Ginzburg - Comp. Prefaces [Chese&Worms, NightBattles, Clues-Miths,Proof]

8/10/2019 Ginzburg - Comp. Prefaces [Chese&Worms, NightBattles, Clues-Miths,Proof]

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CA RLO G IN Z B U R G


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Originally published in Italy as Miti, e mbl emi, spie: morf olog ia e st oria, copyright 1986

by Giulio Einaudi cditorc s.p.a., Torino

English translation published in the United States by 'Ihe Johns Hopkins

University Press 1989

lohns H opkins Paperback edition published in the United States in 1992

Edition with new preface 20 13 The Johns Hopkin s University Press

All r ights reserved. Publis hed 2 013

Printed in the United States of America on acid-fre e paper

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

www.pr ess.jhu. edu

Library o f Congress Control Number: 2012953214

A cata log rec ord for this book is availabl e from the Britis h library .

ISBN-13:978-1-4214-0990-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-10:1-4214-0990-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-42 14-0991-7 (electronic)

is b n- io : 1-4214-0991-7 (electronic)

Special discounts arc available fo r bulk purchases of this book. For more information,

plea se con tact Spec ial Sale s at 41 0-516 -693 6 o r specials alesippres s.jhu.edu.

The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials,

including recycled text paper that is composed o f at least 30 percent post-consumer

waste, whe never possible.

C O N T E N T S

Preface to the 2013 Edition vii

Preface to the Italian Edition xv

Translators Note xxi

Bibliographical Note xxiii

Witchcraft and Popular Piety:Notes on a Modenese Trial of1519 1

From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method 16

The High and the Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledgein the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 54

Titian, Ovid, and Sixteenth-Century Codes for Erotic Illustration 70

Clues: Roots o f an Evidential Paradigm 87

Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on

an Old Book by Georges Dumezil 114

Freud, the Wolf-Man, and the Werewolves 132

The Inquisitor as Anthropologist 141

Not es 149

Index of Names 205
http://www.press.jhu.edu/http://www.press.jhu.edu/


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Preface to the 2013 Edition

The charge that I had capitulated to dominant ideological goals wounded me

deeply, certainly more than the somewhat disdainful allusion to my succumb

ing to the small sequences of historical verisimilitude. Franco Fortini was the

pseudonym for Franco Lattes, the heterodox Marxist critic, among the greatest

of his generation, whose writings, brilliant and sometimes captious, I had been

reading since the 1960s. In his case, what I deemed a mistaken reading of my bookcould have originated from ideological bias (or so I thought), certainly not from

superficiality. And yet I could not exclude the possibility of some sort of defective

reasoning on my part. I had to demonstrate, against Fortini, that research based

on fragments was not incompatible with the perspective of totality. It struck me

instantly that the theme of clues, incarnated in the triad Morelli-Freud-Sherlock

Holmes, was the thread I should follow in preparing my response.

2

What is missing from this retrospective reconstruction is the context. During the1970s, Italy was passing through a period of bitter social and political struggle. Be

hind the carnage wrought by bombs planted in banks or on trains were the plots

hatched by far-right groups, manipulated by the governments secret services. One

talked of a strategy o f tension which aimed to install a reactionary regime mod

eled on the military dictatorship of the Colonels in Greece. In this overheated cli

mate of alarms and suspected conspiracies against the state, attempts from the left

began to be made on the lives of policemen, magistrates, and journalists for which

the Red Brigades claimed credit.

On 11 March 1977, in Bologna, the city where I was teaching, which for decades

had been governed by the Communist Party, a young militant of the leftist groupLotta Continua (Endless Fight) was killed by a member of the security forces

(Carabinieri). A large protest was called for the following day in Rome; I took a

train and went. In the midst of an enormous, somberly silent crowd, some of the

demonstrators were armed. The margin separating protest and terrorism seemed

suddenly very slight indeed.

I returned to Bologna the next day. An armored car was stationed in front of

my apartment, a short walk from the university. I could enter my home only after

showing identification. There were more clashes in the coming days; the tension

in the city was palpable for months. Because the university was periodically oc

cupied and the libraries were sporadically closed, I had little time for my researchon clues. Today, I can ask myself, did I see a connection between what I was study

ing and what was happening all around me? I wonder. To be sure, the version of

the essay I presented at a seminar on Humanities and Social Thought in the

viii Preface to the 2013 Edition ix

somewhat unreal tranquility of Villa Serbelloni at Bellagio was much shorter than

what appears in the present volume and lacked any sort of reference to the politi

cal situation. During the summer, pursuing traces of the evidential paradigm that

emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century, I copied some of the letters

from Giovanni Morelli to Henry Layard that were preserved at the British Mu

seum, and I gathered material on the history of fingerprinting. The research wasexpanding; I decided that the seminar I was scheduled to teach in the fall would

be on clues.

3

On 5 September 1977, Han ns-Martin Schleyer, president of the Association of Ger

man Industrialists, was kidnapped by members of an ultra-leftist militant group

which called itself Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). Three o f his bodyguards were

killed. Photographs of the captive Schleyer circulated showing him with a small

placard around his neck, accompanied by requests (rejected by the German government) that certain prisoners be released. On 18 October, news circulated that

three militants had died simultaneously in the prison at Stammhcim, and a fourth

had been wounded. Authorities said the prisoners had made a suicide pact, a ver

sion of the facts contradicted by the female survivor. A few hours later, Schleyer

was murdered by his captors. I note these tragic events because today they appear

to me as essential in helping to provide the background for the seminar on clues I

olfcred during the 1977-1978 academic year.

Many of the class participants were also contemporaneously attending semi

ology seminars being taught nearby by Umberto Eco, who just a few years ear

lier (but it seemed decades ago) had expressed the wish for the launching of acommunications guerilla warfare that would reintroduce a critical dimension

to passive reception.' Next to these metaphorical guerillas, the militants of the

Rote Armee Fraktion were something entirely different. Had they heard about the

dtournementtheorized by Guy Debord and the internationalist European revolu

tionary group, the Situationists, and their program calling for the overturning of

the symbols of authority against those who had created them? I would not exclude

that possibility. At any rate, the shrewd political exploitation by Schleyers captors

of his images as prisoner seemed like an episode of guerilla warfare, which semi

ology was in a position to interpret precisely because it utilized, distorting them,

the object of semiology itself (the channels of communication). And yet this alonewas not enough: the interpretation of symbols was part o f a long series o f events

which I was absolutely convinced had to be seen in a historical perspective. Erudi

tion and philology could be used against ideology, or, better yet, the spreading of


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x Preface lo the 2013 Edition

ideologies. In this sense even the research I had conducted a few months before

in the British Museum took on a different coloring. For example, the upending

of a traditional practice prevalent among colonial peoplethe use of fingerprints

instead of signatures, employed as an instrument of control by colonial authori

tiesappeared as just one episode in a much vaster and ongoing conflict between

those who held the reins of power and those who did not.Our seminar discussions had been proceeding for several months when, on 16

March 1978, news reached us that Aldo Moro, one of the top leaders of the Chris

tian Democrats, had been kidnapped and that five members of his body guard

had been killed. The shock throughout Italy was immense. A few days later photo

graphs began to circulate of Moro as prisoner of the Red Brigades, closely follow

ing the script which had inspired the Schleyer case. The next 55 days were punctu

ated by a series o f events that were either dramatic or grotesque, sometimes both.

