How would you expect the Spanish Inquisition to treat a confessed witch? Does the suggestion conjure visions of fire, torture, and lots of murdered women? You aren’t alone – but this is a history we definitely need to unpack.
Transcript for: Suffer a Witch to Live? Religious Conflict and Witchcraft Persecutions; or, No One Expects the Inquisition
Researched and written by Averill Earls, PhD
Recorded and produced by Averill Earls and Elizabeth Garner Masarik, PhD
Averill: Between 1652 and 1661, Isabel de Montoya, aka La Centella, was investigated and tried by the Spanish Inquisition for witchcraft in Mexico City.[1] She claimed that she was a curandera – a healer. She identified as a castiza (daughter of a Creole and a mestiza), and was associated with the more famous magic-user Monica de la Cruz. By the time she came under the Inquisition’s scrutiny, she’d spent three years in a jail in Puebla and been confined in a recogimiento (a term you may remember from one of Marissa’s early episodes). She sold love potions, spells for improving ones’ lot in life, and spells for protection. Both she and her clients repeated her incantations, which were recorded by the Inquisitor’s clerk for the records of the trial. She described the process and ingredients for making avenging charms. While she regularly denied being in league with the devil, many of her spells referred to the devil or other demons – “Señor compadre,” or Mister godfather, as well as el diablo cojuelo, the devil on two sticks or “lame devil.” While el diablo cojuelo was a folk figure associated with dance, music, and satire, and was the “messenger for missives of love”, Señor compadre’s diabolicalness was signaled by accompanying rooster calls, dog barks, and approaching horse hoof clops, evidence enough for the Inquisitors to know whom she entreated with her magic.[2]
Elizabeth: In 1661, Montoya was found guilty, and received a very typical punishment for women like her in Spain and Spanish-America who came in contact with the Spanish Inquisition. According to historian Stacey Schlau, she was paraded through Mexico City dressed as a penitential, with a conical hat, a rope around her neck, and a green wax candle clutched in her hands; she abjured – renounced her sinful ways – and was subjected to the abjuration, auto de fe – she was paraded through town half naked on a donkey while a town crier announced her sins to the city, before finally suffering 100 lashes and exile from Puebla for the rest of her life.[3]
Averill: And then she walked away. Not garroted like the women accused of weather magic in Scotland 70 years earlier. Not burned at the stake like the “heretics” in Wurzburg Germany just a few decades before. Not hanged like the dozens of women and handful of men in Salem years later. Forced to repent for her sins, yes, humiliated and beaten, and exiled from her home, but otherwise alive. Who expected the Spanish Inquisition to treat a confessed witch so leniently?
I’m Averill Earls
And I’m Elizabeth Garner Masarik
And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.
Elizabeth: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Karl, Alissa, Maria, Colin, Denise, Edward, Jessy, Judy, Karen, Lauren, Lisa, Megan, and Susan! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.
Averill: As always, I want to acknowledge that the work we do on this podcast is built on and out of the scholarship of other historians. The history of the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions and their relationship to witch trials is quite a robust field, of which I knew wholly too little before starting this episode research. I’m indebted to the reviews of the field written by Gary K. Waite and Augusti Alcoberro. Most of the stories in this episode come from the research and publications of Stacey Schlau, Lu Ann Homza, and Irene Silverblatt. So be sure to go to digpodcast.org to look through the full bibliography for this episode, and learn more.
Elizabeth: So Isabel de Montoya and the Spanish Inquisition. Unless you’re a scholar of the Inquisition or you’ve spent a lot of time reading about it, you may have been surprised to learn that, typically, the Spanish Inquisitors did suffer a confessed witch to live. And there’s a reason for that. Shortly after the Spanish invasion of the Americas, stories were circulated throughout Europe of Spanish bloodthirstiness, of the men and women burned by the Inquisitors en masse, of the abhorrent and unrelenting violence against the indigenous peoples of the Americas. And some of those stories were true; the reports of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de las Casas were widely circulated, and instigated reform handed down from the crown to the colonies. But at times Spanish violence was exaggerated, because their enemies – particularly the English, but also the Dutch – were invested in stirring up anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish sentiment. By repeating the rumors cumulatively known as the “black legend,” the English gained allies to oppose Spanish rule in contested colonies. The black legend was also useful to Protestants in the wars of religion during the Reformation. The repeaters of the Black Legend, of course, conveniently ignored their own atrocities while castigating the Spanish for theirs.
Averill: To be clear: there’s no such thing as kind imperialism, or a friendly way to force people to convert to your religion or obey strict religious rules. No matter what country or institution was doing it, they were spilling blood, torturing and killing people. But in the English-speaking world, this is at least one reason you might assume to know the outcome of a Spanish Inquisition-led witch trial – and why your assumption might be wrong.
Elizabeth: Historians have debated (and occasionally misrepresented) the role of the Protestant Reformation and resulting religious wars in the surge in witch hunts at the same time. In 1967, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that the Protestant and Catholic Reformations were directly responsible for the rise of witch-hunting panics that began in the 1560s.[4] Other scholars eventually debunked Trevor-Roper’s totalizing theory, in part because he was using falsified documents. Whoops. In the decades since, various historians have demonstrated that yes, witch-hunting panics in some regions could be a direct result of Catholic-Protestant tensions, recent conflict, and/or scapegoating. That was the case particularly in the Holy Roman Empire, where witchcraft persecutions increased during the first four decades of the Reformation, after decline at the turn of the century, and spiked after 1560, when the European wars of religion began in earnest.[5] In regions where the Catholic church dominated and endeavored to remain in power – as in France and Italy, but also in Spain during and after the Reconquista – regional Catholic hierarchies working with their monarchies used the Inquisition and other demonstrations of authority – like exorcism of demons – to reinforce their importance to their adherents.
