ABSTRACT
Alonso de Salazar Frías was born in 1564. Like thousands of other Spanish men, he became a lawyer, and he specialized in the decrees of the Catholic Church. Salazar’s legal expertise was significant, and while still young, he acquired important benefactors, the most renowned of which was Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, who became the Archbishop of Toledo in 1599. Salazar turns out to have been more complex than ruling studies allow because of his sense of legal limits, his esteem for obedience, and his attention to the cura animarum, or care of souls. He was a reluctant demonologist, especially after he left on visitation. The evidence that Salazar heard in the field confirmed his vision of the devil as mendacious. He was told that suspected witches could be in two places at the same time, but no onlooker could discern which of the two was a figura, put in place by the devil, and which was real.