On 9 May, Moros body was discovered in the trunk o f a car parked in the center of

Rome between the headquarters of the two largest political parties, the Christian

Democrats and the Communists. All this has been recounted and analyzed manytimes over. To avoid that false familiarity which comes from hindsight, it might be

useful to look at two texts Umberto Eco wrote in the heat of the moment. The Red

Brigades had declared that by seizing Moro they were striking at the heart of the

state. On 23 March 1978, the daily La Repubblicaprinted Ecos comment on the

events, entitled To strike at which heart? It read, in part:

The confused idea which motivates terrorism is a very modern and very capi

talistic principle (which has found classical Marxism unprepared) of a Theory

of Systems .. . When the idea of great systems is accepted, they are once again

mythologized by insisting that they possess secret plans, of which Moro was

one of the repositories. In reality the great systems have nothing secret about

them and we know very well how they function.6

Intervening in the ongoing military and semiotic guerilla struggle, Eco, against

the Red Brigades, was emphasizing the irrelevance of Moros person: to vent ones

rage against him was a vicious and politically senseless gesture. But just three

weeks later Eco tacitly changed his mind on this second point. In a paper en

titled Is There Objective Information? (Ce un informazione oggettiva?), pre

sented at a conference organized in Milan by the Casa della Cultura and the Isti

tuto Gramsci on the theme of Realities and Ideologies of Information (Realt e

ideologie dellTnformazione), he stated that, Unquestionably, pivotal events existwhich change the course of other events, in history as in nature. The bombing of

Hiroshima, the earthquake at Acapulco, the death of a pope are such events (as is

the kidnapping of Moro).7

Preface to the 2013 Edition

At that moment Moro was still alive. Eco was well aware that Moros photo

graphs and letters, being filtered out from the peoples prison, had already

achieved a powerful destabilizing effect. Today, more than thirty years later, it is

difficult to deny that the event changed the course of other events. But can it be

considered transparent, without secrets? Along with many others, I too am of the

opinion that the tragedy of Moros kidnapping, concluding with his murder, remains shrouded in mystery. And like them, during those months I experienced

powerful and confused sensations which the passing of time did not erase.9They

led me to attempt a generalization with which I concluded my essay, a comment

on its title:

But the same conjectural paradigm employed to develop ever more subtle and

capillary forms o f control can become a device to dissolve the ideological clouds

which increasingly obscure such a complex social structure as fully developed

capitalism. Though pretensions to systematic knowledge may appear more and

more far-fetched, the idea of totality does not necessarily need to be abandoned.

On the contrary, the existence of a deeply rooted relationship that explains

superficial phenomena is confirmed the very moment it is stated that direct

knowledge of such a connection is not possible. Though reality may seem to be

opaque, there are privileged zonessigns, clueswhich allow us to penetrate

it.10

This was the reply to Fortinis essay which had set in motion my research, and

which, in the interim, I had inexplicably suppressed. In part, these pages are in

tended to pay him his due after so many years.

x i

4

Contexts contribute to the shaping of events (behavior, writings) which then fol

low their own course. With the passing of time, Clues began to be read without

taking into consideration the intentions, implicit in large part, which had inspired

them.12 But the ambition to attain, with the instruments offered by the eviden

tial paradigm, comprehensive, if not systematic, knowledge was rejected by those

who, either in agreement or disagreement, attributed to me solely a glorification

of the particular and the fragmentary. Actually, such a notion could not be farther

from my mind. Aby Warburgs famous phrase, God is in the detail, which opens

my essay, refers to the whole, namely to the historical totality. And Morelli s comparisons suggest the series (of ears, of nails): in other words, morphology as the

instrument o f analysis.

I was tacitly confronted with the connection between morphology and his


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X I I Preface to the 201} Edition

tory when I began to study such themes as the relationship between high and low

through a century-old lapsus'' If the forms (the images, the words, the rites, the

institutions) are more tenacious than the contexts which from time to time reac

tivate them (and thus reformulate them), the historian has to transform himself,

at least temporarily, into a morphologist." From this followed the impulse to enter

into a dialogue not only with the history of art but, more specifically, with the

question of attributions (connoisseurship); a dialogue not only with anthropol

ogy, but with those anthropologists, above all Claude Lvi-Strauss, w ho from the

1950s aggressively pointed out the limitations of historical knowledge. It was pre

cisely through these discussions that the prerogatives of the profession of historian

could gain validity. Only from a historical perspective was it possible to speak of

the inquisitor as anthropologist or of the psychoanalyst (Freud) as anthropologist

manqu.'*What connects these studies is the impulse to read between the lines

(both literally and metaphorically) a documentation that is either verbal or iconic:

a necessity which evolved working in the archives o f the repression attempting to

grasp the voices of the victims.

Reading between the lines, searching for clueshow was one to distinguish be

tween the reliable and unreliable? My essay Clues lacked a discussion on proof,

an omission which later surprised me, and which I think I would attribute to the

eupho ria of discovery."1' But I promptly realized the risk that I might be misun der

stood on this point. To those who read in my essay a rejection of philological rigor

and control, 1 objected that the question of control is enormously relevant, and

especially because it assumed new forms the moment one incorporates new his

toriographical subjects.17The more elusive the subject o f ones research, the more

rigorous the control needs to be. I would occu py myse lf with controls and proofs

for decades, for general reasons, that is, impatience with post-m odern skepticism,

and at a certain point also for personal considerations, that is, my reactions to

criminal charges lodged against my friend Adriano Sofri, unjustly sentenced to

prison for 22 years.18

5

The original collection of essays, which is being reprinted here, included examples

of research carried out over a 25-year period on a broad spectrum of subjects,

from witches to Titian and Freud. Since the appearance of the first edition, almost

the same amount of time has passed. In the interim, the range of subjects treated

in my wo rk has broadened further. Behind the impulse to replicate the initial mo

ment in my research 1 recognize the need to continue testing on new materials the

efficacy of the analytical tools with which I am familiar. But certain basic concerns

Preface to the 2013 Edition xiii

remain, even if they have become more complex with the passing of time. It is this

underlying continuity, beyond nam es and I.D.s, which permits each o f us to reflect

on his or her own past.

Once again, I am deeply grateful to my translators, John and Anne Tedeschi, for

their unfailing competence, their generosity, and their friendship.


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Originally published in Italy asII formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di unmugnaio del 500,copyright 1976 by Giulio Einaudi editore.

English translation copyright 1980 The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress and

Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

Johns Hopkins Paperback edition published in the United States in1992

Edition with new preface 2013 The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress

All rights reserved. Published 2013

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363www.press.jhu.edu

Libras of Congress Control Number: 2012953215A catalog record for this book is available from the British library.


