Gender and Witchcraft

Early modern women received the brunt of witchcraft accusations, prosecutions, and executions in western Europe, accounting for an average of 75 to 80 percent of the estimated sixty thousand executions for witchcraft, a trend reflected in Navarra’s gendered rates.³ While witchcraft was strongly viewed as a female crime, men also could be suspects, a propensity that increased during chain trials and witch panics as traditional stereotypes broke down.⁴ While these figures may suggest that witchcraft was “sex-related, but not sex-specific,” the vast majority of witches in early modern Navarra were crafted from women and girls.⁵

Religious, cultural, and natural philosophical understandings informed the gendered nature of witch crafting in Navarra and beyond. As the medieval concept of the sorceress morphed into the witch during the mid-fifteenth century and crafted women as witches, it drew from a Christian cosmology that paired women with weakness and sin and crafted witches as women.⁶ Outside of spiritual concerns, early modern culture painted women as weaker of mind, gossipy, petty, and generally untrustworthy. Natural philosophical understandings registered women’s bodies as underdeveloped, unpredictable, and fundamentally flawed. Not only did women have a cold and wet body—all crummy humoral characteristics—but their wombs wandered about, causing erratic and animalistic behaviors.⁷ Demonological writings, too, supported a gendered view of witchcraft, a sentiment epitomized (somewhat dramatically) by Heinrich Kramer’s infamous Malleus maleficarum (1486) that claimed that women were “addicted to evil superstitions” and were more likely to be discovered as witches (see fig. 5.1).⁸ Nonetheless, demonological writings were part of a larger body of work and, as such, did not sustain a focus on witches as women.⁹ Furthermore, a legal system that privileged men above women supported the gendered nature of witchcraft.¹⁰ Women also tended to marry away from their own village and family more than men and thus “were less able to mobilize groups of kin.”¹¹ This put them at greater risk than men for accusations and prosecutions, as they may have had less access to a kinship network to defend them from accusers and prosecutors.¹² To be sure, this patriarchal and religiously reforming society rendered women vastly more vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft.

The royal court and council of Navarra referred to brujos y brujas (male witches and female witches) throughout its trials. Men partook with frequency in giving depositions both for and against the accused witches, and in several cases stood as the accused. But while male witches appeared throughout the witch trials, they accounted for only approximately 20 percent of those accused in Navarra. Male witches were often related to or associated with women with mala fama and noticeably disappeared from the trial records with greater frequency than female witches.¹³ Men enjoyed a patriarchal protective factor not available to women. Within this reform-era context, gender expectations accompanied religious norms, offering men a defense that as ordained providers, they could not complete their duties if they were sentenced for witchcraft. Women, though often providers themselves, did not enjoy the Christian defense of patriarchal duty. It is worth noting that in Navarra, brujos were more likely to be crafted by neighbors than to receive a sentence from the tribunals. While villagers crafted twenty-one men as witches, surviving records reflect sentences (by the secular court) for only four of them.¹⁴ Drawing from patriarchal protective factors, and supported by proofs of indulgences and harvesting responsibilities, men in Navarra did not suffer from witchcraft accusations with the same intensity as women.

While women no doubt bore the brunt of witchcraft fears, early modern women in Navarra also navigated these repressions and pursued justice for themselves. Both within and outside of judicial spaces, women demonstrated strategic actions (such as carefully cultivating buena fama) and agency.¹⁵ Women in Navarra held land, served as heirs, and enjoyed economic independence and authority on the family farmsteads (baserri) that formed the nucleus of Basque life.¹⁶ Many women married later in life (on average at twenty-six years old), even if they already had children. If they bore daughters, properties could be willed to them as equal heirs in Navarra. Widowed women understood, and fought for, their dowry compensation in courts of law as Amaia Nausia Pimoulier revealed in her research on widows and “feminine resistance.”¹⁷ And as Amanda Scott has shown, Basque women maintained religious authority within their communities, even after Tridentine reforms.¹⁸

Early modern women cleverly used legal systems to protect their property and inheritances, to defend their honor and fama, and to pursue their interests in general.¹⁹ They also understood well the devastation a witchcraft accusation could yield.²⁰ Not only were women far more likely to be accused of witchcraft, the types of denunciations levied against witches often overlapped with issues central to female spheres, such as infant death and breastfeeding concerns.²¹ Given their familiarity with and fear of an accusation, it makes sense that women went to great lengths to protect their honor.²² The “rhetoric of honor,” which served to maintain and order social statuses, provided a common strategy that early modern Iberians could use when pursuing disputes against neighbors, a strategy that women especially leaned into when taking legal actions to defend their honor.²³

Several slander trials in the secular tribunals reflect the legal paths women could take to protect themselves from a witchcraft accusation. In 1560, one such accused witch, Juana de Azparren, brought charges against her sole accuser, Johan de Villanueva, a prominent councilman of the court. He had spread rumors that Juana had been imprisoned for witchcraft in the “the País Basco” (her native French Basquelands), a dangerous charge Juana deflected by denouncing him for harassment. Opposing the councilman’s lone accusation, eight witnesses testified to her buena fama and her unwavering church attendance. Demonstrating the ubiquity of fama, one witness suggested that since he had not heard the fama of her being a witch, it simply could not be true, reasoning: “He has always known her to be a buena cristiana, and if it had been another way, [he] would know or would have heard. But he has not heard this before.”²⁴ Asked if she had been imprisoned for witchcraft in the past, he reiterated “if she had been imprisoned there for that reason … he would have known. And this is certain since they are both natives of that town of Azparren.”²⁵ His words illuminate the reliance on, and sophisticated pathways of, fama. The friar Miguel de Cubieta also argued against the allegation saying he had never heard of it, and he would have known since “he confessed Joana de Azparren just last week… . and as such he knows that she is a buena cristiana … and that she is not a witch or a mala cristiana, and if she was one, [he] would know as her confessor.”²⁶ From confessors to neighbors, witnesses argued: “If she was a witch, we would know.” Witch-hood was not an occult practice; it was a public production. It was a truth crafted by the social body, and the transmission of this fama imbued it with life.

