ABSTRACT
https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203055830/24dd5743-be34-469c-a29f-ee1382e625a9/content/ifig16_a_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>By the seventeenth century the phenomenon of European witchcraft was, according to historians, in decline. In a few villages in mid-seventeenth-century Friuli, however, the documentation suggests the importance of trials, even in this period. In fact, the intensity of sixteenth-century battles having cooled, these trials enable us to see how the Church intended to reassert its system of control. Also, female and male witches were interrogated as witnesses of a substantially tamed phenomenon, whose meanings could now be determined more precisely. And crucially, the diminished tension between the inquisitors and the faithful allows an analysis of how the prevalence of women in witchcraft was linked to the female body.
