A Brief History of Navarra

Nestled in the mountains of northern Spain lies Vasconia, the autonomous community of present-day Navarra. Navarra’s landscapes rise to rugged peaks in the Pyrenees and span the gentle valleys in Cantabria, while vast forests and an abundance of water characterize the landscape. Multiple biogeographic areas converge in this humid northern land, including alpine systems, fluvial areas and humid zones, pastures and heaths, and extensive forests. Navarra was, and remains, a wet, mountainous land dotted with sparsely populated villages amid the rolling hills and deep valleys.⁵ The inhabitants of this rural land shared greater identity with their Basque neighbors on the French geopolitical side of the Pyrenean range than with the Spanish-speaking residents of a newly formed Spain. These majestic mountains slowed the penetration of outside “civilizing” forces, and economic, legal, and religious exigencies reflected long-lived local customs and cosmologies. Fernand Braudel may well have been referring to the early modern Pyrenees when he noted “a separate religious geography seems then to emerge for the mountain world.”⁶ And the distinct flavor of this mountain world was infused in its trials of sorcery and witchcraft, ones that favored folkloric notions of maleficas (evil-doers) who used poisonous toad venoms and potent local herbs to harm fields and livestock, and bad neighbors who executed evil deeds without the devil.

The mountainous land of Vasconia has been characterized by fierce independence and semiautonomy in the face of conquest for centuries.⁷ The Roman historian Livy was the first to note the Vascones’ territory in his chronicle from 76 CE, and the Greek geographers Strabo (first century) and Ptolemy (second century) referred to the center of the Vascones’ land as Pompaelo—modern-day Pamplona.⁸ While most of Vasconia became Romanized, the mountains in the north resisted wide-scale Roman settlement and secured some amount of autonomy. Following invasions from Visigoths, and later Islamic powers, the Vascones continued to resist staunchly the interlopers’ attempts at complete subjugation, as would be done in the face of future conquests.⁹

The kingdom of “Navarros and Pamploneses” was established in 803 CE following the Vascones’ defeat of the Franks at the major Battle of Roncevalles. The leader Íñigo Arista was crowned king of Pamplona and ushered in Navarra’s golden age, which would continue to flourish under the reign of Sancho III, expanding socially, politically, and economically, boasting major territorial gains throughout his eleventh-century rule. And when the neighboring kingdom of Aragon subjugated it in 1076, again Navarra resisted, regaining its independence in 1134. The twelfth century saw the popular Sancho “the Wise” advance Navarra through the formation of important legal and administrative institutions, overseeing the foundation of the consejo real (the royal council) and cort general (the general court) and intensifying the kingdom’s campaign against the Moors. Significantly, Sancho the Wise transformed his title from Pampilonensium rex to Rex Navarre, the king of Navarra, a symbolic move signaling that Sancho was more than a noble ruler from Pamplona—he was the king of an independent territory.¹⁰ This bloom was short-lived, however, and the early thirteenth century saw Navarra depleted of its territories of Álava, Guipúzcoa, and Vizcaya by the hands of Castilla, with the kingdom falling to French rule after the death of an heirless King Sancho VII in 1234. The next century and a half were characterized by instability, foreign rule, and conflicts surrounding unclear successions.¹¹ It was this state of internal weakness that would linger and, eventually, be exploited by the Crown of Castilla.¹²

The expulsion of the Moors in 1492 brought Isabel of Castilla and Fernando of Aragon dominion over every territory in Spain except for one: the independent kingdom of Navarra.¹³ Under the guise of the war with France, the Catholic Monarchs invaded Navarra in 1512, forcing it into subjugation that same year; though not without significant resistance. And when the Parliament of Navarra convened in 1513, Castilla remarkably allowed the former to retain autonomy over its courts. The new viceroy swore even to preserve Navarra’s “charters, laws, freedoms, exemptions, liberties, privileges.”¹⁴ This gesture had its limitations, especially as the Spanish Inquisition expanded into Navarra, subjugating its Jewish and Muslim populations and undermining Navarra’s judicial autonomy. Many Navarrans remained profoundly disgruntled by the conquest, a sentiment exacerbated by the Spanish destruction of plazas, castles, and walls.¹⁵ Following Navarra’s initial resistance in 1512, two more significant efforts at liberation were made in 1516 and 1521, both backed by popular support. Navarra came closest to regaining its independence in the revolt of 1521, though this last effort was squashed at the Battle of Noáin, leaving the army in complete defeat.¹⁶ But despite Castilla’s dominance, Navarra’s institutions maintained significant autonomy throughout the early modern period. The parliament, the royal court and the royal council (the royal tribunals), and the Diputación del Reino (a legal organ that supported the royal tribunals) continued to convene from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.¹⁷ Whether or not this can be attributed to the “intransigence of the Vascones,” as claimed by scholar María Puy Huici Goñi, or to the political prudence of the Castellano kings (including Fernando and later Charles V), it is remarkable indeed that the kingdom retained much judicial autonomy separate from royal power.¹⁸ It is this judicial jealousy over its own trials of sorcery and witchcraft that yielded dozens of discursive witch trials processed by Navarra’s secular court and council over the course of 150 years, offering a rare glimpse into quotidian witch beliefs in a region not plagued by convulsive witch panics.

Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe

Witchcraft casts a spell, attracting the attention of both scholars and the general public. In addition to inspiring myths, folktales, plays, movies, and popular imaginaries, witches have given birth to a vast scholarly literature, resulting in hundreds of treatises, books, journal articles, conference papers, edited volumes, historiographic reviews, and Internet sources devoted to witchcraft and sorcery. From madness to psychoanalysis, investigators of witchcraft have chosen their themes eclectically and creatively.¹⁹ Thematic focuses range widely from studies of folklore to intellectual histories of belief, and from attention to the misogyny informing witch trials to the male witches who suffered, too, from accusations.²⁰ Spatial and temporal foci further nuance this complex historiography, ranging from broad overviews to microhistorical analyses, and from medieval sorcery to early modern witch-hunts.²¹ Geographic breadth continues to expand as scholars have turned their studies eastward to Poland and Moscow, north toward Scandinavia, and across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.²² Witchcraft lends itself to interdisciplinarity, inviting research from scholars of religion, literature, anthropology, folklore, history, and psychology. So extensive is this corpus that in addition to multiple historiographical essays addressing the witchcraft literature, two books dedicate themselves exclusively to its historiography.²³ Given the expansive witchcraft literature, it comes as no surprise that this present book has drawn eclectically from many researchers and reflects much of what other scholars of witchcraft have shown: witchcraft was diverse, variegated, and boundless.

In Navarra as elsewhere, the medieval belief in individual practitioners of evil magic evolved into a cohesive notion of the witch sect, enabling courts to find and prosecute witches with greater frequency and ferocity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And as scholars have found with relative consistency, most—though by no means all—of these accused were women, often poor and unattached to a male protector. Though elite male jurists and inquisitors persecuted and prosecuted witches, unlettered neighbors and kin usually supplied denunciations to the court and contributed to legal processes. Legal systems—from ecclesiastical courts to local judiciaries to the extensive Inquisitions—supported witchcraft persecutions, wrestling frequently over the judicial right to prosecute this grave crime. Underlying these various social and legal contexts, Europe’s religious cosmologies and reform projects created and supported witchcraft beliefs, often turning problematic neighbors (in Navarra, “bad Christians”) into diabolical witches.

Early modern European witch trials arose from a conjunction of factors and a constellation of beliefs, and in many ways depended profoundly on local and specific contexts.²⁴ Centering these understandings, this book draws from scholarship that contextualizes witchcraft within its specific social and cultural relationships and advocates for the necessity of multicausal understandings. Robin Briggs turned to social contexts and networks for an understanding of witch persecutions in Witches and Neighbors (1996). Focusing his study on the Lorraine, Briggs demonstrated that witchcraft was dauntingly complex and could only be understood through examining multiple causations. Drawing from local sources, Briggs revealed accusations and trials to be vastly variable, leading him to conclude that “sweeping generalizations about it are either false or so banal as to lack any analytical power.”²⁵ Stuart Clark also examined witchcraft through a manifold lens attending to the broader intellectual contexts of witch belief, situating it alongside other concerns such as religion, law, and science in his seminal work, Thinking with Demons (1999). Rather than casting witch belief as aberrant or ill-informed, Clark approached demonological writings with a careful analysis of language, examining witchcraft on its own terms rather than searching for external explanations for “people’s belief in things that already made sense to them.”²⁶ Clark’s work demonstrated that it made perfect sense to believe in the preternatural—and especially witches—in early modern Europe. And finally, this book makes use of the invaluable surveys of Wolfgang Behringer and Brian Levack, both of whom painstakingly compiled comprehensive witchcraft scholarship and, in combination with their own studies of witch beliefs and trials, offer extensive surveys that encompass interdisciplinary methods, regional contexts, sweeping witch-hunts, and the social, legal, religious, scientific, and cultural cosmologies that supported beliefs, fears, and prosecutions.²⁷

I follow Briggs’s suggestion that analyses must start at the level of the protagonists of most prosecutions—ordinary people—and accept Erik Midelfort’s invitation to “learn from the small and hitherto neglected cases, including the many that resulted in exile or acquittal rather than in massive burnings at the stake.”²⁸ This book therefore turns to the dozens of surviving witchcraft trials outside of the panic, ones that have escaped notice and that were processed under a secular court in a mountainous region in northern Spain.²⁹ Here I offer a brief historiographical review of the less-known but superb scholarship of Spanish witchcraft studies for two reasons: first, literature reviews tend to omit Spanish sources (beyond the customary nod to Gustav Henningsen) rendering many of these works unknown to witchcraft scholars; and second, because this book’s contributions will be best understood when situated among the meager Spanish witchcraft scholarship. As shown, most scholarship has centered on the single witch panic and relied on inquisitorial sources, demonstrating clearly the need to explore witch beliefs and trials over the longue durée.

Witchcraft in Early Modern Spain

Much scholarship on early modern witchcraft has focused disproportionately on dramatic panics and on the more explosive regions of Europe, a trend the Spanish witchcraft literature has followed by fixating on the witch panic of 1609–14 conducted by the Inquisition.³⁰ And the few studies that do not treat the witch panic still rely mostly on inquisitorial sources.³¹ This combination has limited our understanding of Spanish witchcraft, as the witch panic was a short-lived, anomalous event, and inquisitorial reports survive only as abbreviated trial summaries.³² Over the past six decades, few monographs in English have focused on Spain, supporting historian William Monter’s reference to Spanish witchcraft as “the forgotten offense.”³³ Monter, as other scholars have, referred to witchcraft as a crime of the Inquisition.

