The Reforming Landscape

Spain’s Inquisition, established in 1478, prevented the entrenchment of Protestant thought, while its Edict of Expulsion exiled all practicing Jews in 1492.⁵ That same year further reform efforts sought to convert Moorish populations in reconquered Spanish regions. Thus, Spain had already been reforming religious practices for nearly forty years before the start of the Protestant Reformation. Efforts launched against “Lutheranism,” a broad term used to define any Protestant beliefs, came from its Inquisition’s tribunals, such as the one in Logroño.⁶ And although two Protestant conspiracies were uncovered and squashed in Pamplona, Luther’s teachings in reality exerted a limited influence in Iberia and involved mostly elites.⁷ With the Inquisition leading the battle against Protestantism, Spain’s reforming efforts turned to institutional improvements such as limiting corruption and improving education.

Spain’s reformation sought to strengthen the church’s own central authority while raising standards of orthodoxy and education. Marked by the Council of Trent (an ecumenical council assembled at the city of Trento in Italy), the Catholic Reformation focused on reforming behaviors of the clergy and laity alike. Throughout the council’s meetings, from 1545 to 1563, Spanish bishops constituted the largest representations (after the Italian episcopy), taking leading roles in the push for reform.⁸ Among the clergy, reforms targeted clerical abuses such as pluralism and nepotism, while encouraging improved pastoral practices.⁹ Among the Spanish laity, improving Catholic education and practices marked the Reformation’s main goals. Regular attendance at Mass and observance of the sacraments of baptism, marriage, confession, and extreme unction (anointing of the sick) all became core expectations of “good Christians.”¹⁰ Following Trent, Spain’s Inquisition and episcopy turned their attention toward the habits and practices of the Old Christian population and a program of Catholic renewal.¹¹

The effects of the Catholic Reformation enjoyed varying levels of success depending on the diocese. Scholars of early modern Spain have demonstrated that post-Tridentine reforms (goals emerging from Trent) experienced unequal efficacy depending on regional conditions such as the character of the local population, reform-mindedness of the bishops, and the strength of its inquisitorial tribunal. The diocese of Cuenca, for example, mounted a successful, far-reaching campaign to educate and reform the lives of the clergy and laity. But, as Sara Nalle has demonstrated, these accomplishments depended largely on the flexible application of previously existent forms of religious expression.¹² Similarly, Catalonia did experience effective reforms as Kamen has shown, though these changes were slow, uneven, and modified from the original goals laid out at Trent.¹³ Reform in the peripheries of Spain, as Allyson Poska has argued for the Ourense diocese in Galicia, brought official church and ecclesiastical hierarchy to local parishes, ushering in modest change to religious behaviors. Nonetheless, Orensanos “scrupulously maintained a version of Catholicism that was based in local tradition as well as a reciprocal relationship with the heavens and the corporate tradition of their parish.”¹⁴ Even in areas where the Catholic Reformation was strong, local religious practices persisted and the implementation of reform varied depending on the specific conditions of the period, place, and people.

Navarra’s reform-minded bishops played leading roles throughout the sessions of Trent, actively shaping goals. Navarra’s renewal efforts aimed to curb clerical misconduct, improve religious education for the laity, and reform the religious orders.¹⁵ The crucial roles of the delegates from Navarra ensured they took their charge to spread the decrees from Trent seriously, circulating them among parish priests and parishioners themselves.¹⁶ For example, Bishop Cardinal Bernardo Rojas y Sandoval called a synod in Pamplona in 1590, and within a year, printed and distributed a copy of the proceedings to every parish church.¹⁷ But, as Amanda Scott has shown in her research on Basque seroras (female tertiaries), reform depended also on villagers’ participation in the reforming program as “decrees played out very differently when introduced to localities.”¹⁸ Reforming efforts in Navarra successfully increased awareness of religious expectations, provided opportunities to participate in religious renewal, and offered a framework with which to scan their behaviors and those of their neighbors. Still, local religious expression along with cultural and linguistic differences limited reforms, and Navarra resisted a homogeneous, orthodox expression of Spanish Catholicism.

While villagers participated in the established rituals of the church, religion as experienced and conceived of by parishioners transcended doctrinal bounds.¹⁹ The official church centered around the sacraments, the Roman liturgy, and its calendar, while the church at the village level drew from communal patron saints, local ceremonies, and a provincial calendar informed by the region’s own sacred history.²⁰ Local village life relied on religious experiences to provide the crucial bonds of unity and identity, and reform efforts struggled to remove long-established symbols of belief and popular expressions of religiosity.²¹ The average villager in Navarra, for example, would have been loath to stop carrying effigies of the saints to the rivers to bring about rain.²² To fail in this ritual task could bring misfortune and even famine to the community. The needs of lay people to be able to see, hear, feel, and touch the fundamental elements of their belief system could not sufficiently be addressed by a central theology alone.²³ Thus, despite reform efforts at the hands of the episcopate and the Inquisition, Spanish Catholicism resisted a uniform manifestation and retained its nuanced local and popular expressions.²⁴ And as with other rural European communities, the mix of official church doctrines with local religious landscapes shaped witchcraft beliefs and the definition of who a witch was in reformation-era Navarra.

Mala Cristiana = Witch?

The concept of a mala cristiana often informed who was crafted as a witch in Navarra. As religious performativity held together the social fabric, those who weakened it emerged among the first to be labeled witches.²⁵ In at least a dozen witch trials in Navarra’s royal court, the term mala cristiana was used interchangeably with bruja. Similarly—and without exception—the defense attorneys’ first and foremost clause argued that the accused was a buena cristiana, and not a witch. The terms buena cristiana and conversely mala cristiana transcended their religious parameters throughout Navarra’s trial records and were used to signify whether a person might be a witch. These signifiers resist an easy translation that retains their meaning so remain therefore in their original Spanish form.

The connection between labels of mala cristiana and witchcraft accusations appeared throughout Navarra’s trial records with consistency. These accusations did not, however, necessarily reflect long-standing mala fama (negative notoriety) or an actual delinquent Christian (for instance, one who never goes to Mass).²⁶ Accusations of being a mala cristiana often resulted from mala fama as reflected in testimony from the village of Villanueva in 1535. When asked if he knew of any witches, Pedro Etzeberena responded that María Sagardoy must be a witch because she had “the reputation of being a mala cristiana.”²⁷ His primary emphasis on María’s reputation as a mala cristiana revealed the intimate connection in this villager’s mind between witchcraft and Catholic performance. It also underscored that just as early modern witchcraft was the inversion of Christianity, a witch was the inversion of a buena cristiana. In a world constructed of binaries (good/evil, man/woman, angel/demon, saint/witch), inversions or strict polar opposites provided an easily recognizable representation of all that witchcraft encompassed.²⁸ This simple duality registered a complex range of contradictions to an early modern Christian audience who was primed to search for signs of weak Christian performance. The intimate connection between a mala cristiana and witchcraft in the era of Catholic renewal emerged clearly in testimony from 1576. When asked who was known to be a witch in the village of Burutain, sixty-year-old Joanot Echeberri initially responded that his small village of fourteen or fifteen hearths lacked those with fama for witchcraft. But then he suggested: “Domingo de Echayde must be a witch because he has seldom ever gone to hear Mass and the divine services.”²⁹ For Pedro and Joanot, witches were foremost malas cristianas.

