|
''The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries'' is a historical study of the ''benandanti'' folk custom of 16th and 17th century Friuli, Northeastern Italy. It was written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, then of the University of Bologna, and first published by the company Giulio Einaudi in 1966 under the Italian title of ''I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento''. It was later translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi and published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1983 with a new foreword written by the historian Eric Hobsbawm. In ''The Night Battles'', Ginzburg examines the trial accounts of those ''benandante'' who were interrogated and tried by the Roman Inquisition, using such accounts to elicit evidence for the beliefs and practices of the ''benandanti''. These revolved around their nocturnal visionary journeys, during which they believed that their spirits traveled out of their bodies and into the countryside, where they would do battle with malevolent witches who threatened the local crops. Ginzburg goes on to examine how the Inquisition came to believe the ''benandanti'' to be witches themselves, and ultimately persecute them out of existence. Considering the ''benandanti'' to be "a fertility cult", Ginzburg draws parallels with similar visionary traditions found throughout the Alps and also from the Baltic, such as that of the Livonian werewolf, and also to the widespread folklore surrounding the Wild Hunt. He furthermore argues that these Late Medieval and Early Modern accounts represent surviving remnants of a pan-European, pre-Christian shamanistic belief concerning the fertility of the crops. Academic reviews of ''The Night Battles'' were mixed. Many reviewers argued that there was insufficient evidence to indicate that the ''benandanti'' represented a pre-Christian survival. Despite such criticism, Ginzburg would later return to the theories about a shamanistic substratum for his 1989 book ''Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath'', and it would also be adopted by historians like Éva Pócs, Gabór Klaniczay, Claude Lecouteux and Emma Wilby. ==Background== In the Archepiscopal Archives of Udine, Ginzburg came across the 16th and 17th century trial records which documented the interrogation of several ''benandanti'' and other folk magicians.〔Martin 1992. pp. 613–614.〕 Historian John Martin of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas would later characterize this lucky find as the sort of "discovery most historians only dream of."〔 Prior to Ginzburg's work, no scholars had investigated the benandanti, and those studies which had been made of Friulian folklore – by the likes of G. Marcotti, E. Fabris Bellavitis, V. Ostermann, A. Lazzarini and G. Vidossi – had all used the term "''benandante''" as if it had been synonymous with "witch". Ginzburg himself would note that this was not because of "neglect nor… faulty analysis", but because in the recent oral history of the region, the two terms had become essentially synonymous.〔Ginzburg 1983. p. xxi.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Night Battles」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|