Unsurprisingly, multiple Spanish-language academic books have attended to the witch panic. In The World of the Witches (1964), the scholar Julio Caro Baroja provided the first in-depth examination of Spanish witchcraft through a survey of its ancient and medieval roots, and up to modern times. The second half of the book focused entirely on the explosive witch panic spearheaded by Spain’s Inquisition.³⁴ Another prolific author of Navarran institutions and culture, Florencio Idoate, combined over one hundred excerpts from royal court records (some of which are no longer legible or available) with his analyses of the witch panic and other trials in La Brujería en Navarra y sus Documentos (1978). Indebted to Idoate’s work as the former archivist of the Archivo General de Navarra (AGN) and for his introduction to these unpublished sources, this book expands upon this source base by more deeply engaging with the trial excerpts and adding a dozen trials not included in his publication. Yet another prominent scholar of Basque studies, the anthropologist Mikel Azurmendi, explored the witch panic and the dominant power held by inquisitors in Las brujas de Zugarramurdi (2013). Azurmendi meticulously examined the power relationships among villagers and between the inquisitorial interlopers, making clear that witchcraft as understood by villagers “had nothing to do with … the three inquisitors who persecuted the witchcraft of the people who spoke Basque.”³⁵ And more recently, the eminent historian of Navarra, Jesús María Usunáriz, brought together a dozen scholars in Akelarre: La caza de brujas en el Pirineo (siglos XIII–XIX) (2012).³⁶ This edited volume examined various components of Spanish witch trials such as their medieval underpinnings, demonic possessions, and the French experiences of the Pyrenean witch panic.³⁷ One contribution that stood out in its attention to secular trials was Usunáriz’s “La caza de brujas en la Navarra moderna,” which laid out the patterns among the various jurisdictions of witchcraft throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Navarra. Drawing from trial records of the royal tribunals, Inquisition records, and the work of Idoate, Usunáriz succinctly captured the various patterns, trial stages, and judicial contexts, and argued for sophisticated cultural and social investigations of witchcraft at the regional level.³⁸

In English, four of the six books on Spanish witchcraft published by academic presses center on the witch panic. Gustav Henningsen’s exhaustive investigations in both The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614 (1980) and the subsequent The Salazar Documents (2004) drew from the Inquisition’s surviving trial summaries (Relaciones de las causas) and correspondences to explore the witch panic. Henningsen’s work attended to ethnographic and folkloric beliefs, the development of the witch panic, the social dynamics of the panic, and the crucial role of the Spanish Inquisition. These tomes, coupled with the scarcity of English-language studies, resulted in Spanish witchcraft’s nearly exclusive association with this singular panic.³⁹ Forty years later, historian of British witchcraft Emma Wilby turned to the Basque witch panic in Invoking the Akelarre: Voices of the Accused in the Basque Witch-Craze, 1609–1614 (2019), seeking to uncover popular practices or folkloric beliefs that villagers may have “mined” in their witchcraft testimonies. Drawing from previously translated documents emerging from the panic and situating them within a broader European folkloric context, Wilby yielded a provocative, “thematic analysis” of the Basque witch panic.⁴⁰ Most recently, the historian Lu Ann Homza has reexamined the famous witch-hunt in Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 (2022). Homza’s meticulous research revealed that villagers’ slander lawsuits and unchecked notarial derelictions contributed to the Suprema’s disapproval of the Inquisition’s handling of the matter, leading to its new, strict guidelines beyond the efforts of the inquisitor Alonso Salazar.⁴¹ Homza’s book enriches our understandings of the witch panic by revealing the crucial roles of women, children, and collective village action throughout this momentous event.

Only two studies among the scholarship of Spanish witchcraft published in English have looked beyond the witch panic. In Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons (2009), Gunnar Knutsen examined the differences between inquisitorial witch trials in Barcelona and Valencia drawing from the Inquisition’s cases of Supersticiones. Knutsen showed that witchcraft in Valencia was free from diabolism, while Barcelona’s trials emphasized the diabolical aspects of witchcraft, demonstrating that differing cultural influences shaped witch beliefs in each region. Turning toward Aragon, María Tausiet’s Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain (2014) examined the types of magical practices within the trials of Saragossa, arguing that magic in urban Saragossa rested upon conjurations, invocations, and spells, and thus differed from rural magic’s greater association with diabolism. Tausiet endeavored to incorporate source material from all three justice systems in Saragossa: the Inquisition’s tribunal, Saragossa’s secular “Chapter and Council,” and the episcopal court, but the Inquisition held a virtual monopoly over trials of the crimes it labeled Supersticiones.⁴²

Focused on the witch panic and Spain’s Inquisition, the Spanish literature has left the nature of quotidian witchcraft at the village level largely unexplored. This book, by contrast, explores witchcraft beliefs outside of the single panic by turning toward the unremarkable, regular witch trials that yielded few deaths and did not draw widespread attention, but produced over a thousand folios of testimonies. By shifting its attention toward a century and a half of witch trials processed by the secular tribunals of Navarra, this book seeks to enrich our understanding of early modern witchcraft by examining the discursive testimonies of suspected witches, their neighbors who accused them, and the jurists who judged them.

