In The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg does more than introduce his
readers to a novel group of supposed witches - the Benandanti, from
the northern Italian province of Friulia. He also invents and
deploys new and creative ways of tackling his source material that
allow him to move beyond their limitations. Witchcraft documents
are notoriously tricky sources - produced by elites with fixed
views, they are products of questioning designed to prove or
disprove guilt, rather than understand the subtleties of belief,
and are very often the products of torture. Ginzburg placed great
stress on variations in the evidence of the Benandanti over time to
reveal changing patterns of belief, and also focused on the concept
of 'reading against the text' - essentially looking as much at what
is absent from the record as at what is present in it, and
attempting to understand what the absences mean. His work not only
pioneered the creation of a new school of historical study -
'microhistory' - it is also a great example of the creative
thinking skills of connecting things together in an original way,
producing novel explanations for existing evidence, and redefining
an issue so as to see it in a new light.
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