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30 The function of metaphors

31 Master, steward, and workers

32 An hypothesis

33T*ea5anrTetigion____________M_The soul

35 I dont know

36 Two spirits, seven souls, four elements

37 The flight of an idea___________38 Contradictions

39 Paradise

40 A new way of life

_41 To kill priests

42 A new world

43 End of the interrogations

44 Letter to the judges

45 Rhetorical figures

46 First sentence

47 Prison

48 Return to the town

49-Benunciations

50 Nocturnal dialogue with the Jew

__________51 Second trial

52 Fantasies

53 Vanities and dreams

54 Oh great, omnipotent, and holy God ...

55 If only I had died when I was fifteen

56 Second sentence

57 Torture

58 Scolio

59 Pellegrino Baroni

60 Two millers

61 Dominant culture and subordinate culture

62 Letters from Rome

Notes

Index of Names

PREFACE TO THE 2013 EDITION

This book was first published in 1976 in Italian. I had come acrossthe name of Domenico Scandella in the early 1960s, by mere chance

or nearly so. At the time I was interested in trials against witches

and benandanti,persons who fought in spirit against witches, in thenortheastern corner of Italy, the Friuli, in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries; they would become the subject of my first

book. While leafing through a manuscript index, compiled by aneighteenth-century inquisitor, of the first thousand trials held by theHoly Office of Aquileia and Concordia, I ran into a brief resume (nomore than a few lines) of a trial against a peasant accused of sayingthat the world had been created from putrefaction. I copied the callnumbers of the two trials against him on a scrap of paper andpromised myself that one day I would return to Udine to look themup. Now and then I would recall that notation. Seven years passed. In1970 I decided to order a microfilm of the two trials; I began reading,and was instantly struck by them. I transcribed the texts and

commenced studying them. Almost seven years later I published IIformaggio e i vermi, The Cheese and the Worms.

People who have read the work in one of the many languages intowhich it has been translated over the years quite properly did notconcern themselves overly much about its author. More engrossingwas the story that it told and the miller who was its protagonist. I too,today, could limit myself to citing the studies that over the years haveadded to and corrected what we know about Menocchio. I shallmention some of these later on but without any pretense tocompleteness. I have no intention of recapitulating the history of thereception of my book, a matter with which I am not really familiar. Iwould rather say something about the context from which the book


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emerged. For many years I have been reflecting on the discrepancy

be tw een the int en tio ns of the wr ite r (o r th e agen t) and the resu lts ofwhat gets written (or produ ced). I shall start from the relationship

be tw een co nt igui ty and dista nce, be tw ee n the pe rson I am today and

the person I was then.

I began to learn how to be a historian toward the end o f the 1950sby try ing to sa lvage from inqu isi tor ial trials the fra gm en ts of ape rse cu ted, ob lit erate d, forgot ten pe asan t c ult ure. Th is choice ,influenced by Antonio Gramscis prison reflections on the culture ofthe subaltern classes, preceded my casual and indirect contact withMenocchios trials; yet it does not explain my decision to occupymyself with them, which I undertook many years later. In theattention I gave to the echo of Menocchios words (the words which

would provide the book with its title), though they were renderedbanal by the inq uisit ors, I re cogn ize in hind sig ht the same impu lsethat had led me, in my first book, to study the Friulian benandanti:Menocchios testimony represented an intriguing aberration inrespect to a theme, witchcraft, which was itself quite exceptional inrespect to mainstream historiography. The present book also was

bo rn out of pass ion for the anom alo us , and from me di ta tin g on theconnection between anomaly and the norm.

In the early 1970s, Franois Furet (I mention him in the preface tothe Italian edition of The Cheese and the Worms)wrote that what weknow about the non-privileged classes is necessarily statistical, a

statement which, ipso facto, disqualified as irrelevant research suchas mine. I, instead of doing research on the privileged classes, hadembarked on the study of a miller who had a name, who had strangeideas, and who had read a number of books. The substance of a

poss ible footno te had be come the subjec t o f a book . T he pe rsecutedand the vanquished, whom many historians dismissed as marginaland usually altogether ignored, were here the focus of the research. It

was a choice I had made much earlier, but which drew new energyand justification from the radical political climate of the 1970s.

And yet this decision ran up against a major obstacle. The voicesof the persecuted reach us (when they do) through the filters of their

pe rsec utor s q uesti on s and as copie d down by thi rd pa rties , thenotaries. This was the case even with Menocchio, with the exception

of the letter to his son. What value can be attributed to documents,such as the transcripts of inqu isitorial trials, that are the product of

pressure psyc ho logica l, cultu ral, and phys ica l?

I had run into this difficulty even with my first book, I benandanti .It was documents (the trial documents) which compelled me to a

reflection on the histo rians role, a concern I have carried on invarious guises to this day. In the case o f the benandanti, I thought Icould get around the obstacle thanks to the discrepancy between the

questions of the inquisitors and the responses of the defendants. For

the former, the tales of the benand anti about their noc turnal battles,

fought in spirit against witches and warlocks, were a mass ofabsurdities. Menocchios judges greeted his explanations about theorigin of the world with the sam e disbelief. In both cases, the gap

separating the interrogations by the judges from the responses of thedefendants excluded the possibility that the first could haveinfluenced the second. But another element emerged from theexamination of Menocchios trials: the disparity between howMenocchio remembered the books he had read and the actual books

themselves. A deep stratum of oral culture emerged from that verydiscrepancy: the filter unconsciously employed by Menocchio whenhe approached the printed page. What is most profound in historymay also be the most certain, wrote Marc Bloch. I had alwaysthought that this statement presupposed Freud. But today I would betempted to interpret it through another analogy. The relative inability

of the actors inquisitors, Menocchio to process our queriessummons up a situation comparable to so-called double-blindexperiments, the purposes of which are not known either to theexperimenter or the subjects of the experiment.

An experiment always takes place under specific conditions, butits results, with the necessary precautions, can have broaderimplications. The Dutch sociologist Tony Hak, for example, beganfrom the Menocchio case and went on to construct a model ofexegesis that was applicable to the most diverse texts, including the

clinical charts of patients in psychiatric institutions. Later on I shallrefer to other generalizations that were inspired even by the highlyunusual case of Menocchio. It seems clear, nonetheless, that case

and generalization bring us close to microhistory, of which TheCheese and the Wormshas often been considered a typical example(although when it was first published, the term microhistory hadnot yet entered the historical lexicon). This sort of reading from amicrohistorical perspective, which certainly influenced myretrospective understanding of the work, was itself conditioned by the

form in which the book had been written.

In 1970 I began to teach in Bologna. I quickly found m yselfinvolved in discussions connected with the plans for a journal whichwere ne ver realized. The initiative was led by two w riters. Italo

Calvino was already well known; the other, Gianni Celati, had justarrived on the literary scene. Much of the talk concerned the term

archeology, which one of the participants, Enzo Melandri, abr ill iant ph ilo soph er, rede fin ed on the basis of no tions adva nced byMichel Foucault which left me quite perplexed. The original preface

to The Cheese and the Wormscontains a remnant, decisively apo lem ica l one , of those an cie nt discus sio ns . But t he lib erati ng eff ec twhich I received from them was not limited to the preface.