Sources and Language

The remarkable range of trials adjudicated by the secular court in early modern Navarra has been overshadowed by the witch panic’s scholarship, resulting in the oversight of these sources, some which have never before appeared in print.⁴³ These regional sources challenge assumptions about the dominance of the Inquisition and upend the narrative of Navarra’s witch-crazed reputation. Housed in the AGN, the records emerge from the courts of Navarra (the royal court and council, also called the royal tribunals) that tried a remarkable number of witchcraft cases compared to other regions in Spain (as per the current scholarship). To highlight the exceptional nature of these sources, the secular court of the neighboring kingdom of Aragon, for example, only tried one case of witchcraft during the entire early modern period!⁴⁴ This fact illuminates the extraordinary nature of witch trials conducted by Navarra’s royal tribunals. Free from the Inquisition’s filter, these dense sources constitute a superb source-base for researching Navarra’s cauldron of witch beliefs since the tribunals’ legal procedures differed from the more standardized process favored by the Inquisition. The depositions were produced under an interrogation procedure that invited open-ended statements from villagers, generating thousands of folios of discursive depositions from farmers, fishermen, net-makers, parents, children, healers, cobblers, clerics, judges, and accused witches, permitting an intimate exploration of everyday witch belief at the village level.⁴⁵ Though certainly not virginal imprints of early modern Navarrans’ declarations, these mediated records nonetheless represent a dialogue and created a narrative.⁴⁶

Beyond the secular witch trials, this book draws from documentary materials found in the AGN and elsewhere. Fiscal records from the medieval treasury registers attest to the medieval heritage of persecution of sorcery in Navarra and show, for example, that women were burned as witches in the early fourteenth century as reflected in brief accounting ledgers tallying costs for chains, wood, and executioners’ salaries.⁴⁷ Another supplementary source, an inheritance petition brought forth by the prosecuting magistrate’s heirs seeking their share of the witches’ confiscated goods, fills in some gaps created by missing and deteriorated records from the early 1525 prosecutions.⁴⁸ This legal suit provides the names of accused witches, their villages, inventories of their material goods, and some testimonial records. Bringing this event even closer into focus are surviving correspondences including letters between the magistrates of the court and council, communication between these judges and the Spanish inquisitors, and grievances from the vicar general of Navarra. These surviving letters involved a wide range of intermediaries such as the Council of Castilla, the inquisitor general in Madrid, and the vicar general of Pamplona. These letters are found in the AGN, the Archivo General de Simancas (AGS), and the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) in Madrid. Finally, though this study moves away from the Spanish Inquisition, I have examined all records of those witches who were tried by both judicial arms by comparing procesos (trial records) from the royal tribunals with the Inquisition’s Relaciones de las causas housed in the AHN.⁴⁹ To these records I add a single developed witch trial processed by Navarra’s episcopal court and housed in the Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (ADP).⁵⁰

Though not produced by the Spanish Inquisition, these early modern sources present their own challenges as the influence of magistrates, scribes, and translators inherently shaped them. Court records reflect a specific institutional context and the manners in which people navigated the power asymmetries within legal settings. Much was omitted, misrecorded, and lost in translation as their testimonies were noted within the overall goals of a courtroom or trial. Still, the open-ended interrogation processes allowed for diverse and discursive depositions. And while suspicious conformity and repetition of exact phrases among the witnesses appeared in several trials (usually chain trials), most villagers’ denunciations differed from one another, allowing me to approach those varying sources with greater confidence that villagers were not merely replicating suggestive statements from their interrogators. Furthermore, the royal tribunals’ trial records made clear from the onset when accusations were not initiated by the villagers, as the limited variability of the accusations in these particular trials reflected the denunciations that were furthered by a specific person or family. It is with the cautionary tales of other scholars that I approach these sources critically, but also with the appreciation that within these records, as Carlo Ginzburg has suggested, the voices of villagers can be approached.⁵¹

A final note on the sources is that of language: the people of Navarra did not speak Castellano or Spanish, but rather Euskera or Basque, which they referred to as vascuence.⁵² Though Castellano had been used in official matters since the medieval period, it was not until the conquest of Navarra in 1512 that the Spanish tongue began to force itself into the kingdom and the surrounding Basque regions (Guipúzcoa, Álava, Vizcaya).⁵³ Very few villagers in early modern Navarra spoke Spanish, but all spoke Euskera, a language isolate ancestral to the Vascones (ancestors to current Basque peoples).⁵⁴ Though geographically surrounded by Romance languages (those that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the sixth and ninth centuries), Euskera is not related to them. Its origins and history remain uncertain, causing scholars to argue that an early form of the Basque tongue predated the arrival of the Indo-European languages to the area,⁵⁵ while others have sought to prove its Indo-European roots.⁵⁶ As Peio Monteano has shown in his work on Navarra in the sixteenth century, the majority of inhabitants spoke Euskera, a language that nobody wrote. Conversely, few Navarrans spoke Castellano, the language of official documents, and even fewer could read and write it.⁵⁷ The dominance of Castellano in written sources does not reflect the fact that Euskera remained the culturally dominant language in Navarra even a century after the Spanish conquest. Because it does not resemble Spanish in any way whatsoever, magistrates and villagers relied upon interpreters, introducing yet another layer of mitigation between the words expressed by the villagers and the text appearing in the documents.

