Episode V: Language Failure by Giulia Costantini
There is a point where language begins to fail.
Historical records can list dates, trials, and verdicts. They can count the number of accusations, describe procedures, reproduce fragments of testimony. But none of these documents can fully convey the experience of living inside a climate of suspicion. Numbers do not transmit fear.
Categories do not transmit memory. When historians write about the witch hunts, they often rely on the language of analysis: social conflict, gender control, religious anxiety, institutional power. These explanations are necessary. They help us understand the structures that made persecution possible.
Yet something always escapes them.
The lived experience of accusation rarely fits neatly inside theoretical vocabulary.
The Limits of Historical Records
Many of the surviving descriptions of witchcraft come from legal and theological texts written by those who prosecuted it. These documents attempt to impose coherence on events that were often chaotic, emotional, and contradictory.
In trial records, accusations appear strangely systematic. Women are described as flying through the night, attending sabbaths, or making pacts with demonic forces. Their confessions seem to confirm elaborate cosmologies of evil. But these narratives were often shaped under pressure.
Interrogations, threats, and torture created stories that fit the expectations of inquisitors. Language became a tool that forced the accused to speak within categories already defined for them.
The result is an archive where the voices of the accused appear, but only partially. What remains is not a transparent account of their lives.
It is a distorted translation.
When Healing Became Witchcraft
The figure of the witch illustrates this failure of language particularly clearly. In many communities, the women who later appeared in trial records were known primarily as healers or caretakers. They prepared remedies, assisted childbirth, or practiced small protective rituals against misfortune.
But when these practices entered the courtroom, they had to be translated into another vocabulary.
Healing became sorcery.
Protection became malefice.
Knowledge became conspiracy.
Language reorganized reality.
The same gestures that had once been interpreted as care were now described as evidence of supernatural crime.
Rewriting the Landscape
Stories surrounding places such as Benevento reveal how language can transform landscape itself. The famous narratives of witches gathering beneath the walnut tree turned an ordinary site into a symbol of diabolical assembly. What may once have been communal gatherings or remnants of older ritual traditions was rewritten as proof of collective corruption.
Once a story enters written discourse, it acquires authority.
The written version becomes the official version.
And yet written language often simplifies what it attempts to describe. Landscapes become symbols. Communities become caricatures. Practices that once had complex meanings are reduced to single interpretations.
The Modern Witch
Something similar happens when modern discourse attempts to reclaim the witch as a purely symbolic figure.
Today the witch often appears as an icon of empowerment or rebellion. In feminist theory and popular culture alike, she represents resistance to patriarchal control.
This transformation has political value.
But it also carries a risk.
When the witch becomes only a symbol, the messy historical reality of persecution begins to disappear. The burned bodies, the fear inside villages, the fragile negotiations that allowed certain practices to survive—these elements resist easy metaphor.
Language prefers clarity.
History rarely offers it.
Even ethnographic descriptions of rural practices can fall into this problem.
Practices found in regions such as Ciociaria—protective gestures against the evil eye, whispered formulas, small rituals meant to restore balance when illness or misfortune appears—often appear in writing as folklore.
The word itself already implies distance.
Folklore suggests curiosity rather than knowledge.
Yet within the communities where these practices circulate, they do not function as curiosities.
They function as responses to lived experience.
They belong to everyday strategies for navigating uncertainty.
The language used to describe them therefore matters.
When scholars categorize such gestures as superstition or belief, something is flattened.
The complexity of how these practices operate inside community life disappears behind academic terminology.
The Language of Trauma
Language also fails when it encounters trauma.
The historical memory of persecution rarely survives as a clear narrative passed down through generations.
More often it persists in fragments: a hesitation to speak openly about certain practices, a sense that knowledge must be shared cautiously, an inherited instinct to remain discreet.
These experiences do not easily translate into explanatory sentences.
They appear instead as atmosphere.
A tone of voice.
A pause in conversation.
An unfinished story.
Such forms of memory exceed the structures that language normally uses to organize knowledge.
Writing Beyond Explanation
For this reason, writing about the history of the witch often requires moving between different registers.
Historical analysis provides context. It explains institutions, legal procedures, and ideological frameworks.
But narrative, image, and fragment are sometimes better suited to capturing the emotional texture of lived experience.
Language must stretch.
It must allow space for ambiguity.
It must accept that not everything can be reduced to explanation.
The failure of language is therefore not simply a weakness.
It can also be a signal.
When language begins to fracture—when metaphors replace definitions, when stories interrupt analysis—it often indicates that we are approaching forms of knowledge that resist complete translation.
The history of the witch belongs to this category.
It exists partly in documents, partly in memory, and partly in the gaps between them.
Listening to the Silence
To acknowledge language failure is not to abandon understanding.
It is to recognize the limits of the tools we use.
Some histories remain partially unwritten not because they are insignificant, but because the experiences they contain exceed the frameworks available to record them.
The witch survives in those excesses.
In the moments when language hesitates.
In the spaces where explanation gives way to listening.
Giulia Costantini
Sources and References
This essay is informed by historical, cultural, and feminist scholarship on witchcraft persecutions, women’s
knowledge traditions, and Southern Italian folk practices.
Books
Serra, Pierluigi. Maghe e streghe d’Italia. Newton Compton Editori.
Academic and Research Texts
Federici, Silvia. La caccia alle streghe e la paura del potere delle donne. Accademia UNIDEE.
Forni, A. Donne, streghe e streghette nella letteratura per l’infanzia del secondo Novecento: dalla caccia alle
streghe al femminismo magico. Quaderni di Intercultura.
Articles and Cultural Essays
Eleonora Derrico.
“O sottomesse o streghe: le donne dalla caccia alle streghe a oggi.”
https://www.eleonoraderrico.it/o-sottomesse-o-streghe-le-donne-dalla-caccia-alle-streghe-a-oggi/
The Vision.
“Le femministe e la figura della strega.”
https://thevision.com/cultura/femministe-streghe-rogo/
The Vision.
“La caccia alle streghe.”
https://thevision.com/attualita/caccia-streghe/
Cultural and Historical Sources
“Anare di Benevento e leggende della stregoneria femminile.”
https://www.ambasciator.it/anare-benevento-leggende-stregoneria-femminile/
“Donas de fuera.”
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donas_de_fuera
Pink Magazine Italia.
Historical articles on witchcraft and women’s history.
https://pinkmagazineitalia.it/donne/40436/
Agoravox.
“Le masciare: streghe del Sud Italia.”
https://amp.agoravox.it/Le-Masciare-Streghe-dal-Sud-Italia.html
Strega in Biblioteca.
“Streghe, maghe e donne ribelli.”
