ERETICOPEDIA

Dictionary of Heretics, Dissidents, and Inquisitors in the Mediterranean World
Edizioni CLORI | Firenze | ISBN 978-8894241600 | DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1309444
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Domenico Scandella, better known as Menocchio (Montereale Valcellina, c. 1532 – Portogruaro, August 1599), was a Friulian heretic condemned to death by the Inquisition.

Biography

He practised several occupations, primarily as a miller and a farmer. Unlike most of his fellow villagers, he was not illiterate. He had read, in a rather unsystematic way, a number of books. He regularly attended Mass and, on that and other occasions when he met his neighbours, he enjoyed discussing and expounding his own highly heterodox ideas. He denied the efficacy of the sacraments and of prayers for salvation, maintaining that salvation depended solely on good works regardless of religious affiliation. He also habitually blasphemed, arguing that blasphemy was not a sin.

The aspect of Menocchio's thought that has attracted the greatest scholarly interest, beginning with Carlo Ginzburg, is his conception of the origins of the universe. During his first trial he declared:

«Io ho detto che, quanto al mio pensier et creder, tutto era un caos, cioè terra, aere, acqua et foco insieme et quel volume andando così fece una massa aponto, come si fa il formazo nel latte et in quel deventorno vermi et quelli furno li angeli. Et la santissima maestà volse che quel fosse Dio et li angeli, et tra quel numero de angeli ve era ancho Dio, creato anchora lui da quella massa in quel medesmo tempo et fu fatto signor con quatro capitanii Lucivello, Michael, Gabriel et Rafael, qual Lucibello volse farsi signor alla comparation del re, che era la maestà de Dio et per la sua superbia Iddio commandò che fusse scaciato dal cielo con tutto il suo ordine et la sua compagnia. Et questo Dio fece poi Adamo et Eva et il populo in gran multitudine per empir quelle sedie delli angeli scacciati, la qual multitudine non facendo li commandamenti de Dio, mandò il suo figliol, il quale li giudei lo presero et fu crucifisso»¹.

It appears that Menocchio's relationship with the local parish priest—who often engaged him in discussions about his ideas—deteriorated after the priest, who was known not to disdain the company of women, asked permission to take advantage of Menocchio's daughters. Out of revenge, the priest secretly denounced him to the Inquisition of Aquileia and Concordia in September 1583. Arrested, Menocchio underwent four interrogations between February and May 1584. He freely and naively explained his beliefs to the judges, who sentenced him to abjuration and perpetual imprisonment. After two years, however, he was released under compulsory residence in his native village. Meanwhile, Menocchio's family retaliated by accusing the parish priest of heresy, resulting in his removal from the parish.

Having regained his freedom, Menocchio resumed his former habits. On 7 March 1596 he was denounced by a fair musician to whom, during Carnival in Udine, he had declared that the Bible was entirely an invention of the friars. A new trial was initiated by the inquisitor Girolamo Asteo in October 1598. Faced with numerous witnesses against him, Menocchio was arrested on 21 June 1599 and, after a brief trial, was condemned to death as a relapso on 8 August 1599. A few days later he was executed at Portogruaro.

Significantly, by issuing the death sentence, the local inquisitorial judges acted before and effectively bypassed the Congregation of the Holy Office, which had requested further investigation into the accused. The communication from Rome arrived only after the sentence had already been carried out by the secular authorities.

The Historiographical Debate on Menocchio

Menocchio became internationally famous through Carlo Ginzburg's Il formaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo di un mugnaio del '500. Ginzburg emphasized what he regarded as Menocchio's "essentially materialistic and potentially scientific" cosmology, focusing primarily on this aspect while giving less attention to other significant elements of Menocchio's thought that emerge from the trial records—sources that Ginzburg studied but neither published nor transcribed in their entirety.

Andrea Del Col, who later published the complete trial records, offered a more comprehensive reconstruction of Menocchio's intellectual world based on the documentary evidence. He interpreted Menocchio's cosmology primarily as a history of salvation, highlighting its connections with Catharism and medieval heresies, and, to a much lesser extent, with sixteenth-century Anabaptism tout court, which may have left residual traces within popular culture.

Even this interpretation, although better grounded in the documentary evidence than Ginzburg's, has been challenged. Luca Addante, in particular, rejected Del Col's conclusions, arguing instead that Menocchio's ideas bear a stronger resemblance to certain aspects of Antitrinitarianism and radical Anabaptism propagated in the Venetian territories by Girolamo Busale. Busale's thought, in turn, had been deeply influenced by the radical Valdesianism of his former Neapolitan teacher Juan de Villafranca. As Massimo Firpo first pointed out, Valdés's teachings, especially when pushed to their logical extremes—as they were by Juan de Villafranca, Scipione Capece, Giulio Basalù, and Girolamo Busale—could ultimately lead to forms of religious relativism, materialism, and eventually unbelief.

Bibliography

• Luca Addante, Hérésie radicale et libertinage. Le valdésien Giulio Basalù et Domenico Scandella dit Menocchio, "Les dossiers du Grihl", 2009-02.
• Aldo Colonnello, Andrea Del Col (eds.), Uno storico, un mugnaio, un libro. Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi, 1976-2002, Circolo culturale Menocchio, Montereale Valcellina, 2002.
• Andrea Del Col (ed.), Domenico Scandella detto Menocchio. I processi dell’Inquisizione (1583-1599), Edizioni Biblioteca dell’Immagine, Pordenone, 1990.
• Andrea Del Col, Il Menocchio lettore, in «Metodi e ricerche», n.s., XVII, no. 2, 1998, pp. 63–77.
• Andrea Del Col, Menocchio, in DSI, vol. 2, pp. 1024–1025.
• Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo di un mugnaio del '500, Einaudi, Turin, 1976.
• David Levine, Zubedeh Vahed, Ginzburg's Menocchio: Refutations and Conjectures, in "Social History/Histoire sociale", vol. 34, no. 68, 2001, pp. 437–464.

Article written by Daniele Santarelli | Ereticopedia.org © 2013-2026

et tamen e summo, quasi fulmen, deicit ictos
invidia inter dum contemptim in Tartara taetra
invidia quoniam ceu fulmine summa vaporant
plerumque et quae sunt aliis magis edita cumque
[Lucretius, "De rerum natura", lib. V]