Women like Juana recognized the power of the language of witchcraft and the dangers of a witchcraft accusation, and she was one of at least a dozen other villagers who charged their accusers with slander.²⁷ In 1583 Graciana de Aycanoa (not be confused with Graciana Belza from our opening vignette) brought a suit against María de Gorriti for false testimony, charging: “María has intentionally damaged and offended and injured [Graciana] … by saying all over town that she is a witch and she has killed María’s small child … causing great scandal.”²⁸ Multiple witnesses testified to Graciana’s good fama, habits, and manners, leaving María imprisoned for slander. Thus fama, both good and bad, shaped the results of witchcraft accusations.²⁹ To better understand why women sought to protect themselves from slander, let us now turn to the importance of mala fama, a recurring theme villagers used to craft their witches.³⁰

Mala Fama

Allegations of mala fama emerged throughout the secular records. Witnesses commonly responded to interrogations seeking witches with the simple fact that the accused had mala fama, suggesting that at times, fama alone could craft a witch. The signifier of mala fama was employed to designate witches, and this stigma, in turn, reinforced its designations. Informed by behavioral norms and expectations, performativity in Catholic practice, and kinship and social ties, mala fama served as the principal identifier of the witch in one out of four witch trials in Navarra.³¹

Fama stood at the intersection of social and legal realms, commanding an enduring legacy of influence in judicial understandings.³² It served as a recognized form of early modern legal proof and reflected legal status, social prestige, power, and wealth.³³Fama also functioned as a mechanism of social control, helping establish and reify behavioral expectations, while communicating the repercussions for transgressions.³⁴ These expectations centered on Catholic performativity, participation in the rituals of Mass and confession, and curating a reputation as a buena cristiana. Buena fama was further supported by the possession of an honorable parentage and an Old Christian lineage, though all of Navarra’s accused witches identified as Old Christians.³⁵ Rumors and reputations held great weight as they functioned as legal facts.

Graciana Belza’s case from this chapter’s opening vignette highlights the importance of mala fama in accusations of witchcraft. While the parish priest strongly defended the notorious witch, as he had known Graciana for more than thirty years and regarded “her as a person of good living, fama, dealings, and reputation,” nearly a dozen neighbors pointed to her mala fama.³⁶ The crucial role of her fama was reported by the fiscal who noted “the large number who bear witness against her,” further remarking that her accusers were “people of good living, customs, and fama, and buenos cristianos.” The fiscal centered his arguments not on Graciana’s alleged crimes and victims, but on her mala fama that pointed to her wickedness. He confirmed the legitimacy of this reputation by invoking her accusers’ good fama, which stood in stark contrast to Graciana’s mala fama. Fama thus depended upon quality as well as quantity. His concluding remark ordering her torture was telling: “The accusations and witnesses are too many.”³⁷ The intensity of Graciana’s mala fama mirrored the intensity of the torture that left her crippled.

The weight of mala fama relied on its entrenchment within the social fabric. Long-lived and ubiquitous mala fama often surfaced first in witch-hunts, while mala fama lacking establishment or identifiable origins invited procuradores to challenge its legitimacy within the legal sphere. When the village of Ziga became involved in the chain trials of 1575–76, townsfolk provided a lengthy list of suspected witches with mala fama. One witness, seventy-year-old Joanot de Majaferrero, shared some insights into the origins of some of the fourteen accused witches’ fama, saying that for forty years “María de Estermiguel the serora and her sister Catalina de Echeberria have had and have the fama that they have been and are witches.” Then he clarified he had no idea why they had that fama, admitting he had “not seen them say or do anything having to do with witchcraft.”³⁸ He also took care to further spell out that not all of Ziga’s accused possessed such chronic fama as the sisters, and some fama had been a recent production from the priest’s niece. Joanot’s testimony presented a blend of established town witches alongside a clutch of emergent witches. Though these appended witches did not share the established mala fama of the two sisters, in times or places experiencing chain trials or a witch panic, new suspects were folded into the “roll of witches” with ease.³⁹

Following the period of chain trials and the witch panic (1525–1614), mala fama continued to inform the secular court’s final trials of witchcraft throughout the seventeenth century. In the 1647 trial of María Yrisarri, the court meticulously noted the number of witnesses who pointed to her mala fama as follows: “Witnesses numbers 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 11 [say] that throughout this city the accused is in the reputation and common opinion of everyone that she is a witch and sorceress… . Witnesses 4, 7, 8 said she … has the opinion, fama, and public reputation in this city that she is a sorceress and a witch and has done and continues to do great harm with her spells.”⁴⁰ These indictments underscored the number of witnesses and highlighted her fama for witchcraft and sorcery. The legal language itself rested on this fama, demonstrating that the language of witchcraft created in the social sphere was understood and supported within a legal one up through the royal tribunal’s final trial of witchcraft and sorcery.

The tribunals’ final sorcery trial of fifty-year-old healer María Esparza relied heavily on mala fama. While villagers blamed María for everything from insufficient breast milk to spoiled grapes, witnesses and the fiscal highlighted her mala fama. The preliminary summary stated that María was imprisoned because “the ten witnesses of this Inquest all agree that the accused is in opinion, fama, and reputation that she is a sorceress … and this has been and is the public voice and fama and commonplace saying.” This intense fama informed one unlucky farmer’s conclusion that “the accused and her husband were those who destroyed [my grapes] by means of spells because they always are and have been in the opinion, fama, and reputation that she is a sorceress and her husband was too.”⁴¹ María’s fama was so palpable villagers paid to prevent her maleficia, a situation that no doubt furthered resentment.⁴² Villager Pedro de Cubeldra reported that neighbors gave María Esparza and her husband money and food to avoid their maleficia, explaining “they always have had and have the opinion of being witches, sorcerers, and for that reason many people gave them what they wanted, because to do contrary would result in greater harm.”⁴³ María’s intent to harm struck fear among her neighbors, and the court punished her harshly, sentencing her to two hundred lashings and ten years’ exile.

The power of mala fama was so great it could transcend the body of the accused. Fortuno Legaz received multiple accusations from Ochagavía’s villagers testifying they had seen him feed salt to a group of bulls (a common practice in early modern Spain) that died soon thereafter. But it was not the eyewitness evidence that commanded the focus of their testimonies from 1539. Instead, it was his friendship with María Goyena and María Egybel—both imprisoned for witchcraft—that galvanized suspicions he had caused the bulls’ sudden deaths. Over a dozen witnesses highlighted Fortuno’s fama resulting from his association with the disreputable women, declaring “that in all of the town of Ochagavía it is publicly known among the neighbors that Fortuno Legaz is a witch.”⁴⁴ While we do not know how long the trio’s mala fama stood, the fiscal charged: “The above-said witches are known and noted in the fama and vos comun in the town of Ochagavía and in the other nearby areas.”⁴⁵ Though no doubt his interactions with the suddenly dead livestock held weight, Fortuno’s association with the notorious witches propelled the accusations levied against him. And his comradery with the town witches sufficed for the court to sentence him to three months’ exile. The power of mala fama extended beyond the accused, leaving friends—and family especially—of suspected witches vulnerable to accusations.

Hereditary Witchcraft

From villagers’ reports to formal indictments, witchcraft legacies informed witch crafting in Navarra. While being a witch in early modern Europe was not purely hereditary, those accused often possessed connections to a relative or a neighbor who taught them the craft.⁴⁶ The belief that witchcraft was passed on within households from the older to the younger generation had deep roots, as Alison Rowlands has shown in her research on witches in Rothenberg and surrounding villages.⁴⁷ In Navarra, it appears that villagers thought knowledge of witchcraft was transferred along maternal lines.

