The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The classic study of witchcraft and popular belief, newly revisited. A landmark of microhistory, The Night Battles remains one of the most daring and influential investigations of witchcraft and popular belief in early modern Europe.Through meticulous research in the inquisitorial archives of northern Italy, Carlo Ginzburg reconstructs the story of the benandanti-the "good walkers"-peasants of the Friuli region who claimed that, while their bodies slept, their spirits journeyed into the night to battle witches and warlocks in defense of their crops and communities.Armed with fennel stalks, these benandanti fought for fertility and abundance.To the inquisitors who interrogated them, however, such nocturnal visions could only signify diabolical witchcraft.Over decades of questioning and reinterpretation, a profound cultural clash unfolded, and the benandanti were gradually transformed from defenders of the harvest into supposed participants in the witches' sabbat.From this richly documen