>Minor point, & I'm not sure of my memory here -- but they burned
>heretics not witches in the "middle ages"; witch scares came later.
Not so minor. Ginzburg, who knows more about this than anyone, would argue that witch scares were part of the beginnings of modernism.
And heretics would be more likely exiled or otherwise marginalized than burned. Extermination is another modern development.
C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>Medieval Europe did not for the most part believe in witches. The
>great age of witch-fear was the Renaissance.
The inquisition created witches out of things people believed in the middle ages. Again, Ginzburg, who was instrumental in getting the Vatican to open inquisition archives for study, traces this process practically step-by-step in a number of books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benandanti
[...]
Historian Carlo Ginzburg posits a relationship between the Benandanti cult and the shamanism of the Baltic and Slavic cultures, a result of diffusion from a central Eurasian origin, possibly 6,000 years ago. This explains, according to him, the similarities between the Benandanti cult in the Friuli and a distant case in Livonia concerning a benevolent werewolf.
Indeed, in 1692 in Jurgenburg, Livonia, an area near the Baltic Sea, an old man named Theiss was tried for being a werewolf; his defense was that his spirit (and that of others) transformed into werewolves in order to fight demons and prevent them from stealing grain from the village.[1] Historian Carlo Ginzburg has shown that his arguments, and his denial of belonging to a Satanic cult, corresponded to those used by the Benandanti. On 10 October 1692, Theiss was sentenced to ten whip strikes on charges of superstition and idolatry.[3]
[edit] Treatment by the church
Between 1575 and 1675 the Benandanti were tried as heretics under the Roman Inquisition. The Inquisitors were perplexed by their stories, and struggled to reconcile them with the witches' Sabbath stereotype. Accused Benandanti tried to draw sharp distinctions between their actions and the actions of the malevolent witches, claiming that they fought "for the faith of Christ," and that only the Benandanti could save the people from the evils that the witches inflicted upon the villagers and their crops. One Inquisition account stated that
"On the one hand, they declared that they were opposed to witches and warlocks, and their evil designs and that they healed the victims of injurious deeds of witches, on the other, like their presumed adversaries, they attended mysterious nocturnal reunions (about which they could not utter a word under pain of being beaten) riding hares, cats, and other animals."
The Benandanti denied using the same practices as witches as well as going to Sabbath. They claimed that they did not use flying ointments, as did witches.
To avoid persecution, the Benandanti even began to accuse other villagers of witchcraft.[citation needed] This proved futile and only served to destroy their reputation in the village.[citation needed]
In the late 16th century, however, the Inquisitors were less concerned with witchcraft, and more concerned with heresy. The actions of the Benandanti were, according to the church, idolatrous, and therefore heretical. Slowly but surely, they were grouped with those targeted by the Inquisition; their opposition to witches notwithstanding, the Benandanti were made to "realize" after serious persuasive work that they themselves were indeed witches. By the 17th century they had almost completely died out. None of the trials ended in execution, however.
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9804c&L=archives&T=0&P=19671
Los Angeles Times April 17, 1998 Putting the Inquisition on Trial
Pope's push to 'purify' church leads to opening of records on persecution of heretics. Files may shed light on cases such as the miller who said life evolved the way cheese rots--and was burned at the stake. By RICHARD BOUDREAUX, MONTEREALE VALCELLINA, Italy--An odd little shrine to this village's favorite son stands in the cobblestoned piazza outside the Domenico Scandella Social Center. It depicts a wheel of cheese, minus one slice. Water trickles through tiny holes in the cheese. The water is supposed to represent worms.
There is no inscription, but any villager can explain: Domenico Scandella was a verbose and stubborn 16th century miller with dangerous ideas. In a dramatic showdown with his interrogators, he insisted that the universe evolved "just as cheese is made out of milk--and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels . . . and among [them] was God."
For this, Scandella was tortured and burned at the stake--one of tens of thousands of accused heretics, blasphemers, witches, false mystics, devil worshipers, Protestants and lapsed converts from Judaism ferreted out and condemned for their beliefs by the Roman Catholic tribunals of the Inquisition.
