When Charles Godfrey Leland published “Aradia or the Gospel of the Witches” at the end of the nineteenth century as the crowning product of his Italian researches of the 1880s and 1890s, he believed he was preserving what remained of an ancient but dying tradition before it was too late. He could not have known that in so doing he was providing one of the key source-books which would inspire a vigorous revival of the tradition half a century after his death. Had he been able to foresee it, he would have been astonished, probably amused, and almost certainly gratified; for in spite of the occasional Victorian caution with which he expressed himself, his research was clearly a labour of love.