As agents of evil, these mala cristianas were often thought to bring misfortune and suffering to their communities. When the town of Piedramillera searched for its witches in 1576, thirty-two-year-old Catalina de Artabia reported with certainty that “there are witches” and identified three reputed witches, accusing them of sorcery, infanticide, and hanging toads on their doors. Catalina’s emotional deposition reveals the religious framework informing her definition of what a witch was. Catalina reported that she had lost all ten of her children: some were stillborn, and others died shortly after birth. Her relentless misfortunes left her no choice but to conclude: “From having birthed so many dead children, and from her pains and tribulations, she knows … that some mala cristianas brujas have caused this.”³⁰ She used the words “mala cristianas brujas” as one term, which in essence, they were. Malas cristianas, witches, had caused her suffering and the deaths of all her children. Catalina’s conclusion that witches induced her misery is not surprising, as it was common to look for explanations where there seemingly were none and ascribe misfortune to diabolical causes. While a functional role in witchcraft accusations was not a requirement, witch belief often provided just that.³¹

A label of mala cristiana exposed villagers to accusations of witchcraft, especially during the periods of chain trials. In the case of Graciana de Iráizoz mentioned at the outset, her neighbors in Anocíbar easily identified her as mala cristiana who did not fulfill her Catholic duties. Multiple witnesses testified that Graciana had been viewed suspiciously by her neighbors for a long time due to her delinquency from church, her odd behavior when she did attend Mass, and her defiant rejection of their interventions, transgressions that no doubt damaged her social standing. The court’s charges underscored the reasons behind the accusations, reporting “the neighbors saw her mala cristianidad [bad Christianity]” and concluded “the accused is a witch … and a mala cristiana.”³² Graciana defended herself against these accusations, maintaining she had been unable to attend Mass due to a long-term serious illness. Within a month of her incarceration, Graciana died in prison. Though she was very thin and weak, her cellmates took care to report she died with “Jesus’s name on her lips.”³³

Legal reports reflected and supported connections between Christian performativity and witchcraft. In 1576, eighteen villagers of Améscoa accused Martín Lopez, Joan de Alduy, and María de Ecala of witchcraft, highlighting their weak participation at the parish church. The fiscal’s formal charge of witchcraft underscored this religious transgression among the plentiful accusations of maleficia. In addition to noting that many years had passed since they last attended religious services, the fiscal added when they did so “it was only to comply with their neighbors.” Beyond the inadequate quantity of their attendance, he noted, too, the poor quality of their religious performance, continuing “they did not drink holy water, nor pray to the sacred sacrament. And before the priest said Mass and lifted the true body of our lord Jesus Christ and consumed it, they turned their faces and looked at the floor, and never looked at the altar nor the priest.”³⁴ The formal charges highlight the importance that religious performance held in judicial proceedings and legal proofs of witchcraft. They also reveal that villagers enforced proper behavior and that witchcraft labels were a public production influenced by Catholic reform efforts. As the local tribunal drew from the court of public opinion, the caliber of Christian performance emerged as a proof of witchcraft. While villagers, priests, and the royal tribunals called the accused malas cristianas, the accused and their procuradores refuted these charges with pronouncements of being buenas cristianas, supported by declarations of good Catholic and Christian acts and, at times, even with material proofs.

Christian Defense

In all of the royal tribunals’ witch trials—without exception—procuradores argued first and foremost that their client was a buena cristiana, a defense that relied on proof of religiosity as the supreme testament of innocence. While it stands to reason this would be a common line of defense, a review of other criminal trials from the same tribunals, same time period, and same villages revealed that this defense was specifically popular in trials of witchcraft. In a sampling of two dozen criminal trials including infanticide, bigamy, rape, theft, attempted murder, and homicide, not one single procurador invoked the defense their client was a buena cristiana.³⁵ This review privileged the same procuradores, such as Pedro Larramendi, who led every defense on behalf of accused witches with proclamations of his client’s status as a buena cristiana. And though some of these crimes such as rape, theft, and bigamy would no doubt have benefitted from character validation, at no point did they invoke the first and leading defense used to defend accused witches. This examination of contemporary nonwitchcraft trials corroborates that being a buena cristiana was central to a witchcraft trial defense. But what was a buena cristiana? Early modern religion functioned as a body of believers, and proof of membership in this community was enacted through performative visible rites and rituals.³⁶ Public performance through attendance at Mass, participation in Communion, confession of sins, observance of the religious calendar, receipt of the sacraments, marriage at the hands of the local priest, and a Christian Mass at the hour of death all pointed visibly to a buena cristiana.³⁷Procuradores drew from this sphere of visible works, highlighting tangible actions (such as giving alms and money to the church) and participation in community activities (such as pilgrimage) to prove the accused’s character as a buena cristiana.³⁸

While witchcraft accusations varied greatly in form and function, procuradores centered a defense of religious devotion. For example, when Graciana Oroquieta was accused of maleficia, night flight, and diabolism during the chain trials of 1576, her procurador Pedro Larramendi met this hearty set of accusations with a rebuttal that underscored her religious devotion:

She is a good Catholic Christian and person of good living and reputation, she confesses and receives communion as mandated by the holy mother church, and she hears Mass and attends the holy stations. And when entering the church, she has taken the holy water and has adored the cross and given alms and acts of charity. And she is separate from acts of sorcery and witchcraft, and this is held [to be true] and commonly reputed.³⁹

Larramendi intentionally argued first and foremost for the Christianity of his client. By proving Graciana was a buena cristiana—as measured by attendance at Mass, participation in Catholic ritual, and confession—Larramendi disproved that she was a witch. To be both was an impossibility. Defense attorneys relied also on witness testimonies about the religious practices of the accused, highlighting villagers’ responses that confirmed the accused was a buena cristiana, attended Mass with regularity, and had good fama. As with modern litigation, attorneys for the accused mounted arguments that would resonate best within their legal system. And in the witch trials of Navarra during the Catholic Reformation, it was by drawing on proofs of being a buena cristiana.

When Miguela de Villanueva stood accused of witchcraft and infanticide in 1576, Pedro Larramendi countered the allegations by first asserting: “She is fearful of God, a good and Catholic Christian.” He connected her status as a buena cristiana to her privileged, Old Christian (cristiano viejo) lineage as a “daughter and granddaughter of … principled, aristocratic buenos cristianos.”⁴⁰ Larramendi laid bare her buena cristiana proofs: Miguela had been baptized at birth, confirmed, and received a thorough and proper religious instruction in a timely manner. These Catholic rituals would serve as prophylactics from the diabolical seductions of witchcraft. While Larramendi’s arguments invoked her ancestral credentials as an Old Christian, free from the taint of Jewish or Moorish blood, it was her active role as a buena cristiana that Larramendi highlighted above all else.

