Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of T'an-ch'eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector, an irascible farmer, and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife, having run away from her husband, returns to him, only to die at his hands. Magnificently evoking the China of long ago, The Death of Woman Wang also deepens our understanding of the China we know today.

史景迁是美国著名汉学家，他的特长是以细腻的笔触描写中国历史上的动人片段。这种“讲故事”型的历史学家，与专事考证的史家走的是完全不同的道路。
《王氏之死》篇幅不大，再现的是清初山东剡城、淄川农村人民的贫苦生活。主角之一王氏不堪生活的重压，与人私奔，最后却惨死在情夫手下。其实，史景迁的汉学功夫不算深，史料运用不算广，文字技巧也不算突出，但我始终觉得，与其关心他怎么讲述一个故事，不如多留心他为何要讲述这么一个故事，是什么东西最初打动了他。拿《王氏之死》来说，也许是王氏那种在动乱年代里显得模糊混沌的生活状态才是真正值得玩味的。

A survey of popular culture in 16th century Italy. Ginzburg’s study The Cheese & The Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller, first published in 1976, is one of those fascinating micro-histories which explores the remote lives of unknown and forgotten people. The story of Menocchio is one of a peasant life of obscurity but also one of strange and powerful ideas – confused and half-baked even – but powerful enough to bring him into conflict with the Inquisition and thereafter to the final purgatorial flames.
“I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos … 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, and among that number of angels, there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time ….”
This was Menocchio’s own version of Genesis, recounted at his first interrogation: it has perhaps something in common with modern chaos theory. Sadly, the inquisitors did not appreciate the idea that God might have started out as a worm in a primordial curd. Nonetheless, this was Menocchio’s oft-repeated explanation, one he never recanted. More than an independent mind, Menocchio’s was a rebel spirit, harshly critical of Church and clergy and determined to have his say. His ‘learning’ was a fascinating hotch-potch of superstition, oral tradition, ‘strong’ ideas, misunderstood reading, peasant radicalism, paganism and ‘cottage cheese cosmology’. Ginzburg’s book details the patient mechanism of the Inquisition in Counter Reformation Italy as it sought to eradicate suspected heresy and heretical groups rather in the same way that Stalin suspected counter-revolution everywhere.
Bruno burned for the books he had written; Menocchio burned for the books he had misunderstood. Both burnings demonstrate among other things the truth of the old adage; a little learning can be a dangerous thing. Menocchio’s roasting generated more heat than light but at least it did not contradict the Laws of Thermodynamics. Today in Montereale the visitor will find the Domenico Scandella Social Centre. In the piazza there is a monument in the form of a large wheel of cheese with one slice missing. Our heretic has become a hero. Stephen Dedalus said of Bruno that, heretic or not, ‘he was terribly burnt’; so was the poor miller from Friuli.