Gendering the Extended Family of

Ginzburg’s Benandanti
WILLIAM MONTER
Northwestern University (Emeritus)

In the forty years since Carlo Ginzburg surprised historians with evidence
that a set of archaic beliefs about supernatural nocturnal battles waged by
specially endowed people was flourishing in Italy’s northeastern corner in
the late sixteenth century, subsequent research has enormously extended our
information about their shamanstic analogs into widely scattered corners of
the European world and far beyond. Since 1989, Ginzburg himself has con-
tributed to this extension and confusion by stretching his ideas from the Bena-
danti to the breaking point with his Storia notturna.1 If the dust jacket to the
1991 English translation extols Ginzburg’s ‘‘compelling evidence of a hidden
shamanistic culture that flourished across the continent for thousands of
years,’’ one searches its index in vain for specific references to ‘‘shamanism.’’
Nevertheless, by enormously extending the habitats of loosely related crypto-
shamans both geographically and chronologically, Ginzburg has supplanted
Mircea Eliade as an obligatory reference for European historians who discuss
shamans.
At present, the historiography on shamanism seems littered with outdated
general theories and awash in cultural relativism. While both anthropologists
and historians express dissatisfaction with Eliade’s classical definition of 1951,
uninformed by direct contact with shamans, as an invention that artificially
synthesizes practices (including drumming, trances, spirit communication,
and healing) that also play significant roles in nonshamanic contexts, both
also express dismay at its misappropriation by contemporary Western self-

1. Ginzburg, I Benandanti: Ricerche sulla stregoneria e sui culti agrari tra Cinquecento
e Seicento (Turin, 1966); Ginzburg, Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (Turin,
1989).

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Winter 2006)

Copyright 䉷 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
 Monter  Gendering the Extended Family of Ginzburg’s Benandanti 223

styled shamans, which misrepresent indigenous practices in ways that rein-

force subtly racist ideas of ‘‘noble savages.’’2
The most important recent refinement of the concept of shamanism by a
western European historian is Wolfgang Behringer’s masterful analysis of the
ecstatic visions of an Alpine herdsman who was savagely tortured and burned
for witchcraft at almost the same moment that Ginzburg’s Friulian inquisitors
first encountered benandanti.3 Behringer argues that Chonrad Stoeckhlin ‘‘fits
perfectly’’ with the definition of shamans employed by Russian anthropolo-
gists and even Eliade, who saw ecstasy and travel to the underworld as the
heart of the phenomenon. But he also opposes Ginzburg’s ‘‘attempt to dem-
onstrate the continuity of secret cults back into Eurasian prehistory’’ by ar-
guing that Stoeckhlin’s animistic notions, like those of Siberian shamans, had
been ‘‘inseparably mixed . . . with elements from high religions,’’ which
however, ‘‘only partially accommodated the needs of the population.’’4 Beh-
ringer goes on to examine other widespread European evidence suggesting
elements of ecstatic shamanism, both earlier and later, but warns that they
invariably present problems of transmission. ‘‘It is fairly clear,’’ he asserts,
‘‘that no pre-Christian cults survived the thousand years of Christian accul-
turation.’’5 At the same time, he insists that these surviving mythical frag-
ments, broken apart and partially extinguished, nevertheless reemerged in
diverse new forms. Behringer’s following section, entitled (in both the Ger-
man and English versions) bricolage,6 offers Levi-Straussian clues to these un-
predictable recombinations. Behringer notes that Stoeckhlin set off a witch
hunt in which (although a few other men did turn up among the suspects)
he was the only man to be executed. His research has both refined our image
of European crypto-shamans and connected them directly to outbreaks of
witch-hunting.
Meanwhile, local research on Ginzburg’s original benandanti has down-
played their shamanistic elements while fitting them more closely into a bet-

