Ginzburg's significant achievement with this book was that he placed an individual at the center of the history of mentalities for the first time. Peter Burke and Natalie Zemon Davis, Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton – they all listened to the melody of Menocchio's mill and made their own interpretations of it. The book tells the story of the miller Domenico Scandello, known as Menocchio, who confessed before the Inquisition in 1584: "I said that, as far as my thoughts and my beliefs are concerned, everything was a chaos, namely earth, air, water, and fire mixed together. And that whirl became a mass, just as one makes cheese in milk, and within it were worms, and those were the angels." This strange testimony, which is more reminiscent of Aristotle than of scholastic doctrine, serves as the basis for the book that Carlo Ginzburg wrote about a miller born in Friuli in 1532 and burned as a heretic in 1601. Ginzburg not only takes the miller's narratives seriously, but he also reconstructs an entire worldview with them: that of the supposedly illiterate lower class. With a new preface by the author.