Skip to content
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Paperback)
  • The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Paperback)
zoom

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

(author,author of preface), (translator), (translator)
£23.00
Paperback 240 Pages
Published: 10/12/2013
Free UK delivery on orders over £25, otherwise £2.99
  • In stock

Usually dispatched within 1-2 days

Free UK delivery on orders over £25, otherwise £2.99
  • This item has been added to your basket

Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives of Northern Italy, The Night Battles recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centered on the benandanti, literally, "good walkers." These men and women described fighting extraordinary ritual battles against witches and wizards in order to protect their harvests. While their bodies slept, the souls of the benandanti were able to fly into the night sky to engage in epic spiritual combat for the good of the village. Carlo Ginzburg looks at how the Inquisition's officers interpreted these tales to support their world view that the peasants were in fact practicing sorcery. The result of this cultural clash, which lasted for more than a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into the Inquisition's mortal enemies-witches. Relying upon this exceptionally well-documented case study, Ginzburg argues that a similar transformation of attitudes-perceiving folk beliefs as diabolical witchcraft-took place all over Europe and spread to the New World. In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on the interplay of chance and discovery, as well as on the relationship between anomalous cases and historical generalizations.

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9781421409924
Number of pages: 240
Weight: 363 g
Dimensions: 235 x 156 x 16 mm


MEDIA REVIEWS

A work of genuine intellectual distinction. It is an unusually original contribution to the study of witchcraft in early modern Europe, but its importance is far from being exhausted by that description. -- Peter Burke New York Review of Books A tour-de-force of reconstruction, building out of scattered and fragmentary sources a whole world for the reader to inhabit. -- Anthony Pagden London Review of Books

You may also be interested in...

Mephistopheles
Added to basket
Witch Hunt
Added to basket
Paperback
£10.99
Damned Women
Added to basket
Paperback
£24.99
Macbeth
Added to basket
Reading Witchcraft
Added to basket
The Malleus Maleficarum
Added to basket
The The Ipswich Witch
Added to basket
Witch Hunts in the Western World
Added to basket
A Grimoire for Modern Cunning Folk
Added to basket
The Lancashire Witches
Added to basket
Essex Witches
Added to basket

Please sign in to write a review

Your review has been submitted successfully.