Kathleen Biddick

    What kind of complicit relationships to "evidence" and to "truth" might contemporary microhistories of inquisitorial archives enjoy with late medieval/early modern inquisitorial discourse?1 What do Carlo Ginzburg and Guido Ruggiero have to do with the Inquisitors of Modena and Venice, what has Bishop Jacques Fournier to do with Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie and Georges Duby? My essay poses these questions for the problems they raise about engendering and sexualizing authority and authorization both in late medieval inquisitorial practices and in contemporary disciplinarities of so-called "premodern" studies.

    The authority of recent work by such microhistorians as Ginzburg, Ruggiero, Ladurie, and Duby rests on their research in inquisitorial archives, on their "having been there," on their work in the "field" of the archive. The archive functions like a good native-informant. Ginzburg has insisted on the "intrinsic dialogic" nature of inquisitorial trial transcripts, Ladurie on their "direct testimony," Ruggiero on their capacity as records to "speak from the past" for the "storyteller" of today; Duby hears in them the "sound of the authentic female voice" of the Middle Ages.2 The Inquisitorial archive offers, too, just like the field, exotic, sensuous pleasures that exceed the documents themselves. These collections dazzle like Eldorado: "When I was admitted for the first time to the large room which housed in perfect order nearly two thousand inquisitorial trials, I felt the sudden thrill of discovering an unexplored gold mine."3

    But what if the microhistorians' experience of "having been there" should turn out, with critical scrutiny, to be no authority at all but rather the pre-emption of the authority of the inquisitor? Where did the authority of the inquisitor come from? There is more to these questions than the thrill of vertigo. The discipline of ethnography/anthropology, upon which microhistorians eagerly draw, has over the past decade subjected its organizing tropes of the fieldworker, the practice of "having been there," to a historical critique of

    Microhistories of the Inquisition traffic little with current critiques of representation in anthropology. Ginzburg proudly and perhaps, as I argue, not so anachronistically, identified the Inquisitor as an anthropologist and differentiates their work from his work only by its means: "The elusive evidence that inquisitors were trying to elicit from defendants was not so different after all from our own objective: what was different, of course, were their means and ultimate ends."6 The desire of the microhistorian and the inquisitor are seemingly the same. What is it that they both desire?

    Anthropologists have been less anxious to talk of this desire of the microhistorian. Renato Rosaldo has compared the rhetorical strategies of Ladurie's Montaillou with the Evans-Pritchard's "classic" ethnography The Nuer (1940) to show how Ladurie "cloaks himself with the borrowed authority of ethnographic science" in order to convert interrogation into "overhearing and cataloguing",7 into polyphony the equally voiced voices of fourteenth-century peasants and the contemporary French historian. In a disciplinary-wide critique Claire Sponsler had claimed that medievalists are holding out as the "last" ethnographers. They protect a site for the production of ethnography which anthropologists have attempted to dismantle.

    This slippage across historian, ethnographer and inquisitor, such conceptual confusion in the microhistories, may prove to be very productive methodologically. I began to think that confusion offered clues to a genealogy of the European ethnographic project which microhistorians disavow and anthropologists have ignored in telling ways. What if the Inquisition itself served as an important institutional moment and process in the formation of the European ethnographic disciplines?

    This essay, intended as a gesture toward this genealogical problem posed by Inquisitorial practices, proposes to read an exemplary Inquisition manual counter-ethnographically for the ways in which it constructs its authority and its determinations of what counts for evidence.8 The reading protocols used by ethnographic critics such as James Clifford and Mary Louise Pratt inspire my reading at the same time that I attempt to trouble the concept of colonial "encounter" as something transacted not only between but within. In the text of a late fifteenth-century Inquisition manual can be found the stunning evidence for division within the European phantastmatic, for an intimacy of alterity as Inquisitors produced a European ethnos from within. The production of that ethnos within would complicate and divide the mapping exercise of an ethnographic encounter between Europe and the Americas. 9

