Menocchio

Menocchio is the nickname of Domenico Scandella, a miller who lived in the Friuli region of northeast Italy during the second half of the 16th century. He is best known from the records of his interrogation by the Venetian Inquisition and from Carlo Ginzburg’s subsequent study, The Cheese and the Worms, which uses his case to illuminate forms of popular religion in early modern Europe.

Very little is known about his early life, but he worked as a miller in a small rural community in Friuli. The primary sources about Menocchio come from inquisitorial transcripts describing his statements during a late-16th-century trial. In these records, he articulates unorthodox interpretations of Christian doctrine and cosmology, drawing on a mix of Bible passages, folk wisdom, proverbs, and his own readings. The account portrays him as challenging church authority and offering a vernacular, self-guided form of belief that diverged from official Catholic teaching.

As a result of his views, Menocchio was charged with heresy and ultimately executed by burning. His case has become a touchstone in studies of popular religion, literacy, and the social dimensions of the Inquisition. Ginzburg’s work popularized Menocchio as a key example of how ordinary people wrestled with religious texts and authority in a preprint age, highlighting the tension between elite doctrinal norms and lay interpretation. The figure remains a focal point in discussions of microhistory and the history of belief.