Name: The Night Battles (Rle Witchcraft): Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Price: 181.12 NZD
Availability: InStock
Author: Carlo Ginzburg
ISBN: 9781138997998

portada The Night Battles (Rle Witchcraft): Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

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

Type

Physical Book

Author

Carlo Ginzburg

Publisher

Routledge

Language

English

Pages

240

Format

Paperback

ISBN13

9781138997998

Edition No.

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

Carlo Ginzburg (Author) · Routledge · Paperback

New Book Imported to New Zealand

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NZ$ 181.12

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NZ$ 181.12

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Synopsis "The Night Battles (Rle Witchcraft): Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries"

Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives, the book recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centred on the benandanti. These men and women regarded themselves as professional anti-witches, who (in dream-like states) apparently fought ritual battles against witches and wizards, to protect their villages and harvests. If they won, the harvest would be good, if they lost, there would be famine. The inquisitors tried to fit them into their pre-existing images of the witches' sabbat. The result of this cultural clash which lasted over a century, was the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into their enemies - the witches. Carlo Ginzburg shows clearly how this transformation of the popular notion of witchcraft was manipulated by the Inquisitors, and disseminated all over Europe and even to the New World. The peasants' fragmented and confused testimony reaches us with great immediacy, enabling us to identify a level of popular belief which constitutes a valuable witness for the reconstruction of the peasant way of thinking of this age.

Carlo Ginzburg

(Author)

View Author's Page

He holds a PhD in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Pisa. An original historian, sometimes provocative, he has tried to demonstrate the limitations of certain aspects of traditional historical methodology and has established himself as one of the main representatives of the so-called "microhistory", of which The Cheese and the Worms (1976) is one of the most complete examples.

He has taught at the universities of Bologna, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and California, and his works, which include The Night Battles, The Clues about Piero, The Night History, and Wooden Eyes, have been translated into about twenty languages.

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