God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (19 page)

The Cheese and the Worms

For obvious reasons, the cases of Galileo and Bruno have been a focus of debate for centuries. But they were in many ways exceptional episodes. Most of those who came to the attention of the Inquisition did not have to defend themselves over the course of many decades. Most did not have a constellation of powerful prelates taking a very personal interest in their cases. The statistics are arguable, but in the two centuries after its establishment, the Roman Inquisition conducted, at a minimum, some 50,000 formal trials. The number of people investigated but never tried runs to several times this figure. Italy’s population in 1600 was about 13 million, so the Inquisition’s footprint would have been highly visible.

And the number executed? There was a charitable organization in Rome, the Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, whose members took it upon themselves to escort the condemned to the stake. In the Roman Inquisition’s first two centuries, they performed this service for ninety-seven people.
But that’s just Rome. Throughout the peninsula, the total number executed by the Inquisition over this same period is around 1,250.

Trials by the Roman Inquisition followed the usual pattern in certain ways, but departed from it in others. The proceedings were secret, and the accused was never told the source of the accusations or the identity of the witnesses against him. (Accounts of reprisals suggest that the accused sometimes discovered their identity anyway.) But the person on trial was made aware of the specific charges—in writing, and in the vernacular—and could hire a lawyer. “Public defenders” were available for the indigent. The position of the lawyer was in some ways awkward. As John Tedeschi writes, “If the lawyer became convinced that his client was indeed guilty and could not be persuaded to abandon his error, he was obliged to discontinue the defense or fall under suspicion himself.” Just as inquisitors learned correct procedure from handbooks, so did defense lawyers who practiced before the Inquisition bar. Heresy, they were reminded, was a crime of the intellect, and allowances might be made if a defendant could show a lack of intentionality—it was a slip of tongue, he was drunk, he was sleepwalking.

Because so many Inquisition trial records survive in various archives, it is sometimes possible—depending on how the questioning went, and on the fastidiousness of the recording secretary—to get deep inside the heads of particular defendants. One man who has achieved a measure of immortality is Domenico Scandella, known by the nickname Menocchio, a miller in the small northern Italian town of Montereale. If he were to return to his hometown today, he would most likely be taken aback to find a cultural center named for him (the Centro Studi Storici Menocchio) and to learn that his name also graces a small literary magazine (
I Quaderni del Menocchio
).
As Giordano Bruno’s case was making its way toward a conclusion, in the late 1590s, so was Menocchio’s. Like Bruno, Menocchio was a man who could not stop talking, and although he was burned at the stake for heresy in 1599, his words took on a life of their own.

But not until almost four centuries had elapsed. In the meantime, the transcripts from his trial moldered in the Archivio della Curia Arcivescovile, in Udine, and it was there, in that northern Italian city, that they were discovered by Carlo Ginzburg. Ginzburg is an easy fellow to spot in a crowd, with flaring gray eyebrows and a matching shock of unruly hair—he could be Trotsky’s Italian cousin. In the early 1960s, he was at the beginning of his academic career, a lowly
assistente volontario
at the University of Rome, who helped make ends meet by translating books from French and English into Italian.
A man with Ginzburg’s talents and energy—though not his attitude—would have been a very welcome addition to the staff of the sixteenth-century Congregation of the Index. Of course, the fact that he was Jewish would have posed a problem.

Ginzburg was not consciously aware of the extent to which this part of his background, together with his father’s torture and death at the hands of the Nazis in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison, had impelled him toward the Inquisition as a subject of study. The realization came only later, as he has admitted. (“How could I have let such an obvious fact escape me?”)
He began sifting through Inquisition records wherever he could find them, in towns and cities all over Italy. His intention was to study “the persecuted, not the persecutors.”
One day, quite by accident, in the massive state archives of Venice—he was ordering numbered boxes of documents at random, as if prospecting for ore; playing, as he recalls, “Venetian roulette”—Ginzburg suddenly came across references to trials of people known as
benandanti,
a category of heretic that he had never heard of before, and no one else had heard of either. He was so excited by the discovery that he had to leave the archive and walk up and down outside to restore his composure.

His investigation eventually led to the Inquisition archives in Udine, in the region of Friuli. The archives were closed to outsiders—even the fact of their existence was not widely known—but Ginzburg enlisted the help of a local monsignor who happened to be a historian. The monsignor, who had never met Ginzburg, nonetheless sent a note to the archivist that read: “Dr. Carlo Ginzburg is a serious scholar and a reliable person.” He was granted access, grudgingly. The archives in Udine hold the records of some 2,000 Inquisition trials, in hulking wooden cabinets, and Ginzburg worked among them in solitude. “No bureaucracy, no employees,” he would remember many years later. “I used to pick up myself the handwritten volumes I needed, since they were stored in the same room where I was working. I was always perfectly alone. I remember that once I was locked in the archive after closing time; somebody came to rescue me after a couple of hours.”

Ginzburg emerged from the archives of Udine with his first major book,
I Benandanti,
translated into English as
The Night Battles.
The word
benandanti
in fact means “good walkers,” and it refers to people who engaged in nighttime rituals, probably of very ancient provenance, intended to ensure an abundant harvest. From 1580 to 1634, some 850 people in rural northern Italy were hauled in for interrogation because the Inquisition had heard reports of such activities. Ginzburg writes,

The
benandanti
spoke, often without being urged to, of the battles for fertility which they fought at night, in the spirit, armed with sprigs of fennel, against witches, male and female, armed with sorghum stalks. All this was incomprehensible to the inquisitors—the very term “
benandante
” was unknown to them and over fifty years they constantly asked what it meant.

