The Night Battles
Videos
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries is a historical study of the benandanti folk custom of 16th- and 17th-century Friuli, Northeastern Italy. It
The nocturnal visionary tradition of the benandanti led the Roman Inquisition to accuse them of being witches, malevolent Satanists depicted in this 1508 woodcut
Ronald Hutton asserted that Ginzburg's approach in The Night Battles was "heavily Frazerian", being based on the theories of Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), themselves widely discredited in the field of anthropology.
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath is a study of visionary traditions in Early Modern Europe written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg. First published by Giulio Einaudi in 1989 under t
The Night Battles
…represented a pre-Christian survival. Despite such criticism, Ginzburg would later return to the theories about a shamanistic substratum for his 1989 book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, and it would also be adopted by historians like Éva Pócs, Gábor Klaniczay, Claude Lecouteux and Emma Wilby. In the Archiepiscopal Archives of Udine…
First edition (Italian)