The witches of Valcamonica, 1518-1521

Lombardy · The Alpine arc
Valle Camonica (province of Brescia): Pisogne, Breno, Cemmo, Edolo, Rogno; the sabbath of the confessions is on Monte Tonale

The witches of Valcamonica, 1518-1521 — the trials that in the summer of 1518 sent some sixty people to the stake in Valle Camonica, documented day by day in the Diarii of Marin Sanudo and halted by the Council of Ten.

Variants and dialect names

strige and strigoni of Valcamonica in the Venetian letters; «the heresy of Valcamonica»

What is told

Not a creature: a series of trials, and they are documented day by day because the letters from Brescia were copied in Venice into the Diarii of Marin Sanudo. Summer 1518: the inquisitor has «some 70 witches of those valleys» burnt; a later letter specifies «in 4 places about 64 persons male and female», and the writer says he was «at Pisogne to see the above-mentioned witches burnt, number 8»; a tally in volume XXVI gives «in all number 66, videlicet 10 men, and 56 women». The confessions describe the gathering on the Tonale: «they have chosen a mountain, which is called Monte Tonale, on which they gather to fornicate and dance». On 31 July 1518 the Council of Ten halts the inquisitors’ activity; two years of tug-of-war follow with the nuncio Altobello Averoldi and with the bishop of Brescia Paolo Zane, until on 27 July 1521 the Council suspends the trials for good.

What it was forthe author’s reading

It is the case in which the witch-hunt reads as a conflict of jurisdiction: a local ecclesiastical court that tries and burns en masse, and a State that stops it not out of scepticism but because it sees its own authority violated — and suspects, in the confiscations, an economic interest. The Tonale as the place of the sabbath is the first Italian geography of the witches’ gathering fixed by contemporary sources, before and independently of the walnut tree of Benevento.

Where it is attested

Marin Sanudo, I Diarii, ed. Fulin, Stefani, Barozzi, Berchet, Allegri, Venice, Visentini, 1879-1903: vol. XXV, cols. 537-538, 541, 548, 573-574, 584-588, 609-610; vol. XXVI, cols. 55-56 and 411; vol. XXVIII, cols. 144, 273, 287; vol. XXIX, cols. 65, 211, 465, 506-507, 544; vol. XXX, cols. 13, 15, 44, 103, 252, 414; vol. XXXI, col. 353 (the columns of vols. XXV, XXVI and XXX were checked against the digitised text; the others follow S. Brambilla and A. Toffolo, Lo scontro sulla stregoneria in Valle Camonica tra la Repubblica di Venezia e il Papato nei documenti del 1518-1521, Circolo culturale Ghislandi, with the dates of the Council of Ten’s resolutions). Studies: Giuseppe Bonomo, Caccia alle streghe, Palermo, Palumbo, 1959; Massimo Prevideprato, Tu hai renegà la fede. Stregheria ed inquisizione in Valcamonica e nelle Prealpi lombarde dal XV al XVIII secolo, Brescia, Vannini, 1992.

Caution

The figures in circulation are larger than the sources. «Between 62 and 80 burnings, 20 of them men» is a bracket of recent historiography: Sanudo gives 64, 66 and «some 70», and the men are 10, not 20. «Two thousand five hundred witches» is not a count of victims: it is the estimate of adepts attributed to the chancellor of the Tonale in one letter. The «sixty burnings at Edolo and Pisogne in 1510» go back to Cesare Cocchetti, Brescia e sua provincia, 1859, p. 90: places and number coincide with 1518 and the date may be an error, but the 1510 datum on its own is undocumented. The sentences of 1485 at Edolo and 1505 at Cemmo are read everywhere but it was not possible to trace them to a document or to a study with a page number. Leo X’s brief of February 1521 is cited only at second hand. «Famines» as a cause are a modern explanation: in the trials there is the charge of having caused drought and disease, not a documented famine.

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