ABSTRACT
Three court systems in early modern Spain – the secular, the episcopal, and the inquisitorial – had cause to pursue maleficent witchcraft. When compared to research on northern Europe, the study of witch hunting in Spain has a rather more limited history: investigations of it are fewer; the vocabulary and concepts that govern it have arisen from work conducted on witchcraft in the Basque country. The timing of the most virulent witch hunting in Spain – from approximately 1575 to 1630–coincides with rampant plague and what has been called the “Little Ice Age.” Conditionality aside, studies of Granada in the sixteenth century have found that out of some 3033 trials conducted by the Inquisition from 1550 to 1590, only twenty-four – less than 1 percent – involved “superstition.” The crime was prosecuted more frequently in Malaga, ranging from 9 to 13 percent of indictments in the second half of the sixteenth century.