During a recent interview, the Austrian historian Stephan Steiner


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po inted out to me that the charac ter ist ic need to rev eal ho w a piece ofresearch is constructed, recurring in my writings, is rarelyencountered among historians. Steiner sees in this an echo of great20th-century literature; I agreed with him completely, mentioningProust especially, and then Brecht. But in 1970, when I beganworking on Men occhios trials, I added a new name to these,Raymond Queneau, whose Les fleurs b leueswas about to appear inItalian in Calvinos splendid translation. I was tempted to imitateQueneausExerc ices de style by organizing the book I was writing,The Cheese and the Worms, as a sequence of paragraphs w ritten indifferent styles, and taking inspiration from various genres (including

historiographical parody). I abandoned this idea almost at oncebe caus e its fri vo lity co ntraste d too stron gly with the na tur e of thedocuments. Nevertheless, it left some traces in the construction of the

bo ok , especial ly in the alt erna tio n of do cu me ntary fragm en ts offer edwithout comment, in the pursuit of hypotheses, later abandoned, andso forth.

To put in evidence how research is constructed had (and still has)more than formal implications. The liveliness of the oral exchangestransmitted to us by the inquisitorial trials is both real and illusory.We seem to know Menocchio, but he also eludes us, and not just

be caus e his res po nses we re ma de un de r p ressure (ev en be fore tortu re

was applied). Access to the past is always mediated, and, thus,always partial.

Since it is always mediated, always tied to a point of view,historical knowledge is by definition perfectible, even when, as can

happen, hum an error does not intrude. All this occurred, as expected,also with this book. M enocc hios trial records, which I had cited atlength but in a fragmentary way, have been critically and admirablyedited in their entirety by Andrea Del Col. The work contains a longintroduction, which, on a n umber of points left me perplexed. In hisretelling of the story Del Col added new elements taken fromdocumen ts previously unkno wn to me. It emerges from this freshmaterial how a number of witnesses had testified that the priest ofMontereale, Odorico Vorai, had made advances to Menocchiosdaughters. When confronted the cleric had, in turn, denouncedMenocchio to the Inquisition. At the co nclusion of the first trial, a

number of Menocchios friends and relatives plotted their revenge.They assaulted the priest, who barely managed to escape. Not longafter, Vorai left Montereale and settled in a nearby village w here hetook charge of a parish created especially for him.

Del Col fleshed out my reconstruction of events in a number ofpa rticu lars, po intin g out an er ro r in my accoun t. The two let ter s dat ed30 August and 13 November 1599, written by Cardinal SantaSeverina of the Supreme Roman Congregation of the Inquisition, arenot about Menocc hio, as I had surmised, out about another Friulian

heretic, Antonio Scodellaro. By those dates Menocchio had alreadybeen executed: in a no tar ial do cu me nt da ted 16 Augu st, turned up byDel Col, Stefano Scandella is referred to as the son of the deceased(quondam) Domenico Scandella.

This supplementary information and these correctionsundoubtedly add to what we know. I am not convinced, however, byDel Cols suggestion that Menocchios ideas stemmed from theCathar heresy. It is a hypothesis which I too had contemplated at the

be gin ning of my res earch on these documents, bu t wh ich Isubsequen tly tacitly abandoned. Del Col takes up the idea

independently, but suggests many attenuating circumstances which

almost seem to cancel it out: The Friulan miller certainly is noCathar, nor is his religion, as it is docum ented in the trials, entirely

based on Ca thar co ncep ts ... Menocch io is not a Ca thar .. . Del Colclearly saw that his hypothesis po stulated a transmission of ideasover centuries which could not be otherwise documented.

Actually, I myself had set an example by formulating an evenmore daring hypothesis based on pure conjecture, namely on the

presum ed pa ralle ls be tween the t heor ies of Me nocchio ab ou t thechaos from which angels were born, which he compared to wormsissuing from cheese, and the cosmogonies diffused in Central Asia.In a sharp but generous review the anthropologist Valerio Valeri had

praised my book wh ile de mo lis hing my conjectures, wh ich heattributed to populist fanaticism, a roman tic idea of the collective,spontane ous and immem orial nature of popular tradition. I haveoften spoken elsewhere about the connections between populism, to

some ex tent tied to the surroundings in which I grew up, and thechoices I made as a historian. It is an impulse which led me to someerrors and exagg erations. I do not want to defend the former; thelatter are, I think, an ingredient of the m anner in which theacquisition of kno wledge arrives one bu rst at a time. Unless I ammistaken, none of my critics have questioned my analysis of themechanics of M enocchio s readings, to which I dedicated the greater

pa rt of th e b ook. Bu t e ven this analy sis came from a p op ul ist op tion,

namely that it was p roper to try to reconstruct the millers actualbooks and the wa y he had rea d the m. (Su ch a c ho ice seem s obviou stoday, but it was not at the time.) Books and essays h ave been

devoted to some of these writings, in part prompted by my own book.

The Cheese and the Wormshas enjoyed great success and hasbeen tra ns lat ed into ma ny lan guages . It h as been rea d in w ays wh ichare often beyo nd me, throug h cultural, as well as linguistic, filters

which are inaccessible to me. It can happen; why did it happen?

I think we need to look for the answer, first of all, in theextraordinary protagonist of the story, Domenico Scandella, calledMenocchio. But even an exceptional person lives and acts in a

context, or, better, several contexts. Two eleme nts appear in the


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Menocchio saga w hich render it instantly comprehensible even forthose of us who live in a time far removed from his: the interweavingbetwe en oral and wr itte n cul ture, and his challe nge to author ity, bothpol itical and relig ious. Th e nam e of this unknow n mil ler isremembered today because of the challenge he lost.

Once again, I am deeply grateful to my translators, John and AnneTedeschi, for their unfailing competence, their generosity, and theirfriendship.

TRANSLATORS NOTE

We take great pleasure in presenting in English translation CarloGinzburgsII formaggio e i vermi, a lively and ingenious attempt toreconstruct the intellectual world of a sixteenth-century miller wholived out his days in a remote Friulian village. The book has beenrightly hailed as one of the most significant recent contributions to a

burge oning field of s tudy, the po pular cul ture o f early -mo der nEurope. We are hopeful that the present endeavor will help to drawattention to the need of making other distinguished Italian works ofhistory available to a larger public through translation.

The Cheese and the Wormsdiffers slightly from the originalEinaudi edition published in 1976. New are a second prefaceespecially written for this version, the insertion of a date in the first

pag e of the text, and the reply to a c ritic at pp. 15 3-55 n. Nosystematic attempt has been made to bring the references up to date.However, the appearance of recent contributions by ElizabethEisenstein, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and a handful of others couldnot be ignored and have been noted at appropriate points in the book.English titles of works in other languages used by the author havebeen suppl ied wh en ever they w ere kno wn to us.

