5 min readAug 9, 2026 12:54 PM IST First published on: Aug 9, 2026 at 12:54 PM ISTDear Indian Express Reader“In my opinion, all was chaos; that is, earth, air, water and fire were mixed together. Out of that mass, just as cheese is made from milk, worms appeared, and these were the angels.” Sixteenth-century Italian miller Domenico Scandella Menocchio’s ideas brought him before the Inquisition and eventually cost him his life. The subject of Carlo Ginzburg’s historiographical classic, The Cheese and the Worms, Menocchio was unusually well read for a person of his social station. He had read a vernacular Italian Bible, Boccaccio’s Decameron, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, books about saints and the Virgin Mary, local chronicles and, quite possibly, an Italian translation of the Quran.