Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 by Lu Ann Homza

Abstract

Reviewed by: Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 by Lu Ann Homza Amanda L. Scott Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614. By Lu Ann Homza. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2022. Pp. x, 260. $99.95. ISBN: 9780271091815. Between 1608 and 1614, Navarre was rocked by terrifying allegations that the Devil was recruiting villagers as witches, placing them in apprenticeships, providing them with demonic pet toads, and kidnapping and converting children to his cause. As Lu Ann Homza describes eloquently in her new book, the Basque witches’ sabbats [End Page 608] (akelarres) exemplified all the most terrifying elements of early modern witch-fantasy: witches flew to upside-down masses where the Devil presided like the Bishop of Pamplona, they feasted on corpses, they mixed poisons and called down destructive weather, and they danced and copulated with one another to cacophonous music. Entire villages were swept up in accusations; many of the accusers were children. After intense community breakdown and revoked confessions, the Inquisition called a halt, and began treating witchcraft as impossible to prosecute. These elements make the Navarrese witch-hunt one of the most famous episodes of the European witch-craze, yet strikingly one of the least studied. Part of this neglect stems from the lasting influence of Gustav Henningsen’s 1980 study The Witches’ Advocate, which focused on the Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías’s skepticism over the witches’ confessions. To date, this is usually how the Navarrese witch-hunt fits into undergraduate witchcraft surveys: an example of how modernity and enlightened legal thinking triumphed over peasant (and Catholic) superstition. Homza decisively rejects this characterization. In a much-needed reappraisal, Homza returns to Henningsen’s original documentary base, while supplementing it with new and only recently discovered sources from the Navarrese royal archives and Inquisitorial correspondence in Madrid. She considers the poverty and worldly motives that fueled the hunt, but also the surprisingly coherent command of Tridentine religious reform possessed by the Navarrese laity. The result is a careful and sensitive re-evaluation of the witch-hunt and an important contribution to our understanding of early modern daily life. In crisp prose and vivid, humorous descriptions of village conflict, Homza unequivocally demonstrates that witch-accusations were anything but normal. Calling someone a witch was a profound social affront, and such slander had shattering social effects (p. 20). Yet, many of the accusers were children and there was no legal mechanism to stop or punish them from accusing parents and neighbors. In Homza’s telling, we see how Inquisitors stumbled into a complex social world they did not fully understand, and where Inquisitorial penalties might pale in comparison to the trauma and dishonor accused witches faced within their communities. Still, Homza’s most important contribution remains a dramatic rejection of Salazar as an enlightened jurist, who doubted the concept of witchcraft: rather than ushering in modern legal procedure, Salazar “came to doubt not whether witchcraft was possible in theory, but whether his tribunal was proceeding against witch-suspects with sufficient proof” (p. 9). Though Homza rejects geographic determinism—in both limited and broad senses—she nonetheless sees the Inquisition as suffering from a “tyranny of distance”: the cultural and geographic gulf between the Suprema in Madrid, the tribunal in Logroño, and the Pyrenean villages made communication and timely dispatches exceptionally difficult, stoking conflict between individual Inquisitors. Their choices effectively exacerbated the hunt, rather than remedy it (p. 87). The poverty of the Logroño tribunal and the exploding number of cases pushed familiars to search for extralegal mechanisms to help with the backlog, including coerced confessions, torture at the village level, and bringing suspects face to face (p. 100). Village Infernos is then, fundamentally, a portrait of a dysfunctional [End Page 609] Inquisition whose actions actually botched the processes their tribunal was bound to uphold (p. 16). Justice was usurped by individual townspeople and the clergy, some of whom fought back against abuses and mistreatment by bringing suit in other jurisdictions. There was nothing top-down about the use of the courts by these villagers, and the result was “a persecution [that] unquestionably had more witches...