|
Product Description
Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives, the book recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centred on the benandanti. These men and women regarded themselves as professional anti-witches, who (in dream-like states) apparently fought ritual battles against witches and wizards, to protect their villages and harvests. If they won, the harvest would be good, if they lost, there would be famine. The inquisitors tried to fit them into their pre-existing images of the witches’ sabbat. The result of this cultural clash which lasted over a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into their enemies – the witches. Carlo Ginzburg shows clearly how this transformation of the popular notion of witchcraft was manipulated by the Inquisitors, and disseminated all over Europe and even to the New World. The peasants’ fragmented and confused testimony reaches us with great immediacy, enabling us to identify a level of popular belief which constitutes a valuable witness for the reconstruction of the peasant way of thinking of this age.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night (Studies in Early Modern German History)
- Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
- Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath
- The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe)
- Magic in the Middle Ages (Canto Classics)
- Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History (Middle Ages Series)
- Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Critical Issues in History) (Critical Issues in World and International History)
- The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
- The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town
- The Trial of Tempel Anneke: Records of a Witchcraft Trial in Brunswick, Germany, 1663, Second Edition
*If this is not the "The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 6, 2024 09:39 +08.