The Basque world -- The gleeful executioners -- The witch's voice -- The black winds -- The bloodletting bruja -- "Powders and poisons" -- "Man's grease" -- Hidden healers -- Familiar demons -- Milking the toad -- Jeannette's imagination -- The Akelarre -- Dancing with the devil -- Dark banquets -- "There is no sin in it" -- "Be nothing to God" -- Theophilus and the stage -- The first altar of hell -- Mass and misrule -- The malevolent mass -- De Lancre's imagination -- The cultic template.
Summary:
"With their dramatic descriptions of black masses and cannibalistic feasts, the records generated by the Basque witch-craze of 1609-14 provide us with arguably the most demonologically-stereotypical accounts of the witches' sabbath - or akelarre - to have emerged from early modern Europe. While the trials have attracted scholarly attention, the most substantial monograph on the subject was written nearly forty years ago and most works have focused on the ways in which interrogators shaped the pattern of prosecutions and the testimonies of defendants. Invoking the Akelarre diverts from this norm by employing more recent historiographical paradigms to analyze the contributions of the accused. Through interdisciplinary analyses of both French- and Spanish-Basque records, it argues that suspects were not passive recipients of elite demonological stereotypes but animated these received templates with their own belief and experience, from the dark exoticism of magical conjuration, liturgical cursing and theatrical misrule to the sharp pragmatism of domestic medical practice and everyday religious observance. In highlighting the range of raw materials available to the suspects, the book helps us to understand how the fiction of the witches' sabbath emerged to such prominence in contemporary mentalities, whilst also restoring some agency to the defendants and nuancing the historical thesis that stereotypical content points to interrogatorial opinion and folkloric content to the voices of the accused"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.