Domenico Scandella Known As Menocchio: His Trials Before the Inquisition (1583-1599) (MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE TEXTS AND STUDIES)

From the Preface: Domenico Scandella, the quixotic, free-thinking and outspoken Friulan miller was executed by order of the Inquisition in 1599 as a relapsed heretic. This modest figure, virtually unknown in his day outside the borders of Montereale Valcellina, a tiny hamlet nestled at the foot of the mountains, and a few other neighboring villages, suddenly was brought out of centuries-long obscurity and was made one of the heroes of modern historiography by Carlo Ginzburg's now classic The Cheese and the Worms. Ginzburg told a fascinating tale that whetted our appetites to known more about "Menocchio," and an early reviewer of his work expressed the hope that the two voluminous Inquisitorial trials against him, Ginzburg's principal source in the reconstruction of the miller's life and intellectual world, would some day be published in their entirety. This arduous task has finally been accomplished by Andrea Del Col, a historian attached to the University of Trieste, in an edition that is a model of its kind. It is a pleasure now to present to a new audience in its English vestment a book that has enjoyed notable success since it first appeared in Italy in 1990. Del Col's contribution goes well beyond his formidable philological and paleographical labors in bringing to press, in a critical edition, the complete transcripts of two trials conducted over long intervals of time by a branch of the Roman Inquisition. Few such records have seen the light of day in their original languages; they are even scarcer in English translation. The volume provides us with previously unknown and unused documents which further illuminate Menocchio's trafic life; and Del Col's long, scholarly introduction discusses in detail the special relations which prevailed in Friulan peasant society and the cycles and rituals of its agricultural year. It also provides one of the fullest explications of the organization of an Inquisitorial tribunal and its intricate judicial procedures.