Nicki Leone

On the 3rd of February in the year 1584 an Italian miller named Menocchio of the village of Montereale presented himself voluntarily to the Holy Office in Concordia to answer charges of heresy and blasphemy.  His friends and neighbors all counseled him to say he was sorry, to say he never meant any harm, and to otherwise keep his mouth shut. “Tell them what they want to know and try not to talk too much; do not go out of your way to discuss these things. Answer only their questions” was the heartfelt advice of the village vicar.

Menocchio, whose full name was Domenico Scandella, obviously tried to follow the advice of his friends, but his gregarious nature got the better of him and it wasn’t long before he was expounding to his inquisitors his own ideas about the nature of the universe. “In my opinion, all was chaos, that is, the 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. . . .”

Not surprisingly, Menocchio was eventually burned at the stake as a heretic.

It was just over four hundred years later that Menocchio stumbled into my life, when I happened to pick up a book called The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg. The book had been on the “for further reading” list in one of my European History Survey classes in college and I was still at an age where I had the energy and inclination to do all my extra credit work. The author had come across the church documents of Menocchio’s trial while researching something else and was intrigued by the character of the man recorded in the transcripts. The miller was neither nobility nor serf, but a person of some consequence in his town and a little unusual in that he could read and write. Although obviously that wasn’t all that was unusual about him.

I was instantly charmed. I have big, thick tomes on the history of Renaissance Italy and Reformation Europe that cover their era war by war, pope by pope, king by king. But not one of them has left such a vivid impression on me as Ginzburg’s account of the opening testimony at Menocchio’s trial. “He is always arguing with somebody about the faith just for the sake of arguing” said more than one witness. And indeed, Menocchio seems like the kind of man who couldn’t resist poking a stick at a bear. “Priests want us under their thumb, just to keep us quiet, while they have a good time” he said at his inquest, of all places. And then, to his judges, “Everybody has his calling, some to plow, some to hoe, and I have mine, which is to blaspheme.”

My god, I thought, I know this guy. He’s the guy who sits at the local bar and tells you exactly what is wrong with America. The one who tells you what he’d do if he were in charge. The one who won’t shut up after he has a few drinks in him. Opinionated, sometimes annoying, but basically harmless, unless he happens to live in sixteenth-century Italy, in which case it was a fatal habit. Although it should be pointed out that the miller had lived in the same village for over forty years, presumably arguing with all and sundry at the least provocation during that entire time, and no one had felt inclined to report him for it. The fact that he didn’t end up in serious trouble until the 1580s probably says more about the changing nature of Church authority during the rise of Lutheranism than it does about Menocchio’s own wacky philosophies.

Ginzburg attempted, using the documents he found and his own knowledge of the era, to prove a theory that Menocchio’s peculiar ideas of cosmology are founded in an oral folk tradition that has been dressed up in the ideas he gleaned from his rather uncritical reading. (Logic was not one of Menocchio’s strong points). Whether or not the author succeeds in this is open to debate. But he did succeed, spectacularly, in inventing a new kind of history: historia populi.

Sometimes called “micro-history” because it focuses on a small event or place, The Cheese and the Worms is an early example of what I think of as “street-level” history. History told from the vantage point of the average and the insignificant. Most history is told from the top down—from the point of view of kings and leaders, political movements and military actions. The Cheese and the Worms is history looking upwards—at one strange event in a relatively ordinary man’s life, and what that implies about the world in which he lives.

Ginzburg’s historical approach ruffled some academic feathers but captured the imagination of the reading public. It certainly captured my imagination with its almost storyteller’s approach to a field that had hitherto hidden its delights behind formulaic, ostensibly “objective” language (although any historian will tell you there’s no such thing). 

I have an entire wall in my living room devoted to books about history, and more and more of them seem to lean towards Ginzburg’s method for teasing out a story. Among my favorites are A Fool and His Money: Life in a Partitioned Town in Fourteenth Century France by Ann Wroe and The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson. Both books take a single incident at a specific place, and build upon it to recreate an entire era. 

The Ghost Map is an extremely detailed and compelling account of a cholera outbreak in a neighborhood of London in 1854. Its detail is owed to the fact that a man living in the neighborhood, a scientist named John Snow, took it upon himself to survey the neighborhood house by house during the outbreak in an attempt to prove a theory he had hatched that cholera was a water-borne contagion. Thus, thanks to his records, we know that the well water for the neighborhood was probably contaminated on August 28th, 1854, and we know almost to a man who visited the neighborhood pump for water in the week the followed, since they almost all died. We also know who didn’t visit the pump that week, one of whom was an ornithologist named Gould, who was normally a regular pump-drinker but forewent the pleasure that week because he thought the water smelled a little off. It didn’t, but I couldn’t help, after reading this, glancing up at my beloved collection of Gould’s illustrations of tropical birds and feeling a little faint, some 150 years after the fact, at his near brush with certain death.