On the organization and procedures of the Roman Holy Officethe institution whose insistence on a full recording of all eventstranspiring before its tribunal made the present study possiblethereis unfortunately no modern comprehensive study available in anylanguage. A few observations, however, are in order. The RomanInquisition, founded in 1542 by Pope Paul III as a direct response tothe Protestant challenge in Italy, should not be confused with theInquisition in Spain or other areas of Europe nor with the Inquisitionof the Middle Ages, which was the subject of Henry Charles Leashistory. The Inquisition, far from being a monolithic structure, was an


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institution that experienced development and change, in terms of

organization, procedures, and definitions of the law, throughout itslong history. The two stages, medieval and modem, must not beunderstood as a single phenomenon. Furthermore, while moral

ju st ice was im po ssible in a conte xt wh ere the Ca thol ic Ch urch felt,together with virtually all other secular and religious authorities on

bo th sid es of the Alps , that it h ad the right , e ve n the duty, to

pe rsecute those who di ffe red in thei r rel igiou s be liefs, legaljustice insixteenth-century terms was dispensed by the Roman Inquisition. It

was not a drumh ead court, a cham ber of horrors, or a judiciallabyrinth from which escape was impossible. Capricious and

arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, and wanton abuse of humanrights were not tolerated. Rome watched over the provincialtribunals, enforced the ob servance o f what was, for the times, anessentially mod erate code of law, and m aintained, to the extent that a

consensus existed, uniformity of practice.

A word of explanation should be given on the subject ofinquisitorial record keeping. A permanent and indispensable memberof every inquisitorial court was the no tary (or a cleric deputized toassume this function), who transcribed in writing as the legal manualsrequired not only all the defendants responses and any statements

he might make, bu t also what he might utter during the torture, evenhis sighs, his cries, his laments and tears (E. Masini, Sacro Arsenale[Genoa, 1621], p. 123). Since most trial records were generally

reviewed by the supreme tribunal in Rome before the pronouncementof sentence, the practice of recording legal proceedings in theirentirety was designed to discourage irregularities, including the

tendency of some examiners to ask leading or suggestive questions.The notarys charge was to transcribe everything that transpiredverbatim. On occasion, however, as portions of the present bookindicate, both questions and answers were reported in the third

perso n. The au thor na turally is ob lig ed to place such passages withinquotation marks because they are part of the trial record even if theyare not direct quotes. An exam ple of this occurs in section 20 w here aquestion by the inquisitor is transformed by the notary into an

indirect form of discourse: the d efendant is exhorted to nam e all hisaccomplices, or else more rigorous measures would be taken against

him. ...

Further brief introductory remarks on the subject are provided inJohn Tedeschi, Preliminary Observations on Writing a History ofthe Roman Inquisition, in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church

History,ed. F. F. Church and T. Georg e (Leiden, 1979), pp. 232-4 9.Readers wishing to learn more about the productive career of CarloGinzburg, the brilliant youn g scholar who is the author of this book,are invited to turn to the profile by Anne J. Schutte, CarloGinzburg, Journa l o f Modern History48 (1976): 296-31 5.

The interested reader may wish to consultDom enico Scandella detto Menocchio: Iprocessi dellTnquisizione (1583-1599).A cura diAndrea Del Col (Pordenone: Edizioni Biblioteca dellImmagine,1990). The work includes critical editions o f the two trials of

Menocchio, together with new archival data, and a long historicalintroduction that elucidates the organization and procedures of theInquisition and the Friulian background of the story. An English

translation of the volume is scheduled to appe ar in the series ofMedieva l and Renaissance Texts and Stud ies (Binghamton).

Our translation benefited greatly from the many constructive

criticisms and suggestions received from the author and from the staff

and consultants of The Johns Hopkins University Press, especiallyHenry Y. K. Tom, Mary Lou Kenney, and Eduardo Saccone.Professors Paolo Cherchi of The University of Chicago and RonnieTerpening of Loyola University, Chicago, struggled with us patientlyover a number of mystifying terms of sixteenth-century Friuliandialect. Bernard E. Wilson of The Newberry Library read the entiremanuscript of the text and left his mark on alm ost every page. W e areextremely grateful to him as well as to all others named and unnamedwhose advice and support helped to bring The Cheese and the Wormsinto being.

With mixed sentiments of sadness and relief we take leave of thisbo ok and its qu ixot ic prota gonist, Me nocchio. We feel conf iden t tha t

bo th wil l captu re the read er s e ste em and aff ec tio n, as the y did ours.

J.T.

A.C.T.


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PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

As frequently happen s, this research, too, came about by chance. In

1962 I spent part of the summer in Udine. In the extremely rich (andat that time still unexplored) deposit of inqu isitorial papers preserved

in the Archivio della Curia Arcivescovile of that city I was searchingfor trials against a strange Friulian sect whose members wereidentified with witches and witchdoctors by the judges. Later I wrote

a book about them (/ benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari traCinquecento e Seicento[1966; reprinted, Turin, 1979]). Leafingthrough one of these manuscript volumes of trials I came upon anextremely long sentence. One of the accusations against thedefendant wa s that he maintained the world had its origin in

pu tre facti on . Th is ph rase in sta nt ly ca ptured my cu rio sity; bu t I w aslooking for other things: witches, witchdoctors, benandanti. I wrotedown the nu mber of the trial. In the next few years that notation

pe rio di ca lly lea ped out fro m am on g my pape rs and fro m my memory.In 1970 I resolved to try to understand what that statement couldhave meant for the person by whom it had been uttered. At that timewhat I knew about him was only his name: Domenico Scandella,

called Menocchio.

This book tells his story. Thanks to an abundant documentation weare able to learn about his readings and his discussions, his thoughts

and his sentiments fears, hopes, ironies, rages, despairs. Every nowand then the directness of the sources brings him v ery close to us: aman like ourselves, one of us.

But he is also a man very different from us. The analyticalreconstruction o f this difference was necessary, in ord er toreconstruct the physiognomy, partly obscured, of his culture, and ofthe social context in which it had taken shape. It has been possible to

trace Menocchios complicated relationship with written culture: the

book s (or , mo re precisely , some of the books) tha t he rea d and themanner in which he read them. In this way there emerg ed a filter, agrill that Menocchio interposed unconsciously between himself andthe texts, whether obscure or illustrious, which came into his hands.This filter, on the other hand, presup posed an oral cu lture that was the

pa trimo ny not on ly of Me no cchio bu t a lso of a v as t s eg me nt ofsixteenth-century society. Consequently, an investigation initially

pivo tin g on an indiv idua l, moreove r a n ap pa rent ly unus ua l one,ended by developing into a general hypothesis on the popular culture(more precisely, peasant culture) of preindustrial Europe, in the age

marked by the spread of printing ana the Protestant Reformationand by the repression of the latter in Catholic countries. Thishypothesis can be linked to what has already been proposed, in verysimilar terms, by Mikhail Bakhtin, and can be summed up by theterm circularity: between the culture of the dominant classes andthat of the subordinate classes there existed, in preindustrial Europe, acircular relationship composed of reciprocal influences, which

traveled from low to high as well as from high to low. (Exactly theopposite, therefore, of the concept of the absolute autonomy andcontinuity of peasant culture that has been attributed to me by one

criticsee notes pp. 153-55.)

