Menocchio's literacy may be accounted for by the establishment of schools in the villages surrounding Friuli: Aviano and Pordenone.
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Menocchio, also known as Domenico Scandella (1532–1599), was an Italian miller born in the village of Montereale, twenty-five kilometers north of Pordenone (not to be confused with Montereale, Abruzzo).
A famous example of an intellectual history of a non-canonical thinker is Carlo Ginzburg's study of a 16th-century Italian miller, Menocchio, in his seminal work The Cheese and the Worms.