1. I am thinking of the constitution of inquisitorial discourse as a broadly discursive
practice (temporally and spatially) that renders certain objects visible and then regulates their
materialization, their "incarnation," at the same time that such practices can regulate
disincarnation, decorporealization. The technologies relied on to produce the visible and invisible,
what counts for evidence, changed over time and may be located in tensions between the
accusatory and the investigatory, confession and torture, the civil and the canonical. Inquisitorial
texts travel across such varied genres as the interrogation manual, trial transcript, witness
deposition, proclamation of public execution, witchcraft anthology, woodcut and engraving, and
across oceans as well from Europe to the Americas. My work for this essay has its own
discursive influences: Homi Bhabha, "How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern space,
postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation," The Location of Culture (New
York, 1994), pp. 212-235; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
"Sex" (New York, 1993); Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed.
Geoffrey H. Hartman (New York 1994); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
(Cambridge, England, 1993); Cherr”e Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston, 1993); Paul
Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (New York, 1991); as well as a literature of
ethnographic critique cited below in footnote 4.
2. My readings in microhistory for this essay have concentrated on the following
books and articles: Carlo Ginzburg, "The Inquisitor as Anthropologist," Clues, Myths and the
Historical Method (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 156-64 (on the dialogic nature of the archive see p.
159; on the archive as "Eldorado" see p. 157); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The
Promised Land of Error, trans., Barbara Bray (New York, 1978), p. vii; Guido
page 33
Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and
Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York, 1993), p. 19; Georges Duby, "Affidavits
and Confession," in Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, A History of Women in the West. vol.
2: The Silence of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 483. I have chosen these
texts for close reading based on their strong methodological claims for the kind of "voice" that
they can "hear" in the records. For a difference within "microhistory" of Inquisitorial archives see
Mary O'Neil whose work shares similarities of interest with Ruggiero. O'Neil works from the
ambiguity of magical operations for both the inquisitor and the love charmer and therefore
distributes the problem of evidence and truth across discursive fields: Mary O'Neil, "Magical
Healing, Love Magic and the Inquisition in late Sixteenth-century Modena," in Inquisition and
Society in Early Modern Europe, ed. Stephen Haliczer (New York, 1987), pp. 88-114.
3. Ginzburg, "Inquisitor as Anthropologist," p. 157.
4. I am following Marilyn Strathern in eliding ethnography/anthropology to mark
the elision between fieldoworker and writer/author. See her Partial Connections (Savage
MD, 1991), p. 123. My critique of ethnography is also inspired by the following texts: James
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and
Art (Cambridge, England, 1988); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (New York, 1992); Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, ed.
Roger Sanjek (Ithaca, 1990); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992);
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and
Healing (Chicago, 1987); Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York,
1988) and his Mystic Fable (New York, 1992). For specific critiques of Ladurie's
Montaillou see James Clifford, "Naming Names," Canto 3 (1979), 142-53; Renato
Rosaldo, "From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor," in Writing
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds., James Clifford and George F. Marcus
(Berkeley 1986), pp. 77-97; Claire Sponsler, "Medieval Ethnography: Fieldwork and the
European Past," Assays 7 (1992), 1-30.
5. I am indebted to Sara Suleri and Michael Taussig for their discussions of colonial
terror Suleri eloquently notes that "to tell the history of another is to be pressed against the limit's
of one's own thus culture learns that terror has a local habitation and a name" (p. 2).
6. Ginzburg, "Inquisitor as Anthropologist," p. 158.
7. Rosaldo, 93.
8. As an introduction to bibliography on the late medieval institutional history of the
Inquisition and its archives I have found the following texts useful: The Inquisition in Early
Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, eds., Gustav Henningsen and John
Tedeschi with Charles Amiel (Dekalb, IL, 1986); Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the
Inquisition in Spain and the New World, eds., May Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz
(Berkeley, 1991). In my concentration on an Inquisitorial manual on witchcraft, I do not mean to
page 34
imply that the prosecution of heretics and "crypto-Jews" is
not critical to fifteenth-century Inquisitorial activity. I want to make the point that the witchcraft
project of the Inquisition has specific ethnographic effects. The literature on witchcraft is vast.
