Thinker — Microhistory — The Witches' Sabbath

Carlo Ginzburg

b. 1939

Italian historian, born in Turin in 1939, and the founder of microhistory — the method of reading a single small case, often a single trial, closely enough that a whole world shows through it. Where the witch hunts are usually studied from above, through statutes and counts of the dead, Ginzburg went into the transcripts and listened to what the accused actually said. What he found there was not delusion and not nothing. It was a folk cosmology with its own logic, being slowly rewritten in real time by the people interrogating it.

01The night battles

In the Friuli, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were people called the benandanti — "those who go well," or "good walkers." On certain nights they believed they left their bodies and went out in spirit to fight: against witches, for the harvest. If they won, the fields were spared; if they lost, the year went hungry. They did not understand themselves as witches. They understood themselves as the village's protectors against witchcraft.

Ginzburg reconstructed this world from the records of the people who came to destroy it. The Night Battles (1966) is built almost entirely from Inquisition trial transcripts — testimony given under questioning, by people who had no idea their words would survive them. He read those records not for what the inquisitors concluded but for what the accused kept insisting, against the leading questions, about what they did and why.

02How a knower becomes a witch

The drama of the transcripts is a slow collision. The benandanti arrived saying they fought witches. The Inquisition had a category for night-flight, spirit-battle, and ecstasy, and it was not "protector." It was "witch." Over decades of trials, the questions pressed in one direction, and the answers gradually bent to meet them. What had been a harvest tradition was reinterpreted, interrogation by interrogation, into the very thing it claimed to oppose.

This is not a metaphor for enclosure. It is enclosure, caught on the page: a body of folk knowledge being overwritten by an institution with the power to define what it was. The benandanti did not change what they did. The frame around them changed, until the word for them became the word for their enemy.

03A substrate beneath the sabbath

Ginzburg's later work widened the case. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (1989, English 1991) argues that beneath the European image of the witches' sabbath lies a far older substrate — fragments of shamanic cults, ecstatic journeys, spirit-battles for fertility, surfacing across Europe in forms the benandanti were only one local instance of. The sabbath the inquisitors described was not invented from nothing. It was assembled, in part, out of real practices the persecution did not understand and could not leave standing.

A parallel in this book

This is the same passage Eliade catalogued from the comparative distance — the archaic techniques of ecstasy, the spirit-journey as a structure that recurs across cultures. Where Eliade saw the structure from above, Ginzburg found one of its last living instances in a courtroom, at the moment it was being extinguished. The container Eliade said our world has "forgotten how to hold" is here being actively pried out of people's hands.

04The witch as the enclosed knower

This is where Ginzburg meets Federici, and the two halves of the same event lock together. Federici names what the witch hunts did: they removed the women who held communal knowledge, autonomous land, the skills that let villages feed and heal themselves without the wage. Enclosure of the body, of the common, of the knower. Ginzburg shows what was inside the thing being removed — not superstition, not hysteria, but a living folk cosmology with its own coherence, which the Inquisition did not merely punish but rewrote.

For the commons

The witch was the enclosed knower. Federici shows the enclosure; Ginzburg shows the knowing. Put together, the witch hunt stops being a panic that reason eventually cured and becomes what it was: the violent overwriting of a body of common knowledge by an institution with the power to rename it. The harvest-protector was reclassified as the thing she protected against — and the knowledge went into the fire under the name her persecutors had given it.

05A different inheritance

It is worth marking, beside the Eliade profile, what Ginzburg carried into this work. His father was Leone Ginzburg — philologist, historian, co-founder of the Einaudi publishing house, an anti-fascist who was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944. His mother was the novelist Natalia Ginzburg.

Two historians of the sacred and the ecstatic, two inheritances. Eliade lent his prestige to a movement that wielded the holy as a weapon. Ginzburg came from a family that fascism murdered for refusing it. The structure they studied is the same; the lineages are not. The book holds both — the tool is two-faced, and so are the lives of those who handle it.