapra, "The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian", in History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 45-69;
31. Del Col, "Introduction", Domenico Scandella, especially pp. Iv-Iviii.
32. Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York, 1954), p. 32. It should be mentioned that in this excerpt Camus is writing about the "metaphysical revolt" of the Marquis de Sade. Quoting this passage does not mean that we wish to equate Menocchio's intellectual defiance of clerical hegemony with Sade's vision of domination and servitude; rather, we mean to compare their ideas solely as acts of resistance to untrammelled authoritarian power. Resistance in sixteenth-century Venetian Friuli and in eighteenth-century France occurred in very different mental universes; likewise, the options available to a village miller and the descendant of a feudal lineage were equally dissimilar. Nonetheless, the point remains that, in their own ways, both Domenico Scandella and Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, insistently spoke their own metaphysical truths to power.
33. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, pp. 43, 132-133, also 58. Another miller, called by the nickname of "Pighino", echoed Menocchio's belief regarding the commitment of each "of the Hebrew or Turkish" to their faith. To make sense of these echoes in this other miller's tale, Ginzburg connects Pighino's remarks with the Fioretto Jella Bibbia and then forges a link between the villagers of Friuli and Ferrara to assert that a common oral tradition was available to both Mcnocchio and Pighino
34. (The Cheese and the Worms, p. 125).
35. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 167, n. 53 (p. 107).
36. The book was published by Andrea di Giorgio Arrivabene, a third-generation publisher, who was linked to heretical associations and accused of heterodox beliefs in 1549. Arrivabene was questioned by the Venetian Holy Office in June 1551 and denounced again in October 1551 by Anabaptists who lost no love for this "Lutheran". In October 1552 his shop was raided by the Inquisition and he was again questioned about his inventory. The historian of Venetian publishing Paul Grendler links Arrivabene with smuggling networks which trafficked in contraband literature. Other witnesses before the Inquisition in the 1550s testified that Arrivabene held heretical beliefs and offered his shop as a meeting place and post office for dissenters. While he was under suspicion and questioned on several occasions, "Arrivabene was always circumspect; he never committed himself in writing or spoke carelessly." He therefore escaped thorough, unrelenting investigation. Arrivabene, the publisher of the Koran, skated on the thin ice of religious unorthodoxy; compared to many of his compatriots, he was a lucky man - that thin ice did not crack beneath him. Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 103-112. Unfortunately, Grendler mentions that Arrivabene published the Italian-language version of the Koran in passing; he never adds to his simple declaratory statement. Is this another missing link?
37. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello. The Moor of Venice, Act I, Scene iii, pp. 106-109. We would like to thank Ed Hundert for suggesting that we have another look at the way that the linkage between Venice and the Islamic world was understood by the Renaissance's finest mind by rereading the Bard of Avon's tragedy.
38. It is important to make it clear that we are not disagreeing with Ginzburg's conjectural methods; rather we think that he has aimed his conjectural arrows at the wrong target. We will return to this issue below.
39. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 44; see also p. 131.
40. M. M. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (New York: New American Library, n.d.), p. 39.
41. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, pp. 25, 37.
42. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 67.
43. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, 67. Ibid..
44. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, pp. 26-27.
45. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 94.
46. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, pp. 18-21. It is interesting to note that it is this section in which Ginzburg first draws the reader's attention to Simon the Jew's suggestion that Menocchio "had praised a book that may have been the Koran". Having acknowledged this piece of testimony, Ginzburg immediately slides past it by writing, "We would appear to be very far from Luther and his doctrine. All this compels us to return to the point of departure and begin again, proceeding cautiously one step at a time." This is good advice, but Ginzburg does not heed it. He does not return to the stepping-stone or point of departure expressly revealed by the hearsay evidence attributed to Simon.
47. Del Col, "Introduction", Domenico Scandella, pp. 1, lxvii, lxxi, lxxviii.
48. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 44.
49. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 238.
50. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 34.
51. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 222.
52. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 67.
53. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 66.
54. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 37.
