The cheese and the worms Book

As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities'a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty.

Largely a detective endeavor of sorts with leanings towards literary analysis. The work itself is an account of a heresy trial in early modern Italy. While the fate of the miller might be grim, this book also offers a startling optimism. As Terry Eagleton once noted the fact that we send our youth to universities where they have access to the revolutionary sway of ideas there's always hope for a liberated future. Ginzburg dazzles the reader with his erudition, his examination of the 16C testimony where a bit of a loud mouth freethinking miller finds himself in ecclesiastic court which wasn't quite Torquemada's Inquisition, yet it was during the Counter-Reformation and that didn't bode well. The miller wanted an audience until he saw that his neck was on the line. His arrogant cosmology is rather fascinating. Ginzburg's parsing of the books the miller had read and juxtaposing such with his testimony is rather exciting.