2. Alice Kehoe’s Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical

Thinking (London, 2000), concludes that shamanistic expressions resist generalization
into a global religion.
3. Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms
of the Night, trans. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville, Va., 1996). The word ‘‘shaman’’ is
absent from the original German title (Chonrad Stoeckhlin und die Nachtschar: Eine
Geschichte aus frühen Neuzeit [Munich, 1994]), which however contains a section (pp.
151–54) entitled ‘‘Schamanismus.’’
4. Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 143.
5. Ibid., 145.
6. Ibid., 146–51.
224 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2006

ter-known historical category, well represented in all types of inquisitorial

records, by redefining them primarily as magical healers.7 However, neither
investigation paid much attention to the gendering of benandanti, who appear
to reverse the sex-linked but not sex-specific aspects of the ordinary and
maleficent witches against whom many of their activities were directed. Since
the most important criterion for becoming a benandante was being born with
a caul, one could assume a priori that this was an ‘‘equal-opportunity’’ trait.
Forty years ago, it is not surprising that the idea of separating the benandanti
into men and women seems not to have occurred to Ginzburg, although his
earliest examples were men, while some later examples were women. We
now know that altogether, eighty-five people were denounced to the Holy
Office as benandanti in inquisitorial sources. However, few of them were tried
and only a handful received formal sentences, beginning with two men in
1581 and ending with two more men in 1698–1705; between them came
six men and six women from 1585 to 1662.8 In the seventeenth century, the
introduction of the witches’ sabbath into Friulian popular culture produced
a large number of mostly-female defendants charged with diabolical witch-
craft (110 women against 20 men); meanwhile, during the period 1611–70,
men were overwhelmingly accused as benandanti (48 against 4 women).9
Although elements of magical healing appear in many definitions of sha-
mans, research on shamanism and research on magical healers has generally
been conducted in mutual isolation, and neither has spent much effort invest-
igating gender. However, Friuli is one of the few European regions for which
we possess a gendered breakdown of accused magical healers; here, overall,
women comprise about 55 percent of approximately two hundred suspects
denounced to the Roman Inquisition. If we count people labeled as benan-
danti as a subgroup of magical healers and add them, the total number of
accused magical healers in Friuli rises to about 250; and because benandanti
were predominantly male, men now comprise fully half of them.
One frequently finds large numbers of magical healers in early modern
Europe with no trace of shamanism: this certainly applies to Normandy,
whose known healers were predominantly male. Behringer’s Alpine German
herdsman was apparently never asked if he could cure witchcraft, but Nor-

7. See Franco Nardon, Benandanti e inquisiti nel Friuli del seicento (Trieste, 1999),
chap. 3 (139–68), summarized in Richard M. Golden, ed., Encyclopedia of Witchcraft:
The Western Tradition, 4 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2006), 1:108–9.
8. Table in Nardon, Benandanti, 138. The 1619 sentence was also the only one
recorded at Venice rather than Udine.
9. Ibid., 145.
 Monter  Gendering the Extended Family of Ginzburg’s Benandanti 225

