HI 270 LANGUAGE FOR HISTORIANS (SAMPLE PAPER)
Summer Examinations
Time allowed: 1.5 hours
Answer BOTH questions with reference to the extracts from the set text.
Answers should NOT include any significant amount of material already presented in
ANY assessed essays.
Read carefully the instructions on the answer book and make sure that the particulars required
are entered on each answer book.
Extracts from Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi (London, 1980), p. 33.
To what extent can we consider as typical such an unusual figure as that of a sixteenthcentury miller who knew how to read and write? And typical of what? Certainly not of a
current in peasant culture, seeing that Menocchio himself pointed to a group of printed books
as sources for his ideas. By dint of running up against the walls of this labyrinth, we’ve
returned to the point of departure.
Almost, that is. We have seen what books Menocchio read. But how did he read
them?
When we compare, one by one, passages from the books mentioned by Menocchio
with the conclusions that he drew from them (if not with the manner in which he reported
them to the judges), we invariably find gaps and discrepancies of serious proportions. Any
attempt to consider these books as “sources” in the mechanical sense of the term collapses
before the aggressive originality of Menocchio’s reading, a screen that he unconsciously
placed between himself and the printed page: a filter that emphasized certain words whilst
obscuring others, that stretched the meaning of a word, taking it out of context, that acted on
Menocchio’s memory and distorted the very words of the text. And this screen, this key to
his reading, continually leads us back to a culture that is very different from the one
expressed on the printed page – one based on an oral tradition.
This doesn’t mean that for Menocchio the book was incidental, or a pretext. He
himself declared, as we shall see, that at least one book had moved him deeply, encouraging
him to think new thoughts by its startling assertions. It was the encounter between the
printed page and the oral culture, of which he was one embodiment, that led Menocchio to
formulate – first for himself, later for his fellow villagers, and finally for the judges – the
“opinions … [that] came out of his head.”
Questions:
1. What does this passage reveal about the relationship between oral and print culture in
the sixteenth century?
2. Assess the contribution of microhistory – as exemplified by Ginzburg’s Cheese and
the Worms – to the study of early modern culture.