Capturing Basque Witches, Releasing Lyrical Resources: From Historical Cases to Folk Song

On November 8, 1610, eleven Basque "witches" were burned at the stake in Logroño, Spain—six alive, five in effigy. Most of these "witches" were women. In this article, I show that the "witches" persecuted in Logroño and those "captured" by Pierre de Lancre in his treatise On the Inconstancy of Witches (1612) deviate widely from those captured in Basque song. The f ormer represent male and female witches as sexually deviant, cannibalistic, poison-procuring servants of the Devil deserving death for profaning God's name and violating his most sacred laws. The latter features witches—always female—as unruly, fun-loving tricksters but certainly not handmaidens of the Devil. I suggest that the lyrical resources released by these Basque songs about witches remain ambiguous and deserve further study.