ABSTRACT
Despite significant changes in the historiography of European witchcraft, the figure of the witch seems to remain the inevitable center of such studies. It is, after all, for his, or most often, her “witchly” qualities that the person, initially and subsequently, is made visible. All other aspects of the individual's life drop from the historical record as she becomes a piece of data. Absorbed into the documents only because of witchly deeds, real or imagined, the accused is isolated from a personal context. The text upon which the historian depends presents a one-dimensional picture, if a picture at all. The defendant is more likely to become a number, with some court shorthand as to personal characteristics. Only occasionally is a subject troublesome enough to leave an atypical trail in the records. Just as multiple trials over a period of time allowed Carlo Ginzburg to draw a three dimensional Menocchio, 1 two recalcitrant and recidivist women in seventeenth century Venice permit a similarly rounded depiction.
