Letters

SIR: In his long review of my The Night Battles (LRB, 2 February) Anthony Pagden, having first praised me for my literary skills, goes on to criticise vigorously the ‘sometimes shaky nature of the arguments and assumptions’ which ‘underpin’ my ‘reconstructions’. Before examining each one of Pagden’s objections I should like to remind the reader that The Night Battles reconstructs the documented activities of a single sect active in Friuli in north-east Italy between about 1575 and 1675. The members of this sect, who called themselves benandanti (‘good walkers’), declared to the Inquisitors that they had been born with the caul and that they met ‘in the spirit’ four times a year, on the Ember Days, armed with stalks of fennel to fight for the fertility of the fields against witches and warlocks armed with sticks of sorghum. The Inquisitors tried to make them confess that they were simple witches and that they attended the diabolical sabbath (something which, until that moment, had not been mentioned in Inquisitorial trials in Friuli). After an initial resistance the benandanti began to introduce into their accounts the elements suggested to them by their Inquisitors. By about 1600 their transformation into witches had been completed.

1. Pagden claims that my idea that the beliefs of the benandanti were transformed in response to the demands of the Inquisitors is mistaken (‘there would seem … to be a lot wrong with this idea’), because it implies the existence of a ‘true sect’ whose members were in a position to transmit information from one generation to another and from one region to another. The benandanti, however, ‘except during the night battles themselves [do not] … seem to have thought of themselves as a group, much less as a sect with clearly prescribed rituals’. Pagden also claims that their beliefs were ‘simply too vague, too uncertain in the face of determined and precise questioning – and torture – to be subject to wholesale transformation’. What, in fact, emerges from these records is ‘a number of individual responses to a common, though varied experience’ – that of struggling for survival against highly skilled interrogators.

That the benandanti constituted a ‘very special sect’, given their ‘almost dream-like quality’, I had myself made clear (page 16). Its peculiarity consisted in the fact that the life of its members was conducted on two levels, one by day and the other by night: for, although rarely documented, the association of its members in everyday life was anything but non-existent. Take, for instance, the dialogue between Giambattista Tamburlino and Menichino da Latisana in which the first, an experienced benandante, explained to the second, who was still uninitiated (although not for long), the nature of the journey he was destined to undertake. ‘You will have to come anyway, one goes as though in a smoky haze, we do not go physically’ (page 79). Communications of this sort would have directed, and eventually come to modify, through a process of conditioning which we can imagine but whose substance escapes us, the nocturnal ecstasy of the benandanti and the rituals which they practised ‘in the spirit’ (see also the case discussed on pages 129-133). Accounts of the Inquisitorial trials which circulated among the benandanti advising them to exercise caution would have been influential in the same way: the female benandante Narda Peresut di Moruzzo, for instance, advised her client to take care lest she end up like Cappona di Cervignano, who had been tried at Udine for witchcraft (page 79).

This network of daytime contacts may not be sufficient to define the benandanti as a ‘true sect’, in Pagden’s sense, but it does explain how the pressures exerted by the Inquisitors could, little by little, be spread among the benandanti so as to alter the sense of their beliefs. The terms which Pagden uses to describe these beliefs – ‘vague’ and ‘uncertain’ – seem themselves to be thoroughly inappropriate. I cannot understand how a historian who is familiar with both anthropological studies and the history of religion can characterise as ‘vague’ the recourse to such a complex of specific elements as the fact of being born with the caul, the regular trances which this conferred, the night battles during the Ember Days, the use of fennel and sorghum as arms. As for their supposed ‘uncertainty’, it is clear that the benandanti’s description of their night battles began to slide in the direction of the diabolical sabbath almost half a century after the first trials known to us. Given the difference between the competing forces, half a century cannot be considered a negligible period of resistance. This claim presupposes, of course, the validity of the thesis which Pagden contests – namely, that one can speak of the transformation of the beliefs of the benandanti as a single prolonged phenomenon, rather than merely the sum of individual reactions. But to any one who considers the stages – usually at the beginning of a trial – by which the benandanti came to expound their beliefs, such a single and prolonged transformation must be indisputable.