Like witch-hood, Catholic ritual was not an occult practice, but rather public performance. So, while Miguela’s defense highlighted her knowledge of “Catholic understandings, the Sunday prayers, the Creed and the articles of the faith and other devotions and prayers,” it was her visible actions of reciting them in the presence of her community of believers and her frequent attendance at “Mass, vespers, the holy services, always and continually, and with much devotion” that could be corroborated by witnesses. He punctuated these attributes with the confirmation: “And this is public and common knowledge.” Reflecting the reforming landscape, parishioners monitored one another’s church activity and drew more from publicly observed rather than privately practiced transgressions to craft their witches. As such, Larramendi highlighted her frequent confession (which transcended the requisite once per year) and Miguela’s material support of her community of believers, arguing that she avidly tithed, dedicated the first fruits of her harvests, and performed “other praiseworthy and voluntary acts.”⁴¹ Even the quality of her performativity deserved notice, as he noted she enacted these practices with “much devotion.” Since religiosity was measured in terms of outward performances of Christian acts, how devotional acts were performed appeared often in witchcraft defenses. The attention Larramendi gave to Miguela’s Christian defense underscores its importance.

Clerical testimony to devotional performance on behalf of the accused could further strengthen a buena cristiana defense. In the 1576 trial of eighty-year-old Graciana Martínez from the village of Echarri-Aranaz, both the abbot of Urdiain and the parish priest attested to her Christianity as they disputed her witchcraft accusation. Don Miguel de Iturmendi, the seventy-four-year-old abbot, declared in the forty years he had served as abbot and vicar, he had always known Graciana to be a “buena cristiana and almsgiver.” But what stood out most in Don Miguel’s mind was the quality of her gifts. Her significant offering of a silver chalice “valued as much as six or seven ducados” emerged as a noteworthy offering, and multiple witnesses mentioned it in their depositions.⁴² Echoing the vicar’s impressions, the sixty-year-old priest Gaspar de Urdiain professed: “He has seen the accused go to the [church] and hear the divine services with devotion and receive the most sacred sacrament with much veneration and devotion.”⁴³ The scribe’s underlining of “much” leaps from the page. The purposeful stress on the intensity of her devotion suggests that while a tepid performance of the Christian ritual may be enacted by anyone, her expression of faith registered as remarkable by the priest, a strong defense against an accusation of witchcraft. Graciana’s defense rested on her Christianity and acts of charity toward her neighbors. Even so, the fiscal disregarded the seventeen witnesses who testified on her behalf, including two clerics, and severely sentenced the elderly, bedridden, and crippled woman to perpetual exile. While a Christian defense was crucial, it did not guarantee absolution, especially in times of heightened witch prosecutions.⁴⁴

In addition to arguing that the accused was a buena cristiana, defense attorneys could draw from the accused’s status as a cristiana vieja. In early modern Spain, being a buena cristiana typically also meant being an Old Christian.⁴⁵ Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, Toledo enacted statutes of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) aimed to persecute those with any trace of Jewish or Moorish ancestry and, conversely, strengthen the position of those with “clean blood,” that is, Old Christians with “Christian blood.” By the end of the sixteenth century, the ideology of limpieza de sangre had spread throughout Spain (and across the Atlantic) and severely impacted the lives and opportunities of anyone with Moorish, Jewish, or “heretical” heritage.⁴⁶ The notion of limpieza de sangre, at first deployed as a temporary tool to ensure the “purity of faith,” had been transformed into a means of exclusion, and those with “pure” or “clean” blood used this designation to their benefit.

Procuradores at times invoked the concept of limpieza de sangre in their defense of the accused. In 1661, fifty-three-year-old María Brigante was accused of sorcery and the murder of a magistrate from the court. Twenty-four villagers from her hometown of Lumbier testified to her mala fama, and various medical doctors declared that supernatural means caused the magistrate’s death. Confronted with so many accusations of mala fama, combined with the damning medical testimony, her procurador José Quadrado mounted the best defense he could: he highlighted her religiosity and her purity of blood. Not only was María a buena cristiana, she was also an Old Christian. Quadrado’s first article argued: “She is a woman of honor and a buena cristiana, fearful of God… . Her parents were people with honor and good birth, clean from the bad race of Jews, Moors, and those punished by the Holy Office. They were buenos cristianos.” And as such “they were neither witches nor sorcerers.”⁴⁷ It is remarkable to find the concept of limpieza de sangre applied beyond Jewish and Muslim blood and applied to corrupted Old Christian blood, to witches.

Beyond pointed hats and exaggerated noses, medieval antisemitic tropes contributed to the cauldron of witch beliefs.⁴⁸ Medieval impulses of “othering” (be it Jews, lepers, or agotes, a marginalized minority group in the Pyrenees) laid the foundation for a persecuting and intolerant society and became inherent to the idea of the witch as the diabolical “other” within the world of Christian reform.⁴⁹ Early fourteenth-century chronicles reported Jews gathering leprous populations together—along with the devil—to distribute poisons (made of blood, herbs, and the consecrated Host) and launch an attack on Christianity.⁵⁰ These medieval concerns for “a plot directed against society” morphed into fears of a diabolical witch sect within the context of an early modern Christian society of reformations.⁵¹ And notions of Jewish blood libel, infanticide, and cannibalism easily transferred onto the inherently polluted female witch.⁵² Beyond murdering unbaptized children and desecrating the Host, witches posed a greater threat than Jewish heretics as they could masquerade as good Christians while attempting to seduce the flock.⁵³ Even those with pure, Old Christian blood were not safe from the devil’s heightened project of seduction.

The use of limpieza de sangre not only appeared within the secular court of Navarra, but also emerged in Pamplona’s episcopal court. When Pedro Lecumberri was denounced for witchcraft and leading his own witch sect, his procurador Sancho de Berrobi argued: “Pedro de Lecumberri is a presbyter of good living, a noble hidalgo, and an Old Christian in his origin and ancestry, and is a good and Catholic Christian.”⁵⁴ While the claim of being a buena cristiana was sometimes difficult to prove, the accused could draw on their ancestry as Old Christians in their defense. Neighbors and clerics could testify to the accused’s heritage and outward acts of Catholic rituals. But, besides a purely Catholic genealogy, could physical evidence be introduced to the court to support claims of buena cristianidad?

In one particularly rich trial, the procurador provided five original indulgences treasured by an accused male witch as tangible proof of his being a buena cristiana and, therefore, not a witch. A group of villagers in Ultzama, accused of witchcraft during the chain trials of 1576, enjoyed a solid defense from their procurador who argued that they were buenas cristianas and that the false accusations had only materialized “in the last few days … against them by their enemies and those who hate them.”⁵⁵ But to his arguments on behalf of forty-four-year-old Sancho Yraycos, the procurador presented an extra layer of defense: material proof of buena cristianidad in the form of five indulgences from Rome (see fig. 3.1). Indulgences theoretically offered tangible evidence that the owner had engaged in prayer, confession, and monetary support of the Church, all acts belonging to a buena cristiana in post-Tridentine Spain.⁵⁶ This collection of sixteenth-century indulgences, presented in small documents, remains neatly tucked within the trial transcripts at the Archivo General de Navarra. The presence of these slips of paper issued by the Catholic Church, residing for centuries within the dossier of a witch trial, clearly presents the crucial connection between religious performance and witch belief in Navarra.

