Armenian Translation of The Cheese And The Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg

The first book of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Series second phase “Il formaggio e i vermi” (The Cheese And The Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller) by Carlo Ginzburg has been published.

Translator – Minas Lourian

Publisher – Antares

Read below biography of the translator, as well as short information about the author and the book.

Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg is an acclaimed Italian historian and proponent of the field of microhistory. He received a PhD from the University of Pisa in 1961. He has subsequently held teaching positions at the University of Bologna and at the University of California, Los Angeles (1988–2006). His fields of interest range from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European history, with contributions to art history, literary studies, and the theory of historiography.

He is best known for Il formaggio e i vermi (1976, English title: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller), which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.

About the Book

The Cheese and the Worms is a study of the popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time.

For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio’s DecameronMandeville’s Travels, and a “mysterious” book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: “All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed―just as cheese is made out of milk―and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.”

 

Minas Lourian

Minas Lourian, Director of the Center for Armenian Culture Studies and Documentation. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he did part of his musical studies there, then moved to Venice in 1980 to continue his studies. Since 1987, he began to work with Veneto Musica and several other music societies, institutions, and international festivals of early and contemporary, classical and jazz music, as a founder, coordinator, or director. The recording studio founded by Lourian in 1991, created a complete sound archive of the orally transmitted Armenian medieval sacred chant repertoire, conserved since the beginning of the 18th century in San Lazzaro, by the Armenian Mekhitarist Congregation. Between 2016-2019, he was the president of the Italian-Armenian community representative board (Unione degli Armeni d’Italia).