In fact, while the culminating scene in the drama (the meeting between the Inquisitor and the benandante) follows more or less the same pattern, the initial scene takes on a quite different aspect with the passage of time. In other words, the trial does not always begin at the same point. Little by little, the benandanti came to identify themselves with the witches. One of the major interests, in my opinion, of this exceptional series of documents lies precisely in the way that it enables us to follow in detail the processes by which a belief transforms itself under pressure from outside forces. The ties between self-conscious modifications induced by force (psychological, not physical, because in these trials torture was present only as a latent threat), and modifications introduced at an unconscious level, throw light upon a series of phenomena which generally eludes us.

2. The attempt which I made in The Night Battles to link the beliefs of the benandanti with groups with similar beliefs in Central and Southern Europe seems to Pagden to be ‘even more dubious than the transformation thesis’. The connections which I proposed between Germanic and Baltic phenomena seem to him to be both ‘tenuous’ and at the same time obvious. Others, however, might find it surprising that Pagden seems to be willing to speak of analogous material, economic and religious conditions when referring to an area which includes Dalmatia, Switzerland, Bavaria and Livonia – apart of course from Friuli itself. Differences in geographical location, in environmental conditions, confessional adherence, modes of production, are all casually disposed of in the interest of a more than slightly dubious deterministic thesis. But when I see that the – in my view indisputable – connections between the descriptions of their night battles against the witches and warlocks provided by two benandanti from Cividale in 1575-1580 and those described a century later by Thiess the old werewolf from Livonia (pages 28-32) are described as ‘tenuous’, I can only wonder if what separates me from Pagden is really a radical difference over what is commonly described as ‘historical method’. I should at once add that this suspicion is mutual. ‘There is also,’ Pagden writes, ‘something slightly worrying about the method Ginzburg occasionally uses to establish these links. On page 35 one Anna la Rossa, who claimed to be able to “see the dead", and to have learnt things from them she dared not tell to anyone lest she be beaten with stalks of sorghum, is linked, tentatively, with the benandanti although Anna never claimed to be one and the word was never mentioned at the trial. On page 41, however, the same Anna is referred to simply as “Anna la Rossa – one of the benandanti who claimed she could see the dead". And Anna’s presence among the benandanti, though it is not crucial to the argument, is nonetheless used to establish a link between them and the followers of the dame Abonde of the Roman de la Rose. This is not an accusation of wilful distortion,’ he concludes, but rather an abuse of the historical imagination, an indispensable tool of the social historian compelled to make use of fragmentary information.

Well then, let us see. On page 35 I wrote: ‘It was not stated that Anna la Rossa was a benandante, in fact the word was not even mentioned.’ On page 36, after having listed the facts which emerged from her trial, I commented: ‘these are scattered elements which still do not constitute a coherent pattern.’ Then on page 37 I claimed that ‘the connection between the benandanti and those who, like Anna la Rossa, claimed to see the dead emerges more clearly’ because of the trial of a certain Aquilina from which it appeared that those born with the caul were gifted with the power to see the dead. On page 38 I found an ‘explicit confirmation of a link which had been suggested hypothetically’ in a statement made by a certain Caterina la Guercia (‘I am not one of the benandanti, but my deceased husband was; he used to go in procession with the dead’). At this point I dared to define Anna la Rossa as ‘one of the benandanti who could see the dead’.

