uring the Middle Ages, torture became the common accompaniment to legal cases involving matters
of faith. Pagan common-law traditions opposed the use of torture, and regarded
an accused person as innocent until proven guilty by the
prosecution.1 Christian crusaders and inquisitors reversed
this trend. (See Inquisition.) The Inquisition's use of torture removed all possibility of proof of innocence.
Gibbon said, "No power under heaven could save the prisoner; he was doomed."
Johan Weyer (1515 - 88), an eyewitness, wrote that the inquisitors' victims were
"slaughtered with the most refined tortures that tyrants could invent, beyond
human endurance. And this cruelty is continued until the most innocent are
forced to confess themselves guilty."
Surviving records, though scanty, paint a hideous picture of the
Inquisition's activities, which were sometimes disbelieved even by
contemporaries because they were unimaginable. A woman arrested at Eichstatt in
1637 "laughed heartily" on the first day other trial at the idea that she might
have trafficked with the devil. She said she would rather die than accuse
herself of such doings; she had lived a blameless life with her husband and
eight children for more than 20 years. Three weeks later, she died under the
torture, confessing that she was in love with the devil, that she killed one of
her children at his bidding, and that at least 45 other neighbors were
fellow-Satanists.3
Not even the most saintly had a chance against the inquisitors' engines.
A 16th-century abbess of the convent of Santa Isabels at Cordova, Magdalena de
la Cruz, was a woman of "an extraordinary reputation for sanctity." Nevertheless
she was accused and arrested, and soon confessed to practicing witchcraft with
the help of two familiar demons, Balbar and Pithon."4
The inquisitors' rule was to keep on torturing until the victim named
many "accomplices," who were then arrested and tortured until more names were
given, and so on until whole districts were found to be "infected" with heresy.
One woman told her confessor: "I never dreamed that by means of the torture a
person could be brought to the point of telling such lies as I have told. I am
not a witch, and I have never seen the devil, and still I had to plead guilty
myself and denounce others." One minister urged a condemned witch to renounce
her accusations of innocent people, but she answered, "Father, look at my legs!
They are like fire - ready to burn up - so excruciating is the pain. I could not
stand to have so much as a fly touch them, to say nothing of submitting again to
the torture. I would a hundred times rather die than endure such frightful agony
again. I cannot describe to any human being how terrific the pain actually
is."5 Such torture was "extensively, viciously, and
persistently used and could break all but the most heroic spirits."6
Johan Weyer served as a physician in witch prisons and spoke from
first-hand knowledge of women driven half mad "by frequent torture . . . kept in
prolonged squalor and darkness of their dungeons . . . and constantly dragged
out to undergo atrocious torment until they would gladly exchange at any moment
this most bitter existence for death, are willing to confess whatever crimes are
suggested to them rather than be thrust back into their hideous dungeon amid
ever recurring torture." Friedrich von Spee, a Jesuit confessor who also worked
in the prisons, wrote: "All recantation is vain. If she does not confess, the
torture is repeated - twice, thrice, four times. In 'exceptional' crimes, the
torture is not limited in duration, severity, or frequency . . . She can never
clear herself. The investigating body would feel disgraced if it acquitted a
woman; once arrested and in chains, she has to be guilty, by fair means or
foul."7
This might be contrasted with the old law of the Ripuarian Franks, that
any man who killed a woman for any reason whatever must pay a fine so heavy that
it obligated his descendants for three generations.8
Motherhood was a distinct liability for those who fell into inquisitors'
hands. Jean Bodin (1529 - 1596) recommended that children, if "craftily
handled," could be depended on to inform against their mothers. Children were
also highly susceptible to torture; so a rule was made that children could be
tortured at once, without any waiting period. Elicited by torture or by craft,
the testimony of "infants" - meaning children under 10 - was acceptable to the
Inquisition and could convict their mothers of witchcraft, even though such
testimony was not accepted in other kinds of trials.9
Rules for the persecution of witches allowed no revocation of confessions
after torture. Those who tried to retract their confessions were taken back to
the torture chamber and tortured again; once to purge themselves of the
retraction, and once again to elicit a "true" confession. Any display of fear
was proof of guilt. So was denunciation by another tortured victim. In 1597 a
69-year-old woman named Clara Geissler manage to resist the thumbscrew, but
confessed everything she had been asked after racking and crushing of her feet.
