Quotes from Carlo Ginzburg

As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities—a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty.

We can readily see the function of nature, how it reconciles discordant things in such a fashion that it reduces all the differences to unity and combines them into one body and one substance: and also it combines them in plants and in seeds, and by the joining of male and female engenders beings according to the natural course.' — Fioretto della Bibbia

In the fighting that we do, one time we fight over the wheat and all the other grains, another time over the livestock, and at other times over the vineyards. And so, on four occasions we fight over all the fruits of the earth and for those things won by the benandanti that year there is abundance.' Thus, at the core of the nocturnal gatherings of the benandanti we see a fertility rite emerging that is precisely patterned on the principal events of the agricultural year.

It was the encounter between the printed page and the oral culture, of which he was one embodiment, that led Menocchio to formulate -first for himsel, later for himself, later for his fellow villagers, and finally for the judges- the "opinions ... (that) came out of his head.

Gli storici, scrisse Aristotele (Poetica, 51 b) parlano di quello che è stato (del vero), i poeti parlano di quello che avrebbe potuto essere (del possibile). Ma naturalmente il vero è un punto d'arrivo, non un punto di partenza. Gli storici (e, in modo diverso, i poeti) fanno per mestiere qualcosa che è parte della vita di tutti: districare l'intreccio di vero, falso, finto che è la trama del nostro stare al mondo.

of 'base-born old folk or ignorant and simple people, vulgar rustics', or of women

Thus, the mysterious journeys by women during the nights of the Ember seasons was an ancient motif and not limited to the Friuli. Moreover, it always seemed to be closely connected to the myth of the nocturnal travels of the band of women led by Abundia-Satia-Diana-Perchta, and thus also to that of the 'Wild Hunt' or 'Furious Horde'.

At other times the children discerned in the water of the vase a figure which Giuliano recognized as the 'mistress of the game', (a designation used alternately for Diana and Herodias) who 'clothed in black, with a chin to her stomach', appeared before Giuliano himself, saying she was ready to reveal to him 'the properties of herbs and the nature of animals