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- [00:01]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors. To get all History hit podcasts, ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe and you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click.
- [00:20]
DJ Dramos
Stay Farming DJ Dramos from Life as a Gringo. No Making smarter financial moves today secures your financial freedom for a successful tomorrow. Tackle these situations in stride and efq. Be annoyed when an unplanned expense comes up, but not let it be something that slows me down, right as I did with repairing my credit. You know, hiring somebody to do credit repair for me. That was a gift that I gave myself that allowed me to then, you know, get my first apartment like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. State Farm. Proud sponsor of my Kultura podcast Network. Deep in the ocean, an orca pod is on the hunt. But these aren't your average orcas. These guys are organized marketing team.
- [01:04]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
Did you get those social media posts.
- [01:05]
DJ Dramos
Scheduled for the seal migration? Aye aye Captain. We even have an automated notification for all pod managers when they go live. They use Monday.com to keep their teamwork sharp, their communication clear, and their goals in sight. Monday.com for whatever you run, even orcas, go to Monday.com to dive deeper.
- [01:28]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. In 1609, King Henry IV of France commanded one of the judges of the Parlement of Bordeaux, the chief law court, a man called Pierre de Lancre, to investigate accusations of witchcraft in the Pays de la Bour, a Basque speaking province just near to the Spanish border. Under Delancre's gleeful eye, something like 70 people would be burned at the stake that summer, among them several priests, and Delancre later published a lurid account of what he had learned, filled with stories of scandalous Sabbath observances, which included indecent dancing, demonic sex, cannibalism sodomy with the devil, and vampirism. By its end, De l'ancre was still not satisfied. He believed that some 3,000 witches were still at large, which would have been 10% of the population of labor at the time. But questions remain about Delancre's objectivity and his own unusual fascination with perverse behaviors that no Doubt colored his account. The story of the Basque witch hunt has since been told as a campaign by bigoted elite outsiders like Delancre against the innocent Basque people. But my guest today has just published a book that posits a very different and even darker case in which witchcraft was not an external imposition, but a homegrown problem. In fact, he argues that almost everything we think we know about the Basque witch hunt is untrue. Today, joining me for the first of a special month long series on witches, witchcraft and the witch hunts, My guest is Dr. Jan Mackelsen, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University. Jan was one of the first ever guests on this podcast, the second ever most downloaded, where we discussed his work on an early modern teenage werewolf. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Jan, welcome back.
- [04:05]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really delighted to be here. Also really delighted that my book is finally out. It's been such a long time in the making.
- [04:12]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Congratulations on it. Because it's an extraordinary work of recovery and reanalysis and just putting ideas about witchcraft that have become quite entrenched, I would say, in local understandings of that witch hunt to the test and saying, do they really stand up? And your conclusions are fascinating.
- [04:33]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
Thank you. The Basque witch hunt is a remarkable story and I'm conscious that I am approaching it as an outsider, as someone who did not grow up in the Basque country. But in some sense, I argue that's maybe a benefit rather than a drawback, because it allows me an outside perspective to revisit a tale that's become a bit too familiar and too comfortable, that's been retold too many times. And I think it's a tale that actually started with Pierre de Langque himself in a sensational book. And if we dig underneath that story, I think we uncover actually a darker truth. Pietro Lanque is still really important and he's still villainous. I don't think anyone reading my book will come to the conclusion that I'm in any way defending him. But at the same time, there are so many other actors in this story. And it's not just a story about human actors, it's also a story about the environment, about why this witch hunt happened in this border territory in particular.
- [05:33]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Well, let's start there with the sort of geography and ethnography of Le Pays de Labour, La Perdie, as it's called in the Basque language. Could you explain the area to us and why understanding it is so important if we're to understand the witch hunt.