When those she named had been arrested and similarly tortured, Clara was
returned to the torture chamber to confirm their confessions. She was tortured
with "the utmost severity," and died. The record stated that the devil had wrung
her neck.10
In some cases of retracted confessions, the court automatically assumed
that the confession was true, and the retraction a perjury. The victim was then
declared a relapsed impenitent, and handed over to the stake.11
Inquisitors were instructed by their handbooks to give false promises of
mercy for the sake of compliance and confession.12 There was
no need to keep any promises to an accused witch. If a victim confessed
everything, abjured her heresy, and threw herself on the court's mercy, her
sentence was carried out anyway, on two counts: (1) for the "temporal injuries"
she had caused, and (2) for the worthlessness of her confession which was made
"from fear of death" rather than from true repentance.13 The
same "worthless" confession, though, was a legal basis for execution.
Denial of guilt was useless, even if it could be maintained against
tortures. Le Sieur Bouvet declared that "denial of guilt by a prisoner was an
especially good reason why torture should be continued." Limborch's History of
the Inquisition said it was a simple matter to extort confession by torture from
"such as are most innocent." According to Cornelius Loos (1546 - 1595),
"Wretched creatures are compelled by the severity of the torture to confess
things they have never done, and so by cruel butchery innocent lives are taken
and by a new alchemy gold and silver coined from human blood." Von Spee wrote,
"The most robust who have thus suffered have affirmed to me that no crime can be
imagined which they would not at once confess, if it would bring ever so little
relief, and they would welcome ten deaths to escape a repetition."14
Records of the Spanish Inquisition at Toledo show that some victims were
prevented from confessing until the lust of their tormentors had been gratified.
Their torture went on for days or weeks beyond the point where they had wholly
broken down, and pleaded to be told what to say, so they could say
it.15 Such evidence shows that the Inquisition really was a
system of formalized sadism. The fact that the vast majority of its victims were
women points to crypto-sexual motivations engendered by repression on a massive scale.
Pope Alexander III (1105? - 1181, pope 1159 - 1181) said in an encyclical
letter that confessions should not be forced by torture. His successors took it
upon themselves to explain that what Alexander really meant was that torture
must not be used against clergymen by lay persons; but it could be used by the
clergy against laymen. When Pope Innocent IV (1200? - 1254, pope 1243 - 1254)
adopted torture for ecclesiastical trials, he said it should "stop short of loss
of life or limb," but this was a mere formality, since limbs were broken or
crushed routinely in the torture chamber. When a victim died under torture,
inquisitors were authorized by Pope Urban IV (died 1264, pope (1261 - 64) to
absolve each other from guilt, to be innocent in the sight of God.16
Many semantic devices were used to convey an official impression that the
inquisitors were not monsters of cruelty. Records often said confessions were
given freely, sine tortura et extra locum torturae - "without torture and even
out of sight of the instruments of torture." This meant that after the victims
were tortured, they were carried into another room and given the choice of
confessing "freely" or being taken back to the torture chamber.17
When victims managed to kill themselves in prison, or died of their
injuries, they were said to have been slain by the devil. One victim who
succeeded in cutting his own throat was described by Friar Guazzo as "tempted by
a demon," which carried away his soul, "for so did Divine Justice
dispose."18 Few victims were allowed an opportunity to kill
themselves, for they were closely chained at night; but they could easily be
devoured by the rats and other prison-infesting vermin attracted by the smell of
blood and suppurating wounds.19
Most victims pleaded for death sooner or later, but pious ones were
further tormented by visions of the hellfire that awaited them, dying with lies
on their lips. A housewife named Rebecca Lemp sent letters from prison to her
husband and six children, showing radical alterations in her attitude before and
after torture. At first she was confident: "My dearly beloved Husband, be not
troubled. Were I to be charged by thousands of accusations, I am innocent, else
may all the demons in hell come and tear me to pieces. Were they to pulverize
me, cut me in a thousand pieces, I could riot confess anything. Therefore do not
be alarmed; before my conscience and before my soul I am innocent. Will I be
tortured? I don't believe it, since I am not guilty of anything."