This link between witchcraft accusations and familial antecedents became strengthened in Navarra by the Spanish preoccupation with limpieza de sangre. Blood in early modern Europe transcended its life-giving qualities and symbolized the principles of individuals, families, and entire social groups. So much so that “groups were defined according to the alleged nature of their blood, and, thus, it was an important matrix through which society was built and imagined.”⁴⁸ The notion of pure blood took on new meaning in Spain with the passing of limpieza de sangre statutes. The notion that blood carried traits of Judaism or Islam was prevalent in Spain and defined much of the discussions of purity of blood. This concept amplified the importance of hereditary bonds in Navarra, and people crafted as witches often shared bloodlines with other accused witches. After all, if Judaism and Islam corrupted blood, so too could witchcraft.

The significant intersection between blood and witchcraft emerged from the fiscal’s official charge in the trials of 1525 that proclaimed, “each and every one of the accused witches have had and have the inheritance of being brujos and brujas because their fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, have also been brujos and brujas, and some of them were burned by the justices [for it].”⁴⁹ Their tainted blood informed the tribunal’s understanding—and proof—of witch-hood. When forty-year-old Johanicot Zubieta was interviewed, he said he knew nothing about witchcraft, except for the fama that Graxi Yriate and her husband Martín Baquero were witches because “he heard that the ancestors that used to live in their house were witches, especially Ochocho, Graxi’s uncle.”⁵⁰ Johanicot continued to emphasize that “according to the fama and the voz comun of the villagers that the successors and people living in that house are witches.” Worse still, he shared that “Graciana’s (Graxi) grandmother was burned for being a witch … and Graciana has had an unending mala fama.” The fiscal’s official charge pointed to Graxi’s hereditary lineage that doomed Graxi (and her partner) to accusations during this time of chain trials. Similarly, when Lope Esparza, the alcalde of the Valley of Salazar, was fingered as a witch in 1540, the villagers readily recalled his unsavory lineage in their reports. Sixty-year-old Juanot Ochoa stated that Lope’s mala fama was the fruit of his father’s legacy, and the fiscal highlighted in his reports that “his father, having been a witch, was imprisoned and condemned for it by the Inquisition,” and concluded that Lope must also be a witch.⁵¹ And at Lope’s sentencing, the fiscal punctuated his verdict of banishment with the reminder that he “has been and is from a lineage of witches.” Though an unconventional witch—male, hidalgo, and the town alcalde—the mayor’s tainted bloodline trumped his privileged position.

The power of blood ran freely during the chain trials of 1575–76. When the alcaldes of the Valley of Larraun initiated their inquests, villagers turned naturally to their local witch families. The infamous Graciana Oroquieta readily came to mind as a woman condemned from birth by her mother’s fama. Among the serious and diverse charges against her, the fiscal’s formal accusation highlighted the origin of her contemptible fama, reporting: “Graciato de Oroquieta, mother of the accused, also has lived in common opinion, fama, and reputation of witchcraft and sorcery for years and for all time.” So “public and notorious” was her mother’s fama, “the neighbors of Oroquieta did not want to eat anything that her hands had touched, not even the holy bread, which they did not pass to Graciato Oroquieta nor did they did take to her daughter, the accused.”⁵² The tangible reinforcement of Graciana’s unfortunate maternal legacy was conspicuously performed in a sacred space, and such a grave slight as denying a fellow parishioner the Host visibly perpetuated the taint of witchcraft across generations. So great was her hereditary stain she was denied the body of Christ and admittance into his body of believers.

Material culture in early modern Spain reminded neighbors of the malas cristianas brujas in their midst. As the 1576 search for witches in the Valley of Roncal demonstrates, multiple witnesses drew from Joana Larrimpe’s mala fama—one inherited from her mother and grandmother who were both tried by the Inquisition for witchcraft. The court highlighted that “all the witnesses said Joana Larrimpe has fama of being a witch by reason that her mother was sanbenitada and her sanbenito is in the parish church of the said town.”⁵³ Her grandmother was forced to wear a sanbenito, a penitential garment, as a symbolic marker of her sinfulness. Sanbenitos, shortened from saco benito, or blessed sack, visibly marked sinners both during their punishments and for years after (see fig. 5.2). When the convicted finished their penance or after their execution, all the sanbenitos were collected by the church officials and publicly displayed in parish churches, with the names of the convicted.⁵⁴ For those who received sentences of death, their sanbenitos hung in the parish church as a warning to others against heresy and to serve as a “blot on the family’s honor.”⁵⁵ Not only had her mother been a witch but “also her maternal grandmother was killed by a garrote as her sentence for being a notorious witch.”⁵⁶ Joana’s maternal predecessors left her vulnerable to witchcraft accusations, and her fama in turn stigmatized her own daughter, Madalena Soria. The hereditary potential of witchcraft thus condemned four generations of women to mala fama.⁵⁷ Witch belief in Navarra supported a hereditary tendency toward witch-hood, one that was easily transmitted from mother to daughter given its feminine and sanguine nature. Even if they did not agree with a particular witchcraft accusation, villagers volunteered reports of witch legacies. For example, while sixty-year-old Joanot Echeberri from the town of Burutain did not think that Miguelico was a witch, when asked about the town’s witches in 1576, he felt compelled to mention that “he has heard that [Miguelico’s] late mother and grandmother had fama that they were witches.”⁵⁸

Drawing from the connection between blood and witchcraft, attorneys for the accused invoked their clients’ purity of blood as a witchcraft defense. When María Brigante was accused by twenty-four villagers of witchcraft, sorcery, and murder, her procurador countered these damning depositions by invoking her purity of blood. He argued:

Her parents were people with honor and good birth, clean from the bad race of Jews, Moors, and those punished by the Holy Office [of the Inquisition]. And buenos cristianos, fearful of God and their conscience and they were neither witches nor sorcerers, but rather very observant of God’s law.⁵⁹

With so many accusations against her, María’s defense relied upon her “proofs” of being a buena cristiana, drawing on the notion of limpieza de sangre.⁶⁰ The hereditary aspect of these trials shows that early modern Navarrans could draw from the mala fama of their neighbors and their families to craft witches. Even if they had tolerated their reputations for decades, sometimes a trigger, whether it be the death of an infant, the sudden loss of a group of bulls, or general diabolical fears, could turn witch beliefs into witchcraft accusations.

Diabolical Definitions

Systems of witchcraft belief were fluid and created by a reciprocal exchange of ideas and influences. A line between a popular and an elite culture cannot be clearly drawn at any one time, as ideas are exchanged in society among different social classes.⁶¹ Witch trial reports in Navarra reflected a hybrid mix of villagers’ concerns, scribal and translative choices, and the tribunals’ understandings of what witches sometimes did. During the chain trials, the court and council frequently folded attendance at the ayuntamiento de brujas (“witches’ gathering”) into their charges despite its absence from the villagers’ depositions. This does not mean, however, that the witches’ gatherings occupied a central component of witchcraft as understood by the magistrates. As far as the records reveal, they encouraged villagers neither to confess to attendance at these nefarious soirees nor to denounce other villagers for participation. Further distinguishing Navarra’s secular trials, the devil held a peripheral role in most of Navarra’s ayuntamientos, unlike much of western Europe’s descriptions that centered the diabolical pact.⁶² The reports of the witch’s Mass in Navarra reflected established common witch beliefs, fused with notions of witchcraft influenced by demonological writers.