- [05:50]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
So the Basque country is mostly, I think, in our imagination, associated with Spain, and most of it is still today in Spain, but there is a small part of it that is in southwestern France. At the time, the Basques were really rather exceptional in actually navigating the globe. Basques were among the first sort of like explorers, first the oceans, but they also picked up card fishing and particularly whaling. So the Basque country was really a maritime territory, which is influential also and important because of how Piedlanca would see this territory, because he sees this as a territory full of women, because the men folk are all away at sea. But the border is the other really important part of the story, because France and Spain in the early modern period, particularly in the early 17th century, were the two leading powers of Europe. Later on, Spain goes into decline and we see Britain's rise. But in the early 17th century, the main rivalry is between France and Spain, and Spain and its wider sort of European empire encircle France. At that time, the kings of Spain were also the Dukes of Milan, for instance. They owned sort of possessions to east of France. But Belgium, what is now Belgium, was at the time the Spanish Netherlands. So Spain was also encircling France. And that's a big part of this rivalry. The main conduit between France and Spain at the time was the Baie de la Bour. It's that tiny little section of coast just where actually most people would travel through, because France and Spain are divided by the Pyrenees. The Basque country is this really sort of remarkable space, because on the one hand, it's a very alien space to outsiders. Basque as a language is Europe's only language isolate, which means that it has no comparable languages. So people who go there really feel like they're approaching this other world. Pierre de Lancre likens it to visiting the New World, but at the same time, it's a place that actually lots of people pass through. And it's a place that is key to the relationship between France and Spain, the two leading powers. Later in the 17th century, Louis XIV actually gets married in St. Jean de Luz, which is one of the bus stands on the French side. He marries a Spanish princess, but kings constantly pass back and forth. Pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela, major pilgrim site in Spain, they pass through the territory. So the Basque country is a sort of really strange sort of space where on the one hand it seems really exotic and Pierlankrov experiences it in that way, but on the other hand, it's also vital, and it's visited by so many people. And that unique geography really is a big factor into what caused this witch hunt to develop in the way that it did.
- [08:42]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So the witch hunt itself we know chiefly, not quite entirely, but almost entirely from the work of Pierre de Lancre, this Bordeaux judge who investigated the matter on the power of a royal decree, because later he wrote a sensationalist account that centers himself, and yet without him, we wouldn't really know of it at all, as you highlight, because there's a lot of silence about this matter and because the original trial records don't survive. So before we get into what happened and the nature of the witches and the trials, what ethical and methodological questions did this raise for you as a historian studying the witch hunt?
- [09:27]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
You're absolutely right in that the sources are incredibly fragmentary, with the exception of Pieter Lancre's own account. It's a really rich book, but it's also really troubling. If you read it, you really get a sense of his sort of lurid imagination. He's clearly enchanted by Basque women folk and their unique dress, and he talks about their enchanting eyes, and it's really, at times, really unpleasant to read. The obvious step for me, trying to decenter his account was to try and find new sources. And I found some other witnesses, not very many. I found other types of documents that turn out to be quite revealing, but also quite frustrating. There are a lot of surviving financial documents. It tells you a lot of stuff that is adjacent to what you want to know, so it tells you how much people were paid. I know, for instance, exactly where one of the Bordeaux judges involved in the witch hunt changed horses in the journey from Bordeaux to the Basque country, which is a fascinating little tidbit, but it doesn't really help you back how this way, chance happened. I know exactly how many hams the Basque magistrates bought as presents for the Bordeaux judges. And giving gifts to the judges was very common in early modern France. How much they paid for it, how much these hams wage. And yet. So it still doesn't really give you much of a sense as to what happened. But in other instances, these types of receipts are useful. So we know, for instance, payments that are made to p help situate him in a particular village or town at a particular time, so he can map his journey that way. So finding additional sources was a key thing to what I tried to do. The other thing that I tried to do is recognize that Pierre Delancre himself really valued the original testimony. So you're Absolutely right. The sources, the actual 12 documents, have been destroyed by fire, probably in the early 18th century. But Delonque actually excerpts from these sources at great length, actually. When you try and almost cut up the tableau and put these little bits of testimony next to each other, I also think that there's a different story that sort of emerges from that. So those were just my two main, sort of like, approaches to trying to find more evidence. And then I think, finally, I'd say that there is also some Spanish material that's also survived. The Spanish material for the Basque witch hunt and Spain was not my main focus in this book, but I have included some material there. But the Spanish material is a bit richer, and I think that also allows us to make comparisons, because in many respects, what the witches and accusers are telling on the French side and on the Spanish side lines up really well in very surprising ways.
