In his statistically rich study, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons: The Spanish Inquisition's Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona, 1478-1700, Gunnar W. Knutsen has provided specialists of late medieval and early modern Iberia, as well as scholars interested in the history of heresy, demonology, magic, and the occult, a most valuable study. Knutsen builds off the findings of Gustav Henningsen who identified, based on the records of the Santo Officio, or Holy Office, a distinct geographic division between northern and southern Spain regarding the phenomenon of diabolic witchcraft. Spain's northern half was rife with trials of individuals suspected of engaging in devil worship and inflicting damage on people, animals, and crops in the late medieval and early modern period. The southern half of the peninsula, in contrast, lacked these diabolic witchcraft trials, in spite of the presence of "hundreds of trials against suspected sorcerers and magicians" (xi). Yet Knutsen reorients his study along a different axis. Instead of approaching the matter traditionally by questioning the reasons behind the large number of demonic witchcraft trials of northern Spain, Knutsen instead questions the absence of those trials in the south. Geographically, Knutsen focuses on the Mediterranean cities of Barcelona and Valencia and their respective hinterlands. Although there were linguistic, geographic, and economic similarities between these two areas, an important difference lay in the separate regions' maintenance of their own particular laws and secular courts. Based on his extensive study of the relaciones de causas, the trial summaries recorded by the Spanish Inquisition's tribunals and released annually by its bureaucracy, Knutsen shows how these regional laws and courts were crucial for understanding the fundamental differences in late medieval and early modern Iberian conceptions of magic and demonology. Chronologically, Knutsen begins his study with the foundation of the Inquisition in 1478 and ends it at 1700, about the time when the release of the Iberian relaciones de causas shifted from annually to monthly and the witchcraft trials largely petered out across most of Europe.
In his introduction, Knutsen discusses the terminology that the inquisitors themselves used to distinguish the different forms of superstitious actions, hechicería and brujería, sorcery and diabolical witchcraft respectively, and he offers a sound review of the status quaestionis of the scholarship surrounding Iberian witchcraft trials. For Knutsen, ultimately the geographic division between the northern and southern halves of Spain is rooted in the numbers of Christians and Muslims in each area, which had a profound effect upon those populations' collective conceptions of magic, diabolism, and superstition. Compounding the matter further in each area were the presence and influence of foreign witch-hunters and the level of intervention of the Holy Office in relation to the strength of local secular courts' claims to juridical oversight over the trials. Knutsen argues that in Barcelona and Catalonia, where there was a direct influence from French witch-hunters, as well as weaker juridical oversight in the secular courts and little intervention from the Holy Office, a much greater number of witchcraft trials took place within the larger rural Christian population. Valencia, in contrast, had only a small number of trials initiated, and only one successfully prosecuted, due to the confluence of a considerably weaker French influence, the impact of conceptions of demonology and witchcraft that came from the much greater Muslim population in the region, and the early intervention in trials of a significantly stronger inquisition tribunal (9).