The Cheese and the Worms is intended to be a story as well as apiece of histo ric al wr iting . Thus, it is addressed to the general reader

as well as to the specialist. Prob ably only the latter will read the notes which have been de lib erately placed at the end of the book,without numerical references, so as not to encumber the narrative.But I hope that both will recognize in this episode an unnoticed butextraordinary fragment of a reality, half obliterated, which implicitly

poses a s er ies of qu estio ns fo r our ow n cu ltu re an d fo r us .

I should like to express my warmest thanks to my friends John and

Anne Tedeschi for the patience and intelligence with which they havetranslated this book.


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Orig inally published in Italy as / Benandanli: Stregoneria e culli agrari tra Cinquecento

e Seicento, copyright 1966 by Giulio Einaudi editore.

English translation cop yright Ro utledge & Kegan Paul pie, 1983

Johns H opkin s Pap erba ck ed itio n publ ished in the United States in 1992

Edition with new preface 2013 'Ihc Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights rese rv ed. Publ ished 2013

Printed in the United States o f Am erica on acid-free paper

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Ch arles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

www.p re ss .jhu .edu

Library o f Congress Co ntrol Num ber: 2012953213

A ca ta log re co rd fo r this book is av ailable from the Briti sh library.


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This page intentionally left blank

P R E F A C E T O T H E 2 0 1 3 E D I T I O N

Perhaps, finally, your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer

should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap;

the opportunity to express yourself is otfered that once, and you untie the knot

with in you then or never again. Perhaps poetr y is p ossib le o nly in one m oment o f

a life, and for most people that moment is early youth.1

I read these words in 1964 when they had just appeared. Italo Calvino was re

flecting upon his first novel, II sentiero dei nidi di ragno , almost twenty-five years

after it was first published. It never once even remotely crossed my mind that it

might have a connection to the book I was then writing, and which would appear

shortly, I Benandanti(1966). But as the years passed, representing ones first book

(in my case one of research, not of poetry) as a big leap occurred to me often:

big did not pertain to the result, naturally, but to the impulse that seizes one who

throws himself into the fray for the first time.

And yet, even for me, that initi al impe tus was in som e way already a point of

arrival.2As I have related elsewhere, it was in 1959, when I was twenty, that I sud

denly decided I would try to become a historian, that I would study witchcraft

trials, and that what interested me especially in those proceedings were the men

and women who had been accused of that crime.3 I made these decisions with

the greatest unawareness (which is the case for most of the important decisionswe mak e in li fe). And for the times these were cer tain ly odd dec isions, espe cially

the last of the three. For the majority of historians, witchcraft persecution was of

marginal interest, and witches and warlocks themselves, it was thought, were best

left to anthropologists. But today those decisions appear to me less anomalous

considering the intellectual and political context in which they were made.

Italy in 1959 was living through the so-called economic miracle, a period of

intense development that closed the long postwar era. Some years before, Italo

Calvino, with his customary lucidity, had expressed the crisis affecting ideals born

during the partisan struggle and, implicitly, the withering of neo- realism'a

movement in which, although I was much younger, I recognize the roots of myown formation.5 Reading Antonio Gramsci, first his prison letters, later his prison

notebooks, had been equally decisive for me, as for many others." I Benandanti

wou ld n ever have been w ritten wit hout Gra ms cis pages on folkl ore and the suba l-


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.V Preface to the2 0 1 3 Edition

tern classes.7 But in the years that followed, my readings became interwoven with

the ones (quite dissimilar among themselves) which Eric Hobsbawm and Ernesto

de Martino published in Socield,the ideological journal of the Italian Comm unist

Party. In both cases, Gramscis ideas on subaltern classes were developed in an

anthropological perspective: one pursued in isolation by de Martino; the other

developed by the Manchester school, which had inspired Hobsbawms early re

search.8

On a world scale the masses are struggling to become part of history, to over

turn the order which keeps them subordinate, de Martino wrote in 1949. Actu

ally, the masses were already part o f history, but de Martino was reading Gramsci,

with the zeal o f the neophyte , from the persp ectiv e of an idea lized image (later

attenuated to the point of vanishing altogether) of Soviet society in general and of

Soviet folklore studies in particular. Today, decades after the appearance of sub

altern studies and their tortuous trajectory, to read Gramscis ideas from a world

perspective, associating them with the battles fought against colonialism, seems

nearly obvious.10But at the time it was not. The very term subaltern classes con

tributed to making the connection: coined to circumvent censorship within the

Fascist penal system, it permitted Gramsci (and many of his readers) to distance

themselves from the language of the Third International, focused on the centrality

of the w orking class." With the flare-up of anti-colonial wars, ancient separations

between the disciplines suddenly seemed artificial and arbitrary, such as those be

tween folklore and anthropology (de Martino) and those between anthropology

and history (Hobsbawm). Even a beginning student could ingenuously think of

looking at witchcraft trials as a primitive form of class struggle. But when I came

across some judicial proceedings which seemed to olfer splendid confirmation of

this thesisa M odenese peasant woman, Chiara Signorini, accused of h aving cast

spells over a proprietor who had chased her of f her landI experienced a sense of

delusion.1* Perhaps this confirmation reached me too soon; to be sure, the impulse,

partly obscure even to me, which had pushed me toward these subjects continued

to trouble me. (Only much later did I understand my emotional identification, as

a Jew, with the victims of the Inquisition, and later still my intellectual contiguity

with the inq uisitors. )13 At the en d of m y essay o n that tri al ( my f irst publ icatio n), I

wrote : C ase s such as that of C hia ra Si gno rini can have par adig mat ic v alue even in

their most unique aspects"

Paradigmatic here stands for exemplary (Thomas Kuhns Vie Structure of Sci-

entific Revolutions,focusing on the notion of paradigm, would not be publisheduntil a year later, in 1962). The attempt, not totally successful, by the Dominican

demonologist, the inquisitor Bartolomeo Spina, to impose his ideas on the peas

ant woman Chiara Signorini suggested the possibility of interpreting witchcraft

Preface to the2 0 1 3 Edition

trials as the clash between two cultures, between two world views: once again,

Gramsci was at work. To present that chance discovery as exemplary was a hy

pothesis, or, better yet, a wager. But what had moved me to transform a trial into a

case? I do not have the answer; 1 can only say that I have continued to this day to

work a nd reflect on chance d iscover ies and their implic ation s.

Even the casual discovery, in the Venetian State Archives, of the trial against

Menichino da l.atisana, who called himself a benandante (a new term for me as

well as for the inqu isitor ), was som eth ing unforeseen: a chance dis cover y that

turned into a caseboth terms sharing the same Latin etymology, cadere, to fall.

More precisely, Mcnichinos accounts were an anomaly. Ilis talcs of the battles he

fought in spirit together with the other benandanti in the field of Josaphat were

unexpected, in fact, unimaginable; and yet, it struck me instantly that they con

stituted a vivid confirmation of the hypothesis that witchcraft trials were clashes

between cultures. Today, in Edoardo Grendis footsteps, I would say that the ac

counts arc the exceptional normal: in other words, anomalous evidence that casts

light on a widespread, otherwise undocumented phenomenon.1 But this is a ret

rospective consideration: the conclusion of a research trajectory born out of un

usual documentation, generating a hypothesis around which an experiment could

be constructed.16

This experimental dimension of Vie Night Battles has been widely criticized.

