[1][2][3] The study examines the unique religious beliefs and cosmogony of Menocchio (1532–1599), also known as Domenico Scandella, who was an Italian miller from the village of Montereale, 25 kilometers north of Pordenone in modern northern Italy.

Carlo Ginzburg first encountered documents related to Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, in 1963 while he was researching 16th- and 17th-century witchcraft trials (the subject of his first book) in Friuli, a region in the northeast of Italy.

[4] The immediate context of the work was debates about the relationship between popular and high culture, in which Ginzburg became involved during his time as a teacher in Bologna after 1970.

A school was opened at the beginning of the sixteenth century under the direction of Girolamo Amaseo for, "reading and teaching, without exception, children of citizens as well as those artisans and the lower classes, old as well as young, without payment."

Knowing how Menocchio read and interpreted these texts might provide insight into his views which led to his execution for proselytizing heretical ideas.

It is in this hearing that he explained his cosmology about "the cheese and the worms", the title of Carlo Ginzburg's microhistory of Menocchio and source of much that is known of this sixteenth-century miller.

Menocchio said: "I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, 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.

[7] Warned to denounce his ways and uphold the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church by both his inquisitors and his family, Menocchio returned to his village.