Averill: Ecclesiastical courts had a long tradition in Christian Europe. In the medieval period, they had wide-ranging authority, dealing with everything from family law, probate, and of course cases involving priests or religious communities. Ecclesiastical courts could also investigate and punish “heretics” – a baptized member of the Catholic Church who refused to acknowledge or accept a “divine” truth. Whenever someone challenged the practices or teachings of the Church, they could be labeled – and prosecuted as – a heretic. The punishment for those who refused to recant (and even for some who did) could be death by fire. Among those most suspected of heresy in 15th century Spain were the “conversos” – the Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity when faced with death or exile from cities controlled or conquered by the Catholic monarchs. Throughout the Middle Ages, agents of the Church – inquisitors – had been dispatched to investigate rumors or accusations of apostatic or heretical crimes. In 1478, the so-called Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand of Castile and Isabella of Aragon – who were leading wars of conquest to claim Muslim territories on the Iberian peninsula for “Spanish” Christendom – were granted the power to appoint their own Inquisitors, with the authority of the Church behind them. The “Holy Office” of the Spanish Inquisition thus became a Catholic hammer for the Spanish Reconquista and the next three centuries of enforcing both political and religious norms.
Elizabeth: Both Protestants and Catholics grounded their persecution of unauthorized magic-users in scriptural teachings. References to witches, wizards, witchcraft, and all manner of unauthorized magic-use are dotted throughout both the Hebrew scripture and the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Saul visits the Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of Samuel. And of course “Wizards thou shalt not suffer to live” is perhaps the most quoted passage of Exodus 22:18. Notably in the King James I & VI version of the Bible (who you all might remember was the king who led a witch hunt in Scotland in 1590, and authored his own witch-hunting manual, Demonologie, shortly thereafter), that passage was re-translated to read “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Averill: The prohibitions of sorcery in the New Testament leave the same impression. In Galatians 5:20, in the same passage that instructs adherents to “love thy neighbour as thyself”, Jesus lumps magic-use in with all manner of bad behaviors that will prevent followers from “inheriting God’s kingdom”: “adultery, impurity, incontinence, luxury, idolatry, witchcraft, feuds, quarrels, jealousies, outbursts of anger, rivalries, dissensions, factions, spite, murder, drunkenness, and debauchery.” Similar vibes are captured in Revelations 21:8 and 22:15; and Acts 8:9; 13:6. In the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, much of western and southern Europe saw an increase in concern about the influence of diabolical or demonic magic-use. And Europeans, like the Spanish, brought their ideas and practices of sexual magic and witchcraft across the Atlantic, into their colonies.[6]
Elizabeth: Most concerning to early modern European religious opponents of witchcraft and sorcery was the idea that magic-users were making demonic pacts. The demonic role in magic-use was based on St. Augustine’s claim that demons were involved in the performances of magicians, a theological foundation expanded on by scholars like Thomas Aquinas ( d. 1274) and Jean Gerson (d. 1429).[7] According to Lu Ann Homza, Gerson’s works were particularly important to the Spanish writings on witchcraft.[8] One sixteenth-century Spanish treatise argued that “If actions and words have no natural or supernatural power to bring out the effect, then the operation is vain…and if it works, it’s because of a secret operation of the Devil.”[9] This concern with demonic intervention in magic-users’ crafts was at the center of Inquisitorial investigations of suspected witchcraft. To entreat with a demon and/or the Devil, to contravene the teachings of Christ and God, was heresy – and rooting out heresy was one of the primary functions of the Inquisition.
Averill: That said, perhaps in recognition that magic-use was widespread and largely harmless, neither the Church nor secular courts bothered much with the various magic users in medieval European society unlessa magic-user was suspected of causing harm or death. An ecclesiastical court’s job would be to determine the extent of the heresy, and proceed from there. Their goal was to fold the heretic back into the right path – recant their relationship with the Devil and ask for forgiveness, which would be granted, because Jesus died for our sins, yada yada yada. In most cases of “witchcraft” investigated by an Inquisitor, those who confessed were forced to repent, humiliated in front of their community, and typically banished. Not exactly a kind result, and sometimes maybe worse than death – what is an early modern European without her community? – but a far cry from the marching of hundreds at a time to a gallows to be hanged, as was the case in various parts of the Holy Roman Empire. If a heretic refused to recant their heresy – whether that was dancing with the Devil under the pale moonlight or, you know, having a different perspective on transubstantiation – they’d be burned to death. That happened plenty, don’t get us wrong. Just not in the majority of witch cases. If the evidence collected by an Inquisitor suggested that a confessed witch had caused grievous harm, maleficia, then after the repentance they’d likely be turned over to the secular courts. A woman found to have killed her husband with maleficium, for example, would be burned for petty treason by the secular courts (because of the whole patriarchal structure that said man is the king of his household). A woman found guilty of using maleficium to kill another woman’s husband might be hanged for regular old homicide. Still dead, but the distinctions were important to early modern Europeans.
