Drama, drama, and more drama…
I have to admit, I was a little nervous about whether or not I was going to be able to read this selection of the Inquisition trials. However, I’m really starting to adjust to the common vocabulary and abbreviations used in these documents, and once I became accustomed to the scribe’s handwriting style (and the chronic lack of spaces between words), I found that deciphering the meaning of the passage wasn’t all that difficult.
Actually, it was quite interesting. The way in which the scribe depicts Maria Ondraita and her student anointing themselves with dust and flying through the air to the witches’ sabbat was truly very dramatic, and the amount of detail in the description was astounding. It kind of makes me wonder if the dramatization was used to inflame the people reading the documents against the defender. In spite of the detail in describing the satanic celebration, there were definitely some large holes in the narrative that really piqued my curiousity about the history of the people involved in this case. For example, the scribe states that he and the Inquisitor simply found the accused on the road. This makes me wonder what she was doing when they found her, if she was behaving like a witch, if they had already been looking for her, or if she simply got on their nerves. Was it common for inquisitors to randomly search people or people’s houses without suspicion of satanic affiliation? If she was exhibiting signs of being a witch, what were they? Or were they just covering up for shady circumstances in her reprehension? The whole situation of her being found on the road really intrigues me, and I’m really looking forward to researching questions like these while in Pamplona this spring.