The Night Battles is a text which explores pre-enlightenment Europe. It offers an account, taken from verbatim reports from the day, of a curious sect, (if you like), known as the benandanti. These were ordinary men and women who ganged together in order to fight witches, (using fennel stalks, among other things), in order to protect their crops. The book reveals a world where evil spirits are understood to be part of everyday life, where the battle between good and evil is one that is ongoing and tangible. Ginzburg traces how, over the centuries, the benandanti themselves came to be regarded as witches, by the church, in spite of the fact that they claimed to be fighting the said witches. Gradually, the way in which the world thinks, or shapes its consciousness, shifted, so that the benandanti went from being seen as a positive force, to being indistinguishable from those they were fighting, to becoming, by the mid 17th century, an irrelevance, a more-or-less forgotten whisper of a forgotten Europe.
It’s not a straightforward read: this is a scholarly work of history which excavates a lost world pedantically. Yet, underneath the text, there’s the suspicion that what really interests Ginzburg (along with, perhaps, Foucault) is the way in which the human consciousness evolves and develops, incorporating and then shedding world-views, suggesting that the basis upon which the apparent fundamentals of our societies are established is always shifting. That which is solid melts into thin air, as Prospero, who would appear to have many of the qualities of a benandanti, observed.
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