Indulgences served as a compelling proof of buena cristianidad as, in addition to payment, these indulgences would theoretically accompany visible acts such as public prayer, charitable works, and attendance at Mass and confession. They would have been obtained from simple priests who brought them back from Rome, an example of how local communities adapted official church material culture for local use.⁵⁷ Thus when Sancho obtained these five indulgences, he tapped into official church materiality. Two of the indulgences were bulas de la crusada, popular indulgences in medieval and early modern Spain.⁵⁸ The granting of this indulgence would have presupposed the person had already confessed their sins and had “perfect charity,” thus pointing to Sancho’s financial support of the crusades against the Moors of Spain.⁵⁹ Sancho’s centenary indulgence was granted as part of the papal jubilee of 1500 and included a reprieve of temporal punishment or time in purgatory for sins committed up to that point.⁶⁰ To obtain this indulgence Sancho would have likely provided donations for pilgrimage.⁶¹ Sancho possessed also a papal indulgence (issued by Pope Pius IV, 1559–65), a common indulgence regularly issued by popes.⁶² But one of Sancho’s indulgences stands out: he had obtained a plenary indulgence issued by Pope Paul IV (1555–59).⁶³

The requirements for a plenary indulgence were among the most rigorous as it removed all temporal punishments due for the sins committed up to that time. Early Catholics would theoretically have had “to fulfill the following three conditions: sacramental confession, Eucharistic Communion, and prayer for the intention of the Sovereign Pontiff.”⁶⁴ It was further required (in theory) to abstain from and renounce attachment to all forms of sin. Given these strict requirements for possession of a plenary indulgence, his procurador argued: “On behalf of Sancho de Yraycos, currently imprisoned … I present his four Bulls and one Jubilee to the fiscal so he can understand that Sancho is very Catholic, and a faithful Christian, and very religious, and devout.”⁶⁵ Offering not only financial support to the church, Sancho performed Catholic rituals in return for forgiveness. To be sure, a mala cristiana or witch would not show concern for spiritual purity, penance, and prayer; a witch would not possess holy indulgences. The indulgences offered physical testimony to Sancho’s religious performance, and though the court initially sentenced Sancho to five years’ exile, within days his sentence was revoked, and Sancho was set free.⁶⁶

Arguments and proofs made by the defense to refute witchcraft allegations centered on Catholic acts, attendance at Mass, regular confession, and charitable works, all of which pointed to being a buena cristiana. While not all malas cristianas attracted accusations of witchcraft, it was the principal perception considered by villagers when they indicted their neighbors for witchcraft. But while villagers’ reports in Navarra tended to focus on fama over witches’ gatherings, the diabolical dimension of witch belief remained present in their deep cauldron of witch belief, emerging at times in Navarra’s trials.

Christianity Inverted

In 1612 the French theologian Henri Montaigne stated: “God has his rites … the devil his… . God has his shrines, the devil his… . God his martyrs, the devil his.”⁶⁷ Like Montaigne, early modern Navarrans’ prevailing notions of witchcraft were informed by a Catholic mentalité that understood witches as malas cristianas, the opposite of buenas cristianas. Most villagers’ reports did not extend their accusations to witches’ gatherings complete with demonic sex, a diabolical pact, and a buffet of deceased babies. With slimmer influence by the more spectacular demonological writings, Navarra did not concentrate on the inverted rites of Christianity.⁶⁸ The concept of inversion—with witchcraft as a demonic copy of Christianity—did emerge in witch trials, as quotidian concerns for Catholic performance sometimes morphed into diabolical anxieties. As Stuart Clark comprehensively laid out in Thinking with Demons, a “culture highly sensitive to contrary oppositions” registered witchcraft as a religion shepherded by the devil.⁶⁹ Demonic witchcraft made sense in this world composed of inversions and oppositions with God and the devil at the forefront of the battle for souls. Just as God had his religion so did the devil, with witches as his parishioners. Witches were the ultimate Christian inversion; they were the devil’s sect. And as such they represented the most extreme form of religious deviance: they renounced God and their baptism, committing to the devil their bodies and souls bound by a diabolical pact. Their inverted rites of Christian belief and worship were epitomized in descriptions of the witches’ assemblies found commonly in learned treatises.⁷⁰ Though perhaps largely influenced by theologians and the elite, diabolical tropes represented a fusion of learned and common notions that were present—though not predominant—in Navarra.

Reports of inverted Masses, iconoclasm, and diabolism pepper the witch trials of the royal tribunals. From the early trial of Lope Esparza in 1540 and throughout the trials of the sixteenth century, villagers’ reports and official court accusations featured accounts of religious inversions and sometimes included the devil.⁷¹ And while diabolism appeared in half a dozen trials, these reports peaked during the chain trials of 1575–76, and often reflected a diabolical definition offered by the royal tribunals rather than the villagers’ testimonies as reflected in the scribal records.

The pivotal witch trial from Anocíbar in 1575 featured the witches’ gatherings, the diabolical pact, and acts of iconoclasm. The fiscal charged these accused witches and those from surrounding villages of using “sorcery and diabolical arts to fly invisibly through the air, murder children, and destroy the crops and fields.” He further claimed they entered churches and “spat on the crucifixes and the figures of the saints that are in them.” Merging temporal concerns of sustenance loss in a meager society with reforming ideals of religious reverence, the fiscal emphatically declared these witches must be fully punished for something so “abominable and debased.”⁷² Witches registered as the exact opposite of buenas cristianas and their rituals as the most perverse inversions of sacred ceremonies.

The Devil’s Mass

The chain of witch trials throughout Navarra’s valleys in the last quarter of the sixteenth century invited diabolical tropes. As the village of Ultzama surveyed its landscape for those with mala fama, twenty-year-old villager Martín de Echalde testified against some villagers and included a description of the witches’ gathering where they destroyed crops with poisons made of “toad water” and baptized by the “arm of a baby.”⁷³ In the ultimate inversion of the holy Mass, the witches used a dead child’s arm as an aspergillum to bless the poisonous concoction, one responsible for the deaths of people and provisions. In lieu of holy water the witches fittingly used toad water, as toads were associated with witchcraft and death in early modern Europe.⁷⁴ This ritual—like witchcraft—inverted Christianity. These details, like those found in Martín’s deposition, represented inversions of what was good, right, and holy, inversions of a buena cristiana.

One of the most detailed accounts of an inverted Mass emerged from an irregular trial that began in the hands of the alcalde Fermin Andueza in the valley of Araiz in 1595. According to the scribe recording the testimony produced at the palace, a group of accused villagers, including children, confessed to attending the witches’ gathering in a field, adoring the devil, and engaging in diabolical sex. But soon after their transfer to the royal tribunals in Pamplona, they recanted their confessions, claiming the powerful Andueza had forced their confessions with false promises and violent threats. This coerced testimony problematizes whose voices are reflected but offers notions of the inverted Mass nonetheless. The report stated they went to a field where “two figures sat on golden thrones … a black man with two horns on his head” and a white woman dressed in green.⁷⁵ The dark man and his fair female consort reflected an inversion, emplotting her perhaps as Mother Mary’s diabolical counterpart. The details of the golden chairs parodied the gilded altars and relics of the Catholic Church. It was in front of these figures that the accused villagers were said to have declared: “Belzebut and his consort are the true gods and saviors of all creation. And as such, to them we owe adoration.”⁷⁶ Then they all adored Belzebut “as their god and Lord … and reneged their Christian faith.” At this point the female witches, in an inversion of the holy kiss (a traditional brotherly sign of affection among Christians) kneeled on the ground and as Belzebut lifted their skirts with his hands, they took turns kissing “his behind.” Following the anal kisses, Belzebut publicly had sexual intercourse with all the women, leaving María Hernando’s white undergarments “very bloodied.”⁷⁷ Not only did the devil engage in illicit sexual intercourse with multiple women, but he also left at least one covered with blood, a most profane inversion of Christ’s holy blood spilled on the cross.