- [12:13]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And actually, that lining up and where it doesn't line up, where there are gaps on the French side, is also very revealing, as we'll see. So let's go back a bit, then. Before Delinque's arrival, what do we know of witches in this area? What do we know, in other words, about the origins of the accusations?
- [12:32]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
Well, I think there are two things to say there. First of all, witchcraft was very common to the Basque country, and I think here the border is playing one of its magic tricks, because the witch hunt of the Peyre de la Boer is seen as unique. It's like this sensational witch hunt in the context of early modern France. But actually, if you look at it as a Basque story, and you look on the Spanish side of the border, you actually know that there have been a number of notable witch hunts in the Basque country before, many of those involving children, some of them also involving royal witchcraft commissions. What is striking, then, is that there is actually a longer indigenous history of witch hunting that this great Basque witch Hunt of 1609 sort of fits into, and then actually then secret. When I started digging around for sources, for instance, looking at the account books of these stands, it became clear that they've been hunting and prosecuting witches for about four, five, six years earlier. So the first witchcraft trial I found that seems to be tied to this witch hunt was actually as early as 1603. And here, actually having the account books is quite useful because it shows you that one of the reasons why there was a petition, because there was a petition to King Henry IV of France from the Basque country for a witchcraft commission, part of the reason why the Basque wanted a witchcraft commission was because it was cheaper. You get a real sense as to how expensive French justice was in the early 17th century. And this is because the appeals court is in Bordeaux. Bordeaux is about five days travel from the Basque country by horse. And it's not just the accused witches who need to be sent to Bordeaux. The accusers, the witnesses, a lot of them teenagers, they have to be sent over as well. And it is up to the towns in the Basque country to find the money to pay for their transport, their upkeep, the cost of interpreters, they have to pay the judges. So the cost is really building up. And the documents are quite explicit that the reason why they wanted a witchcraft commission is that it's obviously much cheaper to send two judges from Bordeaux to the Basque country and have them interrogate witches there, and then also to do so without any possibility of appeal. Because that was another reason why the cast mounted is because first you'd have a trial in Bayan, which is the main city in the Basque country, and then there would be an appeal to Bordeaux. So it just cuts out a lot of paperwork and therefore make the witch hunting a lot more efficient. But, of course, the result of that is that a lot more people die. So from our perspective, it is a really bad thing, this witchcraft commission. But it's also worth reflecting, just like how costly and how bureaucratic and how unfair in general, French justice was, when you think about the amount of money people would have to cough up to get justice.
- [15:23]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
It's so fascinating as well, because I suspect people listening don't think of witchcraft as being something that was financially burdensome on a local community. And the fact is, this actually is an expensive thing to deal with. And one would have thought that that actually might have inclined authorities not to deal with it. But it does seem to be a very pressing problem.
- [15:48]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
Yes, one of the factors that seems to have happened is that in the main town, St Jean de Luz, that I mentioned, which is this town on the coast, it's also one of the centers of this maritime economy that involves the cod fishing and the whaling that goes all the way up to Canada. So it's a really rich and wealthy town run by merchants. And it seems in here the sources are fragmentary, so in some sense I'm speculating a little bit, but it seems that one way in which this witch hunt ended is that the magistrates who were advocating for this witch hunt fell from power. And that may be because of the vast cost involved of this witch hunt. Because if you look at the Account books, like it takes up a sizable portion of the town's annual expenditure just prosecuting witches. So I think that's a really important point to make. And I think there has always been in the wider witchcraft historiography the sort of idea that witch hunting might actually have a profit motive that you target, like, wealthy widows or that sort of thing. But that doesn't really seem to be the case in a Basque country at all. Also not on the Spanish side. Like the Spanish Inquisition actually gets into financial difficulty because the accused witches were too poor to actually pay for their own upkeep in prison, so they had to actually find money to pay for their upkeep. So the financial side of a witch hunt is actually really important, and it's not actually an aspect that most people or most historians have paid much attention to.