The ayuntamiento appeared in the earliest witch trial of 1525, demonstrating that a composite of witches’ deeds was already understood. The royal tribunals’ summary included tropes often found in testimonies: acts of maleficia, the prominent use of toads, and the ayuntamiento itself. The surviving testimonies from this early case are mirrored in the legal summary, but with an added diabolical dimension.⁶³ Drawing from testimonies and elite understandings, the fiscal charged the accused witches from Ituren and Lasaga as follows:

They have been and are witches and have reneged God and given their obedience and reverence to the Devil… . They go to the ayuntamientos and conventicles of the Devil, and converse and dance with demons and with other brujos and brujas… . And they have made pacts and unguents and sacrifices of toads and the hearts and blood of children. And with those pacts and unguents and venomous things they have killed, crippled, and injured many people … and ruined the crops and trees of the earth.⁶⁴

This early testimony combined common understandings that witches gather to do harm to their neighbors and their livelihoods with the notion that demons and the devil were involved with these gatherings and actions. While the recorded testimonies are no longer available to us, it is probable that villagers did not mention the devil or demons, as their main anxieties pertained to food supply, childbirth, hunger, and sudden death.⁶⁵

The court’s summaries in the following trials from 1540 further demonstrate a cohesive notion of the witches’ gathering, and foreshadowed the diabolical definitions used in the latter half of the century. The fiscal charged the witches of the Valley of Salazar with renouncing “God and our Sacred Lady and of his holy mother and his saints,” then smothering, poisoning, and disinterring children to remove their hearts to commit their maleficia.⁶⁶ This reflected an integration of witness testimony and preconceived notions of the witches’ gathering culled from both folkloric and demonological sources. These early accounts of a diabolical definition of witchcraft in Navarra reveal that the cauldron of witch belief was already forged and used by villagers before the wave of witch trials in 1575 and the witch panic in the early seventeenth century. As revealed by a close reading of each witness’s deposition, sometimes some villagers tapped into this belief, and at other times the magistrates injected a diabolical definition into their summaries. This inconsistency demonstrates the plasticity of witch belief, as witch tropes of diabolism emerged in some trials (such as chain trials) but remained absent in others (the devil, somewhat surprisingly, did not manifest for the vigorously denounced Graciana Belza).

The stock accusation sometimes issued by the secular court, which I refer to here as its “diabolical definition,” reached its zenith during the episode of witch-hunting in 1575–76. It was also at this time that the fiscal’s formal indictments deviated most from the reports given by villagers. In fact, this diabolical definition was levied against accused witches in every witch trial of 1575 and 1576, revealing that when witchcraft fears were heightened—or guided by a court-led search for witches—the rhetoric of witchcraft privileged preconceived notions of witchcraft over specific accusations or commonplace witch beliefs (see fig. 5.3). The diabolical notion as presented by the royal tribunals against the accused witches of Ciordia in 1575 makes clear this phenomenon during times of chain trials. From the slim testimonies presented by a mere seven witnesses, the magistrates forged an especially lengthy three-folio-long list of accusations. This diabolical definition would be echoed in the other chain trials in both substance and wording, but one charge in its entirety will serve as representative of all. The fiscal’s diabolical accusations, which were applied repeatedly to witches in 1575–76, went like this:

The brujos and brujas have, for much time and years, with little fear of Our Lord God and of royal justice, made deals with the devil and have gone from their houses many nights, though their doors and windows are closed, flying through the air. First, they anoint themselves on the head and behind the ears with certain unguents the devil makes. [Then they went] to a field where a great number of men and women assembled, gave reverence to the devil that was in the figure of a cow and they danced … and they got on the ground on top of one another … [to] know each other carnally, some from the rear parts and others from the front. And not being content with the abovementioned, they then wasted the crops of the earth and mountains every year, so that for many years there have almost been no crops … they also harmed children, smothering and killing them.⁶⁷

This stood in stark contrast to the reports made by villagers as not one single villager of Ciordia mentioned night flight, unguents, diabolism, crop failures, or multiple infanticides. And while one witness cited the death of a baby, and another spoke of sex in an open field, most villagers simply echoed who was “in opinion and reputation of being a witch and sorceress.” This illustrates that legal systems were more apt to employ a preconceived construction of witchcraft in times of heightened witch fears.⁶⁸

Over the course of Navarra’s secular witch trials, the devil seldom appeared outside of the chain trials. If and when villagers gave reports of witches’ gatherings, diabolical and sexual perversions were minimal.⁶⁹ Their depositions centered, instead, on the act of gathering, feasting, and causing maleficia with poisoned powders, not through diabolical powers. At times reflecting witness testimonies and at times drawing from the communal cauldron of beliefs, the royal tribunal’s diabolical definition resulted from a synthesis of actual testimony, established witch beliefs, and anxieties surrounding the diabolical. What is particular about the witches’ gatherings in Navarra is its lack of fixation on the devil, except during the witch panic, which as we have seen, reflected an anomalous break from the norm. The very plasticity of the definition of witchcraft invited its function in a variety of capacities. And never again did the royal tribunals depend on a diabolical definition following the chain trials of 1575–76, though the devil appeared under the interrogations of Lord Andueza in 1595, declarations retracted by the detained villagers. By examining witch trials outside of witch panics, the plasticity of the rhetoric of witchcraft becomes clearer and shows that different tropes emerged depending on the type of trial. We see that a focus on the dramatic tends to privilege an elite vision of diabolism. As with witch trials in England, where witch panics were not the norm, diabolism was not central to witch belief or accusations leveled by villagers in isolated trials. Still, informed by Catholic reforms, the devil appeared in their discourse and made himself available in the cauldron of witch beliefs.

Village Vengeance

Accusations of witchcraft could function as an effective tool for revenge. In an interconnected society highly dependent upon one another for goods, services, and even basic survival, opportunities for resentments and bitterness emerged. The spurned lover, the neighbor who never repaid informal debts, bad neighbors whose pigs trampled the gardens, the beggar, all these people no doubt had enemies. Scholars of medieval legal culture have shown that as judicial systems slowly replaced local forms of retribution, public justice could accomplish private vengeance.⁷⁰ And with a witchcraft accusation as their weapon, early modern villagers could and did enact retribution on the legal stage. The various legal systems, aware of the ease and dangers of false accusations, instituted safeguards such as the right of the accused to bring up charges of previous enmity and to counter their accusers with slander.⁷¹ It was therefore not uncommon for defendants and their procuradores to argue that revenge and ill will (mal voluntud) drove an accusation. These counter-accusations are usually difficult to confirm as written sources usually do not chronicle the ongoing squabbles of villagers detailed here, thus it is remarkable to encounter the trials of two aristocratic women in the chain trials of 1576 whose claims of vindictive motives can be documentarily confirmed by decades of litigation with their accusers. Their exceptional cases demonstrate that the belief in witchcraft could be, and sometimes was, exploited and used for vengeance at the village level.