Elizabeth: Curiously, scholars like Martin Nesvig, Lu Ann Homza, and Stacey Schlau argue that many Inquisitors didn’t really believe that most people accused of witchcraft were able to wield real magic.[10] And they weren’t alone. Jean Bodin, a 16th-century Dutch physician known for writing a treatise (On the Tricks of Demons, latin De Praestigiis Daemonum et Incantationibus ac Venificiis) argued the people accused of witchcraft weren’t really using magic, but just crazy old women. Alonso de Salazar Frías, an early 17th-century Spanish Inquisitor, argued that most confessions or accusations of witchcraft were dreams and fantasy, and set an Inquisitorial standard that required a corroborating body of evidence. Throughout much of Spain and Spanish America’s Inquisitorial investigations of witchcraft, officials were more concerned with fraud, and people claiming that they had magical powers and then selling them to gullible customers. But certainly many others – both within church organizations and among the lay people – truly believed in the power of the devil to operate on earth through “witches” and “wizards,” as well as persistent pre-Christian beliefs in various magic systems.
Averill: Church-instigated persecution of individuals who made a living as magic-users or who were accused by neighbors of maleficium originated on all sides of the Protestant-Catholic conflicts. As Gary Waite notes, “Both Luther and Calvin supported witch-hunting, with Luther approving the execution of four witches at Wittenberg in 1541 and Calvin, a few years later, advising Geneva to ‘extirpate the race of witches,’ resulting in the city’s infamous plague-spreading trials.”[11] In the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V instituted the Constituto criminalis carolinas in 1532, which made heresy (and witchcraft) a secular crime to be tried by secular courts. That meant that the HRE (mostly Germany) had no Inquisition, unlike Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.[12]
Elizabeth: By the end of the 15th century, the shape (if not the function) of Catholic ecclesiastical courts changed. The Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, had relied on the aid and support of the Catholic Church in their “reconquista” of Spain, which nominally concluded in 1492 with the expulsion of Spain’s remaining Muslims and Jews. In 1478, Pope Sixtus IV signed a papal bull giving the Spanish “Catholic Monarchs” the power to appoint inquisitors.[13] The Spanish Inquisition was largely an arm of the monarchy’s religio-political crusade. The King and Queen employed a variety of militaristic tactics to police the people they claimed as their subjects through conquest, and put the Inquisition to work rooting out “heretics” – which more often than not really meant formerly Jewish and Muslim “conversos” who’d converted to avoid execution or expulsion.[14] Similarly in Spanish America, the Inquisition was frequently used to police indigenous and mestizo “heretics.”
Averill: In areas where there was more Protestant incursion and no Inquisition, individual religious leaders used witch hunts to establish control. The Jesuit order – which was formed as part of the Roman Catholic Church’s Counter Reformation – often took the lead on witch hunts, as they did in Trier and Ellwangen.[15]Between 1581 and 1595, Archbishop Johann VII von Schöenberg oversaw the Trier witch hunt that accused hundreds. While he claimed to be responding to pressure from locals to deal with the “threat” of witches to their community, Gary Waite points out that he used the opportunity to assert Catholic dogma in a key moment of Catholic-Protestant tension.[16]
Elizabeth: The surges in witch trials in Inquisitorially-surveilled regions were fewer in number and often smaller in scale than in the areas where Catholics and Protestants were locked in battles for control. Still, the Inquisitorial investigations of “witches” are important to understanding the ways that the Church thought about “magic” in the early modern era. And the information extracted – forcefully, painfully, or cruelly – provides insight into the beliefs of a wide cross section of people living in Italy, Spain, and Spanish America.
Averill: In recent decades, historians have established that the reports of the barbarity and bloodthirstiness of the Spanish Inquisition have been overdramatized. For example, according to historian Richard E. Greenleaf, only 5% of the population of Mexico had contact with the Mexican Tribunal; of those, 85% were tried, but only 2% were condemned, .05% were tortured, and .1% were executed.[17] In 17th century Spanish, 14% of Mexican trials involved magic, and 32% of Peruvian trials involved magic. Stacey Schlau points out that in comparison to continental Europe or colonial New England, the total number of adjudicated cases were small. In Cartagena, there were 55 witchcraft trials between 1610 and 1660, and only 60 in Lima between 1650 and 1700. Similarly both Augusti Alcoberro and Stacey Schlau have argued that Spain was largely not a site of witch hunts between 1550 and 1640.[18]
Elizabeth: Lu Ann Homza argues that even if the Inquisition-led executions weren’t on the same scale as witch hunts in the HRE or Britain, the experiences of the accused – and, sometimes, their accusers – were sometimes worse than death.[19] For the individuals who came into contact with the Spanish Inquisition, the experience was horrible, and, occasionally, fatal. While the likelihood that a subject of the crown would encounter the Inquisition in their lifetime was fairly low, witch accusations and investigations in Spain and Spanish America were still harmful. Though the Inquisition did not have control in all areas of “Spain” and Spanish America, it remained a dominant institution with political, spiritual, economic, and philosophical power, until it was abolished by Napoleon in 1808. In keeping with their low opinion of Spain, various other European philosophers cast the Inquisition as the root of Spain’s “backwardness” in Enlightenment thought – even though skepticism about witchcraft often came from scholars within the Church.[20]
Averill: The 1629 edict of faith, which outlined things that were anathema to being good Christians, summarizes the kind of superstition that the Inquisitors believed to burden the world, particularly in the colonies.