Methods and Structure

This book analyzes the lengthy testimonies of witnesses, the accused, the judges, and litigators in witch trials, examining each one through a historical lens and close reading, unpacking historical clues as they elucidate how witch beliefs reflected early modern religion and society. It builds on the work of other historians who have sought to make sense of alternative systems of beliefs that might strike modern readers as irrational. Inspired by these scholars, I approach my documents with the understanding that the villagers’ words and the tribunals’ records reflected a world that made sense to them within their cultural systems and cannot be disregarded as irrational or superstitious beliefs.

Historians of the early modern world often depend upon written records of oral speech, and the judicial proceedings “might be comparable to the notebooks of anthropologists, recording fieldwork performed centuries ago.”⁵⁸ In his Night Battles, Ginzburg approached his sources of inquisitorial interrogations as narratives, using these records to draw out the folkloric traditions and evolution of popular beliefs of the benandanti, a group of special villagers in the Friuli region who were crafted into witches by the Inquisition’s imagination.⁵⁹ Ginzburg treated these records, not just as interrogations, but as mitigated dialogues that represented a conversation, an exchange of ideas, and potentially held the voices of the villagers themselves. Fortunately for this study, the villagers of Navarra were very talkative. The judges, like me, were trying to elicit information from the villagers. They wanted to know who the witches were, why they were suspects, what crimes they had committed, and so forth. In many ways, they shared the same questions that interest us, inviting us to treat these records as a “transcript.”⁶⁰ While Ginzburg lamented the repetitive and “monologic” quality often encountered in Inquisition sources, he offered hope for “some exceptional cases where we have a real dialogue: we can hear distinct voices, we can detect a clash between different, even conflicting voices.”⁶¹ Remarkably, the sources of Navarra evidence “different, even conflicting” depositions as the norm, encouraging their use as “dialogic texts” toward an understanding of village witchcraft beliefs. To be sure, suggestive questioning was present, though usually implicit, but the responses provided by the villagers of Navarra were variable, diverse, and often contrary, suggesting that the villagers navigated how they chose to respond to the inquiries. These dialogues reveal a “particular way of talking about and understanding the world,” and thus I turn to these discourses to better understand the nature of witch belief in Navarra.⁶²

To unpack these dialogues, this study draws from the literary method of discourse analysis that views the function of language beyond the sentence. This approach encompasses a series of interdisciplinary methods that can be used to explore distinctive social features in different types of studies. It recognizes that words are not neutral but play an active role in creating that which they are used to describe. Thus, our knowledge of the world is not objective truth. No such “truth” exists. The ways in which the villagers understood the world were historically and culturally specific and contingent and reflected in their language. So, to understand the reality of witch belief in early modern Europe, we must turn to the words and categories that villagers used to represent their world. Informed by this framework, I have analyzed the importance and contexts of specific words and phrases in an attempt to elucidate witch beliefs, attending closely to what words and signifiers people used to designate witches. Their wordy discourses reveal how witches were crafted, what factors led to accusations, what sorts of behaviors exonerated witches from suspicion, and what kinds of feelings these witches emoted in their neighbors.

One of the most crucial implications of this study is that when we as scholars can move away from extraordinary people and events, specific contexts and nuances come more sharply into view. For example, one of the first observations emerging from these nonpanic trials made clear that power was brokered and shared by villagers. Of course, the elite magistrates of the royal tribunals and the inquisitors at Logroño held significant roles, but the shared language of witchcraft, used by elites and commoners alike, was largely predicated on village-level occurrences. To illustrate, from a more distant view, two older women accused in 1576 could be seen as classic, tidy tales of two old widows who may have been eccentric or beggars. But a closer examination of the vitriol used against them quickly made clear that the accusations were immensely personal and levied by interrelated individuals. This led me to search for previous cases within the families, and it emerged that neither woman had the mala fama (bad reputation) of being a witch in the least. And neither woman was poor or powerless; rather they were wealthy and respected matriarchs. This was no case of heterodox behaviors; this was pure revenge. Another reward of a close investigation at the regional level was the realization of the crucial role religious behaviors and expectations held in the crafting of Navarra’s secular witch trials. While those with weak religious actions may have been largely ignored, in times of Catholic reforms and witchcraft trials, people scanned themselves (and others) in search of shortcomings. So, examining the language of witchcraft, the words that emerged repeatedly— malas cristianas, bad Christians—offered great clues. Most of these villagers had not endured lifelong accusations, but suddenly they appeared, accused of being a mala cristiana. An examination of how this term was used suggests that it was a shorthand for a witch and had little to do with theological heresies. But depending on the time period (such as during the chain trials), who a witch was and what she or he was accused of doing were shaped by the type of trial that processed witches and sorceresses. The judicial context of each witchcraft accusation influenced who was crafted as a witch and what types of maleficia (evil deeds) were said to be committed.

