| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Franco Nardon. Benandanti e inquisitori nel Friuli del Seicento. Foreword by Andrea del Col. (Inquisizione e società, number 1.) Trieste, Italy: Edizioni Universitâ di Trieste. 1999. Pp. 254. L. 25,000.

This book by Franco Nardon offers a revisionist interpretation of the benandanti or "well-farers," a fertility cult devoted to fighting witches and protecting the crops that Carlo Ginzburg discovered and analyzed in his compelling Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, first published in Italian in 1966. 1

As Ginzburg tells it, the story of the benandanti casts its own spell. The inquisitor who first encountered this cult in the Friuli was baffled and perplexed. He probed to learn more about the practices of those "born with the caul" whose spirits, often in the form of a small animal, would leave their bodies four times a year (during the Ember days) to battle witches. The benandanti would carry fennel, the witches sorghum. If the well-farers prevailed, the crops would be protected. But, over time, the inquisitors imposed their own interpretation, gradually assimilating the benandanti, members of an ancient fertility cult, with witches and judging them guilty of the same diabolical practices. This story, well known to early modernists, is emblematic of a process of the presumed erasure of popular traditions by the growing power of elites in Counter-Reformation Europe. . . .

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