    Such a reading may seem to fly in the face of the historiographical agenda

[R]econstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more than a simple change of cultural contents and symbols, for a replacement within the same representational time frame is never adequate. This reconstitution requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written, the re-articulation of the "sign" in which cultural identities may be inscribed.11

1. The Devil and Ethnographic Production of Cannibal Within Europe

[M]achines are social before being technical.12

    Let us begin by imagining the Inquisitor as he conjures himself in this passage taken from the infamously famous fifteenth-century text on witchcraft known as the Malleus Maleficarum.13 This is the picture the Inquisitor paints of himself in part three of that treatise which outlines the rules for carrying out juridical proceedings against witches:

[T]he judge should wear around his neck consecrated salt and other things, with the Seven Words which Christ uttered on the Cross written in a schedule, and all bound together. And he should, if he conveniently can, wear these made into the length of Christ's stature against his naked body, and bound in holy wax.

supra tacta de sale et aliis rebus benedictis cum septem verbis que Christus protulit in cruce in cedula conscriptis et insimul colligatis collo eius alligentur. longitudo christi super nudum corpus ex cera benedicta circumcingatur.(f. 108v)

The Inquisitor gives the sartorial recipe for magically protecting the judge's body from the accused witch who stands before him. Sealed with holy wax and wearing the "textual" body of Christ, the Inquisitor is trying to seal himself, his skin and his body fluids, off from the threat of the witch. The Inquisitor stands before the witch in the juridical space of death and in that space he finds what

    The Dominican Inquisitor, Heinrich Kramer, and his erstwhile co-author Jakob Sprenger, who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), which first appeared in print in 1487, produced a three-part treatise, a Bosch-like textual triptych of the scholastic, the ethnographic, and the juridical in their project to graph an ethnos from within Europe. I have chosen this late-medieval text for a reading because of its noted perversity, its confusion, its refusal to "go away" over five centuries. The amazing (and perverse) twentieth-century translation of Montague Summers is readily available in paperback at the local bookstore, and even Sigmund Freud could not bear to part with his German translation as he stood before his bookshelves in Nazi Vienna making decisions about what books to leave behind and what books to take along on his flight to London.15 The publication history of the the Malleus needs more work, but we know from the history drawn up by Joseph Hansen in 1898 that the treatise went through at least 13 printings between 1487 and 1520, and later in the third-quarter of the sixteenth century formed a canonical part of popular witchcraft anthologies which continued to be published into the seventeenth century.

    The Inquisitors recognized from the outset that the Malleus marked a "modern" rupture, and they use such diction as "modern times" ("ab illo tempore moderne" [f 54v] and "expert testimony" ("experta testimonia" [f. 54 v]) to describe the truth they were capable of securing from the accused . From the first printings, even before debate emerged, Kramer and Sprenger prefaced the treatise with an apology in which they claimed their work to be "old in respect to subject and authority; new in respect to selection and organization" (breve pariter et prolixum antiquum certe materia et auctoritate; novum vero partium compilatione earumque aggregatione [f. 1r]). In other words, they realized that they had produced a new writing space, a surface on which to produce new objects of knowledge, they were producing an ethnos, a people.

    The three parts of the treatise, or its three panels, produced a textual space for an ethnographic theory of reproduction of the savage within to risk anachronism, it can be said that the Malleus risks its own "bio-logy" in order to produce the reproductive rules for its witches, the ethnos it needs to graph. This "bio-logy" is not "natural;" as I shall soon show, reproduction of the European savage within requires the technological assistance of the devil.16 Inquisitorial discourse had to balance its intimacy with the devil with the danger of too much sympathy, a sympathy which could lead them into utter confusion. As they write in the opening question (prima questio), "they [witches] could bring it [the world] to utter confusion" ( "quia sic perimere possent totum mundum" [f. 4r]). Where there is utter confusion, Jonathan Goldberg has alerted us to look for that

