The circulation and exchange of ideas, myths, legends, and oral traditions in the witchcraft trials of Italy

The modern study of historical witchcraft has shown how the circulation of cultural ideas and narratives has shaped the origin, the evolution, and the ultimate end of the witchcraft phenomenon characterizing Europe and its colonies approximately between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Folklore traditions, if not portraying the exact factual truths, do offer the key to read how people understood, perceived, and remembered facts, beliefs, and objects. Their circulation and appropriation represented people’s wider world view. This world view may not be the scientific truth, but it is nonetheless an important point of view which historians cannot afford to ignore altogether. Primary and secondary sources concerning the Inquisition archive of Siena and the Episcopal archive of Novara have shown a fundamental distinction in the perception of the character of the witch.