[I]n order to know and divine the future or unknown things from the past . . . they practice the art of Necromancy, Geomancy, Hydromancy . . . using spells, sorcery, witchcraft . . . invoking demons, having an express or, at the minimum, a tacit pact with them . . . in order to find stolen goods . . . discover places where there are hidden treasures . . . and predict . . . the people and merchandise arriving on [the armadas] . . . and they declare [this] by reading palms . . . and dreams . . . and they throw lots with beans, wheat, and corn . . . mixing sacred things with the profane: like the Gospels, [prayers], altar stone, [and] Holy Water . . . with magnetic rocks, hair, . . . powders and other similar charms . . . understanding that with them . . . they will have good fortune in battles . . . and in business dealings and . . . in bringing together men with women and women with the men they desire. . . . [A]nd for these and similar effects, they say certain meaningless and superstitious orations, invoking God, or Our Lord, or the Holy Virgin . . . mixed with other indecent and disrespectful invocations.[21]
For Spanish inquisitors, they had to combat these superstitions on two fronts: at home, with the heretical conversos in the south and those who believed they were witches in the north, and in the colonies, with the “Indians” like the Mexica and the Inca.
Elizabeth: In the 16th and 17th centuries, “Spain” lacked central authority. Though Ferdinand and Isabella united Spain through the wars of the Reconquista, regional institutions remained powerful. Each region had a governing pact with the king, but continued to hold a lot of local/regional autonomy, overseeing their own courts and judicial power. In contrast, the Spanish Inquisition operated with a central authority. As Alcoberro notes, “Its tendency to act uniformly was particularly obsessive in one particular area: the witch hunt.”[22]The role of the Inquisition in preventing major witch hunt panics is one that is constantly being tested with new studies of witch trials in Spain and Spanish America. Typically, when a local government arrested individuals for witchcraft, the Inquisition interceded on behalf of the accused, and freed them. According to Stacey Schlau, throughout the 16th century Inquisitors rarely prosecuted witches because they saw witchcraft as “ignorance rather than heresy.”[23] In instances where the Inquisitorial Board believed investigation was necessary, they collected evidence in the form of confession, witness testimonies, and physical evidence, and recorded it all.
Averill: Inquisitors categorized magic use into two crimes – hechicerías, which was largely “natural magic” that focused on things like love, fortune telling, finding lost objects, etcetera; and brujería, which was typically demonic. Most Inquisitorial witch trials in Spanish America were categories as hechicerías, though these categories might be conflated, or a “good” witch could easily stray into “bad” witch territory.[24]According to Stacey Schlau, the practitioners of hechicera were almost exclusively women, and could be from any background, though most were from the lowest urban social classes, most were over the age of 40, most were single or widowed, and many were mestiza or indigenous.[25] They sold all kinds of magical promises, including love magic – which was perhaps most concerning to the Inquisitorial enforcers of patriarchal Spanish American structures, because, as Schlau puts it, love could “tie a man to a woman, making him weak, unable to resist or exercise his free will.”[26] Most of their clients, interestingly enough, were elite women and men.
Elizabeth: In the 17th century, parts of Spain experienced increased witch-hunting. In Navarre, that witch-hunting was led by the Inquisition. Between 1609-1610, dozens of (mostly women) were investigated and found guilty by the Inquisition. According to Homza, in November 1610, twenty-nine “witches” were subjected to the auto-de-fe in Pamplona, with an audience of 30,000 witnessing and adding to the humiliation of the 29 “witches”. The investigation stemmed from a number of children claiming that they were snatched from their beds and flown to the Devil’s gatherings, where they were inducted as witches.[27]
Averill: These stories – the “evidence” that the Inquisitors had collected from child accusers and the forced confessions of the accused – were shouted to the crowd as part of the auto-de-fe, undoubtedly shocking the assembled citizens of Navarre. They recounted stories of renouncing Jesus, receiving the Devil as their “lord and god,” and kissing the Devil’s “left hand, face, and chest, and under the tail. Some claimed that the “witches” who stole them forced them to submit to the Devil. The children said that once they’d pledged themselves to the Devil, they were given a toad in clothes to guard. They described the unholy meetings, in which the witches danced, passed through flames without incurring harm, ate the flesh of dead people they’d dug up. Then the Devil had sex with the “queen” of the witches, followed by all the adult witches, and then all the witches had sex with each other.[28] The lurid and disturbing details continued. I imagine the crowd gasped, some people fainted, many others shouted angrily and threw things at the accused. Notably, though they were the source of all these details, the children were never themselves charged or held accountable for their participation in the rituals.[29]
Elizabeth: The cases Stacey Schlau highlights in her book, like Isabel de Montoya, highlight Inquisitors who were largely unconvinced about the likelihood of malicious Devil-worship in their communities. In contrast, the 1609 to 1614 Navarre panic that Lu Ann Homza discusses rested largely on the local Inquisitors’ belief that there was sufficient evidence of brujeria to pursue multiple investigations. From the very beginning, with the first accused that they apprehended and began questioning, they were convinced that there was sufficient evidence that a growing cabal of “witches” who had renounced God and were worshipping and in league with the Devil in Navarre.[30]
Averill: Seven of the first ten arrested were women. Children were essential to the identification and arrest of the accused. It was perhaps because the children seemed to be so threatened by the diabolical coven that the accusations were taken seriously. As Homza points out, the Navarrese were quick to act when their community’s children were in danger or harmed. Adults put themselves at risk to protect their villages’ young – searching for lost children, investigating unexpected deaths, defending against violence from within communities and without. During the witch panic, parents and community members accosted their neighbors when children claimed to have seen them at the Devil’s party. Some were transported to the Inquisition in Logroño; some remained at home, and, without the means to bring the slander to court, dealt with the social fall-out of the accusation.[31]
Elizabeth: Lu Ann Homza points out that for members of Spanish society, the accusation of witchcraft could be just as damaging as the investigation.[32] To call someone a witch was a serious accusation, and to be called a witch wrongfully required that one defend one’s personal and familial honor. While investigations into “actual” witchcraft were largely the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical body, slander fell to the secular and royal courts. And, as in the rest of Europe, the legal system assumed guilt, and innocence had to be proven. It was potentially ruinous, financially and reputationally, to make an off-hand accusation of witchcraft in anger. It was just as ruinous to not challenge scurrilous insults.