mandy’s herdsmen, like its blacksmiths, not infrequently employed illicitly

magical techniques for either healing animals in their care or protecting
smaller animals from predators. On the other hand, one rarely finds elements
of shamanism in Europe without traces of magical healing. Overlaps certainly
exist outside the Friulian benandanti. For example, an old Sami shaman, inter-
rogated by Norwegian authorities in 1692, began by boasting to them that
‘‘he could, with the aid of the gods, remove a spell and reverse its power,’’
sending it back against the person who had cast it.10
With Ginzburg’s benandanti now relocated among traditional Europe’s
countless magical healers, Scandinavia seems to be a promising region for
comparative research on possible links among vestigial shamanistic bricolage,
magical healing, and accusations of witchcraft. For one thing, it broadens the
confessional base. While both Behringer’s Alpine herdsman and Ginzburg’s
benandanti had accommodated to post-Tridentine Catholicism in varying de-
grees, early modern Scandinavia was Europe’s most solidly Protestant region:
like his interrogators, the old Laplander of 1692 was officially Lutheran. Of
course, the first shaman recorded by western Europeans, in northwestern
Russia on New Year’s Day 1557, had never heard of either Luther or the
Council of Trent.
‘‘Scandinavia’’ is merely a geographical construct with no uniform policy
toward its surviving shamans in the far north. Swedish authorities apparently
developed a patronizing quasi-ethnographic approach to them, depicting
them beating their drums and falling into trances in works like Scheffer’s
Lapponia (1674), but rarely arresting them. It is therefore unsurprising that
crypto-shamanistic practices have apparently left no legal traces in Swedish-
ruled Finland, where the term for ‘‘witch’’ (noita) originally referred to one
who employed the technique of falling into a trance or an ecstasy ending in
fainting. Although situated between two famous shamanistic centers (north-
ern Muscovy and Lapland), Finland’s traditional shamans seem in an ad-
vanced state of cultural disintegration by the time recorded witch trials began
here in the 1520s, apparently supplanted by professional diviners (intomies)
who employed neither drums nor trances. Most intomie were men, although
some were women. Although intomies were very rarely charged with witch-
craft, men still comprised a majority of Finland’s eleven hundred known
accused witches. Their punishments, like those of benandanti, seem relatively
mild. Over half were acquitted; lower courts may have passed as many as
150 death sentences, but Finland’s appellate court (created in 1623) rarely

10. Rune Hagen, ‘‘Shamanism,’’ in Golden, Encyclopedia, 4:1030, drawing on his

article in Historisk Tidsskrift 81 (2002): 319–46.
226 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Winter 2006

confirmed them. The witches’ sabbath seems unknown except when Swe-
den’s great panic reached Finland’s bilingual western coast in the 1670s and
early 1680s.11
In contrast, Norway’s Danish governors adopted a severely disciplinarian
approach toward the magicians among their Sami subjects in the Arctic. To-
tally reversing the situation in northern Finland, ethnic Norwegian women
living in its northernmost province rank among the most intensely persecuted
groups anywhere in Europe, with over a hundred convictions and about
ninety deaths among barely three thousand inhabitants. Although comprising
barely one-fifth as many suspects, Finnmark’s twenty-seven native Sami con-
victed of practicing sorcery in the late seventeenth century probably comprise
the largest cluster of shamans anywhere in Protestant legal records. They
were rarely executed, but one Sami man was lynched during his trial by
another man.12
Concerning gender, anthropologists assure us that shamans are generally
but not invariably male. ‘‘All over Europe,’’ observes Rune Hagen, ‘‘most
shamans convicted of sorcery were men.’’13 Nevertheless, the most severe
punishment (public abjuration, three years imprisonment, perpetual exile)
ever given to a benandante by the Roman Inquisition went to a woman in
1619.14 In Ginzburg’s account, she functions as the start of his pivotal fourth
chapter on how inquisitors perceived benandanti as attending witches sabbaths
and thereby began redefining them as witches.15 At her interrogation, Maria
Panzone’s first recorded words were, ‘‘I believe that I have been called and
brought here to talk about the witches in this area,’’ and she immediately
named about fifteen of them. It is worth recalling that Behringer’s Alpine
German herdsman similarly entered the historical record after his identifica-
tion of a maleficent witch in his village through his ecstatic experiences led
quickly to his own arrest. We need some sharply focused empirical investiga-
tions in order to obtain a clearer notion of exactly where and how mainly
(but not exclusively) male shamans impact the still-understudied gendering
of two closely related fields, witchcraft accusations and magical healing.

11. See Marko Nenonen, ‘‘Finland,’’ in Golden, Encyclopedia, 2:373–77; addi-

tional details available on his website: www.chronicon.com/noita.
12. Rune Hagen, ‘‘The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Finnmark,’’ in Acta Borealia
1 (1999): 43–62.
13. Quoted from Hagen in Golden, Encyclopedia, 4:1030–31.
14. Nardon, Benandanti, 138 (table). She was also the only one sentenced at Venice
rather than Udine.
15. Compare Ginzburg’s discussion in The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian
Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Balti-
more, 1983), 99–108.