Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: An Analysis

In the time of the renaissance, magic still existed in the world. Not “real” magic, but a belief in supernatural abilities, witches, and trances. Such a people were the benandanti of the Friuli region of Italy. Though they often were devout Christians, their lives centered on their nocturnal supernatural journeys. They believed that their spirits left their bodies and flew into the countryside, where they would do battle with malevolent witches who threatened the local harvests. Carlo Ginzburg’s historical examination of the benandanti folk tradition, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, effectively exposes the objective of colonialism behind the Roman Inquisition. By dissecting the benandanti’s

For the course of the next century, the leaders of the inquisition would struggle with how to discipline and command these God faring mystics. They claimed to practice the Catholic faith, yet insisted they had powers, saying, “We go invisibly in spirit and the body remains behind; we go forth in the service of Christ, and the witches of the devil; we fight each other, we with bundles of fennel and they with sorghum stalks,” (Ginzburg 8). These were no pagans worshipping the devil, but absolutely not the traditional religion the priests fought to spread. The Friuli benandanti were of peasant stock, poor and largely illiterate and predominantly spoke the Friuli dialect. The metropolitan Venetian priests would be hard pressed to find a people so varied from their literate personnel. However they were important to the church as an economic asset. These were the laborers who farmed for the cities, and must be watched closely. Who were these benandanti with their magic flights and bouts with the

Ginzburg validates this fear, by proposing that the benandanti were possibly descended from, “An older fertility rite,” (Ginzburg 46) which was eventually Christianized. While exact evidence to prove this is lacking, the text offers examinations of popular beliefs from across Europe that bare a resemblance to those of the Benandanti. Of those, the most pertinent is perhaps the cult of the goddess Diana in fifteenth century Modena. Here the night gatherings were not considered evil by the participants, but rather, “Still innocuously magical, of a mysterious female divinity, Diana,” (Ginzburg 52). Comparably to Friuli, the meetings were, “Peaceful nocturnal gatherings of individuals assembled together until dawn to eat ‘the turnips of a field or garden,’ (Ginzburg 52). We find here another example of agricultural focus, conceivably linked to a, “Larger complex of traditions (connected, in turn, with the myth of nocturnal gatherings over which female deities named Perchta, Holda, Diana presided in an area that extends from Alsace to Hesse and from Bavaria to Switzerland,” (Ginzburg 32). Here, Ginzburg proposes that, “In antiquity these beliefs must have once covered much of central Europe,” (Ginzburg 32). In the eyes of a government, such small factions as the benandanti would have to be eliminated before any kind of potential reformation took place. An imperial