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

Interesting survey of the evolution of a complex of myths in Italy. Ginzburg attempts to show how the Church and Inquisition morphed an ancient agricultural folk cult into the traditional witches sabbath. I found myself thinking of this as a meeting of two Heideggerian 'worlds' where the Inquisitors, baffled by the seemingly contradictory "good witches" they encountered, tried to shoehorn the benandanti into the Church's closest conceptual analog i.e. witches, the devil, and the sabbath. Of course, the benandanti are the ones in direct opposition to the witches!