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

Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles, Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi and published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1983, is the English translation of Ginzburg's landmark 1966 Italian study I benandanti, reading Friulian inquisition records as evidence of a surviving agrarian fertility cult that inquisitors gradually reshaped, through repeated interrogation, into confessions resembling standard witchcraft. Its strength is that it is a foundational and widely influential work in the historiography of European witchcraft, built from close reading of primary inquisition records. Its limit, worth stating directly rather than treating the book as settled fact, is that Ginzburg's specific interpretation of the benandanti material is itself contested among historians of the witch trials, so it should be presented as an influential scholarly position, not an uncontested finding.