Averill: Though “witch” was a gender-neutral insult, when it came to the Inquisition, witchcraft was a sex-related issue. In fact, women tended to only show up as the subject of Inquisitorial cases when there was witchcraft involved. In some areas of the Spanish empire, witchcraft was also racialized. In southern Spain, the majority of individuals accused of magic use were Muslim and itinerant Roma-Scintii women. In the Spanish American colonies, the majority of the accused were indigenous, mestiza, castiza like Isabel de Montoya, or some other variation of non-European.[33]
Elizabeth: According to the correspondence that the Inquisitors sent to the Suprema (the central Inquisitorial office), Navarrese villages and towns were besieged by witches turning children into Devil worshippers. Mayors and priests wrote to the Inquisitors begging for help, promising to pay costs.[34] They employed the full gamut of typical witch-hunting lore that one would expect of 17th century Europe: torturing suspects with implements like the rack, searching the bodies of the accused for the “Devil’s mark,” pricking them to see if they’d bleed. At the end of 1609, six of the 26 people in custody died as a result of the poor conditions in the prison combined with old age, ill health, and the effects of torture; but still, at the end of 1610, there were 28 people in custody, and the Inquisitors wrote to the Suprema asking for money to be able to bring in an additional 16.[35]
Averill: Witches who confessed were penanced. They were given periods of confinement in monasteries or convents and various periods of banishment from the region. Those who refused to confess were condemned to death.[36]
Elizabeth: As summarized by Homza, after the auto-de-fe, “six live witches, along with the effigies of five dead ones, were handed over to the secular authorities to be burned at the stake. The executions occurred outside of town. The whole spectacle [auto-de-fe, processions of the inquisitorial personnel, and the executions] was designed to educate, entertain, and terrify.”[37]
Averill: The Inquisitorial clusterfuck, however, failed to actually put an end to the witch-hunting panic in Navarre. After the 1610 edict that pardoned all the accused and put a stop to the Inquisitors’ role in the problem, the locals took matters into their own hands. When children accused neighbors of abducting them at night, parents attacked the alleged witches in the streets. Screaming matches, fist-fights, and property damage were near daily occurrences in various parts of Navarre. In one town, the inquisitorial staff – but not actual Inquisitors – tried to “fix” the witch problem by arresting, interrogating, and torturing accused witches, and allowing lay people to do the same. Many people confessed just to end the imprisonment and torture, so that they could return home – but we don’t really know what happened next, as the documentation dries up once the confessed were released. In a society where the accusation could be as damaging to an individual and family’s honor as a guilty verdict, it’s unclear how long that reputation followed them.[38]
Elizabeth: Navarre’s situation, in which the Inquisitorial office was at least in part responsible for the ramp-up of the witch hunting, only made things worse for other parts of Spain. In most of Spain, the local Inquisitors attempted to intercede in witch accusations whenever they could, pulling accused witches out of secular custody to then be penanced and released. But in 1614, just after the chaos in Navarre, the situation spiraled out of control in Catalonia some 400km away.
Averill: In the 1610s, Catalonian church officials put together a report requesting that the accused (and future witch cases) be turned over to the Inquisition, because of the widespread local abuses of power and mishandling of cases, including using denunciations obtained under torture to determine guilt.[39] Some bishops argued against intercession (which would include a pardoning of all the accused) because to them a blanket pardon would be like saying that “most of its women are witches, a vile vice that discredits the most Catholic people of [Catalonia].”[40] Scholars estimate that at least 1000 people were killed in Catalonia, until the king intervened directly in 1622. He issued an “evocacio general,” which immediately placed all open witchcraft cases under the jurisdiction of the high court. All trials and prisoners were moved to Barcelona, and the trials were then canceled and the prisoners (all women) were freed.[41] In many ways, Catalonia is an example of the limits of the Inquisition, and the failure of the recently centralized state to exert control over local jurisdictions.