María Perez de Olalde, a hidalga accused of witchcraft in 1576, stands out as a case of revenge worthy of closer examination.⁷² In contrast with the usual meager material goods of the accused, María’s list of goods occupied several folios of possessions including multiple houses, vineyards, and properties. Diverging further from most other witch trials, the fifteen witnesses who testified against her were all related, not only to each other but to María Perez by marriage. The San Roman family, relations through her daughter’s matrimony, all accused María of murdering three small children as they slept. The witness testimony was conspicuously polarized: members of the San Roman and the de la Guerra families denounced her for infanticide, while eighteen nonrelated witnesses countered this claim, alerting the jurists to this perennial feud with the San Romans.

The fiscal imprisoned María and charged her with its diabolical definition of witchcraft used in the chain trials.⁷³ María’s defense focused on the enduring animosity between María’s family and her accusers, one created when her husband murdered the patriarch of the San Romans. This bad blood intensified when María allegedly sought to oust his son, Don Pedro de San Roman, from his position at the frontier’s customs post (at the French-Spanish border).⁷⁴ María’s procurador highlighted the history of legal battles between the families and the San Roman’s publicly sworn promise of revenge. He argued that Don Pedro de San Roman was currently holding María’s son prisoner and intended to imprison María as well. A number of witnesses corroborated that the San Romans had publicly declared revenge and sought it through their false accusations of witchcraft. The archival records in Navarra confirm decades of family feuding, most likely instigated by the 1556 murder of Juan de San Roman by María Perez’s husband, Pedro de Calle.⁷⁵ Two court cases support María’s defense of revenge as a motive for her denunciation: Pedro de Calle’s trial in which he is found guilty for Juan de San Roman’s death and sentenced to ten years’ exile in 1556; and the San Roman’s lawsuit against the de Calles for financial restitution for the murder of their patriarch in 1557. Also leaving behind archival evidence was the fact that Pedro de San Roman used the court to settle scores with some frequency.⁷⁶ This familiarity with legal culture emboldened him to use it for personal vengeance, and he astutely seized the opportunity in 1576 during the chain trials, a pattern of crafting that presented an effective tool for revenge.

This revenge accusation took a fatal turn when seventy-year-old María Perez perished in the royal prison within one month of her arrest. Interestingly, María’s witch trial continued for many months, occupying over one hundred additional folios. Hers is the only trial that continued postmortem, suggesting that hidalga families could and would go to great lengths to clear their names from the taint of witchcraft. While mala fama was perilous for all villagers, a witch’s reputation could have marked financial and social consequences and damn the hildalgo legacy for generations. María’s family continued the case for many months after her death, paying for the reexamination of witnesses. It was through this intimate testimony that a lengthy story of murder, loss, jealousy, and revenge emerged. The court neither absolved her nor found her guilty, and her children were held responsible for court costs. This case illustrates how under opportune circumstances accusations of witchcraft could be used for personal vendettas. And during times of heightened witch concerns, they were.

The trial of Teresa de Ollo from the same year mirrors that of María Perez in haunting ways. Teresa, another wealthy hidalga woman, had a long history of feuding with another family that was enacted in the legal sphere. And a disproportionate number of witnesses emerged from a single family, the Ubanis. Like María Perez, an extensive list of goods, boasting three houses and nine vineyards, confirmed Teresa de Ollo’s hidalga status. Teresa was also accused of murdering her own grandchild, an accusation launched by the child’s other grandmother, Graciana Labayen. And like María Perez, fifty-year-old Teresa also died in prison shortly after her arrest. Through her attorney’s defense and the village testimonies, a complicated web of family secrets and contention unfolded.⁷⁷ Teresa’s procurador argued that it was “public knowledge” that the Ubanis were “capital enemies” of Teresa and her son and pointed to multiple trials “treated in various royal audiences, both criminal and civil,” as evidence. This, he argued, was proof of why “they thus have sought to have her accused of being a witch.”⁷⁸ Arguments for her defense concentrated on claims of revenge and, as with María Lopez, the fact that the accusers were all related to one another. Transcending mere village quibbles, this animosity was so profound that Teresa’s attorney argued the vicar “Don Martin de Subica will say anything even if it is contrary to the truth… . [He wants] to see her dead.”⁷⁹ This wish was granted. Teresa de Ollo died in prison within two months of her arrest for witchcraft.

Like María Perez, Teresa was a wealthy hidalga woman and unaccustomed to the cold and crude conditions the prisons offered, and similarly she died quickly. Unlike María, Teresa was absolved by the court two months following her death in the absence of further proceedings. Much like María, the long-standing feud between Teresa and her accusers left behind a robust legal trace that testifies to the usefulness of a witchcraft accusation in enacting retribution.⁸⁰ The discursive trials of the hidalga women accused of witchcraft in the absence of mala fama illustrate the versatility of witch belief. They reveal that in the years 1575–76, the court was particularly receptive to witch trials, and astute villagers seized this moment to exact revenge. While a well-timed witchcraft accusation had the potential to be used for personal reasons, it required legal systems that would support and process these claims. And certainly, we must remember that functional uses of witchcraft were the result of ingrained witch belief, not its cause.

Skepticism

Among the dizzying understandings of witch belief, one emerges as largely absent from the trial records: voices of skepticism. To be sure, some premodern people held skeptical views that questioned the realities of witchcraft and sorcery.⁸¹ Concerns often focused on whether these deeds occurred corporeally, in dreams or imagination, or by means of diabolical delusions. Writers often presented probing questions and doubts about certain components of witchcraft in their demonological treatises, which served to both nuance the body of witchcraft literature and also to reify witch belief, as the reality of demons went unquestioned. Writings such as the Canon episcopi (906 CE), Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (ca. 1437), Gianfrancesco Picodella Mirandola’s Strix (1523), and Johann Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum (1563) drew from religious and scientific arguments to probe the reality of various aspects of witch belief.⁸² Similarly, the inquisitor Alonso Salazar y Frías would reach his own set of skeptical conclusions during the witch panic.⁸³

The villagers’ reports in Navarra did not reflect learned skepticism, though likely many villagers held skeptical opinions as to the legitimacy of specific accusations of witchcraft, the reality of the witches’ gatherings, or perhaps the reality of the deeds assigned to witches.⁸⁴ Indeed, villagers responded frequently that “they know nothing” about witches, while others defaulted by responding with “what they have heard” and nothing more. No doubt a variety of reasons contributed to the exclusion of skeptical responses. Nonetheless, this absence is noteworthy, especially given the extensiveness of the surviving records.⁸⁵ This reinforces that witch beliefs comprised an integral piece of early modern thought, even in a region without convulsive witch persecutions.