The villagers and country people had no idea that they were heretics—what they were doing was simply an immemorial aspect of ordinary life. The inquisitors, for their part, struggled to fit the peasants’ behavior into the categories they knew—such as heresy and witchcraft. They were as dismissive of the “mental rubbish of peasant credulity” as many eminent later historians have been. (The phrase comes from H. R. Trevor-Roper, who had little patience for such things.)

To define the problem can be to create the problem. The commodious encyclopedia of witchcraft, the
Malleus Maleficarum,
or
Hammer of Witches,
the work of two Dominican inquisitors, was first published in 1486; the title was clearly chosen for its resonance with another book, the
Malleus Judeorum,
which had appeared earlier in the century. The
Malleus
Maleficarum
bore various marks of official approval. During the next 150 years, thanks to the printing press, it was published throughout Europe in some thirty-five separate editions.
Its primary purpose was to refute the notion that there was no such thing as witchcraft, and it certainly succeeded in fostering a conviction that witchcraft was widespread. It also created a standard view of what witchcraft was: a pact with the devil, involving magical conclaves and often sexual relations, whose ultimate purpose was the deployment of sorcery to inflict harm on God’s good world. Here is a typical chapter heading: “Whether the Relations of an Incubus Devil with a Witch are always accompanied by the Injection of Semen.” And the one following: “How, as it were, they Deprive Man of his Virile Member.”
The last third of the book is devoted to the techniques, including torture, that inquisitors and others should use to discover and prosecute witchcraft. Much of this advice was taken directly from Nicholas Eymerich’s medieval inquisitors’ manual.

To a modern sensibility, the
Malleus
often reads, as the scholar Anthony Grafton once put it, “like a strange amalgam of Monty Python and
Mein Kampf.
”
Nonetheless, the book’s taxonomy of beliefs and practices became standard, and influenced other treatises. Witchcraft had been an off-and-on concern of the Church for centuries—sorcery was among the charges brought against the Knights Templar—but it’s probably no coincidence that the European “witch craze” made its appearance only after the contents of the
Malleus
became familiar.
The witch craze would eventually cross the ocean. The penumbra of the
Malleus
can be glimpsed around the Salem witch trials, which occurred in 1692. Its ideas peek out from behind the writings of Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and others of the time.

The
benandanti
don’t appear in the
Malleus,
and neither do their practices, but Ginzburg shows how decades of repeated questioning by the Inquisition began to shape the way the
benandanti
saw themselves, gradually bending their self-perception toward something the inquisitors could recognize. The Inquisitors were simply asking the kinds of questions that made sense to them—over and over again, until, in time, the answers conformed to the picture they expected. Yes, we gather with Satan in dark of night. Yes, the sex is good. As one historian has concluded: “The study of actual interrogations shows that the dealings with the Devil that suspects were eventually compelled to admit to are actually foisted onto them by the investigators.”

It was in the archives at Udine that Ginzburg came upon the case of Domenico Scandella—page after page of Inquisition transcripts. Ginzburg found that the transcripts were rendered almost like a modern screenplay, recording gesture and tone as well as dialogue. He would recount Scandella’s story in minute detail in a 1976 book called
The Cheese and the Worms,
one of the most prominent early examples of the genre known as microhistory. What a hundred years ago might have been no more than a glancing reference or intriguing gloss—an unknown individual, a small town, a piece of music, an obscure ritual—becomes the starting point for ingenious narratives. A reduction in scale allows, incongruously, for a widening of perspective.

Menocchio was a man of modest consequence in Montereale. Not only was he a miller, an occupation of some importance, but he had served as mayor of the town. He had fathered eleven children. He played the guitar. And he was literate. He owned a number of books and borrowed others, and according to his testimony in the course of two trials, he had read, among other works, a vernacular Bible, Boccaccio’s
Decameron,
and an Italian translation of a book that may have been (according to one witness) the Koran. Montereale lies only about seventy miles from Venice, which at the time was the most cosmopolitan city in Europe—a seafaring republic with a significant population of Jews and Muslims, transients from all over, and a lively intellectual life. The city supported a vast book-making industry—it had at least thirty different publishers in Menocchio’s day.
In an age before true globalization, Venice was as globalized as a place could be. Menocchio is known to have visited Venice, and to have bought at least one of his books there.

Ginzburg was struck by Menocchio’s plucky self-defense and eccentric views. “I have an artful mind,” the miller admitted proudly at his first trial for heresy, in 1584. Here is his version of the Creation: “All was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.”
Menocchio, Ginzburg writes, appropriated “remnants of the thinking of others as he might stones and bricks” to construct his own unique cosmology, held together by a mortar of rural folklore.

He had been denounced to the Inquisition by the local parish priest, with whom he had quarreled, and from that moment forward the process unfolded in standard inquisitorial fashion. Menocchio was permitted to hire a lawyer; had he not, one would have been appointed for him. He spent the several months between arrest and sentencing in prison, and during that time he was interrogated—at exhausting length—on at least seven occasions. He was not tortured, perhaps because he spoke freely without any prodding at all. A secretary was present at all times. To judge from the transcripts, Menocchio sometimes seemed to take charge of the proceedings. At one point, he was asked whether he believed that the Church represented the one true religion. He said, “I beg you, sir, listen to me”—you can almost see him leaning forward, loud and insistent, and the inquisitors drawing back, wary but curious—and recounted a story he had read in the
Decameron,
though shaping it to his own purpose:

There was once a great lord who declared his heir would be the person found to have a certain precious ring of his; and drawing near to his death, he had two other rings similar to the first one made, since he had three sons, and he gave a ring to each son; each one of them thought himself to be the heir and to have the true ring, but because of their similarity it could not be known with certainty. Likewise, God the father has various children whom he loves, such as Christians, Turks, and Jews, and to each of them he has given the will to live by his own law, and we do not know which is the right one.