The council’s formal accusation reflected a Catholic theology that informed the inverted Mass. Its report concluded that the witches in attendance had renounced God and the Catholic faith. As malas cristianas they “recognized Belzebut as Lord,” and to him alone they gave adoration and reverence.⁷⁸ Their perverted God had his own temples and required of them prayer, fasting, alms, and even “confession of all their sins.” The formal charges concluded that these malas cristianas had turned away from their community of believers, “the holy faith, and the sacraments.” To be sure, there could be no greater inversion of Catholic rites and rituals than the witches’ Mass.

The flexibility of witchcraft beliefs allowed the notion of mala cristiana to be stretched to its extreme limits as reflected in the witches’ gatherings. While the label usually implied weak Catholic performativity and infrequent attendance at Mass, it could also encompass sacrilege, the diabolical pact, and sex with the devil. Regardless of its manifestation, the Catholic cosmos in post-Tridentine Navarra informed notions of witchcraft on every level and for every person, from common villagers to court magistrates to the shepherds of the holy church.

The Priest-Witch

From parish priests to bishops, church officials participated in trials of witchcraft in a variety of capacities. They heard testimonies, relayed accusations, testified in proceedings, delivered the last rites to accused witches dying in prison, and in the case of María Johan of Anocíbar, served as exorcists during interrogations under torture.⁷⁹ While clerics instigated two witch trials, pastoral testimony within the trials usually favored the accused. Clerical voices, though present in the records, were neither overly represented nor necessarily privileged over other testimonies, and some accused witches received harsh sentences despite impeccable defenses provided by religious authorities (as in the case of Graciana Belza in 1561). But what of clerics themselves? Did they ever find themselves on the receiving end of a witchcraft accusation?

A local priest from the village of Burgui in the Valley of Roncal, Don Pedro Lecumberri, was tried for witchcraft by the episcopal court of Pamplona in 1569.⁸⁰ This complex witch trial began with the local alcalde of Burgui in July, was then referred to the curia diocesana in Pamplona, then passed on to the curia of Zaragoza, then transferred to the Inquisition (where it was rejected), and was ultimately returned to the episcopal tribunal of Pamplona, where it finally concluded in December 1570.⁸¹ This dramatic trial lasted over a year and a half, passed through several jurisdictions, and involved a controversial priest who was loved by some and hated by others. Lecumberri’s trial reflected diabolical anxieties, moralizing concerns, and the spirit of reform within the episcopal court of post-Tridentine Navarra.

Thirty-five-year-old Pedro Lecumberri, a charismatic cleric in a village of some one hundred hearths, was denounced to the alcalde for shepherding a small sect of female witches.⁸² Three other members of his alleged sect received accusations alongside him: sixty-year-old María Gracieta; her daughter María Garat; and her granddaughter, seven-year-old Gracieta. The reports against them relied heavily on child testimony, a feature found in witch trials throughout early modern Navarra and beyond.⁸³ The first accusations came from eight-year-old Andella Garat who alleged that she was asked to join the accused in a field while she tended to her father’s sheep. In an inversion of all that is good, the witches fed her vile meat and made her renounce “God and Santa María and their mother and father and godparents.”

Similar to inversions emerging from the secular trials in Navarra, the episcopal court’s records included the devil, desecration of sacred objects, and the anal kiss. One witness, sixty-year-old Sebastián Baldan, grandfather to one of the young girls deceived by Pedro, reported seeing “something black like a goat with horns” that the young Gracieta walked over to “and kissed it under its tail.”⁸⁴ Seven-year-old Catalina Bront also reported the anal kiss and that María Garat instructed them: “Little girls, disavow God and our Holy Mother Santa María and all the male saints and female saints.”⁸⁵ Catalina reported that on another occasion “after dancing … they collected manure and with some little sticks they anointed the feet of [Jesus on] the cross … and they made obscene gestures to all the crosses.”⁸⁶ The reported activities of the perverted priest and his deceived parishioners inverted his pastoral duties and—situated within a reforming mindset—imbued this set of accusations with meaning.

Though this trial featured inversion and gross sacrilege, it remained an isolated trial. All of the accused denied any connection to witchcraft, and most of the testimonies came from young girls, an irregularity noted by the defendants’ procurador, the bishop of Saragossa, and the vicar general of Pamplona.⁸⁷ Children seldom emerged as the sole accusers in the secular witch trials of early modern Navarra.⁸⁸ But the importance of children’s roles in witchcraft proceedings was sometimes heightened, as reflected in the priest-witch case of Burgui in 1569 and the infamous witch panic.⁸⁹ Due to the young age of the key accusers, the Inquisition rejected this case. As the trial passed through various jurisdictions, the reports elicited skepticism as to the realities of the accusations and general incredulity of the entire scenario. The case concluded with absolution for the three accused witches and the improper priest, while Lecumberri was ordered to never again speak with any of them.⁹⁰

The case of the priest-witch in the episcopal court offers several key points. First, it reflects Navarra’s vibrant legal culture where three different jurisdictions all were interested and held the power to prosecute witches. Second, it confirms that when witches were sought, those who exhibited inappropriate behaviors could be crafted as witches, even if their behavior had been tolerated for years or decades. Finally, it illuminates the intersection between reforming efforts focused on clerical misbehavior and the religious inversions in witchcraft trials.⁹¹ As religious reformers and other intellectuals opined on witchcraft and the devil, their demonological writings both reflected and reshaped ideas about witchcraft. And as with everything in witchcraft, the corpus of witchcraft theory ranged widely depending on local factors, personalities, and temporal context.

Religious Writings and Witchcraft

The textual world of demonologies reflected, informed, and complemented the witchcraft beliefs of the early modern world.⁹² Within this large corpus of writings, theologians, clergymen, natural philosophers, jurists, and intellectuals shared their doctrines, doubts, and debates about witchcraft.⁹³ These demonologies reflected a common Christian theology offering invaluable insights into the world of demons, the devil, and witches. Religious reformers composed dozens of demonological treatises, often informing and informed by regional witch trials.⁹⁴ Yet only two of these works found their way into the witch-trial transcripts of the royal tribunals. Both texts, Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechicerías (1537) by Pedro Ciruelo and Disquisitiones magicae (1608) by Martín Delrío, were penned by Spanish theologians (though Delrío was born in Antwerp and traveled extensively).⁹⁵ While these ecclesiastics conceived of witchcraft within a religious framework, they did not linger on the demonological aspects featured in many other popular demonologies, such as seen in Heinrich Kramer’s popular Malleus maleficarum (1486) or the more local Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons by Pierre de Lancre (1612). They instead pushed for deeper spiritual practices, improved religious education, and caution with regard to the occult. This lack of sensational demonological writings and thought produced by Spanish theologians informed and reinforced Navarra’s understandings of witchcraft.