Elizabeth: Significantly, Schlau echoes Alcoberro in noting that even when the Spanish Inquisition did deal with alleged witchcraft crimes, the “punishments” were public and humiliating, but less frequently fatal. By 1525 a typical punishment for crimes of witchcraft included abjuration, requiring the witch to renounce their diabolical practice; an auto de fe, with the accused usually paraded through town half naked on a donkey; as well as a solemn mass, an oath of obedience to the Inquisition, a sermon, and the reading of the sentences, followed by 100 lashes and exile.[42]
Averill: There were few if any “panics” in Spanish America that came anywhere close to those that even Navarre or Catalonia experienced. In Spanish America, the Inquisitorial investigation of witch accusations were infrequent and spread out. In Celaya, Mexico, for example, Inquisitor Diego Muñoz collected testimonies surrounding a poor widowed woman, Isabel Durante. Five women were implicated in the course of the investigation, and another 21 women and five men were to be “reprimanded” by the priest for participating in various spell-buying and incantations. Martin Nesvig translated and edited Inquisitor Muñoz’s reports to the central Holy Office in Mexico City. The harshest punishment was meted down to Francisco Puntilla, an African curandero (healer), who was to get 200 lashes if he went back to his work of healing people with herbs. His harsher punishment, in contrast with that of the Spanish and creole individuals, is consistent with the pattern of the Spanish inquisition to focus their crueller tendencies on non-white subjects.[43]
Elizabeth: Historian Irene Silverblatt notes that the inquisitors in Spanish America were particularly anxious about the ways that European women were attracted to Indian customs, dress, remedies, and even language. In Peru in particular, Spanish and creole women sought out Inca ingredients and knowledge, even when they were blending it with Spanish traditions. Between the 1590s and 1660s, inquisitors blamed witches.[44] “Witches” in colonial “New Spain” were almost exclusively women, though they included Spanish, creole, mestiza, and Indian women. Sex magic shaped the Inquisitorial investigations in Peru, more so even than Mexico City or Cartagena. Women like Ana de Castaneda were penanced for “invoking demons and for mixing the sacred with the profane…mixing love potions to make men love women (including ‘a priest whom she made leave his parish and go crazy [with desire]’,” among other charges.[45]Castaneda told the inquisitors that she was taught love cures by indigenous women. She wore the habit of a Franciscan sister, and claimed that she was the “wife of Fray Diego de Medina, a Dominican monk.”[46] She believed herself a holy Christian woman, and that her work was within, rather outside, the boundaries of righteous and good. This was consistent across Silverblatt’s findings in Peruvian Inquisition cases. Just as none of the indigenous peoples thought of themselves as “Indians” before the Spanish came and labeled them thus, the women magic-users of the colonies did not think of themselves as blasphemers until the Inquisitors so labeled them.
Averill: I had intended this episode to spend equal time on the Italian Inquisition, but really, the form, function, and results are fairly similar to the Spanish. The Roman Inquisition, established in 1542, was a direct response to the threat that the “heresies” that the Protestant reformation posed. As in Spain, though many thousands of “witches” were investigated by inquisitors, very few were executed.[47] As Christopher Black points out, Italian inquisitors in particular – who tended to be well-versed in law – were more likely to emphasize spiritual penance rather than physical. Though one central canonical text from 900 CE, the Cap. Episcopi, referred to “certain wicked women…who believe that at night, in the company of Diana, goddess of the pagans, and an innumerable number of women, they ride on certain beasts, and pass over great distances of the earth in the depth of the night, and obey her commands as their mistress and are summoned to her service on particular nights,” the Italian inquisitors took the view that “night flying” was a “phantasmata” or delusion.[48] The legal minds of the Roman Inquisition resisted accepting maleficium as the cause of accidental death or disaster. They rejected the Malleus Maleficarum as a guide. And even the Sicilians, who had proportionally more witchcraft investigations than the peninsula, did not turn over any “witches” to the secular authorities for execution. In short, the Roman Inquisition was highly skeptical of witchcraft. Though it investigated a fair number of accusations of witchcraft – and across Italy was more involved in witchcraft accusations than other heretical crimes – the Italian Inquisition was even less invasive in the lives of subjects than the Spanish.
Elizabeth: One incredible thing about all these Inquisition records is the level of detail that they included, and the insight that they can offer us into the beliefs, practices, and customs surrounding magic use in early modern Europe and colonial contexts. Torture, even used once, is awful, and keeping the possibility of its use in mind is important when using these kinds of sources. But it’s also true that not all inquisitors used, or needed to use, torture. Individuals who believed that they wielded magic – like Isabel de Montoya and Ana de Castenada – answered questions and confessed, because they didn’t want to be doing a bad thing, and sought forgiveness. These are the records that allowed Carlo Ginzburg to construct one of the first social witchcraft history – his canonical Benandanti, or, The Night Battles, published in 1966 (as well as his second book, The Cheese and the Worm, which is also a fabulous example of microhistory made possible by the Inquisitorial records). Case studies using the Inquisitorial records show fascinating insights into Italian, Spanish, and Spanish American life in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century. You’ve heard a lot about the Spanish examples above. In Italy, in addition to Ginzburg’s “night battles”, historian Sally Scully demonstrates that for some mid-17th century women, witchcraft could offer women economic independence.[49]
Averill: So these records are an invaluable source for social history. Take, for example, these incantations from Isabel de Montoya, translated by Stacey Schlau:
Marta Martilla Senor compadre, Que la comadre me envie dineros. Y al hombre que quisiere bien, que para veer si es verdad que ladren los perros y cante un gallo y el diablo cojuelo [h]ara esto por me.[50] [Martha, little Martha. Mister godfather ask the godmother to send me money. And for the man whom I love well, so that I may see if it’s true. may the dogs bark, and may the rooster crow, and may the devil on two stick do this for me.]