After she had been tortured five times, and had confessed every enormity
her tormentors suggested to her, Rebecca wrote again to her husband: "0 thou,
the chosen of my heart, must I be parted from thee, though entirely innocent? If
so, may God be followed throughout eternity by my reproaches. They force one and
make one confess; they have so tortured me . . . Husband, send me something that
I may die, or I must expire under the torture . . . Send me something, else may
I peril even my soul."20
Another letter smuggled out of the Bamberg prison in 1628 was written by
a man of means, Burgomaster Johannes Junius, whose property was taken by the
inquisitors:
-
Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica.
Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must
I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be
tortured until he invents something out of his head and - God pity him -
bethink him of something. I will tell you how it has gone with me . . . The
executioner put the thumb screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the
blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not
use my hands, as you can see from the writing . . . Thereafter they first
stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the torture. Then I
thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and
let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony. The executioner said,
"Sir, I beg you, for God's sake confess something, whether it be true or not.
Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture which you will be put to,
and even if you bear it all, yet you will not escape." . . . Now, dear child,
here you have all my confession, for which I must die. And they are sheer lies
and made-up things, so help me God. For all this I was forced to say through
fear of the torture which was threatened beyond what I had already endured.
For they never leave off with the torture till one confesses something; be he
never so good, he must be a witch. Nobody escapes . . . Dear child, keep this
letter secret so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most
piteously and the jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden . . .
I have taken several days to write this; my hands are both lame. lam in a sad
plight. Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more .
. . Dear child, six have confessed against me at once . . . all false, through
compulsion, as they told me, and begged my forgiveness in God's name before
they were executed.21
Torture was euphemistically called "the Question." Making a show of
mercy, handbooks of the Inquisition recommended that the accused be questioned
at first "lightly, without shedding of blood."22 Sometimes
this elicited full confessions. A witch in the diocese of Constance confessed to
having raised a hailstorm - by pouring water into a small hole in the ground -
after she "had at first been exposed to the very gentlest questions, being
suspended hardly clear of the ground by her thumbs."23
Other methods, not quite so gentle, included the rack, thumb-screw,
bootscrew, whips, branding irons, pincers for twisting off gobbets of flesh,
ropes to wind the extremities until blood spurted from under the nails. A
favorite of the judges was the hoist or strappado, a pulley to haul the victim
into the air by her arms bound behind her back, jerking her up and down until
the shoulders were dislocated. The water torture was also common. This consisted
of forcing gallons of water into the belly through a funnel put down the throat,
sometimes also forcing down and pulling up long strips of linen along with the
water, or paddling the distended belly with sticks. Feet or hands might be
basted with boiling fat and roasted over a brazier.24 Most of
the instruments were inscribed with the pious motto: Soli Deo Gloria, Glory be only to God.25
Dr. Johann Meyfarth witnessed hundreds of witch trials in the 17th
century and wrote that he would have given a thousand thalers to be able to
forget what he had seen: "feet wrenched off legs, and eyes torn from their
sockets, and the prisoner burned with brimstone and basted with oil. He had seen
torturers apply flaming balls of brimstone to the genitals of a woman while she
was hanging in strappado. He had watched them revel in horror until their
victims confessed-or died (strangled by the Devil, the judges explained)."26
Execution was still another torture, sometimes miserably protracted, as
in Spain where half-burned heretics were snatched from the flames, still alive,
and allowed to suffer for hours before being returned to the fire. At the
"Witches' Tower" in Hesse, victims were hung 15 feet above ground in niches, and
slowly baked to death over a low fire. Numerous burned bones and skulls were
found buried at the base of the tower.27 Oddly enough, the
tower later became the property of the novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, (1836
-1895), who gave his name to the perversion known as masochism.28
