Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World

Abstract

This valuable collection of essays highlights the work of 11 international scholars, almost all of whom are based in Spanish or Mexican universities. The book offers English-language-only readers examples of scholarship from outside the United States, spanning anthropology, art history, history, and literary studies. The notes, bibliographies, and author biographies provide an excellent resource for students and scholars who wish to expand their knowledge of the topic of women, witchcraft, and the Spanish and American Tribunals of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.It is not surprising that the contributions vary in both their readability and the originality of the insights that they provide on this very well-studied topic. Holy Office case studies often tempt scholars into simply summarizing their content; they are so fascinating and even bizarre that scholarship tends to repeat the back-and-forth narrated in the documents, the painful dance between accusations, individuals' testimonies, and inquisitors' reactions. So much more can be done with these documents.The best work on Inquisition case studies demonstrates a strong knowledge of the conventions of this tribunal as well as the expectations for testimonial verbiage; such work frames and contextualizes the narratives and processes for readers in a way that illuminates analytical points that only a highly trained scholar can discern. This scholarship treats the paper trail relating to the Holy Office as a textual record of cultural and political forces at work in Iberia and its territories.A handful of the essays in this volume do this kind of work very well. First, Sonia Pérez-Villanueva examines five Francisco Rizi paintings commissioned by the mid-seventeenth-century Madrid tribunal as a propaganda effort. The paintings depict highly gendered, antisemitic stories drawn from coerced confessions as if they were real events. Instead of a realistic portrayal of a working-class family, the paintings show the accused crypto-Jews as if they were among the class of financiers who had recently roused popular ire. Perhaps even more shocking, the existing official description of the paintings repeats the story again as if it were true. Continuing his work as a propagandist for powerful institutions, a few decades later Rizi painted the famous Madrid auto de fé scene for his patron King Carlos II.In another well-organized and engaging contribution, Cecilia López-Ridaura delves into a convincing comparison between case records in New Spain and the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, creating a conversation between different but closely related texts. The alleged offenses have to do with men and their sexuality, and López-Ridaura underscores that whether or not the events from the tribunal files took place, clearly the Malleus Maleficarum played a role in how people continued to believe for centuries in witches' abilities to control or destroy male sexual potency.Demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the historiography of the Novohispanic tribunal, Yadira Munguía examines a self-denunciation done in 1796 by a young woman named Felipa Olaeta. This essay provides a brief but very helpful overview of gender and the Holy Office in New Spain, and might offer an excellent short introduction to the subtleties of this tribunal for students. Olaeta's self-confession of a very casual or even dismissive attitude toward Catholicism, as well as her public singing of love songs, makes this an appealing case study to present to undergraduates. Her confession of the offense of feeling that God was cruel due to the commonplace nature of corporal punishment resonates strongly in a time when the secular judiciary annually executed dozens of accused men, as well as a few women, in the plazas of Mexico City. Olaeta's light punishment underscores the variety present in the centuries of the Holy Office's existence.Another fascinating essay in this collection comes from Claudia Carranza Vera and Jair Antonio Acevedo López, who discuss the popular poetry of spells documented in Inquisition records in the context of curing the skin disease known as erysipelas.Some of the less effective essays here derive almost entirely from a very limited selection of secondary sources and seem to focus on simply denouncing the abuses of the Holy Office in a highly emotional tone that echoes Black Legend language familiar for almost five centuries. In other essays, the cited sources are quite dated, with many recent contributions to the literature left out. For example, a growing and excellent historiography exists for medical history across the Americas, beyond the mid-twentieth-century publications of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán. On the whole, the provocative and well-researched essays outweigh these less original or up-to-date contributions.Although joining a packed field of similar collections, these ten essays present a diverse range of intriguing approaches from the perspective of different fields of study and analytical methodologies. Readers will benefit from exposure to authors whose writings have previously only appeared in Spanish. This is an important collection for these reasons.