Carlo Ginzburg

In the archive of the Inquisition at Udine, Carlo Ginzburg found a run of cases from Friuli beginning in 1575 in which the defendants said something the inquisitors were not expecting and could not use. They were not witches, they insisted. They were benandanti, those who go well. Born with the caul, they were called out on certain nights, went forth in spirit while their bodies lay as if asleep, and fought the witches in the fields with stalks of fennel. If they won, the harvest was good. If they lost, it failed.

The inquisitors had a category ready and it did not fit. Their questions kept steering towards the sabbath, the pact, the renunciation of the faith. The defendants kept insisting that they fought for Christ and against the witches, which is the opposite claim. Over roughly fifty years of intermittent questioning the pressure told. The answers shifted, the vocabulary of the interrogators seeped into the testimony, and by the 1630s some benandanti were describing themselves in the terms the court had been offering all along.

That slow assimilation is the finding, and it is the clearest documented example of the process historians suspect lies behind confessions everywhere. The interrogation did not uncover a belief. It replaced one.

Ginzburg's method, reading the record for what the defendant said before the questioner reshaped it, has been taken up across the field, well beyond witchcraft.

What the benandanti material means is contested, and the atlas records the argument rather than a winner.

Ginzburg read the Friulian testimony as the surviving trace of a genuine agrarian fertility cult, an organised body of popular belief older than the demonology that swallowed it, and in Storia notturna, translated as Ecstasies, he extended the case much further, connecting it to a wide Eurasian substratum of ecstatic and shamanic practice. Supporters hold that this recovered a real popular cosmology which the trial records had buried, and that it broke the assumption that the only thing inside an inquisition file is the inquisitor.

Critics accept the archival work and reject the frame. On their reading the benandanti testimony records a local complex of dream, vision and folk healing rather than a cult with membership and continuity, and the further reach of Ecstasies, across thousands of miles and centuries, rests on resemblances too thin to carry it. Several historians who admire the first book regard the third as a different kind of argument altogether.

There is a further reason for care here. Any claim that the trials caught the remnants of an older religion sounds like Margaret Murray's witch-cult thesis, which the atlas holds as debunked. Ginzburg's case is not Murray's: he is describing a regional set of beliefs documented in one archive, not a pan-European pagan church surviving in secret, and he is explicit that the benandanti were not the witches the courts were hunting. The distinction matters, because the overwhelming scholarly position remains that the people executed were not practitioners of anything.