A significant detail, speaking psychologically, was that inquisitors
seemed very anxious to make women cry. It was their rule that a witch was proved
guilty if she didn't shed tears during torture. The judge adjured her to weep,
"by the loving tears shed by Christ on the cross." If she did weep, though, she
went to the stake anyway, for it proved the devil had given her the gift of
tears to mislead the judges.29 If she didn't weep, she was
convicted of "taciturnity," a crime punishable by burning. In England, the
punishment for taciturnity was peine Fort et dure - pressing to death.30
England didn't import the engines of torture used on the continent, but
Scotland did. English witch-finders used informal or bloodless tortures like
starvation, "swimming the witch," or "walking the witch" (preventing her from
sleeping until a confession was made).31 Various binding
tortures were used. An accused witch might be stripped and bound cross-legged on
a table, sometimes with ropes around the neck attached to the four corners of
the room, and left in that position until she confessed. Sometimes, accused
witches were so tightly manacled in jail while awaiting trial, that they came to
the courtroom with limbs rotted by gangrene. Many died of "gaol fever" (typhus)
before they could be tried at all.
Swimming the witch was a relic of the ordeal by water. With thumbs bound
to the opposite big toes, the victim was lowered into a stream or pond by men
holding ropes, one on each bank. If the body floated, witchcraft was proved, on
the theory that water rejected a witch. If the body sank, the accused was
innocent, although frequently dead of drowning. The decision was largely
dependent on the men who held the ropes.
Peasant mobs often invented their own tortures for suspected witches. At
Catton in Suffolk in 1603, a mob of men tossed an 80-year-old woman up in the
air, punched her, flashed gunpowder in her face, and "having prepared a stool in
the which they had stuck daggers and knives with sharp points upwards, they
often times struck her down upon the same stool whereby she was sore pricked and
grievously hurt."32
"Pricking" was the favorite technique of witch-finders who claimed to
locate the giveaway witch mark or "devil's mark" on a witch's body by sticking a
three-inch awl into her flesh. The devil's mark was supposed to be a numb spot,
so the pricking would produce no pain. Most witch-finders used a trick
instrument with a retractable blade, like a stage dagger, to find the "painless"
spot.33 Scottish prickers formed a regular guild. Among the
more famous of them were John Bain, John Balfour, John Kincaid the "common
pricker," and Matthew Hopkins, who pricked hundreds of old women in the country
of Suffolk, and soon announced that the entire area was infested with witches.34
The search for the mark was not necessarily definitive, if it failed.
When the Bavarian witch-finder Jorg Abriel couldn't find the mark on a woman, he
simply said she looked like a witch to him, and went on to torture her into
admitting it.35
Grim Calvinist Scotland instituted tortures as nasty as the continental,
ones, though the persecution was less, because the church made no profit from
it. Perhaps the most famous Scottish witch trial was conducted in the presence
of King James VI (James I of England), who was convinced the witches had caused
a storm at sea that nearly wrecked his ship, and badly frightened him. The
record said they had done it by throwing a dead cat into the sea. They also set
sail on the sea in a sieve.36
The alleged ringleader of the "coven" was Dr. John Fian, a schoolmaster,
who displayed exemplary courage in the face of multiple tortures, but his
courage did him no good. "His nails upon all his fingers were riven and pulled
off with an instrument called in Scottish a turkas, which in England we call a
pair of pincers, and under every nail there was thrust in two needles." He was
subjected to "thrawing" (binding the head tightly with a rope), tongue-pricking,
and three sessions in the boots. He "did abide so many blows in them, that his
legs were crushed and beaten together as small as might be, and the bones and
flesh so bruised, that the blood and marrow spouted forth in great abundance,
whereby they were made unserviceable for ever."37 He was
carried to the stake on a cart.38
The memory of this martyr to superstition was sullied by a rather bawdy
tale that arose after his death. Dr. Fian was said to have craved the love of a
village maiden, and bribed her brother to obtain three of her pubic hairs for a
love charm. The boy was caught by his mother, who substituted three hairs from a
cow's udder. Dr. Fian accepted these and made his love charm, after which he was
pursued through the village by a roaring, lovesick cow.39
Through its history, western civilization has been disgraced by
spectacles of formalized infliction of pain upon the helpless. Such spectacles
are even artificially contrived in modern "entertainment," such as films. G. B.