In his review Pagden has simply ignored the stages in the argument between pages 35 and 41. This is not an accusation of ‘wilful distortion’. I simply think that he must have been distracted or in a hurry when he read my book. Anyone can see, in fact, that the claim ‘Anna la Rossa is a benandante’ explicitly assumes the integration of a series of documents – the trial of Aquilina, the trial of Caterina la Quercia – which establishes other convergent links: ‘he who is born with the caul can see the dead,’ ‘who goes in procession with them is a benandante’, and so on. If, when I wrote The Night Battles, I had been able to read Wittgenstein’s notes (published posthumously in 1967) on The Golden Bough, I could have emphasised the need in establishing morphological connections to find ‘intermediate links’ (Zwischenglieder). The connections, which to Pagden seem ‘tenuous’ – between, for instance, the benandanti and those who could see the ‘Furious horde’ or participated in Diana’s ride – are based on intermediate links of this kind.

3. What was the meaning and importance of the benandanti and their beliefs? Curiously, Pagden ignores my hypothesis whereby the Friulian experience can be seen as an example common throughout Europe of the way in which judges and Inquisitors diffused and superimposed upon heterogeneous cultural strata a stereotype of the sabbath. What Pagden denies, on the basis of the socially marginal position of the benandanti, is the possibility of linking their trances with ‘the force of the community’s traditions, the hopes and needs tied to the life of the society’. The available documentation does not, in fact, provide any clear indication as to the marginality or otherwise of the benandanti. It is true that, as Pagden says, one witness said of one female benandante: ‘some of us think that she is crazy.’ But this is only an isolated claim. Of Pagden’s other assertions, the first (‘few seem to have had an established place in the community’) seems to me undemonstrable, while the second (‘most were poor, some destitute or women afflicted by domestic problems’) certainly does not describe a condition of marginality. As for the benandanti’s increasing cultural marginalisation, this was clearly the result of the behaviour of the Inquisitors. But the problem, as Pagden himself ends by recognising, is different. The beliefs of the benandanti, he says, ‘did indeed articulate the community’s traditions by providing the “common man" with an explanation – or explanations – for precisely those things for which his priests could offer none he could understand, and usually none at all beyond the simple injunction to accept the Church’s rulings and believe’. They were, in fact, ‘surely grounded somewhere in a set of “absolute presuppositions" about precisely such matters as the crucial relationship between body and soul, between this world and the next, between past and present, the living and the dead’. Not bad for beliefs which have been defined as ‘vague’ and ‘uncertain’.

Pagden says that the beliefs of the benandanti ‘are couched in a language the historian has still to learn how to read’. Here I agree with him. My attempts at interpretation are far from having exhausted the richness of the documentation, which today, after twenty years, seems to me more unsettling than ever. A deeper analysis might lead above all to an enrichment of the comparative structure in which the benandanti may be located. I have been working in this direction for some time and on the basis of such an inquiry I think that it will be possible to provide an answer to the question Pagden raises about the significance of these beliefs. To this end, however, I think that it should be stressed that any inquiry into meaning cannot be limited exclusively to conscious meaning. From the beginning to the end of The Night Battles I have insisted on the importance of the benandanti’s self-conscious attitude towards their beliefs; and I stressed, in contrast to any notion of ‘collective mentality’, the variety of individual reactions to be found in these documents. But there does exist a stratum of unself-conscious meanings and it is the historian’s task to analyse them. By what means? Any answer would carry me too far from my present purpose. I would like to say only that neither the concept of a ‘collective mentality’ nor that of the ‘collective unconscious’ would be among them. Nevertheless the legitimacy of such an inquiry may be reaffirmed in opposition to claims such as ‘Yet it is surely wrong to suppose that even the most “ordinary" men and women were merely the unthinking mouthpieces of a mind-set not of their own making …’ These words strike me as being popularist and wrong. For the benandanti and their losing struggle against the Inquisitors I have shown the greatest respect and sympathy – sentiments which I did my best to communicate to the readers of my book. But I truly do not see why it is insulting to suppose that their beliefs constitute a ‘mind-set not of their own making’. Does our relationship with language, for instance, not seem like that to all of us? This does not, of course, exclude the possibility of innovation, transformation, or of individual articulation of the complex cultural heritage of which each one of us is a repository.