Works consulted are listed partially in footnote 11. See also Marianne Hester who provides a
succinct overview of English historiography of witchcraft in Lewd Women and Wicked
Witches: A Study of the Dynamics of Male Domination (New York, 1992). Her work can
be complemented by the comparative essays in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres
and Peripheries, eds., Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (New York 1990). Also
relevant to the intersection of Inquisitorial practice and witchcraft see: Edward Peters,
Torture (New York, 1985); Sabine MacCormack, "Demons, Imagination, and the Incas,"
Representations 33 (Winter, 1991), 121-46.
9. For instance, Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native
Caribbean 1492-1797 (New York, 1986) where the Hulme traces a tension between
discourse of Oriental civilization traceable to Marco Polo and a discourse of savagery traceable to
Herodotus in Columbus' journal. I am trying to map yet another engendered, sexualized
discourse, a "European" ethnographic discourse of the Inquisition, a discourse of the cannibal
within to complicate this. For an interesting use of Hulme and a complication of cannibalism,
which joins to the work in this essay on cannibalism, see Carla Freccero, "Cannibalism,
Homophobia, Women: Montaigne's "Des cannibales" and "De L'amiti" in Women, "Race,"
and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds., Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New
York, 1994), pp. 73-82.
10. For an important essay that analyzes the stakes and inter-texuality of nineteenth
century histories of the Inquisition and the fascination with the Inquisition in British historical
novels, see Michael Ragussis, "The Birth of a Nation in Victorian Culture: The Spanish
Inquisition, the Converted Daughter, and the Secret Race,'" Critical Inquiry 20 (1994),
477-508. The following essay has influenced my methodological efforts to reframe the problelm
of demonization-recuperation by posing a different set of discursive questions: Susan Harding,
"Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Other," Social Research
58 (1991), 373-93.
11. Homi K. Bhabha, "Freedom's Basis in the Indeterminate," October 61
(1992), 46; see also Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories (Princeton,1993), p.
12. A citation that reoccurs in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer
(Cambridge, Mass., 1990) and is taken from Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis,
1988), p. 13.
13. I have worked with the following facsimile edited by Gnter Jerouschek:
Malleus Maleficarum 1487 von Heinrich Kramer (Institoris) (New York,1992); and also
with the following English translation by Montague Summers: The Malleus Maleficarum of
Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger (first translated 1928, reprinted 1948) (New York,
1971); Der Hexenhammer: Enstehung und Umfeld des Malleus maleficarum
page 35
von 1487, ed. Peter Segl (Kln, 1988); and various works by
Joseph Hansen including his "Der Malleus maleficarum, seine Drucksausgaben und die geflschte
Klner Approbation vom J. 1487," Westdeutsche Zeitschrift fr Geschichte und Kunst 17
(1898), 119-68 and his Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der
Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Hildesheim, rpt. 1963).
14. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, p. 448.
