How Menocchio's Ordeal Began: Clerical Sex Abuse and the Catholic Church in the Sixteenth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract: Historians, teachers, and students of early modern Europe and the Reformation know Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976), a brilliant account of the heresy trials of Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio, before the Roman Inquisition. Ginzburg drew an unforgettable portrait of one peasant intellectual's bold defense of his original ideas before the inquisitors. This essay calls attention to the role of clerical sex abuse in setting Menocchio's trial in motion. The essay joins recent work by historians reexamining past events that today would be considered sex abuse. Spotlighting clerical abuse of power, including sexual abuse, sheds light on dynamics of power and resistance in sixteenth-century Europe. abstract: Historians, teachers, and students of early modern Europe and the Reformation know Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms (1976), a brilliant account of the heresy trials of Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio, before the Roman Inquisition. Ginzburg drew an unforgettable portrait of one peasant intellectual's bold defense of his original ideas before the inquisitors. This essay calls attention to the role of clerical sex abuse in setting Menocchio's trial in motion. The essay joins recent work by historians reexamining past events that today would be considered sex abuse. Spotlighting clerical abuse of power, including sexual abuse, sheds light on dynamics of power and resistance in sixteenth-century Europe.