SIR: May I point to the confusion created by Dr Charles Hope in his review of The Eloquence of Symbols, when he writes that ‘the articles republished were apparently selected by Wind himself before he died,’ and makes erroneous claims on the basis of this statement (LRB, 15 March). The final choice was, in fact, the editor’s, made well after my husband’s death, in consultation with me, his literary executor, and with the many scholars who wished to emphasise the wide range of his interests. As stated in the preface to The Eloquence of Symbols, Edgar Wind himself ‘never carried the project beyond its early phases’.

Also mentioned in the preface are the Michelangelo papers, as being ‘of necessity’ excluded from the present volume because of their bulk – not, as your reviewer alleges, because their author lost confidence in them. His last years were almost entirely devoted to these studies on Michelangelo’s theological sources, which he always conceived of as a separate book, and it is my intention to follow his wishes and publish them as the third volume of his selected papers.

One final point. On the basis of erroneous evidence, Dr Hope finds it hard to resist the conclusion that my husband’s review of Sir Ernst Gombrich’s biography of Warburg was inspired by ‘personal animus’. Sir Ernst now cites (Letters, 5 April) the entire text of an appreciative letter from my husband about his memorial address for the Warburg centenary in Hamburg. I am at a loss to understand the relevance of this letter. Is it suggested that it committed the author to an equal approval of all Sir Ernst’s subsequent writings on Warburg? My husband greatly admired the address (13 pp.); he was gravely disappointed by the biography (375 pp.), finding the impression conveyed there very different: in each case he spoke as he found. Had it been possible – as it then was not – he would certainly have put his name to the review.

SIR: Sylvia Clayton’s review of the biography of Lord Bernstein by Caroline Moorehead (LRB, 1 March) includes a statement that the Imperial War Museum holds six reels of ‘an unforgettable documentary’ about the concentration camps, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The real facts are that a project of this kind was begun and never completed, probably because the British Government at the time felt that the influence of such a film might turn out to be counter-productive when it became their aim to move towards the post-war reconstruction of Germany. There are five (not six) reels amongst the Imperial War Museum’s considerable collection of concentration-camp film: they are an edited assembly, without sound except for some very small sections, which would have been the basic material for this film.

The biography seems to have created a misconception that Hitchcock directed the actual shooting of the film. This is not so: the camps had been liberated in April 1945, when they were visited by British, American and Russian Army film units, and Hitchcock only arrived in London at the end of June, for about a month. There is no doubt that he made a number of suggestions for the completion of the film, but in no sense is it correct to say that there has been a hidden Hitchcock documentary at the Imperial War Museum. The record film on which it would have been based has been available for research and use, with discretion, for many years. Some of it was seen, for instance, in the World at War programme ‘Genocide’, recently retransmitted on Channel 4.

SIR: I would like to take issue with Frank Kermode’s review of recent work in Biblical scholarship (LRB, 2 February). He sets up a dichotomy between the historians, who investigate the books of the Bible in order to gain ‘access … to real events and persons’ and ‘the pre-historical interpreters’, anthropologists, structuralists, and others, who investigate ‘the patterned structures underlying the narrative transformations’. Among those who belong to the latter camp is, it seems, St Augustine, who knew (along with Edmund Leach) that ‘the feeding stories work like parables.’ St Augustine certainly belongs in the other camp, because, even though he did practise symbolic, allegorical exegesis, he thought that it should be practised on the events that the text depicts, rather than the text itself: it was therefore necessary, before investigating the allegories, to find out all about the ‘real events and persons’ that the text refers to. St Jerome had a similar position. This means that, even though – as Frank Kermode points out – the technical methods of historical scholarship have a ‘relatively brief history’, the interest which these methods serve – that is, an interest in real events and persons – has a far longer one.

SIR: I have been commissioned by Houghton Mifflin and Hamish Hamilton to write a book about Nora, the wife of James Joyce, and about the Joyce marriage. I would be grateful to hear from anyone who has memories of Mrs Joyce or can suggest references to her other than those in well-known studies of the period and Richard Ellmann’s magnificent biography of Joyce.