This book has followed Ginzburg’s proposed model for “construction of knowledge” inspired by the art historian Giovanni Morelli.⁶³ Ginzburg argued that small details yielded large discoveries. The cultural histories of witchcraft have seen the value in the small, uneventful aspects of witchcraft over the spectacular and episodic witch-hunts. This has inspired my research to attend to the “thick descriptions” of the seemingly insignificant, the odd.⁶⁴ Hanging toads, for example, may appear extraneous, but a close investigation of toads using both a broad lens (toads in natural philosophy and religion) and a narrow lens (toads within Navarra and the Inquisition’s reports) yielded rich insights for this project. This book seeks to reassert the value of microhistorical lenses and to reorient our understanding of the past by contextualizing the witch, not only in terms of extending and complicating the story of witches and their persecution in Navarra beyond the popular events of 1609–14, but also by adding nuance to understanding the roles of competing courts, how different trials unfolded, and the reforming campaigns north of the Pyrenees and elsewhere.⁶⁵

Bad Christians and Hanging Toads dedicates each of its five chapters to a particular aspect of Navarra’s witch beliefs and witch trials, reflecting a close examination of witchcraft within its legal, religious, and cultural contexts. The first chapter, “The Witches of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Navarra,” sketches an overview of the witch trials under the secular tribunals of Navarra beginning with its medieval inheritance and concluding with the last sorcery trial in 1675. Crucially, it introduces the three different patterns of witchcraft persecutions (isolated, chain trials, and the witch panic) in Navarra. It then guides the reader through the judicial procedures from accusations through to sentencing, situating the legal and institutional contexts of the early modern trials. Following this, “The Struggle for Souls” attends to the entangled relationship between the Spanish Inquisition’s tribunal in Navarra and its secular court, analyzing the tense relationship between the two competing jurisdictions. The ambiguous nature of the mixed crime of witchcraft contributed to a constant battle over witches, while many accused witches and their defense attorneys (procuradores) sought actively to be judged by the inquisitorial arm. After these legal contexts, “The Christian Crux” situates witch belief within its religious contexts, examining the centrality of Christianity in defining witches, and the notion of a “bad Christian” (mala cristiana) as synonymous with witch. Though not all malas cristianas were witches, all witches were malas cristianas, reflecting the Catholic reforms influencing witchcraft’s prosecution. Chapter 4, “The Testament of Toads,” elucidates the diverse ways toads were used to understand how witches committed their acts of maleficia. This section intersects with the scientific supports of witch belief, as toads’ bufotoxins yielded visible effects in the real world. The metamorphosis of the toad’s roles also demonstrates the changing nature of witchcraft beliefs and the negotiations between elite judges and unlettered villagers. “The Cauldron of Witch Beliefs” concludes the study and turns to the detailed villagers’ reports at the heart of the witch trials and of this book. Rich and variable, these depositions reflect the vast and deep cauldron of belief from which villagers and jurists drew to craft their witches. Taken together these chapters illuminate how witchcraft was forged and informed by an amalgamation of legal, religious, and social forces over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

As its primary focus, this book uncovers the inner logic that imbued witchcraft belief with meaning and illuminates the coherence of systems of witchcraft beliefs. It joins the work of others who have turned to regional sources to promote an understanding of alternative systems of belief that might strike modern readers as irrational or absurd. Witchcraft understandings were natural and part of the “magical universe” in which these people dwelled.⁶⁶ The cauldron of witch beliefs allowed elite judges and unlettered villagers to draw from various ingredients to craft witches. But we must not conflate witchcraft beliefs with witchcraft accusations and trials. Witchcraft beliefs reflected a world in which magic appeared as an indispensable technology for navigating life, while a witchcraft accusation could permanently stigmatize and traumatize not just the accused, but also their family and progeny.⁶⁷ To be sure, witchcraft accusations and trials represented tragedy and sometimes death for those on the receiving end, as legal, gender, and witchcraft scholars have argued for decades.⁶⁸ However, to put the witchcraft trials of Navarra’s royal tribunals into context, I must clarify that an accusation outside of the witch panic was extremely rare (though no less tragic for the accused).⁶⁹ As a final note, the chapters that follow introduce the reader to many fellow humans from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people who will reappear throughout the chapters. It is my hope that my research demonstrates that “a close reading of a relatively small number of texts … can be more rewarding than the massive accumulation of repetitive evidence,” and that these early moderners will inspire within the reader a greater appreciation, understanding, and even empathy for those who lived with and as witches.⁷⁰

1. Archivo General de Navarra, Pamplona (hereafter AGN), TR_63825 (1533), fol. 6r.

2. Florencio Idoate Iragui, La Brujería en Navarra y sus Documentos (Pamplona: Institución Príncipe de Viana, 1978), 253.

3. Idoate, La Brujería, 260.

4. Witchcraft accusations could yield devastating consequences, shattering not just the lives of the accused but condemning future generations to the same infamy.

5. According to the most recent census (taken in 2023), 17 percent of Navarrans live in hamlets of less than one hundred. Europa Press, “El 17% de los municipios de Navarra tiene menos de 100 habitantes,” Diario de Navarra, April 7, 2023, https://www.diariodenavarra.es/noticias/navarra/2023/04/07/el-17-municipios-navarra-100-habitantes-564357-300.html. As of 2023, Navarra continues to have a low population of only 675,000. “Navarra,” Expansión/Datosmacro.com, accessed September 7, 2023, https://datosmacro.expansion.com/ccaa/navarra.

6. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 35.

7. A modern history of Navarra is not discussed here, but contemporary movements for secession from Spain continue, as does the successful reintroduction of Euskera into Navarra’s educational, administrative, and political systems.

8. Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa, Historia breve de Navarra (Madrid: Silex S.L., 2007), 20; Julio Caro Baroja, Con letra aguda y fina: Navarra en los textos de Julio Caro Baroja, ed. Matias Mugica (Navarra: Gobierno de Navarra, 2014), 7.

9. Caro Baroja, Con letra aguda y fina, 27–29.

10. Usunáriz, Historia breve de Navarra, 26–50, 65.

11. Usunáriz, Historia breve de Navarra, 67–117.

12. For a historical overview of Navarra divided into seven major eras, see Iñaki Bazán, dir., De Túbal a Aitor, Historia de Vasconia (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2006), 200–201, Segunda Parte.

13. James Marshall-Cornwall, “An Expedition to Aquitaine, 1512,” History Today 23, no. 9 (September 1973): 640.

14. Usunáriz, Historia breve de Navarra, 139.

15. Caro Baroja, Con letra aguda y fina, 123–24.

16. For a thorough history of the conquest in 1512, see Peio Monteano, La Guerra de Navarra (1512–1529): Crónica de la conquista española (Pamplona: Pamiela, 2010).

17. Usunáriz, Historia breve de Navarra, 138–45.

18. María Puy Huici Goñi, Las cortes de Navarra durante la edad moderna (Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 1963), 18.

19. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion, and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994).

20. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Laura Apps and Andrew Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Alison Rowlands, Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2009).

21. Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016) and Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004) offer excellent surveys; Thomas Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009) provides a superb microhistory of a single witch.

22. The value of regional studies is made clear in Michael Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), and Liv Helene Willumsen, Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Brill: Leiden, 2013). For novel approaches in the Americas, see Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), and Emerson Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

23. Jonathon Barry and Owen Davies, eds., Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Marko Nenonen and Raisa María Toivo, eds., Writing Witch-Hunt Histories:Challenging the Paradigm (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

24. This is seen clearly in the differences between rural and urban witchcraft, as María Tausiet has shown in Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain: Abracadabra Omnipotens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), esp. 3–7. Even within the single region of Navarra, witch trials varied based on how they came to be processed, as will be argued throughout this book.

25. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: Penguin, 1996), 7.

26. Clark, Thinking with Demons, 7.

27. Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, which also includes contemporary witchcraft; Levack, The Witch-Hunt.

28. H. C. Erik Midelfort, “Witch Craze? Beyond the Legends of Panic,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 6, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 31.

29. Two Spanish-language studies present excerpts and analyses of some of these trials; see Idoate, La Brujería and Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa, ed., Akelarre: La caza de brujas en el Pirineo (siglos XIII–XIX), RIEV Cuadernos 9 (Donostia: Sociedad de Estudios Vascos, 2012). None of these secular trials have appeared in English at the time of this writing in 2023. These trials have been available to scholars in various forms. While a dozen of the trials had been unlocated for several decades, some transcripts were available in Idoate’s book, La Brujería en Navarra y sus Documentos. Two witch trials from 1576 remain missing or damaged, and thus I do not include them in my total. I also do not include slander trials due to a witchcraft label in this total.

30. Here I draw from Henningsen’s definition of a witch craze as “an explosive amplification caused by a temporary syncretism of the witch beliefs of the common people with those of the more specialized or educated classes.” It is also characterized by mass numbers of denunciations and confessions, a break in the “functional” role of witch belief, and the indictments of atypical people (such as people of wealth and power, men, and children). See Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614, Basque Series (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980), 392.

31. For a comparison of Spanish Inquisition cases of witchcraft and sorcery (Supersticiones) in northern and southern Spain, see Gunnar Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons: The Spanish Inquisition Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). And for an illuminating analysis of witchcraft in Saragossa, see María Tausiet, Ponzoña en los Ojos: Brujería y superstición en Aragón en el sigo XVI (Madrid: Turner, 2004), and Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain (2014).

32. All witch trial records from the inquisitorial tribunal of Logroño were destroyed following Napoleon’s 1808 invasion during the Peninsular War; therefore, the only materials available to scholars are the Relaciones de las causas, abbreviated summaries of the trials sent to the Suprema in Madrid. Lu Ann Homza, Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 8.

33. 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), 255.

34. At the time of this monograph’s publication, the trial documents from the panic had yet to be relocated after their usage by Henry Charles Lea, but Caro Baroja was fascinated by the conclusions drawn by the inquisitor Alonso Salazar y Frías. Julio Caro Baroja, The World of the Witches, trans. O. N. V. Glendinning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

35. Mikel Azurmendi, Las brujas de Zugarramurdi: La historia del aquelarre y la Inquisición (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2013), 13–14.

36. Usunáriz, Akelarre. This excellent collection of essays is dedicated to Henningsen.

37. Historians of witchcraft should all look forward to Jan Machielsen’s The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2024.

