For the past half century Carlo Ginzburg has been one of the most highly esteemed historians of early modern Europe, and his Storia Notturna, published in 1989 and later translated into English as Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, has undoubtedly been his most controversial book. In that provocative study, Ginzburg argued that the descriptions of the nocturnal gatherings of devil-worshipping witches were not simply the products of the imaginations of Inquisitors who elicited, through torture, confessions from those accused of witchcraft. Rather, ideas of the sabbath reputedly grew out of a deeply rooted hidden culture of shamanism that had persisted in many parts of Europe for thousands of years. To varying degrees, the fourteen essays in this collection are all inspired by that book and are intended to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of its publication.

The contributions to this volume, which include one by Ginzburg himself, come from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. Several are heavily theoretical, and they are definitely geared more to intellectual historians and literary scholars than to historians of witchcraft. In the introduction, Cora Presezzi discusses the degree to which Storia Notturna grew out of Ginzburg's first book, Night Battles, a theme that is repeated in several chapters. In Night Battles, Ginzburg maintained that the benandanti, who purportedly went out in spirit to do battle to ensure bountiful harvests, were vestiges of a pre-Christian pagan fertility cult and had much in common with shamans. In his own contribution to this volume, Ginzburg highlights again the similarities between historians, on the one hand, and anthropologists and folklorists, on the other, noting that both employ etic research (from outside the group under study) while endeavoring to uncover emic answers (from the perspective of that group). Alessandro Catastini offers an interesting study showing numerous parallels between shamans and prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Describing Jesus as “the shaman of shamans,” Gaetano Lettieri finds features of the witches’ sabbath in the book of Revelation, while Presezzi examines writings from late antiquity that depict the Samaritan Simon (Acts 8:9–24) as a magician who wielded demonic power and was a symbol of the Antichrist.

Andrea Annese analyzes a sermon by Nicholas of Cusa about two elderly women who made offerings to and touched the hand of Richella. Ginzburg discussed this sermon in Ecstasies, and Annese observes that while Cusa interpreted this as meaning the women were sealing a pact with the devil through a handshake, Ginzburg equated Richella with Diana, a maternal goddess of fertility. A very different approach is found in the chapter by Margherita Mantovani, who evaluates works by the twentieth-century Cabala scholar, Gerschom Scholem, who looked at werewolves, Lilit the night creature (Isaiah 34:14), and Hebrew magic. The poet Antoine Artaud (1896–1948) is the subject of Raffaella Cavallaro's contribution. This Frenchman spent several years in a psychiatric institution about which he bitterly complained, and Cavallaro finds explicit references to the sabbath in the poetry of Artaud, whom she likens to a shaman. Sergio Botta considers the dialogue between Ginzburg and Mircea Eliade, who helped generate scholarly interest in shamanism, especially through his book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. The last essay is an interesting and useful intellectual biography of Ginzburg, starting with his first article that was published when he was a twenty-one-year-old student. In that article on witchcraft and popular piety, the precocious scholar found that there was a certain negotiation between the Inquisitor and the accused; he was insisting already on the existence of an independent culture among the subaltern classes of early modern Europe, a claim he developed further in many subsequent publications.

The appendix is a list of Ginzburg's publications. Over sixty pages long, this bibliography shows not only how incredibly prolific he has been but also how wide-ranging—chronologically, geographically, and topically—his interests are. A number of chapters in this collection, like Ecstasies itself, can probably be characterized as being more provocative than persuasive. But there is something to be said for stimulating debate, and this is a fitting tribute to a most brilliant scholar.