Shaw remarked, "A public flogging will always draw a crowd; and there will be in
that crowd plenty of manifestations of a horrible passional ecstasy in the
spectacle of laceration and suffering."40 Sometimes it was so
blatant as to embarrass even participants. When Protestants abolished the bloody
sport ofbear-baiting in England, they gave as their reason not that it was cruel
to bears and dogs, but that it afforded too much pleasure to the spectators.41
Animals and women were perennial victims, even equated with one another
by churchmen who claimed both were devoid of souls. Among the most savagely
tormented were women suspected of enjoying their sexuality - witches, whores,
adulteresses. The latter received public floggings in colonial America: "Public
whippings yielded a vicarious sexual experience - a mixture of sadism and mass
voyeurism cloaked in righteous disapproval . . . They gathered on such occasions
to watch as a woman convicted of uncontrolled desire bared her back down to the
waist and was whipped by a man with a kind of erotic violence later made
notorious by the Comte de Sade."42
Western civilization came to choose pain over pleasure: to think
pain-giving permissible, fit for public display, even pious, whereas
pleasure-giving of the physical sort was suspect, hidden, "evil." The two types
of behavior seem to be inversely related. If a society suppresses one, the other
will flourish. Studies with laboratory animals show that individuals conditioned
to be highly aggressive have below-normal sex drive and display little interest
in copulation. It has also been observed among human beings that angry, hostile
individuals have little sexual appetite.43
Sexually repressed individuals abounded in western society, especially in
the church, which spawned the Inquisition. There were also less extreme
manifestations of the evil. Doctors lauded the salutary effects of pain.
Paullini's Flagellum Salutis (1698) recommended severe beatings for "quick and
easy cures" of such disorders as melancholia, paralysis, toothache,
sleepwalking, deafness, and nymphomania. Professor Cullen at Edinburgh taught
that "stripes and blows about the body" help cure maniacs. John Battie, another
expert on the care of the insane, wrote: "Body pain may be excited to purpose
and without the least danger. Beating is often serviceable."44
Among the most curious manifestations of western man's pain-obsession was
its projection upon women as the givers of pain, almost as if man collectively
sought punishment for his historical offenses against females. Flagellation was
remarkably popular among Victorian "puritans." Publisher George Cannon called
flagellation "a letch which has existed from time immemorial, and is so
extensively indulged in London at this day that no less than twenty splendid
establishments are supported entirely by its practice."45 One
writer said, "Lovers of the birch . . . are almost as common as the lovers of Venus."46
But it was Venus who wielded the birch: usually a mother image,
stepmother, aunt, governess, housekeeper, or a large, imposing sort of
courtesan. Swinburne said, "One of the great charms ofbirching lies in the
sentiment that the floggee is the powerless victim of the furious rage of a
beautiful woman." St. George H. Stock wrote: "When an elegant high bred woman
wields the birch with dignity of mein and grace of attitude, then both the
practice and suffering becomes a real pleasure." Dugdale published a
pornographic book entitled Betsy Thoughtless, "a most spicey [sic] and piquant
Narrative of a Young Girl obliged to excoriate her sweetheart's bum before he
could ravish her Maidenhead."47 A typical passage of Victorian "spice" ran:
-
Martinet meanwhile had taken off her loose morning wrapper, and
armed herself with a rod, formed, not of canes and cuttings like the rest, but
of stout birch stems with innumerable branches, like a tree in miniature. With
this weapon in her hand, how terrible she appeared! Juno deprived of the apple
might have looked like her. Her splendid neck and arms were bare, her cheeks
flamed, her huge breasts were heaving. Speech was too weak, the graces of
birching were ignored, nothing short of savage beating would satisfy her
present need of vengeance.48
Was this a vision of woman wronged - or Goddess ignored - through
centuries of oppression, surfacing in pornography - which by its very simplicity
may give expression to genuinely archetypal imagery? These books were written by
men, not women. They presented fantasies that men wanted to see in the mind's
eye. In one pornographic work, a young man was beaten for insulting his mother,
by an older woman presented as a "nurse" - ordinarily, a nurturer or caretaker.