The two demonologies appearing in Navarra’s witch trials emerged from the medical testimony of four physicians in the 1675 sorcery trial of María Esparza. Doctors Francisco de Olazagutia and Francisco de Elcarte, and the master surgeons Juan de Leiza and Juan de Anelieta, were asked to determine whether certain illnesses ascribed to María were caused by natural means. They formed their conclusions by reviewing the witnesses’ depositions, not by examining the affected individuals. It is within their results that Ciruelo’s Reprobación and Delrío’s Disquisitiones appeared as support for their commentaries explaining why certain illnesses, like those caused by preternatural means, were resistant to natural remedies. Though the medics did not engage deeply with these texts, their citations provide clues as to which demonological writings circulated in Navarra.⁹⁶

Pedro Ciruelo composed Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechicerías in 1537, warning Christians to avoid superstitions, sorcery, and things that only “God could and should know.”⁹⁷ The very title of Ciruelo’s work, A Treatise Reproving All Superstitions and Forms of Witchcraft: A Very Useful Book and Necessary for All buenos cristianos, centered his concern for proper Christian practice. Concerned by the “vain arts” to which Spaniards had fallen victim resulting from clerical negligence, he sought to “warn all the buenos cristianos and God’s faithful servants” to guard themselves against superstitious error.⁹⁸ The treatise was comprised of three parts: The first section treated the arts of divinations and argued that all superstitious behaviors contradicted the wisdom of the Ten Commandments and thus constituted sinfulness. The second part warned against practices of nigromancy and sorcery and even astrology.⁹⁹ He also condemned healing practices performed by unofficial healers and advised that seeking such services invited diabolic delusion.¹⁰⁰ The text’s final section denounced spoken or written curses, charms, superstitious prayers, and the evil eye. Ciruelo’s main argument encouraged proper Catholic practices and discouraged seduction by arguing that occult matters should remain occult. Ciruelo’s work was not the only Spanish demonology appearing in the witch trials that warned against the practices of malas cristianas.

Martín Delrío’s Disquisitiones magicae (1608) cautioned adamantly against all magic. Reprinted more than twenty times, it enjoyed great popularity rivaling that of the Malleus maleficarum.¹⁰¹ Delrío, a Jesuit theologian, wrote his treatise inspired by the lax Christian behaviors he observed and concerns for the heretical temptation of magic and sorcery.¹⁰² He admonished Catholics against the lure of magical studies and sought to prevent them from falling into heresy, warning that some things are occult for a reason and buenas cristianas would do well to keep them that way. The prologue’s first sentence centered his concern with Christian behavior. He counseled: “The pride and malice of God’s enemies are increasing. They have a thousand ways of doing harm and use innumerable weapons against humanity, of which magic is the deadliest.” He then forewarned that “never have there been as many witches as there are today, and the main reason for this is the faintness of a contempt for the Catholic faith.”¹⁰³ Delrío cautioned against magic in any form, calling it “the handmaid of moral turpitude,” and lamented that magic’s seduction was great, leaving but “a few fervent Catholics left,” indicating that witches teemed throughout the Catholic world. Framing magic as Satan’s weapon in a holy war against God and the Catholic faith, he offered, “this book is a weapon in that war.”¹⁰⁴ With Catholic propriety as his focus, Delrío emphasized the hope and legitimate succor that only the church could offer. Divided into four books, Delrío paired witchcraft and magic with heresy and apostasy, sending a clear warning: if one loses the faith and becomes a mala cristiana, the sins of heresy, magic, and witchcraft await. Delrío believed the crimes committed by witches occurred in reality, even calling witchcraft’s inversions “quasi-rituals” that mimic “the sacrifice of the mass and other similar Catholic ceremonies.” While Delrío found this to be “the greatest of all [the witches’] crimes” he did not launch into sordid details of diabolism as did other writers of demonological thought, such as Kramer and De Lancre, both of whom participated actively in witch trials.¹⁰⁵ In fact, as Jan Machielsen has recently shown in his thorough investigation of Delrío’s work, “it is likely that the author of the most popular work of demonology in the early modern period never met, let alone persecuted a witch.”¹⁰⁶ Delrío’s work concluded with advice for confessors, emphasizing the crux of Catholic piety and warning them to not turn a blind eye to witchcraft as, for Delrío, it was the devil’s ultimate tool in the seduction of buenos cristianos. He concluded his text with the hope it would reform lay Christians and clerics.

Demonologies were, in many regards, reforming texts aimed at correcting unorthodox Christian behaviors. Ciruelo and Delrío’s concern with correcting improper religious education reflected the concerns of Navarra’s magistrates. For instance, in 1536 the courts of Navarra wrote to the king requesting an in-residence bishop. This petition drew from concerns of witchcraft, complaining that with an absent bishop “the churches of this kingdom are poorly governed, which has resulted in various errors, such as the issue with the witches.”¹⁰⁷ So while demonologists often learned from the courts about the possible activities of witchcraft, they simultaneously developed a rational doctrine of evil, thus reaffirming that diabolical powers were real. They influenced judicial procedures and created a learned body of witchcraft literature, one as varied and nuanced as witch beliefs themselves. Regardless of their positions of skepticism, diabolism, or reforming goals, all demonologies held one truth in common: witchcraft stood as the inversion of Christianity. The demonologies emerging from the records in Navarra, however, approached this fact with a restrained pen, one that focused on Catholic propriety and the avoidance of the seductions of the occult, and did not draw out the witches’ Masses in their grotesque depictions.¹⁰⁸

Witchcraft beliefs in Navarra were informed by and understood within the context of Catholic Reformation, and this spirit of reform helped craft Navarra’s witches. While Spain’s Catholic homogeneity limited clashes between the Catholic and Protestant faiths, Catholic and Tridentine reforms did permeate Navarra, educating and offering Navarra’s villagers the opportunity to reform improper behaviors and participate in religious renewal. Reform-era expectations centered the public ritual practice of Catholic acts and participation in the local church—outward demonstrations of being a buena cristiana. Though not all malas cristianas were witches, all witches were malas cristianas. Operating under this conceptual framework, accusers sought to discredit the religiosity of the accused and pointed to their deficits in Catholic performativity and Christian responsibilities. Meanwhile, procuradores defended their clients with declarations of their buena cristianidad and turned to proofs found in their religious heritage and participation in religious rituals. As reflected in several secular trials, ideas of religious inversion, the witches’ Masses, and diabolism did hold meaning in Navarra, but magistrates, villagers, and theologians did not pursue that strand of belief with great interest. And though demonological writings were produced in, inspired by, and read in Navarra, none of them fixated on the most diabolical witchcraft tropes. These factors, reciprocal and related, shaped witchcraft understandings in Navarra, understandings that placed Christian performativity at their center.

1. AGN, TR_69853 (1576), fol. 85r.

2. Catholic witch-hunting in southwest Germany, for example, differed from the Catholic response to witch fears in southern Spain. H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1582–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 33.

3. For useful maps and charts, I recommend Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 105, 130, 136, 150.

4. See Carlos Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), chap. 23, 632–40.

5. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997).

6. For example, from 1565 to 1600, the Logroño tribunal executed twenty Protestants, burned another twenty-eight in effigy, and sent some one hundred to the galleys. E. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 37, 143–46.

7. Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 24. Helen Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 37–42. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 149.

8. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 22.

9. According to Helen Rawlings, Pamplona had been a particularly strong seat of papal nepotism. Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain, 52.

10. For more on the various aims of Trent’s reforms, see John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).

11. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 258.

12. Sara Nalle refers to Catholic reforms in Cuenca as “an incongruous mixture of official compulsions and popular religious enthusiasm,” a description that perfectly captures the complexities of reform, witchcraft, and belief itself. God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 209.

13. Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 430–34.

14. Allyson M. Poska, Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 161.

15. The education campaign for increased frequency of attendance at Mass and confession successfully increased the demand of catechisms as demonstrated by the proliferation in religious literature coming out of Navarra’s printing presses. José Goñi Gaztambide, Los navarros en el Concilio de Trento y la reforma tridentina en la diócesis de Pamplona (Pamplona: Imprenta Diocesana, 1947), 285, 288.

16. For a thorough analysis of the quality and reach of Tridentine reform in Navarra, see Amanda L. Scott, The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), chap. 3, especially pp. 55–65.

17. This same year, the curia diocesana was restructured according to Tridentine reform. José Goñi Gaztambide offers a comprehensive four-volume account of Pamplona’s episcopacy and their activities before, during, and after Trent. For accounts of the sixteenth century, see Historia de los Obispos de Pamplona, vols. 3 and 4 (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1985).

18. This was reflected in the diocese’s disregard for decrees on regulating third-order religious women and cloistering professed nuns. Scott, The Basque Seroras, 65.

19. For a useful and example-filled framing of the overlapping spheres of magic and religion, see Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (London: Hambledon, 2000), 459–68.

20. Much of what we know of religion in early modern Spain is derived from King Phillip II’s printed questionnaire that was sent to towns and villages in New Castilla from 1575 to 1580. It is unsurprising that these results reveal a religion in which the local was of primary significance. William A. Christian’s study, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), is largely based on the questionnaire’s findings.

21. As Euan Cameron has shown, despite the Council of Trent’s attempt at administrative uniformity, the diversity of sacramentals, unofficial saints, folk healers, and other superstitions persisted throughout early modern Europe (and into the modern period). See Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), introduction.

22. As early as 1510, Martín de Arlés y Andosilla (canon of Pamplona) sought to curb such superstitious practices; however, to this day the ritual of bearing the effigy of San Miguel to bring about rain persists. See Javier Pagola Lorente, A Thousand Routes through Navarre (Pamplona: Fondo de Publicaciones del Gobierno de Navarra, 2000), 65.

23. William Christian’s study of local religion in sixteenth-century Spain provides a glimpse of the sphere of direct contact between communities and their saints. See Christian, Local Religion, 20.

24. In his work on villages in Castilla, David Vassberg shows that even following successful Tridentine reforms local communities retained their own local saints. An example was the beloved “Lady of Riansares” to which local parishioners clung, regarding her as superior to all other virgins in the peninsula. Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World in Golden Age Castile (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 161.

25. This could range from those who held lasting fama for being “dissolute and immoral,” such as Anna Schmieg described by Thomas Robisheaux in The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 72, to those who, in a general way, imposed on others in an already meager society, as explored by Robin Briggs in his analysis of beggars in Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: Penguin, 1996), 155–57.

26. As Levack lays out in his discussion of triggers (individual or communal) that arose and led to denunciations, people usually drew first from those with reputations of moral or religious deviance. This does not mean, of course, that early modern Europeans with unblemished reputations did not get accused of witchcraft. See Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 164–70 for “The Triggers” and 145–47 for “The Personality of the Witch.”

27. AGN, TR_209502 (1535), fol. 3r.

28. Clark offers an exceptional analysis of inversion, the dual classification system, the language of contrarieties, and how these informed and supported demonic witchcraft beliefs. See Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 31–93.

29. AGN, TR_11219 (1576), fol. 7v.

30. AGN, TR_11195 (1576), fol. 3v.

31. Witchcraft accusations sometimes intersected with inexplicable tragedies, such as unseasonal weather or “the accumulation of misfortune [that seemed] unnatural.” But bad things were not the cause of witchcraft beliefs; rather villagers could draw from the cauldron of witch beliefs during hard times if they so chose. Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 85.

32. AGN, TR_69853 (1576), fol. 85r.

33. AGN, TR_69853 (1576), fol. 100r.

34. AGN, TR_69261 (1576), fol. 56r.

35. I examined twenty-five criminal trials in the AGN processed by the royal tribunals from 1570 to 1595, and none argued specifically that the accused criminal was a buena cristiana.

36. For more on the social creation and function of religion, see Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22–28.

37. And, in theory, a good Catholic would know popular prayers and the Ten Commandments. Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain, 79.

38. See Cristina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (New York: Blackwell, 1984), 118.

39. AGN, TR_344109 (1576), fol. 41.

40. AGN, TR_327295 (1576), fol. 32r.

41. AGN, TR_327295 (1576), fol. 32r.

42. AGN, TR_327215 (1576), fol. 25r.

43. AGN, TR_327215 (1576), fol. 27r.

44. The records of this case cannot offer a specific clue as to why the court treated her so severely.

45. Conversos, that is, newly converted Jewish populations, suffered greatly under Spanish suspicions. See Jonathan Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

46. For a thorough discussion of these discriminatory statutes, see Albert A. Sicroff, Los estatutos de Limpieza de Sangre: Controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII (Madrid: Taurus, 1985).

47. AGN, TR_59308 (1661), fol. 58r.

48. As early as 1421, those convicted of sorcery were forced to wear the conical “Jewish hat.” See Naomi Lubrich, “The Wandering Hat: Iterations of the Medieval Jewish Pointed Cap,” Jewish History 29, no. 3 (2015): 232.

49. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 51–52, 67–69.

50. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 35–36.

51. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 121.

52. See Yvonne Owens, “The Saturnine History of Jews and Witches,” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 3, no. 1 (2014): 56–84.

53. Richard Kieckhefer also offered connections between Jewish accusations and those of witches. See “Avenging the Blood of Children: Anxiety over Child Victims and the Origins of the European Witch Trials,” in The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Jeffrey B. Russell, ed. Alberto Ferreiro (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 92–95.

54. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17 (1569), fol. 34r.

55. AGN, TR_69259 (1576), fol. 36r.

56. For more on indulgences, their history, use, controversy, and scriptural underpinnings, see P. F. Palmer and A. Tavardi, “Indulgences,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 7:436–41.

57. Christian, Local Religion, 145.

58. AGN, TR_69259 (1576), fols. 103r, 104r.

59. So popular was this bull, it accounted for a large portion of the royal annual income. For more on the functions of indulgences, see Patrick J. O’Banion, The Sacrament of Penance and Religious Life in Golden Age Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 92–102.

60. AGN, TR_69259 (1576), fol. 106r.

61. A special thanks to Dr. Thomas Robisheaux for his assistance in illuminating the requirements to obtain these indulgences.

62. AGN, TR_69259 (1576), fol. 107r.

63. AGN, TR_69259 (1576), fol. 108r.

64. Palmer and Tavardi, “Indulgences,” 437.

65. AGN, TR_69259 (1576), fol. 109r.

66. AGN, TR_69259 (1576), fol. 137r.

67. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 83; citation of Henri Montaigne’s Daemonis mimica, in magiae progressu (Paris, 1612).