Thanks to Snow’s careful record keeping, plus a general British tendency to bureaucratize everything—and bureaucracy naturally means paperwork—Steven Johnson was able to rebuild the neighborhood around the outbreak almost to a house, along with careful, compassionate descriptions of everyone who lived there, what they did, how they survived (if they survived). And despite the scatological nature of the subject (cholera, I’m sorry to say, is transmitted fecal-oral) he creates for the reader a vivid image of Victorian London with the detail and beauty of a daguerreotype.

Ann Wroe’s book is more sanitized by the passage of time, but also more endearing, if one can use that term about an account of a court case in a medieval French town in 1370. Like Ginzburg, Wroe discovered the story by accident in the moldering court documents in the town archives. That she was in the town at all was unintentional. In fact, the generally accepted reason that there were so many surviving documents in the archives was that the town itself—an out of the way place in southern France called Rodez—was so unremarkable that nothing of import had ever happened there.

Perhaps not. But one thing that did happen there was that one day in early 1370 two workmen, attempting to repair a drainpipe that ran through a section of the town, were excavating the ground floor of a clothes-seller’s shop (for the pipe ran directly under it) and discovered a kettle filled with gold coins. Legal chaos ensued. The shopkeeper, Peyre Marques, insisted the gold was his, buried long ago for safekeeping although he had since forgot exactly where it had been placed. But other parties laid claim as well. The gold wasn’t in the shop, it was under the shop, and thus might actually belong to the man who owned the ground upon which the shop was built. And even that might be in dispute, for as often happens in very old towns, legal jurisdictions become entangled. Rodez was a “partitioned” town, partly under the authority of the archbishop, partly under the authority of the local duke. As it happened, the rather unclear line of demarcation ran right through the unfortunate Peyre’s shop. 

Because there is nothing like a pile of money to bring out everyone’s self interest, the case of Peyre Marques and his pot of gold dragged on in the courts for quite a long time, and the records, depositions, transcripts, lawyers’ arguments and witness testimonies all survive, which is what allowed the author to use the case as a framework in which to recreate a vivid picture of life in a medieval walled town, and bring to life one of its more foolish, even pitiable citizens. Indeed, there is some evidence, as Wroe points out, that by the end of the lengthy case poor Peyre was showing signs of Alzheimer’s or dementia, although naturally such conclusions are only speculation. It is a story filled with honorable men and shady characters, with greed, corruption but also good intentions and well-meant advice. And the reader stands with Peyre through it all as the author literally builds the town of Rodez around him, almost stone by stone, until he feels like he could walk the streets and not get lost, shake the hand of the lawyer and plead his case to the overlord.

Although the one thing he cannot do is find out what happened to the gold. Despite the remarkably well-preserved documents of the case, the one thing that is missing is the judge’s final decision. History is laughing at us.

The richness of detail, the vivid descriptions that are found in A Fool and His Money and The Ghost Map are more usually the province of historical fiction. A novelist is free to imagine and invent. A historian must imagine, but is not allowed to invent—Wroe calls it “the careful use of imagination”:

We are dealing in fact, not fiction; so there is much we can never reconstruct, including what the characters looked like, precisely how they dressed, how most of them talked, the rooms they lived in, their private thoughts. All this must remain unknown. Yet it is no offense to historical truth to describe such things as the blossoming of a pear tree, the stench of rotting meat, the heft of a building stone or the breathlessness of a running man, if these things (as they do) come into the evidence. And they can transport us very quickly.

In many ways these books—The Ghost Map, A Fool and His Money, The Cheese and the Worms—have more in common with biographies than they do with history. Their focus is narrow. Their perspective purposely limited. They are character-driven, although the characters in question are usually historically insignificant. Biographers rely on the memoirs, letters, journals, diaries and other personal papers of their subjects in order to reconstruct their lives. Medieval clothes-sellers and sixteenth-century millers aren’t in the habit of writing memoirs. Even if they were, history isn’t often in the habit of preserving them. No, the “things that come into evidence” for such men are much more mundane—court records and tax rolls, property deeds, wills, birth certificates, marriage licenses and death certificates. Church registers and bills of sale. It is from these miscellanea that Wroe, Johnson and Ginzburg have managed to bring to life—with almost a novelist’s skill—places and times and people that would otherwise be utterly lost to us.