Only two trials featured skeptical thought, and both emerged from the chain trials of 1539–40 and involved men with connections to the royal court. The first voice of skepticism came from the guard of the royal prisons, Juanes de Zubiri. The court charged him for dereliction of duty by failing to apprehend accused witches from the village of Ochagavía and even facilitating their flight. While the fiscal suggested that bribery by the accused alcalde, Lope Esparza, motivated his dereliction of duty, villager Iñigo Ladronde Cegema dismissed the whole witch project, proposing: “The porter in Ochagavía says … that all regarding the witches is a joke and dreams, and other things.” Iñigo himself admitted: “I think it is true what the porter says.”⁸⁶ This skepticism was not confined to the porter and this villager of Ochagavía at this time, as a member of the tribunals shared his own doubts.

The jurist, Bachiller Lope Camus, opined in the case of the insubordinate jailer. He recalled seeing Juanes in the company of Doctor Goñi, who had previously disputed “that of the witches” with the royal council, and recounted a conversation he had with Goñi:

[Juanes de Zubiri] asked Doctor Goñi if he had faith in what the witnesses had said about having seen the alcalde dance and join in the congregations of other witches, and the doctor responded that he did not have sufficient faith … to charge them with it. The doctor said that the devil can transport your body and mine… . In fact if God permitted it, the devil could transport the city of Pamplona to the hill of San Cristobal.⁸⁷

The doctor couched his skepticism in terms of religious belief, arguing that the devil can cause things to appear in a certain way. If it was all illusions made by the devil, a legal penalty would not serve justice. His concern was the legal ramifications of such belief. He also reinforced his skepticism by allying his belief with the Inquisition’s, sharing “that he had seen certain inquisitors … and that they had spoken about witches, and they had come to conclude that it was more fiction of dreams than truth.”⁸⁸ The skeptical thoughts of Doctor Goñi paralleled learned discussions debating the reality of witches’ deeds and the role of diabolical delusions. Goñi was perhaps drawing from conclusions the Spanish Inquisition had reached after the fierce witch trials in Navarra under Judge Balanza in 1525.⁸⁹

Both Doctor Goñi and Bachiller Camus represent lettered elites voicing their skepticism. Perhaps less educated villagers shared these sentiments, but their testimonies were not as articulate as the bachiller’s and simply not noted by disinterested scribes.⁹⁰ This is suggested by the one elite accused witch, Lope Esparza, a hidalgo and the town alcalde, who emphatically denied the accusations by asserting “those who speak of the dances and gatherings are false. And those people cannot nor should not be believed because to believe in what such people say is an error and against the Catholic faith.” He then paraphrased the Canon by arguing, “the people who say and confess they go to dances riding … it is all a joke and diabolical illusion that the devil gives them in dreams and they think in their imagination.” Lope couched his bold skepticism as to the reality of witchcraft in Christian terms and argued it was heretical to believe that people held preternatural powers. He even framed his skepticism as proof of being a buena cristiana saying, “I believe in all the articles of the Catholic Faith and in all that the holy mother church maintains.”⁹¹ While Lope implied that the Catholic Church’s official policy privileged diabolical delusion over corporeal reality, the reforming church in Spain possessed variable witchcraft ideas as it, too, drew from the cauldron of witch belief.⁹²

The voices of skepticism in such specific terms are limited to these trials from 1539–40 demonstrating that the magical universe and the existence of witches (not necessarily legal witchcraft accusations) inhabited part of everyday life and were not “believed in” but simply known to exist. While small instances of skeptical thoughts peppered the arguments of the defense, never again do judgments as to the reality of witch belief and deeds appear. And never again did the court’s interrogation questions probe the reality of witchcraft. These few skeptical voices, situated within dozens of reports in this trial (which testified to everything from Lope’s usage of toads to his hereditary witch-hood), serve to illustrate the assortment of beliefs used to craft a witch in early modern Navarra. The silence on doubts about the reality of witchcraft, however, loudly conveys the fact that witches in Navarra were real to the villagers who crafted, feared, and lived with them. Finally, the complexity of human belief invites us to acknowledge what scholar Stuart Schwartz noted from his research on local religious beliefs: “The simultaneous existence of credulity and incredulity among people drawn from the same social backgrounds and who shared the same cultural understandings speaks to the potential independence of mind and thought that was always possible to individuals.”⁹³ Indeed, all drew from the cauldron in diverse ways.

Conducting a deep analysis of every extant, nonpanic witch trial from the secular tribunal’s first in 1525 to its last in 1675 reveals that witchcraft in Navarra defied broad generalizations. The cauldron of beliefs represented the intersection between a magical universe and specific qualities of witch beliefs that allows us to pinpoint five tropes and functions that emerged in witch trials. A key learning from a regional study such as this is that much can be gleaned from the mundane: witchcraft beliefs remained plastic and variable and reflected a complicated bundle of contradictions practical for those seeking revenge. It was incredibly rare to be accused of being a witch, but if one did find themselves judicially processed for an accusation, the results were often catastrophic. Even if a witch was not executed, their lives were certainly ruined, given the vast majority lacked financial resources to recover from the ordeal and modern science was centuries away. From mala fama to disfigurement by torture, a person bore the marks of being accused of being a witch for life. This even transcended the accused’s body and extended to associates and descendants. While witches tended to be crafted by their neighbors, the magistrates did infuse diabolical definitions into their charges during chain trials. Fortunately, witchcraft prosecutions remained rare even as witch beliefs permeated throughout early modern Navarra.

1. AGN, TR_211115 (1561), fols. 21r–31r. The folios in this case measured roughly seven by eleven inches.

2. This reflects Behringer’s finding that “coexistence with witches had been the rule, and prosecution the exception.” Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 37. It reminds us, too, that witchcraft accusations comprised but one part of an expansive, vibrant “magical universe” as Stephen Wilson has shown, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (London: Hambledon, 2000).

3. In Navarra, 80 percent of those judicially processed for witchcraft by the secular tribunals were women and girls. Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa puts the breakdown at 26 percent men for 1525–95; “La caza de brujas en la Navarra moderna (siglos XVI–XVII),” in Akelarre: La caza de brujas en el Pirineo (siglos XIII–XIX), ed. Usunáriz, RIEV Cuadernos 9 (Donostia: Sociedad de Estudios Vascos, 2012), 320. Note that this did not hold firm in all parts of Europe as shown by the prevalence of men accused of witchcraft in countries such as Russia (75 percent) and Iceland (90 percent). Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 45; Valerie A. Kivelson, “Male Witches and Gendered Categories in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 3 (2003): 617.

4. H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1582–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 182.

5. Christina Larner’s statement goes on to elaborate that women were accused, not because they were women, but because they were witches, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (New York: Blackwell, 1984), 161. See Willem de Blécourt, “The Making of the Female Witch,” Gender & History 12, no. 2 (July 2000): 289–90, for his provocative review of gender and witchcraft studies.

