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In the early seventeenth century, thousands of children in Spain's Navarre region claimed to have been bewitched. The Child Witches of Olague features the legal depositions of self-described child witches as well as their parents and victims. The volume sheds new light on Navarre's massive witch persecution (1608-14), illuminating the tragic cost of witch hunts and opening a new window onto our understanding of early modern Iberian life. Drawing from Spanish-language sources only recently discovered, Homza translates and annotates three court cases from Olague in 1611 and 1612. Two were defamation trials involving the slur \"witch,\" and the third was a petition for divorce filed by an accused witch and wife. These cases give readers rare access to the voices of illiterate children in the early modern period. They also speak to the emotions of witch-hunting, with testimony about enraged, terrified parents turning to vigilante justice against neighbors. Together the cases highlight gender norms of the time, the profound honor code of early modern Navarre, and the power of children to alter adult lives. With translations of Inquisition correspondence and printed pamphlets added for context, The Child Witches of Olague offers a portrait of witch-hunting as a horrific, contagious process that fractured communities. This riveting, one-of-a-kind book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of witch hunts, life in early modern Spain, and history as revealed through court testimony.

This book revises what we thought we knew about one of the most famous witch hunts in European history.Between 1608 and 1614, thousands of witchcraft accusations were leveled against men, women, and children in the northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre.

Through analyses of Inquisition trials, biblical translations, treatises on witchcraft, and tracts on the episcopate and penance, Homza illuminates the intellectual autonomy and energy of Spain's ecclesiastics, exploring the flexibility and inconsistency in their preferences for humanism or scholasticism, preferences which have long been thought to be steadfast.

This book revises what we thought we knew about one of the most famous witch hunts in European history. Between 1608 and 1614, thousands of witchcraft accusations were leveled against men, women, and children in the northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre. The Inquisition intervened quickly but incompetently, and the denunciations continued to accelerate. As the phenomenon spread, children began to play a crucial role. Not only were they reportedly victims of the witches' harmful magic, but hundreds of them also insisted that witches were taking them to the Devil's gatherings against their will. Presenting important archival discoveries, Lu Ann Homza restores the perspectives of illiterate, Basque-speaking individuals to the history of this shocking event and demonstrates what could happen when the Spanish Inquisition tried to take charge of a liminal space. Because the Spanish Inquisition was the body putting those accused of witchcraft on trial, modern scholars have depended upon Inquisition sources for their research. Homza's groundbreaking book combines new readings of the Inquisitional evidence with fresh archival finds from non-Inquisitional sources, including local secular and religious courts, and from notarial and census records. Expanding our understanding of this witch hunt as well as the history of children, community norms, and legal expertise in early modern Europe, Village Infernos and Witches' Advocates is required reading for students and scholars of the Spanish Inquisition and the history of witchcraft in early modern Europe.

This article borrows a paradigm from a 2003 essay by theologian Mercedes Navarro Puerto to gauge spiritual priorities in sixteenth-century Spain. Spanish Catholicism in the early modern period very often is construed as averse to horizontal ties, individual judgment, and the free construction of religious communities, but Navarro’s concept of “spiritual accompaniment” helps us to grasp the presence of conversation, reciprocity, and non-confrontational discernment in early modern Spanish Catholicism. The evidence assessed here broadens our understanding of what Spanish Catholicism would tolerate and even support in the sixteenth century, and deepens the way we portray religious dissent.