The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History

(Hardback)

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In 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called the Pays de Labourd. In four months, they executed some 80 women and men for the crime of witchcraft, causing a wave of suspects to flee into Spain and sparking terror there. Witnesses, many of them children, described lurid tales of cannibalism, vampirism, and demonic sex. One of the judges, Pierre de Lancre, published a sensationalist account of this diabolical netherworld. With other accounts seemingly destroyed, this witch-hunt has always been seen through de Lancres eyes. The narrative, re-told over the centuries, is that of a witch-hunt caused by a bigoted outsider. Newly discovered evidence presented here for the first time paints a very different, still darker picture. Far from an outside imposition, witchcraft was a home-grown problem. Panic had been building up over a number of years and the region was fractured by factionalism and a struggle over scarce resources. The Basque Witch-Hunt reveals that De Lancre was no outsider; he was a local partisan, married into the Basque nobility. Jan Machielsen meticulously dissects events to show that, living at the Franco-Spanish border, the Basques were victims of geography; geo-politics caused a local conflict which made the witch-hunt inevitable, sending thousands of religious refugees from Spain to France where they, in turn, became new objects of popular fear and anger. The Basque witch-hunt is justly infamous. This book shows that almost everything historians thought they knew about it is wrong.

Author Bio

Jan Machielsen is Reader in Early Modern History at Cardiff University, UK. He is the author of The War on Witchcraft: Andrew Dickson White, George Lincoln Burr, and the Origins of Witchcraft Historiography (2021) and Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (2015). He is also the editor of The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil (2020).