6. For a study on the intersections among heresy, witches, and gender, see Tamar Herzig, “Flies, Heretics, and the Gendering of Witchcraft,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 5, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 51–80.

7. Lin Foxhall, Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 4.

8. Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Christopher Mackay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 41–46.

9. Michael Bailey makes this point and reveals that Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (ca. 1437) connected women to witchcraft decades before Kramer in “The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages,” Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002): 120–34.

10. Provocative regional studies of early modern women and European law abound. For an overview of general trends, see Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 4th ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 51–57, and 57–58 for a list of readings. And for women and lawsuits in early modern Spain, see Renato Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1528–1735 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 117–56.

11. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: Penguin, 1996), 273.

12. In his study of Lorraine, Briggs found that half of the women accused had no husband and many had no children. He later clarifies that this statistical trend was by no means an automatic default. Navarra’s secular records reflect that in isolated trials, most of the accused were widows, while during its chain trials, more married women appeared. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, 264, 356.

13. This does not mean they all received absolution; rather a case would emerge including men, but only the women would receive sentencing as per the trial records.

14. Usunáriz offers the figure of seventy “indicted” men (not necessarily sentenced) in the royal tribunals from 1525 to 1595. See Usunáriz, “La caza de brujas,” 320.

15. Allyson Poska has demonstrated the wide range of female behaviors and agencies in Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See her introduction for an excellent analysis of the nuances of gender in early modern Spain.

16. Women often became the heads of households as Basque men migrated to the Americas. This was largely informed by the maritime, foundry, and shipyard economies that took men away from home, and offered independence and agency to women. See Juan Javier Pescador, The New World Inside a Basque Village (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003), 67.

17. For an excellent study of widows and gender, see Amaia Nausia Pimoulier, Ni Casadas ni Sepultadas, las Viudas: Una Historia de Resistencia Femenina (Navarra: Txalaparta, 2022).

18. Amanda L. Scott, The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 18–36, and throughout.

19. Lu Ann Homza has argued compellingly that women not only took their accusers to court for slander during the witch panic, but their actions contributed to the Inquisition’s skepticism. See Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 14–23, 109–21.

20. One such woman from Augsburg in 1650, Anna Ebler, screamed out to her neighbors that they were sending her to “the butcher’s slab” as officials led her away due to accusations by other women. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 202.

21. Lyndal Roper located fantasies and fears at the heart of these accusations. These fears and fantasies tended to coalesce around feminine issues, such as during childbirth and the dangerous lying-in period following it. Dangerous moments such as these heightened fears, and when coupled with the sudden death of the mother or newborn, these inexplicable tragedies sometimes led to accusations, usually of other women. Roper, Witch Craze, 8–12, 127. Michael Ostling also argued that witchcraft anxieties were attached to issues internal to the female sphere, such as breastmilk, in Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 18. In The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), chap. 1, Tom Robisheaux captures the tension surrounding the lying-in period and the explosion of witchcraft fears when a healthy new mother suddenly dies.

22. In his research on honor and violence in Castilla, Scott Taylor has likened criminal investigations to duels as they “embodied a collection of public rituals dedicated to disputing truth and reputation.” Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 78–79.

23. Here Taylor borrows from Thomas Cohen’s definition of honor as a rhetorical process as opposed to a code, quality, or intangible commodity. See Taylor, Honor and Violence, 8, 235 n. 18.

24. AGN, TR_66473 (1560), fol. 9v.

25. AGN, TR_66473 (1560), fol. 10r. Italics mine.

26. AGN, TR_66473 (1560), fol. 13r.

27. The AGN holds records for thirteen trials of injurias, spanning between 1581 and 1714. Thirteen women in total alleged false accusations of witchcraft against them, alongside seven men.

28. AGN, TR_212327 (1583), fol. 1r.

29. As early as 1415, the word bruja was elevated to a category of slander, or injury (injuria). For more on slander, see Cristina Tabernero and Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa, “Bruja, brujo, hechicera, hechicero, sorgin como insultos en la Navarra de los siglos XVI y XVII,” in Modelos de vida y cultura en Navarra (siglos XVI y XVII), ed. Mariela Insúa (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 2016), 382.

30. Richard Kagan found a wealth of honor cases in the court of Castilla where litigants sought to restore their honor and reputation after receiving affronts to their fama by words such as judio, marrano, or hijo de puta. But he also cautioned that insult cases could stem from deeper grievances and could have less to do with a sense of personal honor and more to do with protracted disputes or external circumstances. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 90–91.

31. The importance of fama was not unique to Navarra. In Larner’s research in Scotland, the majority of witchcraft accusations “were pre-selected by reputation,” whether it be due to a family association or their own actions. Larner further noted that in Scotland, fama extended as far as twenty miles away. Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 30.

32. As early as the sixth century, the Visigothic Code in Iberia drew from the concept of infamia, one of its many legal concepts borrowed from Roman law. See Jeffrey Bowman, “Infamy and Proof in Medieval Spain,” in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. Thelma Fenster and Daniel L. Small (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 98–99.

33. Roman law marked infames (those with legally declared mala fama) and denied them the legal protections and privileges afforded those with good fama. Though the Visigothic Code dedicated more than twenty statutes to infamia and mala fama, it did not clearly define the differences between these concepts. The Sieta Partidas, statutory codes introduced in thirteenth-century Castilla, adopted the legal concept of fama, providing a legal definition of buena fama as the “good state of a person who lives justly according to law and good customs, having no defect or mark.” Bowman, “Infamy and Proof in Medieval Spain,” 103–5.

34. Alison Rowlands’s work on early modern German witchcraft has shown that fama could provide both the circumstantial evidence to support a case and the guidance to decide whether interrogative torture would be warranted. Since cases of witchcraft lacked eyewitnesses and physical proofs, communal opinion became even more crucial in these trials. See Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561–1652 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 18.

35. Over the course of my examinations of these witch trials, I have not found any accused witches reported to be conversas, or “new Christians.”

36. AGN, TR_211115 (1560), fol. 51v.

37. AGN, TR_211115 (1560), fol. 61r.

38. Only fragments of this trial survive. It was among the thirteen witch trials rediscovered by Miriam Etxeberria in 2014 in the Archivo General de Navarra. AGN, TR_344108 (1576), fol. 19r. Seroras were a type of religious laywomen; see Scott, The Basque Seroras.

39. Here I refer to the “roll of witches” (rolde brujas).

40. AGN, TR_16058 (1647), fol. 6v.

41. AGN, TR_17176 (1675), fol. 8r. Italics mine.

42. Briggs has shown the strain begging placed on communities. Witches and Neighbors, 155.

43. Unfortunately, the records do not offer more details about this supposed mafia-style extortion. AGN, TR_17176 (1675), fol. 21r.

