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Title: The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century
ISBN: 0801843863
Author:
Carlo Ginzburg
Publicate Date: 1992-03-01
Publish: 1992-03-01
List Price: $21.00
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $12.35
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Italian Witches
This is by far my favorite historical account of a witch hunt. The book looks at a northern Italian area called Friulian and the fertility rituals people performed in the 1600s and 1700s. The benandanti, marked at birth by the sign of the caul, served Christ and their community by leaving their bodies at night to fight evil witches that had attempted to destroy or steal their harvest. The Catholic Church believed the benandanti were witches and conducted inquisitions and trials. If you've ever been fascinated by the witch trials and don't know where to begin, I suggest this book as a fun yet informative read.
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2: A Fascinating Exploration
Prof. Ginzburg outlines in detail the information we have concerning the transformation from ancient agrarian cult to the witchcraft scare. This is not your mother's Margeret Murrey, this is done right.
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3: The Night Battles Helpful in understanding culture
The book is enlightening concerning some aspects of the culture.
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4: The "Good Walkers"
In his book, The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg addresses the historical problem of why, during sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, did the Friulian fertility rituals of the benandanti, or "good-walkers", gradually assimilate into witchcraft. The benandanti, marked at birth by the sign of the caul, served Christ and their community by leaving their bodies at night to fight evil witches that had attempted to destroy or steal their harvest. Because of the ignorance of the Friuli language and benandanti rituals, the Church conducted incessant inquisitions and trials against the self-proclaimed benandanti, which in effect, pushed the benandanti toward witchcraft and participation in the sabbat.
In support of this argument, Ginzburg employs inquisitorial records that reveal an unmistakable gap between the beliefs and mentalities of the benandanti with those of the inquisitors. Brian P. Levak's review, published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, notes the significance of Ginzburg's exploration of the mentalities and culture of the Friuli. Levak writes, "The Night Battles is a milestone in the history of popular culture, for it was one of the first studies to use judicial records to gain direct access to popular beliefs." In addition, by skillfully using his primary source material, Ginzburg is able to discern between the "genuinely expressed popular ideas and those that reflect the more learned notions of [the] interrogators, especially when the accused was faced with either the threat or the reality of torture." To Ginzburg's credit, he allows the strength of the inquisitorial records to stand alone in support of his thesis and in exposing the popular culture of the Friuli. Furthermore, Ginzburg's use of comparative methodology demonstrates, not only the evolution of the benandanti fertility rituals under inquisitorial pressure, but also the vast cultural and spiritual gap between the Church and the peasantry.
While Ginzburg's work is an example of ground-breaking historical writing, there are several critiques that can be made of The Night Battles. First, Ginzburg's book makes way for more questions regarding the experiences and participation of the benandanti in the fertility rituals. For example, Ginzburg admittedly does not address why the benandanti, spread out over a vast region, testify to similar experiences and physical participation in their night gatherings. How is it that these people all testified to a common experience during the inquisitions? Ginzburg would be well-served to investigate the parallels in testimonies, if only to further personify the popular culture and mentalities of the Fruili. Secondly, as Alby Stone noted in her Folklore review, "the book would be improved by making the index more comprehensive and, alas, there is no bibliography." The Table of Contents page is too simplistic, almost juvenile, and does not reflect Ginzburg's reputation as a consummate and seasoned historian. Ginzburg does offer a comprehensive appendix and notes section. However, he fails to include a bibliography - a necessity with historical writing. While the Contents and the Bibliography do not impact the overall significance of his work, these are areas that should be improved.
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5: Ian Myles Slater: on Popular Belief and Official Doctrine
Whether or not Carlo Ginzburg actually discovered evidence of shamanism in sixteenth-century Italy, in this or later books, is in part a matter of how one defines shamanism. What he undeniably found, in the seemingly unpromising records of the Inquisition, was evidence of beliefs so remote from those of official European culture as to be flatly unintelligible to the churchmen who first encountered them. Eventually, the Church courts managed to impose something resembling officially acceptable doctrines on the local population, but the process took generations, as Ginzburg is able to show from trial records.
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.
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