15. Here is a brief selection of comments, largely contradictory, on the importance
of the Malleus Maleficarum culled from a selection of major histories of European
witchcraft. Much work remains to be done on the publication and translation histories of this
text: Sydney Anglo, "Evident authority and authoritative evidence: The Malleus Maleficarum,"
in The Damned Art, ed. Sydney Anglo (London, 1977), pp. 1-31: "It now seems to be
becoming fashionable to suggest that the Malleus has been accorded an exaggerated
importance. This may well be true, for the influence of most books tends to be exaggerated by
historians. On the other hand, it was reissued more frequently than any other major witch-hunting
manual; it was long the most commonly cited; and it remained one of the works which the
opponents of persecution sought especially to refute. But perhaps none of this matters" (p. 31);
Julio Caro Baroja, The World of Witches, trans., O.N.V. Glendinning (Chicago, 1964):
"The views it advanced spread rapidly through Italy, Spain, France and countries in the north of
Europe. Both Catholics and Protestants were influenced by it. And the more learned was the
judge in charge of the trial, the more notice he took of it" (p. 250); Witchcraft in Europe
100-1700: A Documentary History, eds., Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters (Philadelphia,
1972): " first 'encyclopedia' of witchcraft beliefs, exhaustively analyzed the entire problem of
witch beliefs and set out meticulously the ways by which witches could be found, convicted and
executed" (p. 113); Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (London, 1975): "the
importance of the most famous of the witch hunters' manuals, the Malleus Maleficarum,
published in 1486, has been exaggerated" (p. 225); Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare
Bewitched," in New Historical Literary Study (Princeton, 1993), pp. 108-35: "Faced with
the necessity of producing the effect of the real of the materials of fantasy, the inquisitors turned
to narrtive. The Malleus Malleficarum rehearses dozens of tales crafted to redraw the
boundary between the imaginary and the real, or rather to siphon off the darkest contests of the
imagination and pour them, like a poison into the ear of the world" (p. 110); Richard Kieckhefer,
European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500
(Berekeley, 1976): " made available a fully developed manual for witch hunters" (p. 23); Ruth
Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice 1550-1650 (New York, 1989): "there is
no evidence that in their dealings with witchcraft Venetian Inquisitors made any use of the book.
There was no demand for its reprinting and circulation amongst Inquisition tribunals within Italy
and no mention or reflection of the Venetian witchcraft
page 36
investigations during the period up to 1650" (p. 58); H.C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in
Southwestern Germany 1562-1684 (Stanford, 1972): "the Malleus Maleficarum failed
to become generally accepted doctrine, and its influence and authority have been vastly
exaggerated by most scholars" (p. 22); Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle
Ages (Ithaca, 1972): "immediately achieved broad popularity among Inquisitors and
throughout the church . . . . It contributed little original to the witch phenomenon, but its careful
organization and argumentation, combined with the papal approval that accompanied it, fixed the
whole system of witch beliefs firmly in the mind of Inquisition and society in general" (p. 230-31);
William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquistion from the Basque Lands to
Sicily (New York, 1990): "One tantalizing clue only deepens the mystery of the Suprema's
encouragement of the Narvarrese with-hunters in 1609-10. A brief letter in February 1608
ordered an overzealous comisario in Bilbao to release seventy-six copies of the newly-reprinted
Malleus Maleficarum, the most famous handbook of witchhunting, which he had
confiscated; they belonged to a Madrid bookseller named Francisco de Robles, who may well
have sold a few copies to inquisitorial policy-makers that year. The Suprema had warned the
Navarre Inquisitors about the Malleus Maleficarum seventy year previously: "'Do not
believe everything in it,' they had said, even if he [the authors] writes about it as something he
himself has seen and investigated, for the cases are of such a nature that he may have been
mistaken, as others have been,'" (p. 270-71). The German translation of the Malleus
Maleficarum may be found catalogued in Freud's London Library. For the catalog see Roger
Dennis Simmons, "The Freud Library," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association 21 (1973), 646-87.
16. The following essay offers a way of thinking about reproduction as a historical
problem in cultural studies: Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of
Assisted Reproduction," Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research-International
Symposium on "The Politics of Reproduction," November 1-9, 1991; rpt. in Procreation
Stories, special issue of Science and Culture 17 (3, 1993), 522-61.
17. The work of Jonathan Goldberg on the utter confusion of sodomy as a category
and his exploration of "some of the terrains of confusion in the Renaissance" (p. 18) has informed
my use of sodomy in this essay and my own exploration of the Inquisitorial fear of "the utter
confusion of the world": Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern
Sexualities (Stanford 1992).
18. Michel de Certeau's chapter on Ethno-graphy in his The Writing of
History has guided my work here. The notion of the "picture of orality" comes from p. 209.
19. De Certeau, Mystic Fable, p. 66.
20. For discussion of the engendering and racializing the space of cannibalism in late
medieval/early modern Christendom, see Kathleen Biddick, "Gen-
