Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives, the book recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centred on the benandanti. These men and women regarded themselves as professional anti-witches, who (in dream-like states) apparently fought ritual battles against witches and wizards, to protect their villages and harvests. If they won, the harvest would be good, if they lost, there would be famine. The inquisitors tried to fit them into their pre-existing images of the witches’ sabbat. The result of this cultural clash which lasted over a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into their enemies – the witches. 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 to the New World. The peasants’ fragmented and confused testimony reaches us with great immediacy, enabling us to identify a level of popular belief which constitutes a valuable witness for the reconstruction of the peasant way of thinking of this age.
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A tour-de-force of reconstruction, building out of scattered and fragmentary sources a whole world for the reader to inhabit.
(Anthony Pagden London Review of Books )A work of genuine intellectual distinction. It is an unusually original contribution to the study of witchcraft in early modern Europe, but its importance is far from being exhausted by that description.
(Peter Burke New York Review of Books 1985)Book Description
Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles is a remarkable tale of witchcraft, folk culture, and persuasion in early modern Europe.
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The book also pioneers a new understanding of Europeans and their history - one that focuses on the peasant and his relationship with the land (and the Church). The aristocratic elite that controlled the politics and religion of mediaeval Italian city states was just a tiny fraction of the population; Ginzburg therefore opens up a new (and should i say delicious) can of worms.
This book represents a huge step forward in our understanding of European shamanism. Ginzburg burrows deep into the 16th century Inquisition archives from the Friuli region of Northern Italy (where Latin, Slavic and Germanic traditions come together). He returns with a fascinating discovery of an ancient fertility cult, whose participants (the benandanti) represented themselves as defenders of harvest and fertility of the fields. A benandante was someone who four times a year during the Ember days left the body and went "invisibly in spirit" to fight the witches and the devil - "we fight over all the fruits of the earth and for those things won by the benandanti that year there is abundance", said a peasant while questioned by the Inquisition. The benandanti were united by a common element of having been born with the caul (i.e., wrapped in the placenta, which was thought to be an object endowed with magical powers). The departure of the spirit from the body, which was left lifeless, was understood as an actual separation, an event fraught with perils, almost like death. The soul was considered very real and tangible. "We crossed over water like smoke and following combat, everyone returned home as smoke...". The soul was always associated with a spirit animal (usually hare, but also pig, rooster, mouse etc.). This was a world of spells, incantations, evil eye, herbal potions, spirits and communication with the dead.
Ginzburg shows that these beliefs in 16th century peasants were all-pervasive and deeply connected with Earth and its cycles. The Ember Days (i.e., Christmas) festivities had survived from ancient agricultural cults and symbolized the changes of seasons, the passage from the old to the new time of year and a promise of planting, harvest, reaping and autumn vintage. Ginzburg paints a interesting picture of Italian Inquisition - that of a huge centralized organization which was inefficient, swamped with bureaucratic legalisms and in most cases not that interested in prosecuting "ignorant peasants" . The book also champions a rather controversial thesis according to which the Church managed to steer the perception of the benandanti cult from representing fertility rites to that of witchcraft and the devil, almost as if the Church created the very devil that it abhorred. Interesting parallels with modern times, I should say.
Briefly, Ginzburg found that, in the Friuli district, there was a widespread belief that certain men and women were marked at birth as defenders against witches and demons, these being regarded mainly as the enemies of the people, their livestock, and their crops. The chosen defenders, the "Benandanti," or "good walkers," ventured forth in their dreams to do battle with the forces of evil. Those born with the mark of the Benandanti regarded themselves as good Christians, the allies of the Church. To those outside the local culture, this position was clearly nonsense; unauthorized and unsanctified supernatural power could only be Satanic in origin, and those who claimed to exercise it were, at best, dangerously deluded. In the end, if the court records are to be trusted, they persuaded even the Benandanti themselves that this was the case. At least, the "absurd" and "outrageous" testimony of self-described Benandanti fades from the records, to be replaced with conventional witch-beliefs endorsed by the Holy Office.
The official tendency, Catholic and Protestant, to lump local witch-doctors together with the witches they claimed to counter had long been recognized by historians. Ginzburg, however, discovered, and offered to surprised historians (in the original Italian edition of 1966), a stratum of belief that, when first recorded, seems to have been entirely outside the mainstream of medieval European culture. There is scattered evidence for similar concepts in other parts of Europe, and abundant evidence from other continents, but the connections and age of the beliefs in and about the Benandanti remain subjects for controversy. The demonstration that diverse local beliefs had been rendered uniform by the judicial process, and by intensive indoctrination of the "lower classes," however, remains a landmark.
As described in the "Preface to the English Edition," the Italian version rather quickly received favorable -- and some unfavorable or uncomprehending -- notice from historians of European witchcraft. It was interpreted, or perhaps misunderstoond, by Mircea Eliade, the influential figure in "History of Religions" at the University of Chicago, one of the great authorities on shamanism (and much else). Although sections had been published in English earlier, the whole book became available in English in 1983, in the present translation, from Routledge & Kegan Paul in Britain, and Johns Hopkins University Press in the U.S. I first read it a few years later, and eventually acquired a copy of a Penguin Books re-issue of 1986. (All the English-language editions seem to differ only in cover art, besides the name of the publisher.) I have re-read it from time to time over the years. Although historical views of European witch-beliefs and popular culture have both been in flux, this book remains among the most fascinating in its crowded field.