- [17:18]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So a royal commission is petitioned for and unusually granted. And you suggest that's in part because the border is so troublesome. But it isn't just Pierre de Lancre who is sent as a commissioner, he has a co investigator. Could you just briefly introduce him and give us a sense of whether he was as committed to witch hunting and as credulous as Delancre.
- [17:41]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
They sent two commissioners. Pierre de Lancre is actually not the most important one of them. He has a colleague called Jean d'espagne and he is a president of the Bordeaux Parlement. So the Parlement is the appeals court, so he's the more senior of the two judges. It seems that the original plan from the Basque country was to just have Pied de Lancre. And that makes sense because one of the other things that I can show in my book is that Piedlanca was actually related by marriage to one of the members of the Basque nobility. So he was actually, in some sense, even though he sees the Basque country as extraordinary alien, he was in some sense not even like an outsider, but he was part of this local factionalism that really fed this witch hunt. So it makes sense that Jean d'espanaye was added to this commission as a way of reassuring people, perhaps his colleagues at the Bordeaux parliament. But Espigner, in some sense, seems to have been as committed to this witch hunt as the Lancre has been espanier. He is a really interesting figure. He was an alchemist, so he was interested in, like, finding the secrets of nature. And actually, in some sense, Pierre Delanque's interest in the Witch's Sabbath is also like a quest for secrets. Like when a German translation of Pieter Lancre's famous treatise, the tableau of 1612, when it gets translated into German in 1630, it's called the Wonderful Secrets of Witches. And it really shows you what Delanque's book is about and what Delanque is interested in. And it's like revealing this secret demonic netherworld of the witch's Sabbath. And Espinier, as an alchemist trying to uncover the secrets of nature, is actually quite similarly minded. So the fact that Espionage writes two poems that preface Piedoleonquist Tableau, I think, shows that the two must be to some extent on the same page. The fact that when Pied de Lanque, in 1630, years after the witch hunt, makes his final will and testament and then appoints Esp. Benier as the executor of his will, shows that the two men clearly had a lifelong relationship. So they clearly work together. And the few documents that have survived from the witch hunt that I found always name the two together, and some of them show both their signatures. So this original idea that some historians have tried to advance, that sort of it was just Pierre de Lancre and that Espinier either tried to frustrate this witch hunt or left the commission early. None of that seems to hold up.
- [20:13]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So Pierre Delancre is fascinated by the Sabbath, the witches Sabbath, and writes this book all about it. Can you give me an idea of.
- [20:21]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
What a witch's Sabbath was in early modern Europe? Part of the idea of how witchcraft worked was that witches made a pact with the devil. And perhaps unsurprisingly, because this is an age where you have Protestants and Catholics and Anabaptists and you have all sorts of rivals, confessions, the idea that the devil needs worship in the same way that sort of quote, unquote, heretics are worshiping like God, but the wrong way really takes hold. The idea that the devil needs to be worshipped by witches, quite often by having sex with him, is a commonplace across early modern Europe. It's not really there very much in the English sources. That's a different story. But the idea of the Sabbath is not just specific to the Basque country. Peter Lanka goes to the Basque country. And I'm sure he's expecting to find details about Sabbath narratives, including things like which is flying to a Sabbath at night and then worship the devil. I'm sure he's expecting to find that type of material, but what he actually finds is so much stranger than he could ever have imagined, because the Bachs have all sorts of, like, really detailed stories to offer about the Sabbath. Like, it's very common in the set of narratives across Europe for witches to eat the bodies of unbaptized babies. In the Basque country, they don't just do that, they do eat babies. There is actually an engraving included in Pied de l'angristableau where if you look closely, you can see witches eating a baby in the right hand corner. But what they do in the Basque country as well is they dig up apparently the bodies of dead witches and then the devil gives them special dentures to eat the bodies of dead witches. And these are the types of like strange tales that are really unexpected and it's hard to see these stories emerge out of Pieta Lanque's imagination and they clearly are rooted in the Basque country. And it's like we're saying that for Pieta Lancre, who spoke not a word of Basque everything, who are true interpreters, the Basque country was this exotic space only seemingly inhabited by women and priests and men because the men were sailors and off at sea. And it was this almost miniature new world that existed at the edge of France. So I think those two things chimed for him like the exotic location, plus these really exotic stories that he heard about the Sabbath.