    What kind of ethnos were the Inquisitors graphing and why did they need to spell out the rules of production for that ethnos? The strong binary of alliance constructed in the first part of the treatise aligns sacramental, married, procreative sex over and against, not, as we might expect, anything else that might threaten alliance (the confused non-category of sodomy), but rather, a juridically and technologically organized, demonically assisted form of counter-alliance. This demonic counter-alliance both produced its own offspring at the same time it preyed on the reproductive processes of married, procreative sex. Witches, according the Inquisitors, ate children, the product of alliance; they also could induce sterility in men and undo sacramental, procreative sex.

    The intimate urgency of alliance and counter-alliance is set in motion in the first section of the Malleus Maleficarum. The Inquisitors first stage a crisis of alliance in part one of the Malleus, its scholastic space, in which the authors mostly rely on citations of traditional scholastic authorities for their authority. They speak of the "most powerful cause which contributes to the increase of witches" as "the woeful rivalry between married folk and unmarried women and men" ("Et revera potissima causa deserviens in augmentum maleficarum est dolorosum duellum inter maritatos et non maritatas feminas et viros" [f. 21v]). So effective is the reproductive economy of the witches that they seem to be depopulating all of Christendom ("iam totam christianitatem depopulare videntur"[f. 33r]). This counter-economy, like sacramental marriage, requires a pact, a kind of marriage agreement, contracted between the devil and a woman. In Part One the Inquisitors discuss this pact according to the discursive concerns of whether such a pact (pactum) made by words or by deeds can reduce the witch to apostasy (f. 37r). In discussing this problem the text begins to map a series of spaces for which the demonic pact marks the axis of the vanishing point. Beyond the vanishing point of the pact witches recede from infidels (f. 36v), bad angels (f. 36r) and the first parents (f. 36r). Through the pact witches vanish spatially beyond the Others ("Jews" and "Turks") of Christianitas (f.36v ). They are located too beyond any heavenly topography, and beyond salvation history, since the sin of witches is even greater than original sin, greater than the sin of Adam and Eve.

    The second part of the treatise also deals with the pact but now as an ethnographic rather than as a scholastic phenomenon. In Part Two of the treatise the Inquisitors elaborate on the kinds of ritual involved in setting up the pact. Once again the text produces a series of spaces and I want to pause and look at these spaces, since an understanding of their textual construction can offer insight into the spatial practices used in the Malleus. In Part One, the Inquisitors endlessly established conditions of proximity and distance, organized around the subject of the witch as a vanishing point. Part Two of the treatise maps a specific oral geography of witchcraft by citing testimonies and confessions of witches collected from specific Inquisitorial sites, or "fields."

    An analysis of the rhetorical structure of this chapter on the ethnography of

    Let me show how this cartography gets mapped in the chapter on pacts. First the texts draws a powerful frame around the space of witches. Witches are cannibals their practice of devouring their children sets them apart from humans, although there is a space for the wolf inside this strong frame ("sunt autem he que contra humane nature inclinati omnem immo omnium ferarum lupina tantummodo excepta proprie speciei infantes vorant et comedere solent" [f. 48v]).20

