>Here is a weird coincidence: Last week I read Italian historian Carlo
>Ginzburg's The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the
>Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries for my Early Modern Europe
>course.

Oh man, the benandanti were awesome. People have been mining them for use in fiction for ages; Guy Gavriel Kay, of "I helped put together the Silmarillion" fame filed the numbers off of them and has used them in a number of his books, most notably Tigana and a little bit in Ysabel.

I'll have to check out that Ginzburg, as I've not actually ever read a proper scholarly treatment of them.

-Merc
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