- [22:55]
Don Wildman
In case you haven't heard in the US It's a presidential election year. We're going to hear a lot of this is America. No, no, you're all wrong. This is America. But on American History hit. We're leaving that to the rest of them. Join me, Don Wildman, twice a week where we look to the past to understand the United States of today. With the help of some amazing guests, Let us introduce you to the Founding Fathers, guide you through the west wing of the White House, and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by. To find out just how we got here. American History hit A podcast from history hit.
- [23:34]
DJ Dramos
Deep in the ocean, an Orca pod is on the hunt. These aren't your average Orcas. These guys are organized marketing team.
- [23:44]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
Did you get those social media posts.
- [23:45]
DJ Dramos
Scheduled for the seal migration? Aye aye, Captain. We even have an automated notification for all pod managers when they go live. They use Monday.com to keep their teamwork sharp, their communication clear, and their goals in sight. Monday.com for whatever you run. Even orcas go to Monday.com to dive deeper.
- [24:04]
Don Wildman
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- [25:12]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So Denial and Espinier arrived on 2 July 1609 and basically had carte blanche until the beginning of November. Can you first of all kind of establish what happened in that interval? Is it possible to say even how many witches were executed with certainty? I confidently put a figure on it in my introduction, but I want to test that against you.
- [25:35]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
Now this is the issue with the tableau as our main source is that Delancre is so enchanted by the witch's Sabbath, it's really the only thing he wants to talk about. And that sort of means that there are a lot of things he does not bother to tell us about. So I know about his day of revival, the 2nd of July, as you mentioned, simply because that's mentioned in one of the few surviving letters that remain in the archive, the end date, 1st of November. That's something that Pieter Lanca mentions, but just in passing. So the tableau is not some sort of straightforward chronological account where he says we arrived on this date, this was what the reception was like. The next day we interrogated X number of witches and we sentenced so and so to death. He is really not interested in giving us any of these types of basics or facts. To the extent that it is structured, it is all structured around the Sabbath and then you end up with having to pick bits and pieces together. So when he occasionally mentions a date. So in the book, I try to reconstruct the journey that they took, starting in Bayonne, sort of the main city in the region, and then traveling towards the border and then visiting a number of villages on the way. And I've lined up all the instances where Pierlanco clearly says that someone has been executed. He also says at one point that they interrogated between 60 and 80 famous witches, but in French he says surcier, so female witches. And we know that he also executed a number of priests, which are obviously men, so there is a complicating factor there. And he says interrogated. So we don't quite know exactly what the outcome of every trial was. Some of them may have been banished, and it's all very difficult. And it's really quite a telling of Pierre de Lancre's personality that he's just not interested in telling us any of these things, because he doesn't even really see these people as fully human. Right. They are just wonders for his collection. But if you put it all together, I do think perhaps 60 people may have been executed. If you look at the whole witch hunts, including the period, the few years leading up to the commission, what happened afterwards, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a hundred people who died in this witch hunt. It's difficult to put a precise figure on it, but it's sizable and it spills in comparison to some of the German witch hunts, but it's still the largest witch hunt of France. And then when it spreads into Spain, it's the largest witch hunt in Spain. And that does make it quite a significant story.