Knutsen divides his book into three parts. Part One provides the historical background for his analysis over the course of three chapters. His first chapter regards the development of the institution of the Inquisition and its gradual shift from an organization designed to root out the heresy of the thirteenth-century Albigensians to one that, by the later Middle Ages, began to concern itself increasingly with magic and superstition. Key to this was the growing belief, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that "the existence of an explicit or implicit pact with the devil" was central to superstitious activities and therefore constituted a heresy to be investigated directly by the Holy Office (15). Knutsen discusses the various legal resources at the inquisitors' disposal, including the famous fourteenth-century manuals by Bernard Gui and Nicolau Eymerich; the cartas acordadas, letters of instructions sent by the Suprema to all tribunals; and the abecedarios, comprehensive, unified, but sometimes inconsistent guides with exact references to a multitude of legal texts. The large corpus of legal materials at inquisitors' disposal resulted in their having considerable latitude in how they handled individual cases. Knutsen also investigates the mechanics and processes of the trials themselves, which were rooted in "absolute secrecy" (21). Two legitimate witnesses were necessary to determine the full culpability of any purported heretic and torture, with its many problems and limitations, was supposed to be used only when the totality of the evidence had been gathered and its legitimacy ascertained. The "lavish punishment ceremony" of the auto de fé completed the procedure: it served as a very public spectacle of the disgraceful results of falling into heresy and its punishments ranged from transfer to the secular arm for public execution to galley service for healthy male heretics to the wearing of the sanbenito (30-31). Afterwards, the case would be filed in the archive of the Inquisition. Despite the attempt at standardizing these procedures and sources, local conditions always affected the enforcement of the Inquisition's power and the exact process could vary significantly. In his brief second chapter, Knutsen studies the local relationships between Christians and Muslims. The Muslims who resided along the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, "first as Mudejars and later as Moriscos," (40) are significant to understanding the geographic spread of Iberian witchcraft trials, as Muslims and Christians had fundamentally different conceptions of what constituted superstitious behavior. There is not a similar understanding of the Devil and eternal damnation in Hell in Islam as in Christianity, although there did exist the belief that a host of demons and lesser spirits could be summoned by a skilled enough practitioner and compelled to do his or her bidding. Thus the supposed sabbaths and pacts with the devil crucial for Christian conceptions of heresy in the diabolical witchcraft trials made very little sense within the Islamic context. As a result, in areas where there was a considerable Muslim population, such as Valencia and its environs, there was a marked scarcity of cases involving diabolical witchcraft.
Chapter three has a bit of a sprawling quality, as Knutsen treats the chronology and typology of the superstition trials in Valencia and Catalonia, as well as conceptions of popular and learned magic, the role the Inquisition played in simultaneously punishing and perpetuating sorcery, and the particular characteristics of some of the trials involving Moriscos (51). Based on his statistical analyses of the relaciones de causas, Knutsen identifies a pronounced growth in the overall number of trials for superstition in both seventeenth-century Catalan and Valencian tribunals, peaking from 1640 to 1680, although the total number of overall trials decreased. That specific period saw an increased influence of French witch-hunting upon the Catalan secular courts, more time for the Inquisition to deal with smaller cases in the two tribunals, and the inclusion of minor cases that, a century earlier, would have been settled without the need for a trial based on personal visitations by the inquisitor, his amanuensis, and an alguacil, or constable (57). Another key difference in the northern and southern halves turns on the practice of the invocation of demons, the subject of a greater number of cases in Valencia. In his endeavor to cover such a great quantity of information, Knutsen's third chapter does not have the same level of thematic unity as the other chapters in his book. Still, Knutsen evocatively concludes that "the Christian areas were infected with Satan's servants while the mixed Christian-Muslim areas were infested with masters of demons" (81), whence the title of his book.
Parts Two and Three respectively focus on the urban and surrounding rural areas of Barcelona and Valencia. Chapter four regards the "plague of witches" that Catalonia considered to be a problem as early as 1517, the date of the first reference to witches from documents from the Holy Office. Most of those accused of diabolic witchcraft in Catalonia and tried by the Holy Office appear as the stereotypical witch as sketched in the fifteenth-century Malleus maleficarum: the crone who, after establishing a compact with the devil and celebrating that pact with an inversion of Christian ritual in the form of the witches' sabbath, murders infants and small children and engages in maleficium to inflict harm upon people, animals, and property. Many of these relaciones de causas luridly depict the details believed to be part of the ritual of the witches' sabbath. For example, in one case from 1575, the report states that the sexual union between the Devil and the accused witch, Andreua Beltraneta, central to sealing the pact, provided her no pleasure, as the Devil's "member was rough like a grater" (95). Knutsen's fifth chapter regards the sometimes, but not always, contentious relationship between Catalan secular courts and inquisitorial tribunals over the matter of diabolic witchcraft. In Barcelona, the Inquisition tended to not enforce its jurisdiction and intervene against witches and instead left that to "the much more brutal secular courts," which were only too ready to extract confessions via torture from women who then accused other women (102). In order to discover these supposed witches, the Catalan secular courts tended to rely on witch-hunters, many of whom were foreign, coming from France. Yet the frontier between accuser and accused often blurred and the inquisitorial tribunal in Barcelona frequently tried and punished these French witch-hunters in turn.
