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Title: The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Carlo Ginzburg, Anne Tedeschi, John Tedeschi ISBN: 0-8018-4386-3 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Ground-breaking work
Comment: As anthropologists fanned around the world they brought back detailed accounts of shamanic practices of indigenous peoples from Africa, Asia, Siberia & Native America - but not from Europe. European shamanism (including druidism) is thought to have been largely stamped out due to the combined efforts of Enlightenement and the Holy Inquisition. The book opens up the question of the many similarities between Germanic, Latin, Slavic agricultural cults and their relationship to the Dionysian rituals as well as the issue of universality of core beliefs that underly indigenous practices around the world.
The book also pioneers a new understanding of Europeans and their history - one that focuses on the peasant and his relationship with the land (and the Church). The aristocratic elite that controlled the politics and religion of mediaeval Italian city states was just a tiny fraction of the population; Ginzburg therefore opens up a new (and should i say delicious) can of worms.
This book represents a huge step forward in our understanding of European shamanism. Ginzburg burrows deep into the 16th century Inquisition archives from the Friuli region of Northern Italy (where Latin, Slavic and Germanic traditions come together). He returns with a fascinating discovery of an ancient fertility cult, whose participants (the benandanti) represented themselves as defenders of harvest and fertility of the fields. A benandante was someone who four times a year during the Ember days left the body and went "invisibly in spirit" to fight the witches and the devil - "we fight over all the fruits of the earth and for those things won by the benandanti that year there is abundance", said a peasant while questioned by the Inquisition. The benandanti were united by a common element of having been born with the caul (i.e., wrapped in the placenta, which was thought to be an object endowed with magical powers). The departure of the spirit from the body, which was left lifeless, was understood as an actual separation, an event fraught with perils, almost like death. The soul was considered very real and tangible. "We crossed over water like smoke and following combat, everyone returned home as smoke...". The soul was always associated with a spirit animal (usually hare, but also pig, rooster, mouse etc.). This was a world of spells, incantations, evil eye, herbal potions, spirits and communication with the dead.
Ginzburg shows that these beliefs in 16th century peasants were all-pervasive and deeply connected with Earth and its cycles. The Ember Days (i.e., Christmas) festivities had survived from ancient agricultural cults and symbolized the changes of seasons, the passage from the old to the new time of year and a promise of planting, harvest, reaping and autumn vintage. Ginzburg paints a interesting picture of Italian Inquisition - that of a huge centralized organization which was inefficient, swamped with bureaucratic legalisms and in most cases not that interested in prosecuting "ignorant peasants" . The book also champions a rather controversial thesis according to which the Church managed to steer the perception of the benandanti cult from representing fertility rites to that of witchcraft and the devil, almost as if the Church created the very devil that it abhorred. Interesting parallels with modern times, I should say.
Rating: 5
Summary: Northern Italian Shamanism
Comment: This is not Ginzburgs only book on Shamanism. He also covers the subject in his book "Ecstasies". Nonetheless, this is a superb book. In it, he deals with a group of men in northern Italy who believed that their souls left their bodies while they slept to do battle with malignant forces. However, he does not view this as either a hard-line skeptic or a muddle headed New Ager. He approaches it as a historian and treats it no different from any other subject, thus creating an unbiased account of what happened. And what he constucts is an account of shamanism and witch trials in a northern Italian village. This is a fascinating account, and certainly well worth the read. If you appreciate this book, then I strongly recommend you check out "Ecstasies", his other book on European Shamanism and the witch-hunts.
Rating: 5
Summary: Not really about witchcraft but fascinating
Comment: Witchcraft was the belief that there were people, principally women, who met at night in deserted spots to worship the Devil. There is no evidence that this ever happened, except perhaps in the 20th century, after women were misled by the books of Margaret Murray.
Ginzburg's subject is a group of men who dreamed that at night they would go to fight witches so that there would be a good harvest.
Highly recommended.
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Title: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, Anne Tedeschi ISBN: 0801843871 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1992 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History (Middle Ages Series) by Alan Charles Kors, Edward Peters ISBN: 0812217519 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: December, 2000 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (Studies in Early Modern German History) by H. C. Erik Midelfort ISBN: 0813915015 Publisher: University of Virginia Press Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft by Robin Briggs ISBN: 0140144382 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Magdalena and Balthasar : An Intimate Portrait of Life in 16th Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife by Steven Ozment ISBN: 0300043783 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: July, 1989 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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