It has been objected that the trials against the benandanti who declared that they

were fight ing in spirit agai nst w arlo cks represent on ly a fract ion of the extant t ri

als against the sect; that these trials are only a minute part of the totality of trials

conducted by Friulan inquisitors; that this inquisitorial documentation is only a

sliver of the documentation available concerning Friulan sixteenth- and seven

teenth-century peasants; that a hypothesis not rooted on a thorough knowledge

of the context (or contexts) is invalid.17But research almost never proceeds in an

orderly fashion; it advances in fits and starts and follows a roundabout course. Ev

ery hypothesis is a leap in the dark; and the experiment generated by a hypothesis

implies, as all experiments must, a selection (an impoverishment) of the available

data. In the trials against the benandanti, especially in the oldest that have sur

vive d, the absence o f a com mon langu age betwe en inqu isitors and the accus ed

suspended provisionally an element which ordinarily would have contributed to

the dominance of the former over the latter. And, just as in an experiment, what

is anomalous in the situation to the eyes of the observer sheds light on the nor

mal phenomena. Such terms as benandante or camisciola (born with the caul)came from the mouths of the accused, not from the inquisitors.18The inability of

inquisitors to decipher in many instances the benandantis accounts allows an an

cient stratum of peasant beliefs to emerge; only a half-century later these beliefs

xi


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Preface to the 201j Edition

were traced back, although not completely, to the schemes o f traditional demon

ology.1 The exception implies the series, thus the possibility of a generalization:

a complex intellectual operation that can never be taken for granted. It seemed

reasonable to suppose that something resembling the radical change experienced

by the accounts of the benandanti under prodding from the inquisitors could have

happened elsewhere in Europe and even beyond, I would now add, namely the de

monizing of a stratum of pre-existent beliefs.20From this hypothesis sprang a dif

ferent, even more extreme notion: that there was a connection be tween the benan

danti and Siberian shamans, something I proposed many years ago in another

book, Ecstasies.:| These hypotheses have been met by both approval and dissent

(especially the latter). On the benandanti, many new studies have appeared, and

presumably others will follow.

The present book was not written only for specialists. Without sacrificing

scholarly rigor, I hoped to reach a wider audience. I could never have imagined

that the forgotten wordbenandantiwould be rediscovered and coupled with

musical groups, novels, films, comic strips, agricultural resorts: first in Friuli, and

then, thanks to the spread of the written word, far afield.*3 Much more moving for

me has been the fact that people in distant lands have recognized themselves in

the benandanti. This book which flew out of my hands has traveled far on its own.

Once again, I am deeply grateful to my translators, John and Anne Tedeschi, for

their unfailing competence, their generosity, and their friendship.

C.G.

Bologna, 2012

xiiF O R E W O R D

Some time in the late sixteenth century the attention of a perplexed Church was

drawn to the prevalence of a curious practice in the region of the Friuli, where

German, Italian and Slav customs meet. This was the ritual association of the

good walkers, a body of men chosen from those born with the caul, who fell into

a trance or deep sleep on certain nights of the year while their souls (sometimes

in the form of small animals) left their bodies so that they could do battle, armed

with stalks of fennel, against analogous companies of male witches for the fate

of the seasons crops. They also performed cures and other kinds of benevolent

magic. Carlo Ginzburg argues that theirs was a fertility ritual once widespread

throughout central Europe, but by this period perhaps flourishing mainly in mar

ginal regions such as the Friuli (and Lithuania, whence a strictly similar institu

tion of benevolent werewolves i s recorded from the late seventeenth century), and

suggests Slav or even Ural-Altaic influences, which must be left to the judgment of

experts in popular religion.

However, the real interest of his extremely lucidly written book lies elsewhere.

'Ihe Holy Inquisition (not unhampered both by its representatives ignorance of

the Friulian dialect and the suspicions of the Venetian Republic) did not quite

know what to make of the good walkers. It therefore attempted to assimilate them

to the well-classified and heretical practice of witchcraft, and to press its victims

to admit their participation in the diabolist sabbaths. What is more, it succeeded.

A series o f inquisitions and trials stretching from the 1570s to the 1640s, details of

which Signor Ginzburg has extracted from a variety o f archives, show the good

walkers gradually assimilating themselves to witches (though attempting to main

tain their benevolent functions) under the pressure of the now alerted Church. It

was no doubt fortunate for them that their conversion into witches came too late

for serious persecution. The main effect of the Churchs intervention in traditional

peasant practices appears in this instance to have been to lead to their decadence.

The story is local, but its relevance to the general study of the witch-cult is

obvious. For here we have not Margaret Murrays subterranean old religion hostile

to Christianity but ritual practices which had long established a symbiosis with

the dominant religionthe benandanti originally regarded themselves as cham

pions of Christ against the devilbut which are forced into opposition (one of


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xi v Fore wor d

the accused thought their practices were similar to those of the Turks, Jews and

Heretics) by Church policy.

Yet the inte rest of Ca rlo Gi nz bu rg s b ook lies n ot m ere ly in the lig ht it th row s on

religion, magic and witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a sub

jec t m uch writ ten abou t s ince 1966 , but s till a rather spe cial ized one. His pr im ary

concern is to reconstruct the peasant mentality of the period . Writing the history

of those whose opinions are rarely documented has become an extremely popular

practice in recent years. Justifiably so, since they constitute the great majority of

humanity. It is Ginzburgs merit to have recognized, long before Le Roy Ladunes

Mo nta illou , thatcontrary to what has often been assumedthe documents of

the Inquisition allow us to catch the voices of its victims and to reconstruct their

intellectual universe, public and private. It takes a highly skilled and, above all, an

imaginative historian to do so. But those who have read Ginz burg s later book The

Cheese and the Wormswill not need to be told that he is both. In this early work he

has written a study which will fascinate and stimulate all historians of the popular

mind. Fortunately it will find many more of them to stimulate in 1983 than in the

pioneer days o f 1966.

E.J. I Iobsbawm

t r a n s l a t o r s n o t e

We a re ve ry plea sed to have been offere d the o pportu nity , w ith The Night Battles,

of presenting to the English reader a second wo rk by the innovative Italian social

historian, Carlo Ginzburg. Actually, the present book, which quickly became a

classic in the historiography of witchcraft after it first appeared with its original

Italian title / Benandanti in 1966, preceded by more than a decade The Cheese

and the Worms,Ginzburgs pioneering study in popular culture. These two works

represent only a small part o f the best of the new social, cultural and religious his

tory being written today by a host o f distinguished Italian scholars. The agenda of

future translations should be a long one.

A few wor ds of explana tion abou t our Eng lish vers ion may be help ful. There

are a number of seeming inconsistencies among name forms but these occurred

in the original documents, written in an age before orthography had become stan

dardized, and we simply retained them. Unless it was clear that a name was a

family name (and the instances of this were few), rather than a Christian name

with the add itio n o f a place for iden tific atio n, we have used the form , Agn abc lla

of San Lorenzo, etc. The exception to this is for ecclesiastics whose places of origin

often became a permanent name by which they were henceforth known: thus,

Bernardino da Siena.

