What the benandanti material means is contested, and the atlas records the argument rather than a winner.
Ginzburg read the Friulian testimony as the surviving trace of a genuine agrarian fertility cult, an organised body of popular belief older than the demonology that swallowed it, and in Storia notturna, translated as Ecstasies, he extended the case much further, connecting it to a wide Eurasian substratum of ecstatic and shamanic practice. Supporters hold that this recovered a real popular cosmology which the trial records had buried, and that it broke the assumption that the only thing inside an inquisition file is the inquisitor.
Critics accept the archival work and reject the frame. On their reading the benandanti testimony records a local complex of dream, vision and folk healing rather than a cult with membership and continuity, and the further reach of Ecstasies, across thousands of miles and centuries, rests on resemblances too thin to carry it. Several historians who admire the first book regard the third as a different kind of argument altogether.
There is a further reason for care here. Any claim that the trials caught the remnants of an older religion sounds like Margaret Murray's witch-cult thesis, which the atlas holds as debunked. Ginzburg's case is not Murray's: he is describing a regional set of beliefs documented in one archive, not a pan-European pagan church surviving in secret, and he is explicit that the benandanti were not the witches the courts were hunting. The distinction matters, because the overwhelming scholarly position remains that the people executed were not practitioners of anything.