Johann Wier

This book deals with a fascinating and original claim in 16th-century Europe. Witches should be cured, not executed. It was the physician and scholar Johann Wier (1515-1588) who challenged the dominant idea. For his defense of witches, more than three centuries later, Sigmund Freud chose to put Wier’s work among the ten books to be read. According to Wier, Satan seduced witches, thus they did not deserve to be executed, but they must be cured for their melancholy. When the witch hunt was rising, Wier was the first to use some of the arguments adopted in the emerging debate on religious tolerance in defence of witches. This is the first overall study of Wier which offers an innovative view of his thought by highlighting Wier’s sources and his attempts to involve theologians, physicians, and philosophers in his fight against cruel witch hunts. Johann Wier: Debating the Devil and Witches situates and explains his claim as a result of a moral and religious path as well as the outcome of his medical experience. The book aims to provide an insightful examination of Wier’s works to read his pleas emphasizing the duty of every good Christian to not abandon anyone who strays from the flock of Christ. For these reasons, Wier was overwhelmed by bitter confutations, such as those of Jean Bodin, but he was also celebrated for his outstanding and prolific heritage for debating religious tolerance.

NIGROMANCIA Y GÉNERO. LA BRUJA EN LA NARRATIVA DE PILAR PEDRAZA

En su literatura —normalmente vinculada a lo fantástico y lo gótico—, Pilar Pedraza pone énfasis en individuos al margen, a menudo monstruosos. Entre todas estas figuras, destaca la de la bruja. El artículo estudia cómo la concibe la autora. A partir de las ideas expuestas en Brujas, sapos y aquelarres (2014) y el repaso de las obras más representativas, busca dirimir en qué medida el tratamiento de Pedraza afecta a su poética como creadora de una narrativa insólita y hasta qué punto se puede hablar de un enfoque específicamente femenino —o feminista— de este tipo de ficción, sobre todo en su vertiente gótica. Abstract: In her literature —commonly linked to the fantastic and the gothic—, Pilar Pedraza focuses on individuals on the margins, often monstrous. Among all these figures, the witch stands out. The article studies the way the author conceives it. Based on the ideas exposed in Brujas, sapos y aquelarres (2014) and the analysis of the most representative works, it aims to determine to what extent Pedraza’s treatment affects her poetics as a producer of unusual fiction and to what extent we can consider it a specifically feminine —or feminist— approach to this type of fiction, especially on the gothic side.

VOCES Y OTREDAD. DE LAS CARTAS DESDE MI CELDA A BÉCQUER Y LAS BRUJAS

La crítica especializada ha relacionado las leyendas de las cartas Desde mi celda de Bécquer con la insistencia por parte del autor en la búsqueda y recuperación del folclore y de las tradiciones populares. No obstante, el acercamiento a las mismas exige una doble lectura. La riqueza polifónica muestra que, al Bécquer folclorista, habría de añadírsele su faceta de lector afamado, imprescindible en su configuración como narrador de historias. El escritor sevillano mira al pueblo, recoge y bebe de la tradición, pero la filtra a través del prisma del movimiento gótico, de los ecos que aún permanecían en la literatura y que se atisbaban en las últimas manifestaciones de las narraciones románticas y en la incipiente narrativa realista. El largometraje recientemente estrenado Bécquer y las brujas ahonda en esta riqueza polifónica de una figura, construida desde la más pura otredad: la de la bruja. Abstract: Literary scholarship has credited the legends collected in Bécquer’s letters Desde mi celda for the writer’s interest in the research and recovery of folklore and popular traditions. However, when approaching these traditional stories, another perspective is possible: Bécquer’s polyphonic narrations are rooted in his wide readings, from which he draws the material of his stories. The Sevillian writer observes and grasps the people’s cultural traditions, but through the filter of the Gothic, the echoes of the last romantic prose and the emerging realist narrative. The newly released film Bécquer y las brujas highlights the richness of his compositions, based on the purest otherness: the figure of the witch.