We h ave app ropriat ed from the Italian the words ben and ante /be nand anti , the

singular and plural forms, to designate the members of the fertility cult who are

the subject of this book. A literal translation of the word would be those who go

wel l or good -do ers ! We have also typ ica lly used wit ch in the bro ade r sense for

both males and females, unless the Italian text mentioned together both Strega

and stregonewhich we then rendered as witch and warlock!

As we noted in detai l in our prefa ce to G inz bu rgs The Cheese and the Worms,

the wording in the inquisitorial trial records was transposed by the notary of the

court from direct testimony to speech in the third person, and questions and an

swers were transformed into an indirect form of discourse. Nevertheless the au

thor was obliged to put these passages within quotation marks, even though in

this indirect form, because they are taken directly from the original documents.

Our translation, with the exception of one deleted paragraph (pp. 46 -7), repro

duces the Einaudi 1974 second edition of 1Benandanti. In addition to Ginzburgs


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xv i Tran slator s Note

new preface for the English edition, only a handful of new bibliographical refer

ences have been added by the translators. No attempt has been made, otherwise,

to update the apparatus. In the Index we have used full names for historical per

sonages and writers, and initials for the first names of modern authors.

J.T.

A.C .T.

P R E F A C E T O T H E E N G L I S H E D I T I O N

Several years after it first appeared, I Benandantiis being made available to English

readers as The Night Battles. In the period since the book was originally published,

studies on European witchcraft have proliferated, many of which h ave made im

portant contributions. What was at first considered little more than a curiosity,

today is a fashionably current theme of research, and new works on the subject

are appearing in a steady stream. Nevertheless, all modesty aside, I believe that the

present book is still o f interest and perhaps more so today than fifteen years ago,

capable of appealing to a wider pu blic, and one not confined to specialists.

It was E.W. Monter who, in 1969, drew attention in very generous terms to

the / B e n a n d a n t i thereby introducing into international scholarly discussion this

monograph dealing with a peripheral area (the Friuli) written in a language which

today is also peripheral (Italian). In his review Monter observed that the docu

ments which I had collected and studied furnished unexpected support for the

old (and discredited) thesis of M. Murray which regarded witchcraft as a fertility

cult. Elsewhere, Monter explained that what had been confirmed was only part

of Murrays thesis.2This was an important qualification: Murray, in fact, had as

serted: (a) that witchcraft had its roots in an ancient fertility cult, and (b) that the

sabbat described in the witchcraft trials referred to gatherings which had actually

taken place. Wh at my work really demonstrated, even if unintentionally, was sim

ply the first point. While there is an indisputable connection between benandanti

and fertility cults (in this respect, I think, we should acknowledge the kernel of

truth in Murrays thesis), no document allows us to conclude with certainty that

the benandanti actually met on set occasions to perform the rites described in

their confessions.1 Certain scholars, to be sure, have claimed for the benandanti

that no firmer bit of evidence has ever been presented that witchcraft existed

(J.B. Russell) or that they remain to date the only authenticated witch cult in early

modern Europe (II.C. Erik M idclfort).5 1 consider this interpretation unfounded

if it infers from the link between benandanti and fertility cults the physical exis

tence of an organized sect of witches. Equally unjustified on the other hand, in my

opinion, is the assurance with which N. Coh n, in a polemic with Russell (and also

because of a misinterpretation of my book) concluded that the experiences o f the

benanda nti . . . were all trance experience s.6 On the basis o f the available docu-


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xvi ii Preface to the English Edition

ments, the existence or non-existence of an organized sect o f witches in fifteenth-

to seventeenth-century Europe seems to be indeterminate. It is a dilemma, how

ever, which to my eyes at least has only relative importance. Those who believe the

contrary (and they are still the vast majority o f scholars dealing with this subject)

remain unconsciously bound to the view taken by those long-ago judges, ecclesi

astical or secular, who asked themselves before all else whether the accused had

participatedphysically in the diabolical gatherings. Even if the sabbat had been a

purely mental phenomenon (and this cannot be proved) its importance for the

historian would not be diminished.

This point should be stressed because the benandanti have been discussed too

often in witchcraft studies for the wrong reasons. No one has cast doubt on the un

precedented richness of the materials gathered and analysed here. But the excep

tional nature of the documents has no bearing on the question of the physical re

ality o f the witches congregations. This has to be searched for in a totally different

direction: the gap between the questions of the judges and the confessions of the

accused which was gradually reduced only in the course of decades. To his credit,

P. Burke has seen in the use I have made of this gap a device by which, through

broader application, the student of popular culture may circumvent the limita

tions inherent in judicial sources.7 In the present case it was possible to achieve

an in-depth analysis (which if I am not mistaken seems to have remained a some

what isolated effort in the study o f European witchcraft) o f a stratum of popu

lar beliefs which the inquisitors could only slowly make coincide with their own

preconceived ideas. The extraordinary characteristics of the group of documents

collected here make possible this reconstruction from within (from the point of

view o f the benandanti) and demonstrates that the history of witchcraft need not

be limited to the study of its repression. Popular beliefs relative to witchcraft

mental rubbish of peasant credulity and feminine hysteria, as Trevor-Roper

scornfully defined themare neither universal (and therefore lacking specific

ity) nor unworthy of study.11Today, the emergence of the feminist movement, the

interest in popular culture and the vogue of the occult make this quite obvious.

For this reason, a review of some of the difficulties which research of this type

encounters may serve a useful purpose.

We can try then to extend the type of analysis adopted for the benandanti:

but with what results? If the phenomenon o f the benandanti had been an episode

with totally anomalous characteristics, strictly circumscribed in time and space,

the unusual nature of the documentation would also have to be accepted in a di

minished sense. Its importance for the history of European witchcraft would be,

all in all, quite negligible.

Here too it is essential to make distinctions. The process of acculturation

Preface to the English Edition xix

through which diabolical witchcraft was superimposed on beliefs, such as those of

the benandanti, was not a phenomenon restricted to the Friuli. There arc obvious

parallels with the cult of Diana in Modena which unfortunately cannot be pursued

systematically because adequate sources are lacking. Consequently, the story of

the benandanti sheds a great deal of light on the ways in which the image of dia

bolical witchcraft as envisioned by demonologists, judges and inquisitors gained

ascendancy in Europe. (Beginning from what? we ask ourselves at this point. This

is a question I would like to pursue in another work.)

It is difficult, however, to find analogies outside the Friuli with the complex of

ideas which emerges with such a wealth of details in the accounts of the benan

danti. Nevertheless, many more parallels could be added to those which arc al

ready noted in the following pages. In particular, the connection between the

benandanti and shamans alluded to in the original preface, and confirmed by

M. Eliadc, could be developed further.91 intend to attempt this in the book men

tioned above. In some respects, it will integrate, and in others continue, on a vaster

chronological and spatial scale, the research which began with The Night Battles.

C.G.

Bologna, 1982

Ginzburg - Comp. Prefaces [Chese&Worms, NightBattles, Clues-Miths,Proof]

Documents

Transcript of Ginzburg - Comp. Prefaces [Chese&Worms, NightBattles, Clues-Miths,Proof]