- [28:02]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So insightful that he's not really seeing them as human and he's sort of not concerned from our perspective with the reality, but with this fantasy. So let's get into that. What can we make of the details that he records about the witch's Sabbath, which he's so fascinated by? I mean, to the point of, like, almost being pornographic in the way that he talks about it. What is the role of toads and roosters and goats? And how do we make sense of this?
- [28:33]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
This is the 100 million pound question, or whatever the precise phrase is in it, because what really happened, that's ultimately quite often what we witchcraft historians really want to know. And there's always been a sort of assumption that it all just existed in the imaginations of the judges. And there are two problems with that. At least with Pierre Delanque and the Baas witch hunt is concerned. The one problem is that Pierre Lancre clearly wrote his book because he was enchanted, spellbound by what he found. He thought that the stuff that he found in the Basque country was so unexpected, so wild and bizarre that the world needs to know about it. And then the second problem is that we have not just a witch hunt on the French side, but we also have a witch hunt on the Spanish side, and these witch hunts move independently from one another. So actually, on the Spanish side, the Inquisition already rounds up the first witchcraft suspects before Pierre de Lancre and Jean d'espanaye arrive in the Pays de la Bourse. And these witchcraft suspects are then transported away from the border to a small town called Logronia, quite far away from the Basque country, from at least the part of the Basque country where the witch hunt happened. And there. There's actually lots of similarities, these Basque witches, to Piedlonque and Espinier, the same sort of things that they're telling these inquisitors in Logrono, which, like, really strongly suggests that it's not existing in the imagination of the judges, that what they are telling are folkloric tales by comparison.
- [30:01]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
With the Spanish sources you've identified that there are things that Delacre obscures or leaves out. What are they?
- [30:09]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
I think the comparison between the French and Spanish sources is interesting because on the one hand it shows how there are quite a few similarities, but there are also some striking differences. So one difference, for instance, is the fact that on both sides there were meant to be queens of the Sabbath, but on the Spanish side, the queens of the Sabbath are maybe what we might call stereotypical witches, women in their 80s. On the French side, according to Pierre de Lanquere, they are the most beautiful witches, which feels rather what one might expect from Pierre de Lanque's particular obsessions. The other thing that's really striking and that's missing is that on the Spanish there are also stories of the devil having sex with male witches, and there is nothing about homosexuality in Pieta Lancre's account. So again, I think both of those changes, or both of these absences on the French side, really also point to the fact that Pieta Lanque, as an editor of this material, is clearly removing stuff that is not of interest to him as a man who's really obsessed with the Basque Feminine, mystique, and that as a judge, he may have been pushing for more details about the sort of sexual nature of the Sabbath that the queers might not be pressing too hard on. So there are changes between the French and Spanish side do reveal something, I think, about Piet Lancra's particular interest, let's put it that way, his proclivities.
- [31:34]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Yes, yes, you give a good example in the book of the way in which he has some of the younger women who are testifying before him demonstrate the dances that happened at the Sabbath, which we can imagine was for his own Titillation, amongst other things. And actually there's a distinction made in this witch hunt between the witches and witnesses. And many of the latter are children or teenagers. Is it possible to recover their perspective at all? Can we make something of their testimonies?