    Within this anthroprophagic frame the Inquisitors proceed to list sixteen maleficia or harms rendered by witches. The list traverses spaces ranging from the interior of the womb, the infant's cradle, the local climatic region, the juridical space of arrest, court and torture, roadways and bridges, inter-regional travel, even the space of the future and the invisible. Maleficia could be worked through a diversity of senses the eye by a mere look, the voice by incantation, the hand by a touch. After citing a list of maleficia, the Inquisitors again attempt to frame and to contain these nomadic spaces by insisting on the carnality of the witches they copulate with devils ("hoc tamen est commune omnium spurcicias carnales cum demonibus exercere" [f. 48v]). Once these non-contiguous spaces of interiority and exteriority, the domestic, the regional, and the inter-regional are layered within this double-frame of cannibalism and diabolic copulation, the Inquisitors then go on to authenticate this strange panel through nothing less than the body of an Inquisitor, the Inquisitor of Como. They tell the story of the Inquisitor of Como who, thirty years ago, had 41 witches burned in one year. Thus the body of the eighty-five year old Inquisitor (still going strong) superimposed over the bodies of 41 burnt witches somehow im-pacts the pact-making of the ethnos and further frames the double-frame of cannibalism and copulation with the devil drawn around the witches. It is as if, as the Inquisitors pile up more spaces semantically, they need more burnt bodies to offset these spaces. The stake at which witches were burned somehow makes a delirious vanishing point for these nomadic spaces.

    The Inquisitors next take on the work in Part Two of describing the ritual of the pact. To do so they adapt and invert the figures and gestures of the profession of a novice into a nunnery to describe the pact-making. This ritual is described in the third person. In order to authenticate their description they then recollect yet again the collective bodies of the Inquisitor with "we Inquisitors" (" . . . hunc modum nos inquisitores experientia teste procepimus

    The control over space and time discernible in this one anecdote which interrupts Part Two with specifically located materials interpolated from Inquisitorial trial-proceedings repeats in seven other anecdotes interpolated into this chapter. What is the inquisitorial strategy, we can ask, for staging these Inquisitorial trial-transcriptions at certain spaces in the text? What is the purpose of this so-called Inquisitorial dialogue that interrupts impersonal third-person descriptions? It seems to me that the piling up of anecdotes throughout the second part of the treatise and not only in its second chapter functions as a kind of "collection" of oral testimony, a kind of Inquisitorial museum. This museum of testimony provides a counterspatial practice in the text. With the careful incantation in Part Two of inquisitorial anecdotes extracted from processes held in Berne (three times), Basel (three times), Strasburg (one time), Constance (one time), the Inquisitors can anchor the nomadic spaces of maleficia to a local cartography. The space of the Inquisitorial text, its grid of anecdotes, becomes a cartography through which the nomadic ethnos can be mapped. Thus the space of orality generated by this interpolation of "expert testimony" is an engendered space founded on the burnt bodies of female witches. It becomes an Inquisitorial cartography in which the Inquisitor himself eats the first-person of the located narrative in order to set himself in this place. An engendered cartography is thus cannibalized in order to produce the Inquisitor as the guarantee of a mapping exercise that defies meaning: "It is a Babel in which the maps accumulate and mix without dissolving. A spatial polyglotism."21

    The Inquisitor cannibalizes the witch-cannibal and in so doing gnaws at the very frame that is somehow to contain the nomadic spaces over which maleficia wanders. Where does this cannibalism leave the sexuality of the Inquisitor, his

    The devil, it seems to me, provides a way into thinking of the utter fear of the Inquisitor, his utter fear of the "utter confusion of the world," from which he must defend the world. Could this utter confusion of the world mark what Jonathan Goldberg has called a "sodometrical relation," a relation that does not yield the sodomite but delivers the relational structures "precariously available in prevailing discourse" for enabling and disabling the construction of sexual exteriorities which mark the abject and the unspeakable. How does the encounter of the judge with the witch both enable and disable the category of sodomy in the Malleus?22

