Menocchio in the Twentieth Century: Peasant Poets and Popular Irreligion

This article reopens the question of irreligion among the subaltern classes in European history, a subject long treated as marginal since Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms. It challenges the enduring assumption that popular culture was either sincerely devout or merely superstitious, arguing instead for the persistence of critical, sceptical, and materialist engagements with religion among peasants and other subordinate groups over the longue durée. Drawing on inquisitorial archives, oral traditions, and twentieth-century ethnographic research—particularly Giovanni Kezich's study of improvising peasant poets in central Italy—the article explores how irreligious motifs were articulated, transmitted, and reinvented across time. Through a comparative analysis of early modern figures such as Menocchio and modern peasant poets, it highlights continuities in naturalistic cosmologies, anticlericalism, and critiques of religious authority rooted in lived experience and literary circulation. Rather than positing a self-contained “popular irreligion,” the article emphasizes the transversal circulation of irreligious themes across social strata, while showing how these ideas were inflected by the specific conditions of subaltern life. In societies where religion and political authority were closely intertwined, such forms of irreligion inevitably carried political implications, challenging both sacred legitimacy and social hierarchy. The article thus calls for a reassessment of popular culture as a site not only of religious persistence but also of enduring critique and dissent.