What the Inquisition Recorded

Almost nothing is known about the donne di fuori from a friendly source, because almost no friendly source recorded them. What survives comes overwhelmingly from Sicilian Inquisition trial transcripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which accused visionaries, mostly women, described under interrogation how they traveled by night with bands of fairy-spirit women to feast, dance and sometimes heal or curse a household, testimony historian Gustav Henningsen reconstructed from the archives in his study "The Ladies from Outside." The record is adversarial by construction: nobody wrote these accounts down to celebrate the belief, they were transcribed by inquisitors building a case, which means the surviving detail is filtered through what an interrogator thought worth asking and a defendant thought safe, or necessary, to confess. Henningsen situates the Sicilian material within a wider pattern he traced across early modern southern Europe, other regions with strikingly similar testimony about nocturnal fairy-society gatherings distinct from the demonic witches' sabbath stereotype more familiar from northern European trials, suggesting the donne di fuori are a genuine regional variant of an older, more widespread folk-visionary tradition rather than an isolated Sicilian invention of either the accused or their accusers. What cannot be recovered from that record is the tradition's own voice: every donna di fuori a modern reader can read about speaks only through the mouth of someone on trial for their life.