Marta Martilla/ comadre la mala/ que le ruegues al senor de la calle,/ que estuviese fulano / no le dejes parar, ni sosegar / hasta que me benga a buscar. [Martha, little Martha/godmother of evil/beg the ruler of the streets/ if someone is there / not to let him stop, or rest until he comes looking for me.][51]
Elizabeth: These are both love spells – and like the love spells from ancient times that Ave talked about in a previous episode, there are some interesting – and coercive – elements to them. In Spanish, these spells rhyme, which is interesting – because I think of Shakespeare’s representation of a witchy incantation in Macbeth, which also rhymes. Bubble bubble, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Averill: I’d be curious to investigate how widespread the practice of rhyming in spellwork was across early modern Europe. What kind of power was there in rhyming? Language is so weird! I’m just rambling. But more importantly, Isabel de Montoya’s spells are drawing explicitly on local and religious folk custom. The Devil’s presence is signified by a dog barking, a rooster crowing, or a horse passing by – and these would have been signals that the Inquisitors would have been keyed into. The “Saint Martha” that she references is, curiously, a biblical figure said to be Mary Magdalene and Lazarus’ (as in raised from the dead Lazarus)’s sister. She was the patron saint of cooks and household workers, and, according to one apocryphal story, slayed a dragon in France. The “diablo cojuelo” references in the first spell is a popular folk figure in Latin America, the devil on two sticks, or “lame devil”, who was associated with dance, music, and satire, and was the “messenger for missives of love.”[52] So she’s calling on this folk devil to bring her love – this blending of religious iconography and prayer with folk remedies and customs reveals a lot about the syncretism in magic systems of the early modern period.
Elizabeth: As Irene Silverblatt points out, the mixing of “sacred things with the profane” was something that the Inquisitors noticed too – and were quite concerned about. Witches used scrapings of altar stones, holy water, and the consecrated baptismal oil in their various brews and potions; they included the Lord’s Prayer, Ave Maria, or the credo in their incantations, and they called on figures like Saint Martha and Erasmus.[53]Combined with indigenous or folk ingredients – like peyote – both practitioners and their customers believed in the power of combining these powerful elements. And, as Silverblatt argues, they had no “intention of blaspheming the Church; for these women thought that they had ‘the faith of God’ behind them… It was the Church that made them blasphemous.”[54] Inquisitors might be among the believers, or they might just be appalled at the bastardization of the sacristy.
Averill: In contrast to other regions of Europe, Italy, Spain, and Spanish America’s dealings with “witches” seems modest, maybe even humane. But as Lu Ann Homza argues, looking at numbers can trivialize the experience of being caught up in a witch panic.[55] Montoya, for example, experienced a typical conclusion of her encounter with the Spanish American Inquisition. From Schlau’s recounting, she was either under investigation or interrogated for nine years. It’s a miracle that she didn’t die while being held in Inquisitorial prison.
Elizabeth: It was precisely because of the catastrophe – and use of torture – in Navarre between 1608-1614 that Salazar de Frias, a respected Inquisitor, wrote his treatise opposing the torture and physical punishment of people accused of witchcraft. Even before 1610, the conditions for using torture were supposed to be rare; the official guidelines set out by church leaders Diego Simancas and Eliseo Masini prohibited torture unless there was substantial evidence of a prisoners’ guilt, but he was refusing to confess.[56] In witchcraft cases, Italian inquisitors were reticent to use torture even in cases that met the guidelines. In Spain, that was generally true as well, but there are records of inquisitors using the rack. Significantly, sleep deprivation was not considered a form of torture by early modern Europeans, so it was used regularly – and may account for some of the fantastical descriptions of night flying and demonic visits confessed by the accused. These methods of interrogation were used by judicial systems across medieval and early modern Europe. Horrific, to be sure, and also a part of the standards for adjudication. Marissa did a whole episode on this topic, covering the use of judicial torture and capital punishment in early modern Europe.
Averill: For the last five or so years, I’ve been teaching a course on the history of witchcraft. It’s largely focused on Europe, and even more so on England and Scotland. One of the early exercises in my class is historiographical in nature – in which I have students read a short article and listen to a podcast episode that, together, present one of the theories that historians have posited for explaining why there was a surge of “witch hunt panics” in Europe from around 1500 to 1800 or so. One group is assigned weird weather and the Little Ice Age, another group “patriarchy” and the sex-relatedness of the witch hunts, and another group the theory that witch hunts spiraled out of control in areas where there was a lack of a strong central government during political upheaval. I recently added the “religious” theory – which is framed around the idea that the Protestant Reformation and the conflict between Protestant sects and the Catholic Church is to blame for the surge of witch hunts, and that the “Church” was behind the accusations, either formally, like the Inquisitions in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, or informally, with religious leaders urging monarchs or locals to root out and destroy diabolical “Others” in their communities. The point of this exercise in my class is to point out that none of these “theories” are perfect for generalizing our understanding of why witch hunt panics happened. But in examining the panics through these lenses, we’re able to tease out the variation across regions, and consider the role that weather or patriarchy or religious conflict played in the experience and causation of particular surges. Most of the podcast episodes I assign to go with the academic article are Dig episodes – including Marissa’s great episode on the Little Ice Age, and my episode on brewsters. But until now, I haven’t been able to find a podcast episode that gives good examples of the role of the Church or religious conflict in witch trials – which is the genesis of this episode. So for my students who are listening/reading this in the future, I hope this has been useful. And for everyone else who is tuning in, I hope you enjoyed this episode!
Whenever I say “let’s do a witchcraft series for October” Marissa says “but we’ve already done that” as if there couldn’t possibly be anything else to say about the history of witchcraft, but just look at the bibliography of this episode!
