the child witches of olague

In the early seventeenth century, thousands of children in Spain’s Navarre region claimed to have been bewitched. The Child Witches of Olague features the legal depositions of self-described child witches as well as their parents and victims. The volume sheds new light on Navarre’s massive witch persecution (1608-14), illuminating the tragic cost of witch hunts and opening a new window onto our understanding of early modern Iberian life.

Drawing from Spanish-language sources only recently discovered, Homza translates and annotates three court cases from Olague in 1611 and 1612. Two were defamation trials involving the slur ＂witch,＂ and the third was a petition for divorce filed by an accused witch and wife. These cases give readers rare access to the voices of illiterate children in the early modern period. They also speak to the emotions of witch-hunting, with testimony about enraged, terrified parents turning to vigilante justice against neighbors. Together the cases highlight gender norms of the time, the profound honor code of early modern Navarre, and the power of children to alter adult lives.

With translations of Inquisition correspondence and printed pamphlets added for context, The Child Witches of Olague offers a portrait of witch-hunting as a horrific, contagious process that fractured communities. This riveting, one-of-a-kind book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of witch hunts, life in early modern Spain, and history as revealed through court testimony.

Lu Ann Homza is Professor of European history at William & Mary. She is the author of The Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1614: An Anthology of Sources, Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance, and Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates: Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608-1614, the last also published by Penn State University Press.