- [32:07]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
This is another question where I think my answer can only go so far and that there are parts there that. That won't satisfy everyone, because the sources can only tell us so much. One of the key things that Pietolonque says at the start of his book is that he and his colleague interviewed between 60 and 80 famous witches and 600 witnesses. And then the question is obviously, who are these witnesses? Because he then goes on to say that these witnesses all went to the witch's Sabbath. And you think by definition, almost if you go to a witch's Sabbath, you are a witch, so how do you get to go there? And it only becomes apparent when you read the book closely that with these witnesses, he means children and teenagers who claim that they've been taken to the Sabbath by people against their will, and that there are therefore unwilling participants who are partly excused because of their age. There's a particularly upsetting example of a 17 year old girl who makes a mistake of saying that she was occasionally taken by some of her neighbors, but sometimes went on around. And Delancra does not call her a witness, he calls her an excellent witch. And he says she was remarkable because usually witches don't testify anything. But clearly she hadn't realized that she was no longer a witness. She hadn't realized that she had become a witch because she traveled to the Sabbath voluntarily. And he says that she confessed everything constantly until she got to the scaffold when suddenly she denied everything. And it's quite a sad story, but it really makes it quite clear how this distinction between witnesses and witches works, that the witnesses were the victims of witches, they were the accusers of witches, and they had all of this testimony about the Sabbath that sort of really filled the pages of the tableau. How these children came to testify then is a really difficult question. We know that there were child accusers in earlier witch hunts in the Basque Country. It also seems that these children created sort of social groupings, like Pierre de Lanque and Jean Lespinier housed them together at night in the same room. So the two judges literally woke up the next morning with fresh testimony straight from the witch's Sabbath. And you can see how in the book I tried to unpack some of these stories, showing how it seems like there is a lot of social pressure that these children exert on each other to tell these types of tales. So those are at least partial answers. I'm not convinced that the answer that we'd like to be true, namely that behind these children in their accusations there's always like an evil adult standing pushing them to give this answer. I'm not convinced that is true. Certainly not in all instances. I'm sure it must be true in some cases, but yet the full story as to trying to get to their perspective is really difficult.
- [35:14]
Don Wildman
In case you haven't heard, in the US it's a presidential election year. We're going to hear a lot of this is America. No, no, you're all wrong. This is America. But on American history hit we're leaving that to the rest of them. Join me, Don Wildman, twice a week where we look to the past to understand the United States of today. With the help of some amazing guests, let us introduce you to the founding Fathers, guide you through the west wing of the White House and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by. To find out just how we got here, American history, hit a podcast from Historyhit.
- [35:52]
DJ Dramos
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- [36:29]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
DeLancre's book only includes one confession excerpt from a 6 year old woman called Catherine de Berendiguy. What can we learn from it?
- [36:39]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
Yeah, so most of the testimony comes from the witnesses from the teenagers and there are about two dozen of those whom he names. But as I mentioned, there may have been hundreds of them that he talked to. So we actually very sadly hear very little of the witches themselves. And Catherine is perhaps the main exception because there he actually excerpts her testimony for several pages on end. She's actually interrogated not by him, she's derogated back in Bordeaux after the witchcraft commission ends. But it's still a really rather fascinating confession after torture. We don't know. He doesn't say how much torture that was. We know that she would have been imprisoned in Bordeaux for months and that itself would not have been a pleasant experience. But she's also confronted with the testimony of her daughter Marie, who is one of her Accusers. And this is one of the really sad and upsetting things about the Basque witch hunt. These teenage accusers, they accuse priests, they accuse all the women that we might expect, but they also seem to turn against their parents, at least in some instances. And what Catherine does with her testimony, I think is really interesting because it shows you that even the witches themselves have a form of agency in shaping this witch hunt. And it's Catherine's main concern to save her daughter. And she does that by telling stories that make it clear that you have to be a certain age before you're introduced into the real mysteries of the witch cult. You have to be over 20 before you're being taught how to make potions. And Marie was younger than that. She also claims that other people involved in the witch hunt who've been seen at the Sabbath weren't really there, but were there as almost as statues created by the devil. So she's trying to, with her testimony, as she's confessing herself to be a witch, she's trying to save the lives of some other people, she's trying to save her daughter, she is trying to save some of her co accused by making it clear that they were never really there. But then she also clearly is trying to condemn someone else. There's another older witch, another mother of accusers called Carvar, and she says that she was definitely there. And it's really unclear because we can't get to the truth behind all of it, whether or not Catherine and Kavar had history, whether or not Kavar had been one of Catherine's accusers. But it's like a fascinating example, I think, is to show that even in the act of confessing as a witch, Catherine's testimony shows us that witches have agency. Yes, they're damning themselves to death, but there can also be their testimony, try and save others, and they can also damn and condemn others. And I think that's a really important part of this story. Because if the aim of this book is to show it wasn't just Pierre Delancque, that actually there are lots of factors here, lots of agents, including geography, including these accusers, including this geopolitical rivalry, but also the witches themselves, that they have had some role, some agency in the story too. And I think that's a really important takeaway. And I hope that the readers of my book will pick up on that aspect of the story too.
