Night Battles
Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg’s Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries is based on Catholic archives he discovered in northern Italy in the 1960s. These capture a fascinating, otherwise overlooked aspect of the Inquisition: its investigation in the late 1500s of the benandanti (literally, “good doers” or “good walkers”), a group of peasants near Venice who believed they were called by God to do battle against witches in order to protect the community’s crops and livestock. But the ancient rural beliefs their quest represented conflicted with the hierarchy and doctrines of the urban church, which sought to curtail their witch-hunting. Ginzburg gives this tale of the republic of Venice in conflict with the church of Rome and of religious ecstasy verging on the erotic considerable lyricism and poetry.
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But Donald Gecewicz’s adaptation for Live Bait, directed by Susan Leigh, offers only the bare bones of this conflict, not the vibrancy and passion that lie behind it. Gecewicz provides the gist of the story but tries to cram too many historical threads into the script, and Leigh’s stodgy direction fails to ignite the material or make the conflicts vital.
A subplot–Felice’s power struggle with the Venetian prelate (Andrew Dannhorn)–fails to help us understand why controlling the benandanti mattered so much to Rome. And though the benandanti were dealt with much more mercifully than many other victims of the Inquisition–no torture was used against them–the script doesn’t tell us whether that was a function of Franciscan practice or of the Venetian church protecting its flock from Rome’s worst excesses.