55. E. Ibrahim and D. Johnson-Davics, Forty Hadith Qudsi (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 88-89.
56. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 36.
57. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, pp. 40-41.
58. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, pp. 43, 58.
59. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 375.
60. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 54.
61. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Ibid., p. 76. Ginzburg's exclusionary viewpoint towards connections with Islam is rather surprising given the fact that a few pages earlier he states, "Menocchio's peasant paradise probably took more from the Mohammedan (rather than the Christian) hereafter about which he had read in Mandeville's lively description" (p. 77). In other words, Ginzburg does not allow that Menocchio, the village miller of Montereale, could have had any contact with the Koran, the sacred text of Islam. Ginzburg thus presents us with arguments to fit the evidence rather than taking advantage of Occam's Razor - and cutting directly to the point - with a much simpler explanation.
62. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 375.
63. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 427.
64. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 54.
65. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., pp. 61-62.
66. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, pp. 90-91.
67. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, pp. 176-178.
68. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, pp. 112-113.
69. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 69.
70. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, Ibid., p. 94.
71. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, Ibid., p. 62.
72. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, Ibid., p. 454.
73. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 72.
74. This point is developed much further by Paola Zambelli, who argues that, in regard to Christ's humanity, Menocchio is "very close to the words of Averroes' Destructio" rather than to the models proposed by Anabaptists. Furthermore, Zambelli notes, "Menocchio always refers to religions as 'laws' in the same way as Averroes does, and believes their value to be relative." Zambelli, "From Menocchio to Piero Della Francesca", p. 993, n. 19.
75. Melchiori had also been prosecuted for heresy in 1579-1980 (Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 73). Del Col notes that "the judicial situation of the priest of Polcenigo was extremely delicate, because in 1576 he had been tried by Fra Giulio Columberto and by the vicar general Camillo Cauzio for heretical utterances, magical arts and giving comfort to heretics. The case had been reopened in 1579 by the same inquisitor and by the acting vicar Maro, continued by Fra Felice [the hammer of Menocchio] and the vicar general Scipione Bonaverio and concluded on appeal at Venice on 29 November 1580 with a sentence reconciling him to the Church based on a light suspicion of heresy. The dossier was massive, over a hundred pages, and the two judges of 1584 remembered the affair well." Del Col, "Introduction", Domenico Scandella, pp. lxxxv-lxxxvi.
76. Zambelli, "From Menocchio to Piero Della Francesca", p. 994. On the next page, Zambelli writes that "the core of Menocchio's ideas has a lively and critical, but undeniable, connexion with some of the advanced trends in contemporary high culture, even those of the Florentine academy and the school of Padua. He was not unaware of them; he had an instinctive knowledge of the conflicts and inbreeding which occurred in the works of those intellectuals. It was not only by a 'surprising coincidence' that he reiterated their fundamental ideas: 'he simply translated them into images that corresponded to his experiences, to his aspirations, to his fantasies'
77. (p. 112, The Cheese and the Worms). Why, then, deny that he really was a 'philosopher, astrologer and prophet'?" Although Zambelli joins us in looking for other linkages to connect Menocchio to contemporary cultural discussions, she looks in different places and comes up with different answers. The intellectual fraternity to which the miller of Montereale belonged becomes even more of a mysterious puzzle wrapped in an enigma. Will the 'real Menocchio' please stand up?
78. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, "Introduction", Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. xix.
79. They arc quoting Salvatore Settis, Las Tempesta interpretata (Turin, 1978), p. 73.
80. We are thinking here of Bertholdt Brecht's brilliant poem, "Questions from a Worker who Reads", printed in John Willett and Ralph Manheim, eds., Bertholdt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956 (London, 1976), pp. 252-253. Ginzburg himself suggests that his own Damascus Road conversion to microhistorical research was prompted by Tolstoy's conviction that "a historical phenomenon can become comprehensible only by reconstructing the activities of all [emphasis added] the persons who participated in it". Carlo Ginzburg, "Microhistory: Two or Three Things I Know About It", Critical Inquiry, vol. 20 (1993), p. 24. In Ginzburg's response to Tolstoy there is more than just an echo of the seventeenth-century Levellers' claim that "the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he".
