Review Of The Night Battles By Carlo Ginzburg's Salem Possessed

Historiographical Review: Witchcraft

When studying witch craft over the past 500 years or so, authors have covered a lot of material. , the In Carlo Ginzburg’s work, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, he attempts to locate the origin of the ‘Benandanti’ belief and how it came to be in the Friuli region of Italy. The Benandanti were a group of people who believed that during the Ember Days of the year, after they fell asleep, that their souls left their bodies and went off to fight witches in the night. Ginzburg goes into great detail on the many trials associated with the benandanti during this time. In Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s work, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft,

The authors studied primary sources including church records, town history, and many undocumented local sources. Through the study of these sources, Boyer and Nissenbaum focus their attention of the people of Salem and how they interacted with one another. This demonstrates how the factions came to hate one another and how the class difference may have led to a more gruesome witch hunt. Ginzburg took a social history approach as well and studied mostly court documents from benandanti cases. These primary sources allowed Ginzburg to see the social differences between the inquisitors and the accused within the trial. In showing the inquisitors intelligence and manipulation of the peasants, it can be seen that the benandanti were not treated as much of a threat but still related to witch craft. Bostridge took a more cultural approach, studying the published works of many well-known authors and historians. These authors include John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Daniel Defoe and a few others. He used these primary sources to demonstrate the connection between political and religious beliefs and witch