Religions
Sicilian Folk Religion
Religions
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The folk-religious layer of early modern Sicily, existing alongside official Catholic practice rather than replacing it, in which local visionaries described nocturnal encounters with fairy-like spirit-women, the donne di fuori, who could bring blessing or harm to a household. Its clearest documentary record comes not from celebration but from prosecution: Sicilian Inquisition trial transcripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which accused visionaries described these gatherings under interrogation, giving historians an unusually detailed if adversarial window onto belief that otherwise left no written record of its own.
Facts
Open Questions
Origin PeriodSicilian belief in the donne di fuori is known almost entirely through Inquisition trial transcripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an adversarial record of prosecution rather than of the belief's own history, and nothing in that record says how old the practice already was when it was first prosecuted. 1580 is recorded only as the rough era of the earliest surviving trial documentation, not as an origin date for the belief itself. Cross-Tradition Connections
Objects and Practices of This Tradition
Sources
1. The Ladies from Outside (Henningsen)
Gustav Henningsen, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds.), Clarendon Press, Oxford, in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, 1990Henningsen's study of the Sicilian donne di fuori trial record
Open Questions (1 open question)
How long had belief in the donne di fuori existed before the Sicilian Inquisition trials that document it?
Everything known about the donne di fuori comes from sixteenth and seventeenth century Inquisition trial transcripts, an adversarial record built from interrogation rather than celebration, and no source independent of that prosecution says how established the belief already was when the trials began.
What would resolve this A Sicilian civil, notarial or ecclesiastical record predating the sixteenth century that references night-gathering spirit-women under any name would show the belief already existed before the surviving trial record begins.
history and folklore studiesGustav Henningsen, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds.), The Ladies from Outside (Henningsen)
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