Knutsen uses three case studies in his sixth chapter to investigate the situation in early modern Valencia and argues that, in stark contrast to the responses farther north in Catalonia, the Holy Office demonstrated remarkable restraint in each of these cases, rooted in the conditions particular to Valencia. The first case involves a fourteen-year-old servant, Vicenta Mapel, who claimed to have revelations of Christ, Mary, St. Francis, St. Vincent Ferrer, and the Devil. Brought before the Holy Office in 1588 and threatened with torture, Vicenta confessed that the Devil came to her in the form of a man named Joan, who promised that her visionary claims would gain wide acceptance if she gave herself to him. Vicenta reported that she had carnal relations with the Devil as Joan for two years. Unlike the typical depiction of demonic congress, which was reported to be wholly unpleasant, involving the infliction of pain and the ejaculation of cold semen, Vicenta declared that "she felt him ejecting semen, which was neither cold nor warm...and the devil wiggled to satisfy her" (122). Despite Vicenta's claim to still maintaining her virginity, these important details convinced the inquisitors that Vicenta had not engaged in carnal union with the devil and they did not press her to confess that she either forged a diabolic pact or attended a witches' sabbath. The second case study is situated in the town of Traiguera, near the border with Catalonia. There, from 1669 to 1670, the elderly Vicenta Queralt had fallen afoul of neighbors who blamed her as the source of their health troubles and, in addition to raining blows upon her, denounced her as a hechicera (sorceress) and a bruja (witch). Although she was brought to trial, her case fell apart when inquisitors summoned her witnesses and questioned them critically: nobody had ever seen Vicenta engage in maleficium directly. The third case study focuses on the failed witch-hunter and exorcist, Fray Juan Girona. By 1672 Juan had raised suspicions among the residents of Torre Blanca, southeast of Traiguera, due to his claims of locating witches and questionable methods for exorcising demons, which involved physical beatings and the destruction of personal property, and they brought him to the attention of the Holy Office. Although he took the initiative and stood before the inquisitors before they could haul him in, Juan attempted to deflect the proceedings and solely confessed to having the desire to be humiliated by strangers and arranging "for more than twenty-five different women to whip him and be whipped by him while naked" (136). Juan's strategy did not work but the inquisitors, after having arrested him in May of 1672, upon further questioning, found no evidence of diabolism, but instead superstition. Chapter seven studies how inquisitors' thorough and sensitive knowledge of the peculiarities of Valencian demonology helped foster this climate of greater caution in the region, which, in turn, prevented secular courts from encroaching upon the jurisdiction of the Holy Office. In his final chapter, Knutsen turns to the cosmology of the Valencians themselves who, having been influenced by Morisco conceptions of the demonic, believed that demons could be "forced, trapped, and sold by humans" (155). In Valencia, those who were able to invoke demonic forces were ultimately far more frightening than those who entered a pact with Satan. Appendices in the forms of a glossary of unique Iberian legal and juridical terms, as well as a comprehensive list of the relaciones de causas that Knutsen investigated that includes the names of the defendants and the years of their trials, round out his book nicely.
Although at times Knutsen's style can be a bit unclear, his consultation of an array of legal and inquisitorial sources is nonetheless impressive and he has given scholars an extraordinarily useful book. Slight errors in copyediting creep into the work (xiii, 4, 40, 98), but these certainly are not enough to detract from its overall merit. In fact, his excellent translations of the sources-- simultaneously precise and readable--are a highlight of the book. Furthermore, he offers a sensitive and judicious analysis of the actions taken between the accusers and the defendants and he does not mitigate the horror and suffering experienced by those accused of witchcraft. This particular reviewer hopes that Knutsen's marvelous study will inspire additional scholars to plumb the rich holdings housed in other Iberian archives to answer the intriguing questions that Knutsen posed surrounding late medieval and early modern notions of superstition, discernment of the demonic, and the application of power.