Reddit reviews The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
We found 3 Reddit comments about The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Johns Hopkins University Press
Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries edited by Bengt Ankarloo & Gustav Henningsen
-contains article: "The Ladies from Outside: An Archaic Pattern of the Witches' Sabbath" by Gustav Henningsen, discusses Sicilian witches who interacted with fair folk/local spirits.
Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile
-A collection of fairy tales which provides insights into interacting with local spirits.
Magic: A Theory from the South by Ernesto de Martino (Sud e Magia), tr. by Dorothy Zinn
Under the Devil’s Spell: Witches, Sorcerers and the Inquisition in Renaissance Italy by Matteo Duni
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath by Carlo Ginzburg
Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Carlo Ginzburg
Incubation, or The cure of disease in pagan temples and Christian churches by Mary Hamilton
-Discusses the practice of incubation among pre-Christian and Christian Italy, informative regarding the use of dreams in Southern Italian folk practices.
Thracian Magic: Past & Present Paperback by Georgi Mishev
TL;DR: Your friend is correct that Beowulf is not authentic, from the viewpoint of a contemporary Pagan Viking. However, I highly recommend that your friend learns Old Icelandic and reads Hrolfs Saga in its original language, if he ever wants to be able to argue about this, rather than just bitch inelegantly about the very real Christianization of European literature.
Everyone in this thread has grossly oversimplified their answer to what is a grossly oversimplified statement. Beowulf IS DEFINITELY ARTIFICIALLY CHRISTIANIZED. That does not make it "trash." However, studying it in a vacuum DOES make your efforts sadly less effective than if someone bothered to put Beowulf into cultural and religious context. You'll get a nice poem and some religious propaganda, but you won't understand its place in history.
The problem is that it's difficult to address the problems in Beowulf without admitting the Christian effort in the Late Middle Ages through the modern era to eradicate non-Christian culture. It's vicious, and it must be owned up to, or the literature simply doesn't make sense. And readers, or teachers, who are Christians themselves find this erasure to be difficult to accept, as if their medieval ancestors never did nothin' wrong.
And students who are Pagan themselves find a lot of anger when they find out exactly how badly their own (or what they feel are their own) traditions have been suppressed. Your friend's an edgy teenager, sure, but he's not wholly wrong, either.
When you first discover how very much has been lost to political/religious bickering over the years, it's really easy to just get sad, and angry. We are looking at the attempted eradication of entire cultural traditions, and as an historian, a modern neopagan, or a lover of literature, it's very hurtful. It's depressing. It's like hearing about the lost libraries of the ancient world, or book burning in 1930's Nuremberg or 1990's Ohio. It's a loss to the world, and it sucks, and it's OK to be ticked off about it.
What if someone re-wrote Star Wars to champion Scientology, and then tried to destroy all mentions of the original? It's a lot like that. You'd be sad and angry about anything lost deliberately to history, because someone 500 years ago or 1000 years back wanted to hide alternative thoughts from future generations. It was censorship as much as it was creativity, and this does need to be acknowledged.
Dismissing this sense of loss as "fedora tipping" or "/r/atheism is leaking," as some below have done, doesn't help anyone understand why a literature student may have a personal, heartfelt beef with the Christians of centuries past. Dismissing this is shallow and narrow-minded; destruction of literature is wrong no matter who's doing it. And we should all be able to sympathize with someone who's pissed off about its loss, even if that person is speaking with more anger than erudition.
There is a strong argument to be made that Beowulf represents an opportunistic appropriation by a Christian culture, of older stories written by a pre-Christian culture. When you examine Europe's literature during this period, you see quite a bit of this, and there's a deep sense that the Christian scholars busy re-working and translating other stories didn't have respect for the original content. They had contempt for the concepts of pagan religion, and were not shy about changing the story to make it Christian-affirming. It's Christianized, all right.
It's not "trash." Books aren't "trash" and major historical sagas, national epics, and key examples of turbulent, transitional periods of history are not to be fucking referred to as trash. That's what the original appropriators did: they trashed the old versions in favor of their improvements. That's why you don't respond to book-burning by burning the other guy's books.
First, framing your friend's objections as simply "disliking mentions of Christian content" dismisses the problems with political/religious erasure and cultural appropriation. It's definitely problematic, and those problems should be addressed. Just like we don't throw the work out because of its appropriation, we don't put it on a pedestal and ignore the problems, either. One should NOT read Beowulf without a running explanation of which elements were injected solely to provide a Christian context to future readers, to make it seem like this story, and all stories, were Christian stories only. It's part of the experience.
I'd go further to say that the proper companion to Beowulf is Hrolfssaga, as this is the pagan text that Beowulf is well-understood to be the Christianized, and Anglicized version of. Beowulf was intended to communicate something FROM Christians TO Christians, most of whom would have been already familiar with the stories of Hrolf Kraki, Bo∂ar Bjarki, or the quest against that monster. Eliminating the original work just leaves you with half the story.
The Christian erasure of Europe's non-christian past has been wildly successful over the years. So much so that modern people aren't even aware it's happened. The impulse of individual Christians to re-appropriate, gloss over, or outright deny other cultural expressions in literature and history seems to be long-lasting. Early Modern translations of Old Norse works read side-by-side with the original language, for example, might leave out key mentions of gods, or remove references to pagan funeral rituals.
Another example: Carlo Ginzburg, of The Cheese and the Worms fame, wrote a very revealing history of an Italian town's dealings with the Inquisition, in which a peasant tradition of apparent Shamanism is wiped out (over the course of a century) so thoroughly that not even the local residents were aware their traditions used to be different. That book is The Night Battles, and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to argue about "Christianization" of Pagan Europe.
In fact, if you argue any stance on the subject of Christianization of literature or culture in Europe, and have not read The Night Battles, I think you are missing an enormous piece of the puzzle; Ginzburg (a Catholic, and very highly regarded by the Vatican) was given access to inquisitional records which had been sealed or ignored for centuries. He uses this to re-construct not only the richly syncretic cultural environment of a Europe which was transitioning from Pagan to Christian, but the exact cultural process by which ordinary people were convinced that their traditions were other than what they really were.
The importance of this work is enormous: Before the Inquisition, local people thought that their beliefs about witchcraft were traditional, and historically-derived: they got their beliefs from their ancestors, same as everyone. Their beliefs were that witchcraft was for the benefit of the community, and resembled Shamanism in practice and belief, but Christianity in vocabulary -- Witches fight the Devil!
AFTER the Inquisition, local people believed that they had always believed that witches were followers of the devil. Turns out, the Inquisition made this up and then convinced everyone a) to believe it, and then b) that they'd always believed it and that their ancestors had also believed it.
You're going to be in for a tough time! Finding good sources that are non-academic on witch trials and Sabbats is like finding Bigfoot. Part of it is because of the high amount of folklorists who believe they were real witches and treat it with a nonhistorical tint. Often they add facts that are blatantly false. The rest are academics who do good microhistories on witch trials.
My number one suggestion would be to either try out this book (mostly primary sources, but in good English and readable) or read some Carlo Ginzburg. He's the authoritarian on Sabbats and one of the best historians in history. His Night Battles and Ecstasies are both on Sabbats and are the premier work on them.
Sorry I can't be of more help there! If you do stumble upon something better let me know, because it's a problem I'm encountering as well.