With its call for an "examination of conscience" on the eve of Christianity's third millennium, the Vatican has opened most of its central archives on the Roman Inquisition to give scholars a clearer picture of these persecutions in medieval and early modern Europe.
The opening is a windfall for historians--documents covering 3 1/2 centuries of heresy trials, theological controversies and book bannings--as well as a test of the growing body of revisionist thinking that the Inquisition wasn't so bad after all. The Inquisition and the church's Index of Forbidden Books have been studied extensively from records in Italian provincial archives, but until now much has remained hidden in secret Vatican files in Rome.
The miller's tale, first gleaned from provincial records 22 years ago, is a sample of the discoveries that may be in store. People here were stunned at first by the sudden unearthing of a scandalous, forgotten past, but eventually embraced the miller as a freethinking hero.
"We have overcome the years of aversion to this person," said Father Giacinto Biscontin, a Catholic priest with the unusual role of host to periodic church gatherings in a heretic's honor. "Now he is part of our history. We have no problem with that."
The reconciliation of this village with its past is, in a peculiar way, the kind of "purification" that Pope John Paul II is demanding of his entire flock. In the countdown to 2000, he has voiced regret over Catholics' role in the slave trade and their passivity during the Nazi slaughter of Jews. He has admitted that Galileo was wrongly censured by the Inquisition for asserting that Earth was not the center of the universe.
"The church," the pope says repeatedly, "has no fear of historical truth."
How Far to Go?
And yet, how far can the church go in "regretting" its own thought police? The Inquisition, after all, was authorized and led by previous popes to suppress heresy, and it still operates today under a different name--the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--occasionally excommunicating an outspoken priest or barring a rebel theologian from teaching.
An answer could come this fall when John Paul addresses a congress of eminent scholars summoned to the Vatican to put the Inquisition itself on trial. It will be the Holy See's first critical look at its record of repression.
Debate over the Inquisition's methods is nearly as old as the institution itself, which dates to 1233. Holy inquisitors for centuries had papal blessing to torture any accused heretic into confessing, and their cruelty became a standard by which later atrocities were measured.
The Spanish Inquisition, set up in 1478 by that nation's monarchs with a nod from Pope Sixtus IV, grew so zealous that the Vatican often condemned its excesses. Yet the Roman Inquisition, founded in 1542 as a Vatican agency to counter the Protestant Reformation, also sent heretics to die by garroting or to burn at the stake until 1727. Such horrors faded with the Enlightenment as popes and civil rulers grew more tolerant of religious dissent.
Many historians have softened toward the Inquisition in recent decades, arguing that uniformity of religious belief was needed to curb anarchy in medieval Europe. Their studies show that torture was used sparingly and that less than 2% of the Inquisition's known suspects were executed. Any defendant, they note, could have an attorney, a right not yet introduced in secular courts.
"It was actually a very progressive tribunal and dispensed a very high level of law in 16th century terms," said John Tedeschi, professor emeritus of church history at the University of Wisconsin.
The Vatican hopes that the Roman Inquisition's newly opened archives will bolster that view. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Inquisition's successor agency, said the opening reflects that body's "confidence in the face of any critical and serious investigation."
But some scholars say they believe that the decision was forced by the pope on a reluctant Vatican bureaucracy and must be read as a rebuke of the past.
"The Inquisition remains shameful, no doubt about that," said Carlo Ginzburg, one of Italy's premier historians and a professor of Italian Renaissance studies at UCLA. "The opening of the archives is deeply symbolic because it implies the idea of rejecting, turning the page of a long chapter of the church's history and trying to clean its image."
Ratzinger credits Ginzburg, a Jew and self-professed atheist, with provoking a decisive Vatican debate over the archives with his 1979 letter urging the pope to unlock them.
The Vatican reacted with characteristic speed: Twelve years later it began granting unpublicized access to selected scholars. Only in January did it announce the formal opening to "qualified researchers" of any religious belief who are affiliated with universities.