81. Testimony of Ser Giulio, son of the deceased Stefanut, quoted in Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 13.
82. Ginzburg, "Microhistory", p. 28. For those, like us, who were puzzled by the word "gnoseological", it refers to "the philosophy of cognition or the cognitive faculties" according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
83. Montereale was located close to the system of roads that had, for centuries - even millennia - connected Northeastern Italy to the Alpine passes that led to the heartland of Central Europe.
84. On this point, see the stimulating comments by Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990-1990 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 145ff.
85. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (London, 1973), vol. 2, p. 841, n. 15.
86. Among the Venetian arsenalotti, service was onerous in times of war when they were "sent abroad to serve the state aboard the galleys they had helped to build. In 1629, out of a total of 1,320 enrolled shipbuilders, 490 (or 37 percent) were away at sea; in 1645, the percentage was about the same - 516 out of 1,366 masters - but with the Candia War, which began that year, over half the arsenalotti would be sent out with the fleet." Robert C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 105.
87. Braudel, The Mediterranean, vol. 2, p. 865.
88. Richard Goy, Venice: The City and its Architecture (London, 1997), p. 70.
89. Deborah Howard, Venice and the East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), passim.
90. Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550-1670 (Totowa, N.J., 1983), p. 184.
91. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 23. While others identified Menocchio as a miller, it is interesting to note that in his own testimony he did not seem to have recourse to metaphors relating to that trade to explain himself to the inquisitors, whereas he does use references to carpentry to make his point: "I will tell you how it is: these seven things are given by God to man in the same way as to a carpenter who wants to build things. So just as a carpenter with a hatchet and a saw, wood and other instruments does his work, so God has given something to man so that he can also do his work; and not doing his work, there is no value at all." Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 50. Again, "just as someone who is building a house uses workers and helpers, but we say that he built it. Similarly, in making the world God used the angels, but we say that God make it. And just as that master carpenter in building the house could also do it by himself, but it would take longer, so God in making the world could have done it by himself, but over a longer period of time." Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 57.
92. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 110; see also p. 122.
93. This point is expanded by Dominick LaCapra, who notes that Menocchio's playing at feasts "could be seen as camivalesque". LaCapra, "The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian", p. 47.
94. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 29.
95. Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. 129.
96. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, pp. 20-21, 117.
97. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Ibid., p. 33.
98. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Ibid., p. 45.
99. LaCapra, "The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian", p. 53.
100. This splendid phrase is borrowed from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "Rétif de la Bretonne as a Social Anthropologist: Rural Burgundy in the Eighteenth Century", in The Mind and Method of the Historian (Chicago, 1981), p. 215.
101. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 24.
102. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. 37.
103. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. 4.
104. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. 54.
105. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. 31.
106. What was the contemporary purchasing power of "two soldi"? The closest evidence we have found relates to early seventeenth-century Venetian prices, and it is important to bear in mind that surging inflation had probably reduced monetary value in the interim. Beef sold for 18 soldi per kilo; a capon would fetch 30 soldi; and the "heavily flavored pesci azzuri (such as mackerel) 2 soldi apiece or sardines (8 soldi per kilo)". Davis, Shipbuilders, p. 103.
107. Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 12.
108. Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 Ibid., pp. 4-6.
109. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. 117.
110. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Ibid., p. 84.
111. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, Ibid., p. xvii.
112. Carlo Ginzburg, "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method", History Workshop, vol. 9 (1980), pp. 27, 13.
113. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 4.
114. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., pp. 10-11.
115. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. 13.
116. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. 15.
117. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. 17.
118. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, Ibid., p. 20.