My tolerance for the kind of historical detail and minutiae contained in these kinds of histories is apparently endless, as evidenced by the most recent book to join The Cheese and the Worms on my shelf of “street level” history: The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl. William Shakespeare defies his biographers at every turn, for it is famously known that not a single letter, not a notebook, diary, journal or any personal correspondence of his of any sort remains. It is an omission so great and glaring that it is generally agreed it must be deliberate. At some point Shakespeare must have destroyed all his personal letters. The only thing we have to prove he even existed are his plays, his signature on a few bills, one will, and a couple entries in church registries marking his birth and death. And one short deposition in an obscure court case over a bride’s dowry given on Monday, May 11th, 1612. On that day and that day only we hear the echo of William Shakespeare actually talking. 

Nicholl uses the event of that court case as a starting point to reconstruct what Shakespeare’s life might have been like during a couple of years that he was known to be living as a lodger with a French family on Silver Street in London. The street no longer exists; there is a highway overpass on the site above one’s head, and an underground parking garage below one’s feet. Standing there, amidst the cacophony of constant freeway traffic, the author proceeds to point off in each direction, walking the reader along, carefully rebuilding each house and street corner as it must have existed in 1605 when William Shakespeare was actually living there. 

His attention to detail is staggering (a friend of mine called it “turgid”). It takes the author almost fifty pages to go, step by step, from the front stoop of the house where Shakespeare lodged, through the front room, up the narrow stairs to the top floor, and finally into the attic room—which gets a chapter all its own called “the chamber” wherein the author describes what kinds of furniture might have been found, what the desk may have looked like, what may have been painted on the clothes that were hung over the bare walls, what books were most likely in the wooden chest by the desk, what might have been seen if one peered out the tiny top floor window. Unlike Ann Wroe, who had refused to reconstruct “how they dressed, how most of them talked, the rooms they lived in,” Nicholl it seems can barely reign himself in. The smallest details of the neighborhood, the house, and its occupants capture his attention and interest. That the landlady frequented an astrologer for medical advice, that this astrologer was also a known seducer, that the landlord was a notorious skinflint and lecherous old man . . . all these “facts” are teased out of the miscellaneous records that have floated down through history—notations of disapproval by the local church authorities, cryptic entries in the ledger of the astrologer-doctor, complaints filed with the civic authorities, listings in the account books of clients and customers.

And I was riveted. It is a book not so much about Shakespeare as it is about what it might be like to live when Shakespeare lived. If anything, it is the story of the Mountjoy household—“Mountjoy” being the name of the family from whom Shakespeare rented his room. Nichol sets his reader down on Silver street and points in one direction, towards Cripple Gate, describing the houses you can see and who lives there, up to and including the physic garden recently installed at the Alchemist’s Hall at the end of the street by no less a person than the famous herbalist John Gerard only a few years earlier. He points in another direction towards the unsavory Turnbull Street, infamous for its brothels and bawdy houses (including an inn owned by one George Wilkins, a pimp and wannabe writer who is actually known to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Pericles.) He opens the door and lets you peer inside to the workshop of Mr. Christopher Mountjoy, a French immigrant and “tire-maker,” meaning he had a business constructing those elaborate headdresses, wigs and hairpieces that one sees in portraits of Elizabethan and Jacobean noblewomen. In fact, it was here, in the extensive section on the Mountjoy workshop and the art of Elizabethan head-dresses, that I had my only moment of thinking “well, this is too much information.” It came after reading a description of a lady dressing her hair to go out:

First she must have her scalp rubbed: “Come Joyle, rubbe well my head, for it is very full of dandriffe.” For this procedure there are “rubbers”, which the page has earlier been ordered to warm. Next she has her hair combed, but “give me first my combing-cloth, otherwise you will fill me full of hayres”. Two combs are used, one of ivory and another “boxen” (boxwood), and when the combing is done, the page is ordered to clean them with “combe-brushes” and to “use a quill to take away the filthe from them”.

It is odd what sets us off, isn’t it? I, who had read through an extremely detailed description of what the human body goes through when afflicted with cholera, who can recite the definition of “nightsoil” without batting an eye, felt my stomach flip and turn at the image of a serving woman picking away at the crud caught in a lady’s hair comb.

The Lodger solves none of the mysteries of Shakespeare’s oddly undocumented life but it does an excellent job of recreating the background through which he moved. The stories and small domestic dramas that surround his time on Silver Street are extraordinary perhaps because they are so ordinary—fights over money, affairs and secret assignations, battles with tax collectors. There is a tendency to view history as a progressive thing, that each age is somehow an improvement over the one before—culminating, naturally, with our own time. But these street-level stories and micro-histories of small events and unimportant people remind us that while history might progress, human nature stays wonderfully, marvelously constant. That whatever the pressures driving kings and princes, the over-riding motivations of their subjects remain achingly familiar—a curious man’s desire to know how the world works, a wife’s desire to be loved, a man’s desire for more money, a woman’s desire to look pretty. And, after reading that last bit in The Lodger, a most serious desire on my part to wash my hair.
 

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.