The Night Battles - C. Ginzburg

Witchcraft ansd agrarian cults in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Carlo Ginzburg’s study of the extraordinary miller of the Friuli, The Cheese arid the Worms (1980), established his position in the English-speaking world as a leading historian of popular culture. The present book, which is an account of the religious and other mental attitudes of a peasant society, confirms his prominence in the field.

Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives in north-east Italy, the book tells the story of a peasant fertility cult centred on the benandanti. These were men and women who, because they happened to have been born in a caul, were regarded (and regarded themselves) as professional anti-witches. They confessed to the Inquisitors that, apparently in dreamlike states, they fought ritual battles four times a year against witches and wizards, to protect their villages and harvests from harm. If they won these symbolic conflicts, the harvest would be good; if the witches won, there would be famine. The Inquisitors listened with genuine amazement to the benandanti's extraordinary tales, and tried to fit them into their preexisting images of the witches’ sabbat. The result of this cultural clash, which lasted over a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the henandanti into their enemies - the witches.

Using the exceptionally rich records of the Friuli archives, Carlo Ginzburg shows clearly how' this transformation of the popular notion of witchcraft was manipulated by the Inquisitors, and disseminated all over Europe and even tcf the New World. The peasants’ fragmented and confused testimony reaches us with great immediacy, enabling us to identify a level of genuinely popular belief which constitutes a valuable witness for the reconstruction of the peasant mentality of this age.

Voor de inhoud: zie foto 2.

INCLUSIEF VERZENDKOSTEN binnen Nederland