Menocchio lives as a married miller in Montereale, having served his village as both mayor and church administrator.

Menocchio gains a reputation for openly sharing heretical and blasphemous ideas with fellow villagers over many years.

The town priest files an anonymous complaint against Menocchio with the Roman Inquisition.

Menocchio is arrested and brought before inquisitors for the first time.

Menocchio describes his cosmogony to inquisitors, comparing the universe's formation to cheese and the angels to worms.

During the first trial, Menocchio professes a wide range of heresies, including a belief in universal religious tolerance.

Facing continued imprisonment, Menocchio writes a letter to the Inquisition pleading for merciful treatment.

The Inquisition finds Menocchio guilty of being a heresiarch and sentences him to indefinite imprisonment.

Menocchio's son Ziannuto successfully petitions the Inquisition for his father's release from prison.

Menocchio is freed under strict conditions, including wearing the shaming habitello and remaining confined to Montereale.

A violinist named Lunardo Simon reports Menocchio to the Inquisition for again expressing heretical beliefs at a festival.

Menocchio is arrested a second time and faces a new round of interrogation by the Inquisition.

The second trial finds Menocchio guilty as a relapsed heresiarch.

Menocchio is subjected to torture by strappado but refuses to betray any accomplices.

Menocchio is burned at the stake after word of his heresy reaches the Pope himself.

Menocchio was a sixteenth-century Italian miller who spent years openly sharing unorthodox religious ideas with his neighbors in Montereale. His provocative behavior attracted the attention of the Roman Inquisition, and he was arrested and questioned for the first time in 1584. Rather than staying silent as his lawyers advised, Menocchio freely confessed his strange beliefs, including a cosmogony comparing the universe's formation to cheese and angels to worms. Found guilty of being a heresiarch, he was imprisoned until his son secured his release, but he could not stop spreading his ideas. A second arrest, conviction, and torture followed, and after word of his case reached the Pope personally, Menocchio was burned at the stake in 1599.

The headline events of Menocchio's two trials and execution.

Menocchio seeks legal counsel from his childhood friend Melchiori, a priest familiar with Inquisition proceedings.

Menocchio's son Ziannuto attempts to have charges dismissed by arguing his father is mentally ill.

Menocchio boasts to inquisitors that he has the capacity to amaze church leaders with his ideas and speech.

Menocchio borrows the book Il sogno dil Caravia from a painter named M. Nicola with Anabaptist ties.

Ginzburg compiles the list of eleven books Menocchio is known to have read, drawn from trial testimony.

Ginzburg discovers that Menocchio borrowed nearly all his books from unexpected community members, including women and neighbors.

Menocchio misreads Rosario della Gloriosa Vergine Maria to support his conviction that the Virgin Mary was not chaste.

Menocchio tells inquisitors that Mandeville's Travels deeply troubled him and shaped his tolerant views on religion.

Ginzburg identifies the materialist metaphors Menocchio used to describe God, comparing him to a father and a landowner.

Menocchio is reappointed as church administrator in Montereale after returning home from prison.

Inquisitors discover that Menocchio has been concealing his shaming habitello beneath outer layers of clothing.

Menocchio offers shelter to a converted Jew named Simon, who later reports his ongoing heretical conversations.

Menocchio submits a sorrowful note to his inquisitors lamenting that his own children consider him crazy.

Menocchio's house is searched and his personal writings are confiscated by the Inquisition.

Ginzburg closes the study by noting that other executed heretics like Menocchio remain entirely invisible to history.

Before and during his first trial, Menocchio navigated a web of relationships, from a childhood friend who served as informal legal counsel to inquisitors he could not resist astonishing with his boldness. Ginzburg reconstructs the books that shaped Menocchio's thinking and the community borrowing network through which he accessed them. Analysis of his reading reveals systematic misinterpretations driven by a materialist peasant worldview, including his reading of a religious text on the Virgin Mary to deny her chastity. Between his two imprisonments, Menocchio quietly regained social standing in Montereale but also accumulated debts and violated the conditions of his release. By the time of the second trial, his isolation had grown severe, and a sorrowful letter to his inquisitors and the confiscation of his private writings marked the final stages of his story.

The supporting details, books, and secondary moments of Menocchio's story.

Inquisitors ask whether Menocchio is joking about his beliefs, and he firmly and earnestly denies it.

Despite legal advice to stay silent, Menocchio refuses to restrain his heretical ideas when questioned by inquisitors.

Menocchio asserts that the Church's sacraments are exploitative merchandise fraudulently marketed to the poor by the clergy.

Menocchio declares the Bible is a man-made product composed by the four evangelists rather than divine scripture.

Ginzburg rejects both Protestant Reformation and Anabaptist teachings as sufficient explanations for Menocchio's unusual heretical beliefs.

Ginzburg proposes that Menocchio filtered every book he read through an invisible oral peasant cultural lens.

Menocchio misinterprets a Legenda Aurea story about Mary's funeral procession as evidence she was not truly a virgin.

Menocchio reverses the usual power dynamic by taking on the role of spiritual teacher and instructing his inquisitors in the Three Rings legend.

Ginzburg concludes that the cheese and worms metaphor reflects a peasant belief in spontaneous generation familiar from cheesemaking.

Inquisitors corner Menocchio with questions about whether God and the spirit are the same thing, eventually rendering him speechless.

Ginzburg identifies a subconscious parallel between Menocchio's developing self-image and Foresti's portrayal of Martin Luther.

The death of son Ziannuto deprives Menocchio of his most loyal supporter ahead of the second trial.

Ginzburg introduces Pellegrino Baroni, a fellow miller whose heretical beliefs and defiant behavior strikingly mirror Menocchio's own.

Ginzburg traces a small clandestine network of heretical thinkers that links Menocchio to other radical figures across Northern Italy.

Ginzburg concludes that the Inquisition functioned as a deliberate upper-class instrument for suppressing dangerous peasant cultural radicalism.

Menocchio's defiance during the first trial revealed a man unwilling to conceal his ideas, even when doing so put his life at risk. Ginzburg's central analytical breakthrough is his theory that Menocchio read every book through an invisible oral peasant culture filter, producing systematic misinterpretations that formed the basis of his heretical worldview. Key encounters during interrogation, such as Menocchio's impromptu lesson on the Three Rings and his silence before questions about God's spirit, illuminate the profound cultural gulf between the miller and his inquisitors. The second trial brought new revelations, including Menocchio's emerging prophetic self-image and a deepening isolation following the deaths of his closest family members. Ginzburg ultimately situates Menocchio within a broader hidden tradition of peasant radicalism, linking him to other heretical millers and a clandestine network of radical thinkers across Northern Italy.