- [39:57]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
To end, then, let us try and consider how the witch hunt itself ended. We may be tempted to think, oh, it's when the commissioners Left. But actually, you suggest that doesn't resolve the witchcraft problem at all. It makes it worse. So why, in the end, do you finish your story with this appalling incident of Christ in a handkerchief?
- [40:23]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
You're absolutely right. I wish I had a more uplifting ending to tell, that the Basque witch hunt was a story where reason triumphed over superstition. And I'm just really sad that's not the case. But I think it makes sense that after four months of terror, and after four months of all of these stories about witches and the evil things that they're meant to do, that when the judges leave, it's still territory in crisis. And there are some examples of witches being lynched in the territory after the departure of the judges. But what also seems to be happening in the decade after they leave, so in the 1610s, is that there is another group of people that move into the territory during the witch hunt. You have French witchcraft accused fleeing across the border into Spain in the 1610s. You have groups of new Christians. So these are people whose ancestors had converted from Judaism and Islam. You have groups of these flee from Spain into France, and they settle in towns like Bayonne and Saint Jean de Luz, just across the border. And these foreign refugees seem to become the new objects of popular fear and hatred. So my story ends in 1619 with the lynching of a Portuguese New Christian woman called Katherine Fernandez. And when she was told that she had to go and hear confession in church, and as part of that, she was given the Eucharist. But instead of eating the Eucharist, as you were meant to do at that stage, she decided to save it for later as a snack, basically. And that sort of triggered in the Basque country quite a lot of fears, but very Basque specific ones and very general ones. The witch hunt was also centered in part on the Eucharist, on the communion waiver, because witches said that while they were on the devil's surface, they couldn't see the Eucharist, the commune wave, or the host. They only saw a black cloud. So there were stories about the Eucharist and Basque witchcraft narratives already, but they're also disturbing. European white tales of Jews mutilating hosts that then started to bleed and because it's the body of Christ. So this theft of this Eucharist, and I put theft in quotation marks here, really sparked a riot. And at the end of this riot, Catherine Fernandez was put in a barrel and burned alive. And that's where I end the story. Dubas witnesses claim that after her death, everything was good. The weather had improved, the sailors dare to sail to the New world again. And so it's almost like an act of expiation that sort of ends this story, but it's a really gruesome and unjust one.
- [43:07]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Well, on that horrifying and sobering note, we end, and I think actually it is a salutary one to end on, because on Halloween particularly we think of witchcraft and witches as fun and we tell stories that we've passed down through fairy tales and it's all a bit of a laugh. But in actual fact, the stories of people who were accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe at least, is not fun at all. And it's good to be reminded of the reality of that, whether that is people being accused of being a witch or in this case, not really being Christian Jan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast again to talk about your book. There's so much we haven't been able to get into today. Listeners do pick up a copy of the Basket Witch Hunt. For example, there's a deposition from a 21 year old Taylor's wife that includes some fascinating features. So much more to know, but thank you so much for your time, Jan. Today it's been fascinating.
- [44:14]
Dr. Jan Mackelsen
Thank you so much for having me. It's been really wonderful to be back on this podcast again and to discuss some of the things that I learned working on this subject. Thank you so much.
- [44:23]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And if you enjoyed this podcast, please do go back and listen to our podcast from three years ago, An Early Modern Teenage Werewolf. We're always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at not just the tudorshistoryhit.com or on X formerly Twitter otjust tudors. Remember that you can also listen to all of these podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe it's well worth it. And as a special gift, you can also get 50% off your first three months when you use the Code Tudors at checkout. That's historyhit.com subscribe with the code Tudors and if you would be so good as to follow not just the Tudors on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.
- [45:38]
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