This is not Ginzburgs only book on Shamanism. He also covers the subject in his book "Ecstasies". Nonetheless, this is a superb book. In it, he deals with a group of men in northern Italy who believed that their souls left their bodies while they slept to do battle with malignant forces. However, he does not view this as either a hard-line skeptic or a muddle headed New Ager. He approaches it as a historian and treats it no different from any other subject, thus creating an unbiased account of what happened. And what he constucts is an account of shamanism and witch trials in a northern Italian village. This is a fascinating account, and certainly well worth the read. If you appreciate this book, then I strongly recommend you check out "Ecstasies", his other book on European Shamanism and the witch-hunts.

Witchcraft was the belief that there were people, principally women, who met at night in deserted spots to worship the Devil. There is no evidence that this ever happened, except perhaps in the 20th century, after women were misled by the books of Margaret Murray.

Ginzburg's subject is a group of men who dreamed that at night they would go to fight witches so that there would be a good harvest.

Highly recommended.

This book is goddamn outstanding! You really see the simple power and depth behind these poor Northern Italian farmers who believed their souls left their bodies in ecstasy to fly through the night to do battle with life-destroying witches on their own grounds! At the very height and heat of Christendom, their beats an ancient, pagan heart. All who wish to know this hidden history, I definitely recommend this!

Yes, Ginzburg actually contends that the so-called "witches" of old Europe were in fact remanents of the old Shamanic cultures of Europe, and he does make an excellent arguement for it. I will admit, I do agree with him on some points. Shamanism is a universal phenomena, and yet (with the notable exception of the Lapps in Scandinavia and a few scattered myths and legends like Orpheus and Odin) Shamanism seems to have all but been absent in Europe, and this has always puzzled me. Certainly, had Shamanism been widespread in Europe, it probably would have survived well into the Christian era, just as it has in other parts of the world. As such, Ginzburg may be right on the money about the witch hunts and such. Regardless of your thoughts on the subject, this remains an excellent book. And if you like it, he has another book, entitled "Night Battles" about a community of Shaman in northern Italy.

Ginzburg is one of the first historians who has come forward with a convincing theory that there may well have been pagan sects during the Middle Ages that were the focus of persecutions and regionalized hunts and crazes. This is a fascinating analysis of the legendary Witchs' Sabbath and its mythical foundations, as well as a convincing theory of what led localities to persecute those suspected of being witches.

In the introduction to this touching collection of several influential writers, William Weaver illustrates with photographic precision the personalities and circumstances that defined the Rome of the postwar epoch. For anyone interested in contemporary Italian writing, Mr. Weaver's profound insight and vast personal knowledge of both Rome and its writers will be an enlightening experience. No other book offers the reader such a fascinating invitation into the lives and stories that were the lost, open city of postwar Rome.

Having read the reviews already listed here, I believe the one major facet of this book has been downplayed. Dr. Ginzburg's approach is to utilize and interesting story scraped from the otherwise monotonous and one-sides Inquisitorial records from the Roman Inquisition. What is most important about this book, is that it demonstrates a separation of culture, call it "high" culture and "low" or "peasant" culture. We follow the great thinkers of the past two millenia from grade school through graduate studies, never fully attempt to delve into a concurrently extant peasant "history of ideas." What Dr. Ginzburg has displayed through this fascinating yet sad tale is that the great thinkers we know of, i.e., Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, Galileo, etc., are a representation of a literate educated class which by no means excludes a secondary ideology which flourished mostly thorugh an oral culture. Dr. Ginzburg seeks merely to bring our attention to this fact and more or less demonstrate the wealth of knowledge and study that has yet to be done in light of the fact. Menochio merely highlights the existance of long standing ideas which otherwise would have been lost to history were it not for "high" society's interest in synchretism. This book is therefore an eye-opener to anyone who believes that the great thinkers speak for everyone and that only they should be reserved for study.

Carlo Ginzburg was one of the first historians to put into practice anthropological ideas about culture as a historically transmitted system of meaning. These ideas were developed by Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and ultimately, Michel Foucault. In using Menocchio, Ginzburg makes a statement about making history from the point of view of the excluded, the liminal characters of society. In this sense, Menocchio's story ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a reflection and a statement about the way Italian society was constructed in the 16th century. All this from the point of view of those upon whom power was imposed.