Johannes Kepler's 'Somnium' and the Witches' Night Flight

This article explores the uses of the witches' night-flight in Johannes Kelper’s Somnium (1634). It situates Kepler's engagement with the motif in the broader context of debates on the reality of the night-flight among early modern witch theorists, including Kepler's contemporary and friend, Georg Gödelmann. It proposes that Kepler understood the night-flight as a phenomenon with a disputed reality status and, as such, an appropriate imaginative space through which to pursue the thought experiment of lunar travel. Consequently, it suggests that we ought not to dismiss Kepler's engagements with the figure of the witch as a vestigial medieval superstition (itself a problematic contention), but rather an interest characteristic of his age, and that we might find in the speculations of witch-theory the very beginnings of science fiction.

Mulier Striga, documento atribuido a Bartolo de Sassoferrato. ¿Primera piedra medieval para el retrato de la bruja?

In this article we delve into de consilium entitled Mulier striga, attributed to Bartolo de Sassoferrato and dated between 1331-1334. We contribute to spread the fact it is a forgery and that its author was Giovanni Battista Piotti, a sixteenth-century lawyer, a fact hardly known by many specialists who continue to present the texto as medieval. On the other hand, we will analyze in detail the portrait ot the witch present in this work, never examined by the experts before, in order to determine whether the picture offered is anachronistic, as it happens with other aspects of the document, or matches the beliefs of the first half of the fourteenth century. En este artículo profundizamos en el consilum Mulier striga, atribuido a Bartolo de Sassoferrato y fechado entre 1331-1334. Contribuimos a difundir el hecho de que se trata de una falsificación y que su autor fue Giovanni Battista Piotti, jurista del siglo XVI; cuestión apenas conocida por muchos especialistas que siguen presentando el texto como medieval. Por otra parte, analizaremos pormenorizadamente el retrato de la bruja presente en este escrito, no abordado por los expertos, con el fin de determinar si la imagen ofrecida es anacrónica, como sucede con otros aspectos del documento, o se ajusta a la primera mitad del siglo XIV.

The Social Burden of Witchcraft accusation and Its Victims: An Exercise in Philosophy

The killing and burning of witches in contemporary era seem to be unabated. The contemporary minds have not succeeded in ‘scienticising’ belief in witchcraft. In Africa, Canada and India, the incidence, accusations and extrajudicial sanctions against witches are routine. The phenomenon of witchcraft is justified to be real. Before a misfortune could be plausibly attributed to witchcraft, it had to be seen as the outcome of a certain type of social situation. For in a witch-case the suspect was usually a person who had been involved in a relationship of real or presumed hostility towards the victim, then an accusation of witchcraft originated with someone living in close proximity to the suspect, and was meant to explain some local and personal misfortune. We then explain the socialization of witchcraft accusation in terms of the immediate social environment of the witch and her accuser. What we have in mind is that there are a lot of socialization between the witch and her victims in such a way that witches do not attack stranger and the victim can easily guess who is socially responsible for his/her misfortunes. We shall argue therefore, that once we are able to explain witchcraft causal reasonable explanation, the kind of metaphysical change of mind on witchcraft and the subsequent incidence, accusations and extrajudicial sanctions against witches would be reduced.

‘To kill harmless cattle': Animal Victims and The Witch of Edmonton

The Witch of Edmonton (1621) is often viewed as a sceptical portrayal of witchcraft that offers a sympathetic view of the accused, but its accurate depiction of animal victims in events leading to accusations remains overlooked. This essay argues that witchcraft in early modern England was largely an animal crime. Following its source text, Henry Goodcole’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, A Witch (1621), and earlier prose accounts, The Witch of Edmonton illustrates the centrality of human-animal relations to the gendered dynamics and discourse of early modern witchcraft.

Autentificando el discurso de la verdad en El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros

In Casamiento-Coloquio, the opposition between the narrator’s discourse and the discourse of the characters plays with a minimal initial presence and a total final absence of the authorised narrator’s discourse, and with the progressive emergence of characters eager to narrate their own lives, and impose their voice over the frame story – whose power is none other than to regulate and qualify their interventions, – thus leaving them with complete freedom. By situating the enigma of the intrigue of both stories, the miracle of two talking dogs, in a fictional possible not authenticated by the authorised narrator but, paradoxically, by a shady character like the witch Cañizares, Cervantes executes the most complex and astonishing technical pirouette possible. For by means of establishing the absence of an authority in the ordering of the story (an authority from which the ever-reassuring promise of a single version emanates), he makes possible the diverse perspectives offered by the characters with their stories and, with that, he sets off the impossibility of deciding on the truth of the related events.