44. AGN, TR_36180 (1539), fol. 10r.

45. AGN, TR_36180 (1539), fol. 23v.

46. This stands in contrast to what anthropologists have seen elsewhere, such as some African communities, where witchcraft is hereditary. See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

47. Rowlands’s analyses of the Brosam family of Wettringen in 1561 showed that villagers thought Barbara Brosam had learned witchcraft from her parents-in-law. And in the 1563 trial of Appolonia Kellner and her children Appolonia, Anna, and Georg of Finsterlohr, popular opinion disclosed that the siblings had gained their reputations as witches from their mother. Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany, 23, 25.

48. Pablo Ortega-del-Cerro and Juan Hernández-Franco, “Debates on the Nature of Blood and the Forging of Social Models in Early Modern Spain (1630s),” Journal of Early Modern History 26, no. 4 (2022): 335–60.

49. AGN, TR_35728 (1525), fol. 26v.

50. Florencio Idoate Iragui, La Brujería en Navarra y sus Documentos (Pamplona: Institución Príncipe de Viana, 1978), 261.

51. AGN, TR_63994 (1540), fol. 59v.

52. AGN, TR_344109 (1576), fol. 21r.

53. AGN, TR_327775 (1576), fols. 9r–10r. Italics mine.

54. There were different types of sanbenitos: the colors and drawings indicated the crimes the convicted had committed and the punishments they deserved. They had the name of the accused and a set of flames. 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), 332.

55. Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 28.

56. AGN, TR_327775 (1576), 9r.

57. As demonstrated by Lope Esparza, men too were rendered vulnerable by ancestral accusations. Larner similarly identified that most of the men accused in Scotland were related to women suspects. Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 73.

58. AGN, TR_11219 (1576), fol. 8r.

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

60. The documentary record leaves us with no resolution to this trial.

61. For a helpful framework of these overlapping spheres, see Jan Machielsen, The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil (New York: Routledge, 2020), 184–90.

62. Ronald Hutton offers a clear analysis of the role of diabolism in “the making of the early modern witch” in The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 168–79.

63. This is the first reference to the witches’ ayuntamiento in the records, and it does not use the term akelarre. Akelarre was not used until 1609, so it is anachronistic to apply it to gatherings before this term was inaccurately created by the language of the Spanish Inquisition. See Mikel Azurmendi, Las brujas de Zugarramurdi: La historia del aquelarre y la Inquisición (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2013), 139–46.

64. Idoate, La Brujería, 263.

65. As scholars have found throughout their witchcraft research, the greatest concerns were of loss and death of children and limited goods. The testimonies of villagers in Navarra in nonpanic trials reflect this. Scholars of witchcraft have also shown that seeking misfortunes does not necessarily tidily line up with or overlap with larger disasters such as drought, famine, or disease.

66. AGN, TR_63994 (1540), fol. 2r–v.

67. AGN, TR_327214 (1576), fol. 33r–v.

68. For an interdisciplinary, edited volume on the devil and early modern (mostly) Spain, see María Tausiet and James A. Amelang, eds., El Diablo en la Edad Moderna (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2004).

69. Diabolical sex was only mentioned in a handful of cluster trials from 1575–76, the 1595 trial inspired by Lord Andueza (AGN, TR_71319), and the witch panic of 1609. Andueza charged these villagers with diabolical acts, including sexual relations with the devil. That is, neither the royal court nor their neighbors used heterodox sexual tropes to craft them.

70. Daniel Smail treats “vengeance as a state of mind” and shows “vengeance and justice were closely paired in society.” The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 8, 13–20, 27, 35, 131–36, 162, 183, 200, 243, and throughout.

71. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, 138.

72.Hidalgos and hidalgas were people of nobility and enjoyed legal and social privileges in their position. Only five hidalgos are accused of witchcraft in the run of documents, and most of these appear within a verifiable context of revenge.

73. Note that none of the witnesses drew from diabolism to craft María Perez as a witch.

74. AGN, TR_294640 (1576), fol. 52r.

75. AGN, TR_66043 (1556).

76. Pedro de San Roman appears in multiple court cases spanning more than twenty years. In 1569, he was accused of abuse of power in his position as custom’s officer by the Valle de la Berreuza (AGN, TR_27831). In 1586, he battled family members over inheritance disputes (AGN, TR_148115). And in 1593, he accused someone of attempted murder, little surprise given his contentious relationships with neighbors and family members (AGN, TR_176366).

77. Teresa’s daughter married into the Ubani family, and her son Juanes married into the Labayen family. While embroiled in litigation with the Ubani family, Juanes and his mother Teresa angered the vicar of Legassa, Martín de Subica, by exposing the sexual affair between the vicar and Juanes’s mother-in-law, Graciana Labayen. AGN, TR_327744 (1576).

78. AGN, TR_327744 (1576), fol. 146r.

79. AGN, TR_327744 (1576), fol. 146r.

80. In 1563, Teresa’s husband had a case against Martín de Ubani over disputed land, a fight that erupted into the destruction of a stone wall. AGN, TR_324661 (1563). In 1572, Teresa’s son was accused of stabbing his wife and assaulting and attempting to murder his mother-in-law, Graciana Labayen. AGN, TR_10981 (1572). Two years later, Teresa’s son was in litigation against his brother-in-law, Martín de Ubani, over an inheritance. AGN, TR_326734 (1574). The following year, he litigated with his mother-in-law, Graciana Labayen, over goods and exchanges, a case that involved nearly every person in the witchcraft case. AGN, TR_327323 (1576).

81. As Jan Machielsen notes in The Science of Demons, 9, skepticism and belief drew from the same font. For a helpful overview of skeptical thought as to the reality of diabolical witchcraft at the elite level, see Alan Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), chap. 10.

82. Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 155–59, 239–45, 280–89.

83. Homza, Village Infernos, 172–81.

84. Perhaps these statements stood in for doubts or skepticism. It is quite certain that the written record does not fully reflect all doubts, and witnesses were likely not asked about their skepticism, or perhaps were uninterested in voicing their apprehensions. Similarly, the scribes may have chosen to omit testimonies that spoke to neither the guilt nor the innocence of the accused.

85. Valerie Kivelson noted the lack of “trenchant critiques of the entire enterprise of witch-hunting.” Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 10.

86. AGN, TR_63196 (1539), 79v.

87. Idoate, La Brujería, 281.

88. Idoate, La Brujería, 281.

89. The Inquisition’s conclusions considered the difficulty in determining whether witches actually committed the crimes to which they confessed or only imagined them. This mirrors the postpanic instructions where inquisitors were also advised to work with rigorous diligence in confirming the truth, and encouraged improved sophistication in investigations, such as an inspection of the unguents witches claimed to use for their maleficia. See Homza, Village Infernos, 175–77, for a summary of the new instructions.

90. In medieval and early modern Spain, the term bachiller referred to the lower grades of university studies as opposed to the higher levels of coursework needed to be a licenciado or doctorado.

91. AGN, TR_63994 (1540), fol. 65r.

92. This is reflected in the Spanish demonologies and official church doctrine toward witchcraft.

93. Schwartz, All Can be Saved, 169.