Italian Folklore; the Legend of Aradia; Maddalena

"This just in: Some recent research from anthropologist Sabina Magliocco sheds new light on the Aradia legend. She has contributed a chapter titled Aradia in Sardinia: The Archaeology of a Folk Character and it appears in a new book titled Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon - a collection of essays.

Here are some interesting excerpts:

"In this paper I present indirect evidence that a medieval Italian character by the name of Aradia must have existed, for she survived in Sardinia under a slightly different name until the late 20th century. I will demonstrate that she is linked to medieval legends of Herodias and Diana, and that her name is a Sardinian version of the Italian 'Aradia.' My hypothesis is that at some point before the late 19th century, legends about an Italian character by the name of Aradia, corresponding to medieval legends of Herodias and Diana and linked to witches and fairies were brought to Sardinia, where they developed separately." - page 43-44

"Ronald Hutton in fact suggested that the name Aradia was actually Leland's Italianization of Jules Michelet's witch goddess 'Herodiade' from his novel La Sorciere (1862) (Hutton, 1993, 307).

While Michelet's romantic, egalitarian portrayal of witchcraft certainly influenced Leland, who may well have based his assumption that Aradia was in fact Herodias upon the work of Michelet, my research suggests that Aradia already existed in Italian Folklore; she did not need Leland to invent her." - page 43

"The survival in Sardinian Folklore of the 1980s of a character related to Aradia attests to the longue duree of narratives about Diana and Herodias, and the possibility that they could have existed in Tuscany a century earlier. Thus it becomes more plausible that his informant Maddalena may have presented Leland with this character even as late as the 1890s" - page 44

“From this very brief study, two important conclusions can be drawn. The first, which will be if interest to historians of contemporary Paganism, is that at some point, there was a character known in Italian folklore as Aradia, derived from medieval legends of Herodias and linked with night flights, entry into homes, spinning, weaving, and magic. While she seems to have disappeared from the folklore of Tuscany and Emila, where Charles Leland reportedly found her in the late 19th century, she still exists in Sardinia, albeit in a localized form.” – page 58"

Source
http://www.wiccantogether.com/group/strega/forum/topics/new-findings-on-the-aradia