38. Usunáriz provides illuminating maps that track the various witch trials throughout the sixteenth century. “La caza de brujas en la Navarra moderna (siglos XVI–XVII),” in Usunáriz, Akelarre, 309–18.

39. Before Henningsen, Henry Charles Lea addressed the witch panic in A History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York: MacMillan, 1906), 4:222–39.

40. Emma Wilby, Invoking the Akelarre: Voices of the Accused in the Basque Witch-Craze, 1609–1614 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2019), 3.

41. Homza, Village Infernos, 165–79. The Suprema is the main office of the Inquisition.

42. For example, the ecclesiastical court treated only eight trials focused on charlatans and deceivers, while the secular court treated a single case throughout the early modern period. Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain, chap. 1. Her exceptional first book on witchcraft in Aragon, Ponzoña en los Ojos (2004), investigated witch trials in Aragon as tried by the Inquisition, the ecclesiastical court, and the single witch trial by the secular court, though regrettably, this work remains untranslated from Spanish.

43. Roughly a dozen trials presented here have not appeared in print. About a dozen others had parts that appeared in Idoate’s work. Some of the trials had not been located from around 1978 to 2014 when they were rediscovered by the tireless labor of the extraordinary employees at the AGN.

44. See Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain, chap. 1.

45. To offer a point of comparison, in the trials of two witches in 1647 appearing in both the inquisitorial and royal courts, the file from the Inquisition’s records on both sorceresses covers only eight folios total whereas the royal tribunals’ offer 222 folios of reports. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid (hereafter AHN), Inq., Lib. 838, fols. 19v–23r, and AGN, TR_17176 (1675).

46. This informs the lengthy, dialogic trial excerpts that appear throughout this book. Carlo Ginzburg proposes this approach to witch trials in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 159. To support this approach, the reader will notice direct quotes throughout to allow the records to speak.

47. Here, again, I restrict the study to the region of Navarra and not the other three Basque provinces. But Ander Berrojalbiz offers other early sources from Basque regions in Sources from the Dawn of the Great Witch Hunt in Lower Navarre, 1370 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

48. AGN, 1525-Caja 113512, AP_Rena, Caja 94, N. 13.

49. In this case, the examination pertains solely to cases treated by the tribunal with oversight of Navarra. Thanks to a personal gift from Gustav Henningsen, many of the Inquisition sources from the AHN have been given to me digitally. I do not, however, attend to the slander trials treated by the royal tribunals that emerged from the witch panic.

50. Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (hereafter ADP), Proceso de 1569, Aguinaga, Cartón 13.

51. See Natalie Zemon Davis’s critical review of Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error in “Les Conteurs de Montaillou,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 34, no. 1 (1979): 68–70; Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 159–64.

52. For more on the Basque language, see Jose Ignacio Hualde, Joseba A. Lakarra, and R. L. Trask, eds., Towards a History of the Basque Language (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995), and Peio Monteano, El iceberg Navarro: Euskera y castellano en la Navarra del siglo XVI (Pamplona: Pamiela, 2017).

53. Caro Baroja, Con letra aguda y fina, 353–54.

54. Name given to the pre-Roman tribe that inhabited the region known as present-day Navarra.

55. Joaquin Gorrochatequi and Joseba A. Lakarra, “Why Basque Cannot Be, Unfortunately, an Indo-European Language,” Journal of Indo-European Studies 41, nos. 1/2 (2013): 203–37.

56. Gianfranco Forni, “Evidence for Basque as an Indo-European Language,” Journal of Indo-European Studies 41, nos. 1/2 (2013): 39–180.

57. In his excellent study on the lasting pervasiveness of Euskera and its importance in Navarra’s history, Monteano also makes provocative connections between Euskera and witchcraft beliefs. See El iceberg Navarro, 97–104.

58. Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 141.

59. Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

60. Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 160.

61. Marianne Jorgensen and Louise J. Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage, 2002), 1.

62. Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” 5–36.

63. Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” 7.

64. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.

65. Scholarship has shown the incredibly diverse manifestations of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the effects of reforms on witchcraft, gender, and law. For an overview, see the edited volume by Peter Marshall, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For the roles of reform in witch trials, I recommend Levack, The Witch-Hunt, 100–118.

66. I borrow this term from the ambitious work of Stephen Wilson who describes the early modern European world as a “magical universe” where magic was infused into everything. While sustaining engagement with his work is beyond the scope of this book, his treatment of the wider context of witchcraft beliefs that “were in turn part of a much wider system of magical belief and practice” offers compelling insights into the magical universe. See The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (London: Hambledon, 2000), throughout but esp. xvii–xxx for his introduction.

67. The psychological and physical toll ruined lives permanently. For a palpable and noteworthy depiction of the consequences of an accusation, see Robisheaux, Last Witch of Langenburg, 191–227, 302–27.

68. Though not specific to tragic outcomes, an interdisciplinary volume dedicated to witchcraft and emotions is Laura Kounine and Michael Ostling, eds., Emotions in the History of Witchcraft (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

69. Here I draw from archivist Peio Monteo’s estimate of nearly one hundred thousand trials in the AGN from the sixteenth century. El iceberg Navarra, 48. Of these, only approximately three dozen processed accused witches.

70. Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” 7.