The tregenda

Tuscany · The Po plain and the northern Apennines
Tuscany; a Florentine word attested from the fourteenth century. Pulci’s <em>Beca da Dicomano</em> places it in the Mugello

The tregenda — the fourteenth-century Tuscan word for the host that goes by night through the countryside «with lighted lamps», in the train of Diana and Herodias, and which whoever meets it takes for living people.

Variants and dialect names

tregenda, andare in tregenda (to go in tregenda); today «una tregenda» also means a storm or a tumult

What is told

Not a creature but a host: the company that goes by night through the countryside «with lighted lamps», and which whoever meets it takes for living people. The Vocabolario della Crusca of 1612 defines it thus: «An invention of simple people, and it is, according to them, a quantity of company that goes by night with lighted lamps. Lat. larvae». The oldest text is the Dominican Jacopo Passavanti, around 1354: the demons «take the likeness of men», go «by night in a troop», «and this in some places is called the Tregenda»; and some people, «especially women», say they go «by night in company with this same tregenda» and that the women of the troop are «Erodia» and «the ancient Diana, goddess of the Greeks». In Luigi Pulci’s Beca da Dicomano two peasants run into «so many little lights» and everyone flees, «for it was the Tregenda».

What it was forthe author’s reading

It is the Tuscan name, three centuries before the trials, for the belief that canon law had condemned as an illusion since the tenth century: the night flight in the train of Diana and Herodias of the Canon episcopi. Passavanti uses it in a manual of penance, that is, to tell confessors what they would hear told. That the tregenda goes «with lighted lamps» and is mistaken for the living brings it closer to the processions of the dead of the Alps and of Galicia than to the sabbath of the demonologists.

Where it is attested

Jacopo Passavanti, Lo specchio della vera penitenza, c. 1354, ed. F. L. Polidori, Florence, Le Monnier, 1863. Luigi Pulci, Morgante («E Trivigante forse la Tregenda») and La Beca da Dicomano; Il Pataffio («Benché stanotte sentì’ la tregenda»). Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, 1st ed. 1612, p. 906, and 4th ed. 1729-38, vol. V p. 151 («A name invented by simple people to denote some fabulous company that goes about by night with lighted lamps»). Etymology: Treccani, from Lat. *transienda, «passage», through a northern dialect; S. Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, vol. XXI.

Caution

The word is fourteenth-century, so it cannot come — as the Italian Wikipedia has it — from the surname of a seventeenth-century «Bulgarian sorceress»: the surname etymology is a fantasy. The sentence «the witches go in tregenda» attributed to Francesco da Buti is not in his commentary on Dante (ed. Giannini, Pisa, 1858-62): the passage with witches and tregenda is Passavanti’s. In Idelfonso Nieri’s Lucchese tales (1906) the word does not occur: in modern times it survives in the figurative sense and in dictionaries, not as a collected belief. The trial of Matteuccia of Todi (1428) revolves around the walnut tree of Benevento and does not name Diana: linking it to the tregenda is a generalisation to avoid.

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