Elizabeth: We’ll never run out of ‘new’ topics in the history of witchcraft and magic! It’s wild that we haven’t done an episode on witchcraft and the Inquisition before this, especially when you look at just how occupied with witch investigations Inquisitors were in places like Venice, Sicily, and Navarre.[57] For good reason, the history of magic and the construct of the “witch” in different times and places is endlessly fascinating, so this will not be the last time we talk about witchcraft on this podcast.
Averill: As my students this year have already been pointing out, learning about witch hunts and panics is useful for thinking about systems of oppression, violence, and censorship, especially when we seem to be living through yet another one of those historical – witch-hunt panic – moments.
Elizabeth: Thank you for joining us today. We invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store and our bookshop at digpodcast.org.
Averill: Thanks for listening. Bye!
Elizabeth: Byeeee
Bibliography
Augusti Alcoberro, “The Catalan Church and the Witch Hunt: The Royal Survey of 1621,” eHumanista 26 (2014) 153-169.
Christopher Black, The Italian Inquisition, (Yale UP, 2009)
Ed. Gustav Henningsen, The Salazar Documents: Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frias and Others on the Basque Witch Persecution (Brill, 2004).
Lu Ann Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608-1614 (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022).
Lu Ann Homza, The Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1614 : an anthology of sources, (Hackett, 2006).
Claudia Stella Geremia, “The Donna de Fora: A Sicilian Fairy-Witch in the Early Modern Age,” Religions15:161 (2024).
Ed. Brian P. Levack, The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern European and Colonial America, (OUP, 2013).
Martin Austin Nesvig, Forgotten Franciscans: Works from an Inquisitorial Theorist, a Heretic, and an Inquisitional Deputy, (Pennsylvania State UP).
Stacey Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment: Women and/in the Hispanic Inquisitions, (Brill, 2012).
Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and Colonial Origins of the Civilized World, (Duke UP, 2004),
Vincezo Tedesco, “Treasure Hunt–Roman Inquisition and Magical Practices Ad Inveniendos Thesauros in Southern Tuscany,” Religions 10:444 (2019).
María Jesús Zamora Calvo, Women, witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (LSU, 2021).
Notes
[1] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 130-40.
[2] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 135.
[3] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 123.
[4] Gary K. Waite, “Sixteenth Century Religious Reform and the Witch-Hunts,” The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern European and Colonial America, (OUP, 2013) 485-506; 486.
[5] Waite, “Sixteenth Century Religious Reform and the Witch-Hunts,” 486.
[6] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 121.
[7] Lu Ann Homza, The Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1614, (Hackett, 2006) 153.
[8] Homza, The Spanish Inquisition, 153.
[9] Pedro Ciruelo, Reprobacion de las supersticiones y hericerias (1530), qtd. In Homza, The Spanish Inquisition, 153.
[10] Martin Austin Nesvig, Forgotten Franciscans: Works from an Inquisitorial Theorist, a Heretic, and an Inquisitional Deputy,(Pennsylvania State UP,) 82; Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment; Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[11] Waite, “Sixteenth Century Religious Reform and the Witch-Hunts,” 498.
[12] Waite, “Sixteenth Century Religious Reform and the Witch-Hunts,” 489.
[13] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 4.
[14] Stephen Halicizer, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478-1834, (University of California Press, 1990) 1-8.
[15] Waite, “Sixteenth Century Religious Reform and the Witch-Hunts,” 503.
[16] Waite, “Sixteenth Century Religious Reform and the Witch-Hunts,” 502.
[17] Stacey Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment: Women and/in the Hispanic Inquisitions, (Brill, 2012) 2.
[18] Augusti Alcoberro, “The Catalan Church and the Witch Hunt: The Royal Survey of 1621,” eHumanista 26 (2014) 153-169.
[19] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[20] Halicizer, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1-8.
[21] Qtd. in Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and Colonial Origins of the Civilized World, (Duke UP, 2004), 165.
[22] Alcoberro, “ “The Catalan Church and the Witch Hunt,” 155.
[23] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 121.
[24] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 123-124.
[25] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 125.
[26] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 128.
[27] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[28] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[29] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[30] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 34-65
[31] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[32] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 2.
[33] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 121.
[34] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[35] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[36] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[37] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[38] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[39] Alcoberro, “The Catalan Church and the Witch Hunt,” 161.
[40] Alcoberro, “The Catalan Church and the Witch Hunt,” 162.
[41] Alcoberro, “The Catalan Church and the Witch Hunt,” 168.
[42] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 123.
[43] Martin Austin Nesvig, Forgotten Franciscans: Works from an Inquisitorial Theorist, a Heretic, and an Inquisitional Deputy,(Pennsylvania State UP,) 83.
[44] Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 165.
[45] Qtd. in Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 168.
[46] Qtd. in Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 170.
[47] Christopher Black, The Italian Inquisition, (Yale UP, 2009) 231.
[48] Black, The Italian Inquisition, 232-3.
[49] Sally Scully, “Witchcraft as an Alternative to Marriage in Venice,” Journal of Social History (1995).
[50] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 135
[51] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 137-38.
[52] Shlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment, 135.
[53] Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 166.
[54] Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, 167.
[55] Homza, Village Infernos and Witches Advocates, 33-65.
[56] Black, The Italian Inquisition, 81.
[57] Black, The Italian Inquisition, Appendix.
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