Pagan Book Shelf: Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries

Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries

Carlo Ginzburg

ISBN 0-14-007688-3

1983

Penguin Books

$10.95

Carlo Ginzburg is currently a professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and has taught at the University of Bologna and University of California. He is credited with writing a letter in 1979 to the Vatican requesting that the Inquisition Archives be open, later allowing researchers access to that material.

“I am a benandanti, and I have gone out with the other benandanti called by their captain,.......I went with him and with the other benandanti twice a week, every Wednesday and Thursday night for the space of a whole year..........On one side were the benanadanti and on the other the witches. The witches had staves in their hands like those for scraping ovens, and we benandanti had stalks of fennel or elder......many times combat ensued between the benandanti and the witches, but sometimes not, and then everyone went back home.”,”(pg 130, Bastiano Menos)

Imagine leaving your body while asleep to attend nocturnal battles where you might ride upon a hare. Such are many of the accounts in Night Battles, a book recording the interviews/confessions the church had with the Benandanti. The accounts help create a record of European Witchcraft beginning in March of 1575.

The Benandanti are seen both as hero and villain. The stories vary slightly but some themes are common, such as a Benandanti wore the caul at birth and traveled abroad in their sleep to meetings where they do battle. They are defenders of the harvest and the field, a fertility cult with German and Slavic traditions. Their meetings eventually was said by the church to be the devil's sabbat.

If history is important to one, this book is a must have. The reader watches as the stories of the Benandanti evolve and change over time. One can only wonder at the pressures put upon the people confessed. Some questioned change their story in an attempt I believe to end the intensive questioning and give the Interviewer the information they wanted to hear. Some might call the beliefs of these folk superstitious, but when you consider many did not live in the same areas....and the many similarities in their stories, it does arouse the curiosity.

I believe history is just as important as present. I see very little on the modern book store shelves that is equal to Ginzburgs 'Night Battles'. For many of us unable to historically trace back so many generations this may be our only link to what went on.

Ginzburg has published the following books:

Threads and Traces True False Fictive

Routledge Library Editions Witchcraft the Night Battles, Witchraft and the Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century

Vivre Le Sens(French)

Hexensabbat

Wooden eyes Nine Reflections on Distance

Ectasies Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath

Historia Nocturna Las Raices Anthropolicas Del Relato

Rapports De Force histoire Rhtorique Preuve

Der Kse Und Die Wrmer Die Welt Eines Mllers Um 1600

The Judge and the Historian Marginal Notes on a Late-twentieth- century Miscarriage of Justice

The Enigma of Piero Piero Della Francesca