Ginzburg weaves a tale of a peasant who could read at the moment boot-legged books of the Reformation trickled 'cross the Tyrolean Alps. He was untrusting of church doctrine, and prefered to invent a vision of the cosmos that was more in tune with the laws and commandments of his world, a world of philosophy born of folk remedy. Ginzburg leads the reader through the labryinthine mind and life of a miller from the town of Fiuli, in the years of the late Renaissance, in Italy. Menocchio's life is reconstructed from original court documents. Ginzburg builds the life of a man,which is a brilliant description of one man's life that challenges the reader to touch the life of one man who lived long ago, and was eventually burned at the stake for his belief that the moon was made of cheese.

I read this book after reading The Cheese and the Worms and found only one essay of interest, the one of the title. There, Ginzburg argues that history cannot be studied profitably from the scientific (meaning Galilean, or mathematical physics) standpoint, there is inadequate empirical basis for it. Rather, the methods of art history and Sherlock Holmes (clues in small exceptional things, like a deformed fingernail) provide better results. I think he may have something here. For the opposite viewpoint, which in my opinion is wrong, see Buchannan's Ubiquity.

An immense pleasure! Carlo Ginsburg reminds us more than once that he is not an art historian, but an historian. As such, his approach to paintings such as Piero della Francesca's "Flagellation" which to our eyes are difficult if not unfathomable iconographically, is not bound to the orthodoxies of specialist methodology. If this sounds heady and dense, it is. This is not a book for the casual admirer of Renaissance painting because much of the suspense(and it is suspenseful) is reading the author's discrediting of other interpretations(these are often amusing), suggesting the roadmap he will take to circumvent the errors of the previous historians, then elegantly exhuming the necessary evidence and reasoning to produce-voila- a fresh, impressively founded exegisis before our very eyes. One marvels at the depth and breadth of cultural knowledge that is this historian's primary resource, and facility with archives. But there is another dimension to this book. As one reads, one understands that this is the work of contemporary humanist, and the source of his insights is perhaps this empathy, if not kinship with his subject, whether patron or artist.

This little book by Carlo Ginzburg is another J'accuse, Zola's powerful indictment of the "investigation" which framed Captain Dreyfus for the espionage he had not committed. The case Ginzburg exposes here is that of three Italian leftists accused of having commissioned (and committed) the murder of a notorious right-wing police investigator in 1972. As Ginzburg makes amply clear, the case at hand is extremely weak and the conviction of the three former leftists a clear miscarriage of justice. The case rests entirely on the plea bargaining representations of someone who in the 1970s had been a close comrade of the three men, and who claims to have been the getaway driver in the murder. Allegedly overcome by guilt, this man decided to tell all to the police, some twenty years after the murder and just a short while before the stature of limitations for the crime expired. Again, as Ginzburg ably shows, the testimony of the would-be driver is full of contradictions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and the court that convicted the three went to extreme lengths to discard reliable eyewitness accounts of the murder to accept the self-styled driver's version(s) of events. Unfortunately, the book is not especially reader-friendly. It requires close reading and would probably not appeal very much to someone not conversant with the intricacies of Italian politics and the Byzantine nature of the Italian legal system which can convict someone on clearly flimsy evidence. Such weknesses in the book are a shame, because the issues involved here are potentially of wide appeal. They are also of great relevance to readers interested in history, because of the issues of evidence and proof raised. Ginzburg is a famous historian who has justly earned a world reputation with pathbreaking books like THE NIGHT BATTLES (his first and, to my mind, his best) and THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS (both of which, incidentally, I strongly rtecommend). Those works are based on trial evidence from early modern Italian courts run by the Inquisition, and in the present work, Ginzburg shows the amazing similarity between the investigative procedures for establishing guilt used by the Inquisition more than three-hundred years ago and those used by the modern-day judges who convicted the three men accused of the 1972 murder. Still, THE JUDGE AND THE HISTORIAN makes no attempt to help a reader unfamiliar with the tortured history of Italian politics since the 1970s, and so will prove difficult (and worse, tedious) to all but the bravest. Yet a simple re-drafting could have made this a besteller and brought this case of injustice to world attention.