119. Ibid., p. 8. Why didn't Vorai spill the beans on Menocchio earlier? Was his reticence connected to his well-founded fears of Menocchio's kinsmen who, in the event, did harass him and drive him out of Montereale? Or did the fact that he had known Menocchio for so long create a kind of immune response to the miller's statements? It is relevant to note that another witness, Giovanni Foscari, provveditore and captain of Pordenone, told the second trial that he had informed "the priest Odorigo that he was obliged to denounce him to his superiors". Without this prod, the priest might have kept his own counsel (p. 110). It is also germane to situate the personal relationship between the priest and the miller in a broader context. Del Col suggests that in mid-century Friuli there was "a tranquil acceptance of heretics" which occurred as a result of "protections afforded by members of Friulian noble clans (Spilimbergo, Porcia, Frattina) who had accepted Reformation ideas, communal ties within towns and villages, religious ignorance and indifference". The result was that "People were relatively little concerned to denounce heretics, and the local tribunals were not particularly energetic in proceeding against them." Only after 1580 did the Counter-Reformation's inquistiorial campaign to probe the hearts and minds of the population really take off. It is also important to note that it was during the turn-of-the-century tenure of Menocchio's final judge and tormentor, Fra Girolamo Asteo da Pordenone, that inquisitional trials reached their zenith. Andrea Del Col, "Shifting Attitudes in the Social Environment towards Heretics: The Inquisition in Friuli in the Sixteenth Century" in Hans Rudolf Guggisberg, Bernd Moeller, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, eds., Ketzerverfolgung im 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1992), pp. 65-82. See also John Martin, Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Venice 1550-1650 (Oxford, 1989).
120. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 154.
121. To quote a completely decontextualized example, when Samuel Bamford walked from post-Peterloo Manchester to London in the spring of 1820, he did so in a fairly rambling, desultory manner, stopping at many public houses and checking out the sights along the way. The penultimate leg of his journey, from Stoke Goldington, near Northampton, to north London - a distance of roughly 80 kilometres - was negotiated in one day which had 13 hours of daylight. Passages in the Life of a Radical (Oxford, 1984, pp. 270ff., especially 284-286.) The 100 kilometres between Montereale and Venice could probably have been covered in one day during the time of year when the hours of sunlight were longest.
122. Del Col, Domenico Scandella, p. 11.
123. Davis, Shipbuilders, pp. 93-94. It should be noted that Davis's figures relate to the 1642 census; it should also be kept in mind that he is reporting "households" and that many (or most?) of the foreigners would have been solitary transients, given the nature of their work as sailors.
124. Pullan, The Jews of Europe, p. 256.
125. The likelihood of capture was so imbricated into Venetian experience that "there were local scuole and hospedali dedicated to raising ransom money". Davis, Shipbuilders, p. 101.
126. This statement was made in his own defence by "Enriques Nuňes, otherwise Abraham called Righetto, alternately Christian and Jew" who was handed over to the Inquisition by the Venetian Council of Ten in 1570 (quoted in Pullan, The Jews of Europe, p. 69).
127. Venetian women often asked local diviners about missing family members: "sometimes an entire group of lost male relatives: was he (or they) alive or dead? was he free or enslaved? had he abandoned Christianity ('si faceva turco')? Armed with magical mirrors, smoke, or even a vase filled with holy water that conjured up images of a miniature Moor ('un hometto vestito da negro giovane, con un colar al collo'), the minor sorcerers of the community attempted (at 2 or more lire per session) to give their clients the reassurances that officials of the State, the Church,and the Arsenal were apparently unable to supply." Davis, Shipbuilders, p. 115, see also pp. 17, 26, 42. Most converts to Islam came from the lower classes: sailors, ship's cooks or carpenters, cabin boys, traders, fishermen, and so on. Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558-1685 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 41-43.
128. Davis, Shipbuilders, p. 116.
129. Ginzburg himself seems to approve this approach by linking it to Michel Foucault's early concern with exclusions, prohibitions, and limits which characterized Histoire de la folie: "What interests Foucault primarily are the act and the criteria of the exclusion, the excluded a little less so." But Foucault disappointed Ginzburg; he was an apostate who cowered timidly before Jacques Derrida's "facile, nihilistic objections" which meant that "Foucault's ambitious project of an archéologie du silence becomes transformed into silence pure and simple". Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xvii.