    The Inquisitors in their construction of a counter-economy of diabolic reproduction came precariously close to imagining a sexual ethnography which could be categorized as sodomitical by conventional, scholastic prescription, which defined sodomy as the emission of semen in an inappropriate place.23 Witches copulated not only with devils but with animals, such bestiality could put into question the category of appropriate places. Although the Inquisitors attached a sodometrical threat of alliance to witches, they also worked carefully, even phobically, to protect the devils from accusations of sodomy in their generation of the ethnos of witches. The devil's involvement in the counter-economy of diabolical reproduction as detailed by the Inquisitors could appear suspect to a discerning scholastic eye. According to the rules of this economy an unwary human male serves as the donor of semen which the devil collects as a succubus (lying underneath). The devil then travels to a witch to inject ("infundere" [f. 13r]) the semen as an incubus (lying on top). The devil is thus responsible for a kind of "artificial insemination." The devil chooses a male donor for utilitarian purposes, namely the virility of his semen, not for his past or future involvement in witchcraft. Devils can also extend the chain of semen transfer in this reproductive economy. If a succubus with collected semen chooses for whatever reasons not to serve as an incubus to a witch, that devil can simply transfer the collected semen to another devil. Thus semen can thus travel through a chain of places on its way to the appropriate place known as the "vas debitum" (f. 14 v) the place that is owed. This semen chain, with its

    The Inquisitors insist, however, that the male donor, and not the devil, is the father of the child (" . . . unde si queritur cuius filius sic natus existit. Patet quia non est filius demonis sed illius hominis cuius est semen acceptum . . ." [fol. 13r]). The laws of blood and kin are thus properly upheld even in this counter-reproductive economy. This insistence on maintaining the good order of lineage suggests that some other fluid did the work of marking the exteriority of Christendom, and that fluid was blood.24

    These rules of the counter-reproductive economy also construct for the male donor an unknowingness, a kind of secret vulnerability, which seems to proliferate in the treatise into anxious concerns over the power witches exercise against the God-ordained procreative economy, the economy of marital alliance.25 Witches can disappear penises or render them disfunctional thus introducing male sterility into sacramental marriage. It may seem too strong to say that the Inquisitors build in a kind of homophobic/homosocial self-ignorance into their rules for reproducing the ethnos, if it were not for their active denial of any sodomitical practices by the devil. They desire to find a sodometrical relation in witchcraft and to deny it at the same time. Writing of the sexual practices of the devil they foreclose the suspicion of sodomy as follows:

. . . and it must be carefully noted that, though the Scripture speaks of incubi and succubi lusting after women, yet nowhere do we read that incubi and succubi fell into vices against nature. We do not speak only of sodomy, but of any sin whereby the act is wrongfully performed outside the rightful receptacle.

. . . tamen nusquam legit in vitiis quibuscumque contra nature loquendo non solum de sodomotrico sed etiam de quocumque alie peccato extra vas debitum propere agendo se incubus et succubus fecisse. (f. 14v)

    The Inquisitors of the Malleus, consistent with their protection of the devil, are also careful to skirt discussion of the witches' sabbath (available to them discursively at the time they composed the treatise) with its tropes of sexual orgy, same-sex pleasures, and the ritual kiss offered by witches to the devil's anus. Why, beyond producing a purportedly coherent counter-economy of diabolical alliance capable of supplying the Inquisitors with the phantasmatic of a self-reproducing savage within to persecute, would the Inquisitors so protect the devil in their treatise? What purchase does the devil have on this text?

    The devil, I argue, serves as a kind of optical device that makes the Inquisitor's counter-economy visible and therefore something that can be

    The Inquisitors of the Malleus give examples, such as the following anecdote which they recount from a Dominican house in Spires, of such optical insight. They tell this story in the first person, that is, in the voice of the confessor. Their use of the first person reminds the reader that when it comes to looking through the optical device of the devil, the eye of the Inquisitor gazes through one end of the apparatus:

"[O]ne day," he says, "while I was hearing confessions, a young man came to me and, in the course of his confession, woefully said that he had lost his member. Being astonished at this, and not being willing to give it easy credence, since in the opinion of the wise it is a mark of light-heartedness to believe too easily, I obtained proof of it when I saw nothing on the young man's removing his clothes and showing the place.

