Early modern Venice, much like its peers, was a dangerous city by modern standards. One need only page through the handwritten necrologies, compiled by the health magistracy, that record deaths in the city to see how often drowning or other accidents took the lives of residents. One also sees entries marked with small drawings of daggers and the like to indicate murders – malice as well as bad luck took its toll. But even darker forces were understood to be at work in this self-styled “Most Serene Republic.” In one of the necrologies, we find an entry from August 1610 that records the death of a young woman named Isabella from the parish of S. Martino and married to a certain Rizzardo da Valentin. The cause of her death, according to the file, was “Strigarie” – witchcraft. The same fate is recorded for a 26-year-old woman from the parish of S. Giovanni in Bragora in 1636; she had died suddenly after long suffering from strigarie. In a volume covering 1641 we see a 50-year-old bookseller from the parish of S. Moisè who died as a result of witchcraft.