68. The thousands of folios of witness testimony and summaries in the royal tribunals of Navarra make mention of only two demonologies.

69. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 70.

70. Examples of prominent demonologies that described the reality of the witches’ gatherings include De la demonomanie (1580) by Jean Bodin, Daemonolatria (1595) by Nicolas Remy, and Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (1612) by Pierre de Lancre. See Alan Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 290–302, 322–29; Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, trans. Gerhild Schultz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).

71. The first official report of a witches’ gathering, in the case against many witches in Ochagavía in 1539, featured a reneging ceremony of God and the saints, as well as meeting in fields and the town square to dance, spread poisons, and use toad powders and blood to murder infants and adults. AGN, TR_63994 (1540). The devil had appeared in Spanish literature for centuries before the Reformations, as reflected in its literature, folklore, and art. For Spanish speakers, I recommend El Diablo en la Edad Moderna, ed. María Tausiet and James S. Amelang (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2004), especially 99–158.

72. AGN, TR_69853 (1575), fol. 1r.

73. AGN, TR_69259 (1576), fol. 14r.

74. The biochemical properties of toads largely influenced this association. See Rochelle Rojas, “The Witches’ Accomplice: Toads in Early Modern Navarre,” Sixteenth Century Journal 51, no. 3 (2020): 693–714.

75. AGN, TR_71319 (1595), fols. 116v–117r.

76. AGN, TR_71319 (1595), fol. 117r.

77. AGN, TR_71319 (1595), fol. 118v.

78. The name Beelzebub could apply to a lesser demon or the devil himself and as such appeared in witch trials throughout early modern Europe and North America. In France, Beelzebub possessed the Ursuline nuns in 1611, while in North America, he inspired Cotton Mather to pen Of Beelzebub and His Plot following the Salem witch trials. See Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 31–35; and Cotton Mather, Of Beelzebub and His Plot, Original Sources, accessed July 31, 2023, http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=5DDGZ6LDDLS5NMR.

79. The Franciscan friar Francisco de Huarte attended María Johan’s first torture session in case he was needed to perform an exorcism. AGN, TR-_69853 (1575), fol. 109r.

80. This differs from what Tausiet uncovered in Aragon’s ecclesiastical court, which treated eight trials of witchcraft. Though several other trials in the ADP include brujería, this trial reflects the most comprehensive trial of persons fingered as witches.

81. This section draws from several sources: the original 235-folio trial dossier in the ADP, the section on this case found in Florencio Idoate Iragui, La Brujería en Navarra y sus Documentos (Pamplona: Institución Príncipe de Viana, 1978), 74–87, and Félix Sanz Zabalza, Las brujas de Burgui (Navarra: Editorial Evidencia Medica, 2013).

82. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17 (1570), fol. 27r.

83. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17 (1570), fol. 27r.

84. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17 (1570), fol. 42r.

85. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17 (1570), fol. 48r.

86. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17 (1570), fol. 84r.

87. Idoate, La Brujería, 78–82.

88. While villagers under the age of discretion (twelve for girls, fourteen for boys) served as mouthpieces for the neighborhood gossip and reflected the beliefs they heard from their parents and elders, their involvement was usually not overly represented in the testimonies before the royal tribunals. The data shifts significantly, however, if we include the witch panic, suggesting that evidence resting largely on child testimonies often held an exaggerated role in moments where witch belief became dysfunctional. While the 1575 case of Anocíbar and the two young witchfinders of 1525 and 1595 center children’s roles, most witch trials in the secular court did not rely entirely on juvenile involvement.

89. Of the witch panic, Lu Ann Homza has shown the persistent and crucial roles played by children, arguing the panic “should be framed as fundamentally a children’s event, given that boys and girls predominated as victims and accusers.” See Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 74–75, 102–4, 185–86.

90. The records suggest that Lecumberri was engaged in inappropriate relationships with at least one of the women, and perhaps other parishioners; see Sanz Zabalza, Las brujas de Burgui, 149–50. ADP, Aguinaga, Cartón 13, n. 17 (1570), fol. 234r.

91. Amanda Scott’s analysis of Don Pedro de Atondo, a parish priest notorious for healing, conjuring, and even violence, shows how parishioners used the diocesan courts to reform their priest’s misbehaviors. See Scott, “The Wayward Priest of Atondo: Clerical Misbehavior, Local Community, and the Limits of Tridentine Reform,” Sixteenth Century Journal 47, no. 1 (2016): 75–98.

92. It is worth noting that there were no such things as demonologies or demonologists; it is, as Jan Machielsen put it, “an artificial creation, brought together by historians,” used to designate writings that included natural philosophy, religion, and law, as well as thoughts regarding demons, witchcraft, sorcery, and so forth. These writings, therefore, range from focused and intense (such as the Malleus maleficarum) to general and skeptical (Disquisitiones magicae). Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 5–7.

93. Witchcraft theory was not written in isolation and relied upon a whole range of intellectual commitments to make sense. See Clark, Thinking with Demons, viii.

94. For a study of the demonologists assembled at the Council of Basel, see Michael Bailey and Edward Peters, “A Sabbat of Demonologists: Basel, 1431–1440,” Historian 65, no. 6 (Winter 2003): 1375–96.

95. See the case of María Esparza, AGN, TR_17176 (1675).

96. Lu Ann Homza analyses these two demonological writings and shows how these texts could be used to “produce different witches from different sources” thus placing demonologies as one context of the crafting of witches. See Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 182–209.

97. Pedro Ciruelo, A Treatise Reproving All Superstitions and Forms of Witchcraft, Very Necessary and Useful for All Good Christians Zealous for their Salvation, trans. Eugene A. Maio and D’Orsay W. Pearson (London: Associated University Press, 1977), 26.

98. Ciruelo, A Treatise Reproving, 26.

99. Homza, Religious Authority, 182–209.

100. What constituted official versus unofficial healing remained blurry throughout the early modern period, with education being one of the only distinctions. The majority of medical interventions were performed by unofficial healers. See Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, for a discussion of “Official and Unofficial Healing,” 141–52.

101. Jan Machielsen reveals that Disquisitiones magicae was reprinted more times than was the Malleus maleficarum. Machielsen, Martin Delrio, 5.

102. Delrío’s research into witchcraft was inspired by Jean del Vaulx, a Benedictine monk accused of witchcraft and beheaded for the crime in 1597 in Liège. Martín Antoine Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, ed. and trans. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 6.

103. Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, 27.

104. Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, 29.

105. Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, 15.

106. In Martin Delrío, Machielsen turns toward this demonological piece written outside of “witch hunting.” Delrío, similar to other authors of so-called demonologies, was a humanist scholar and a Catholic intellectual. Machielsen’s excellent work moves away from the explosive Malleus maleficarum trope of overzealous demonologies and invites us to examine more of these treatises individually and within their specific contexts.

107. Idoate, La Brujería, 279.

108. Though Pierre de Lancre was inspired by witchcraft in the Basque region when he composed his fantastical demonology, Tableau de l’inconstance (1612), its publication occurred after the chain trials and the witch panic in the French Basquelands.