. . . quadam inquit die dum confessionum audientie instarem Iuvenis quidam accessit et inter verba confessionis membrum virile lamentabiliter se perdidisse asseruit. Ammirans ego pater et verbis suis faciliter credere nolens eo quo (**) levis corde qui facile credit a sapiente iudicatur. Experientia didici per visum nihil cernendo dum iuvenis locum vestes detegendo demonstrasset.(f. 58r)

    The purchase of the Inquisitors, their mastery of the visual plenitude of an invisible world, came at a cost, since they had to manipulate the materialization of the devil to have this optical access. The intimacy of the inquisitorial gaze, as it focused through the devil's sensorium, threatened the good homosocial order that the Inquisitors worked so hard to maintain in their text. Looking forward to the ethnos of the witch engendered on female corporeality involved the Inquisitors in looking backward through the devil, a materialization that could make a certain optics matter as evidence. The Inquisitors thus caught themselves in a kind of optical unconscious of disavowal; yes, the counter-economy works through sodometrical relations that implicate the Inquisitor, but the counter-economy is "proper" because devils are strictly heterosexual.

    Who or what has dropped out of sight in the fifteenth century raises the question of medieval Jews from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. Medieval Jews were both dropping out of sight at a faster pace in fifteenth-century Christendom at the same time that they were becoming more visible as a group ordered under sumptuary law to mark themselves with signs such as yellow badges.28 Expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, subject to the wearing of distinguishing signs in northern Italy in the 1430s (Padua, 1430; Perugia, 1432; Florence and Siena, 1439), expelled from several Imperial Rhineland towns in the 1420s and 1430s and finally expelled from Spain in 1492, Jews were subject to growing Inquisitorial and civic violence over the fifteenth century. Expulsion did not mean the end to anti-Semitism, as the discursive investment in the phantasmatic Jew of late medieval England literature and drama shows.29 Nevertheless, expulsion and the persecution of Jews in blood-libel cases meant that the population grew less available as the corporeally materialized Other who guaranteed Christendom by marking its exteriority.30 The synchronization of a growing manuscript tradition of witchcraft treatises from the late 1430s, which then proliferated in print culture in the 1470s, 1480s, and 1490s, needs to be viewed as a process in tension with the Christian destruction or "cannibalization" of the bodies that counted as its exteriority. Christians had to materialize a new corporeal ethnos to which the anti-Semitic tropes of the exterior, namely usury and its sterility, could be shifted and at the same time doubled by the engendering of witches as a corporeal exteriority. This occulted doubling of the Jew in the misogynistic production of the witch as an ethnos set in motion a counter-procreative economy in which semen functioned usuriously through chains of transfer and in which the sterility associated in the scholastic mind with usury became the corporeal obsession of Inquisitors and male laymen.

    Tropes of anti-Semitism thus flickered in a kind of blindspot in the ethnographic space of witchcraft crafted by Inquisitorial discourse, in which space, as we have seen, witches served as the vanishing point. Within this strange space in between the blind spot and the vanishing point the Inquisitors materialized the devil as an optical device that magically tried to fill this tragic gap with a savage visual plenitude. The authority of the Inquisitor and the devil were closely intertwined; therefore the devil must be both protected as an optical device at the same time that the devil must be kept out sight as a sign of what might lie beyond the invisible to which the devil gives access.

    The inquisitorial engendering of an ethnos relied on an optics in a way that the pursuit of heretics, a more textually-based inquisitorial pursuit, did not. It is this conjuncture of the need to produce an ethnos as medieval Jews were decorporealized in Christendom which required the strategic optical interventions of the devil. Witches were about sight and space; heretics , a category of

    The Malleus Maleficarum significantly remapped the phantasmatic borders of Europe, where wild men, and monsters lurked, into its savage center, into the churches and town squares where Inquisitorial processes and persecutions occurred. The neighborhood thus became the monstrous edge of a mappae mundi and the town-square became a local theater of cruelty. In other words, I am claiming that we might find that the Inquisition produced "natural man" through "natural woman" in the fifteenth century and that production proved crucial to the New World ethnographic project.