Her bizarre speech ran: "The young gentleman thought, I dare swear, there was no
one could break him of those crimes, but I'll whip this bold backside of his
till I strip every bit of skin off it, or I'll work an amendment in him." The
youth pleaded, "Try me this once, my dearest mistress! Oh gracious! Try me! Oh,
I'm killed! let me down! Let me down! nurse! nurse! nurse!" She answered, "You
may roar, and cry, and kick, and plunge, and implore, my pretty gentleman, but
all will not do; I'll whip you till the blood runs to your heels! You shall feel
the tuition of this excellent rod!"49
William Gladstone, four times prime minister of England, regularly
indulged in flagellation and patronized brothels for the purpose, as was
discovered when his diaries were published in 1975.50 Of
course, English public-school customs of hazing and caning created many
unfortunates whose sexual drives were warped into a confusion between pleasure
and pain; the poet Swinburne presents a well-known example. But a tradition even
older had predisposed all Christendom to this kind of confusion. The sense of
sin and guilt attached to all forms of sexuality; the ubiquitous image of a
tortured Christ revered for his suffering (inflicted on him by Father); the
generally accepted theory that children must be trained to "fear God" through
painful punishments-many such things together established a culture of cruelty,
where men often judged their own success in life by their level of ability to
make others suffer. This was the real meaning of power.
Psychologically, men who obviously enjoyed torturing women and children
revealed their own incapacity to inspire love. Sadists find sadistic behavior
satisfying because it can elicit strong emotional responses from people who
would otherwise pay no attention to them. A sadist doesn't know how to be
lovable. This feeling of powerlessness can be transformed into a feeling of
power if he can torture. He can even achieve something like a sense of bravery
or daring, despite the fact that the victim has no opportunity to retaliate. To
subject others to any violent physical attack is to defy their rage. When such
rage is made completely helpless to express itself, as in the case of a
prisoner, the victim becomes an object of total control - which is precisely
what men yearned to make of women ever since patriarchal thought introduced the possibility.
Sadism has been called the religion of psychical
cripples.51 It was also a religion of sexual cripples. Unable
to reconcile their concept of sin with the tenderness and affection that good
sexual relatedness requires, Christians turned to perverted obsessions with pain
and punishment. Western historians were fond of describing the barbarian
cruelties of the ancient pagan world, as contrasted with a "Christian" morality
of kindness. However, it might appear that of the two approaches to morality,
paganism was the kinder one on the whole. At least its cruelty was never so
mercilessly efficient as that of western civilization, extending from the
Inquisition to the wars and concentration camps of the 20th century.
References and Notes:
- Lea, Henry Charles. The Inquisitionof the Middle Ages. New York: Citadel Press, 1954; unabridged version published by MacMillan, New York, 1961. Pg. 117.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pgs. 500, 540.
- Haining, Peter. Witchcraft and Black Magic. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1972. Pg. 103.
- Summers, Montague. The History of Witchcraft and Demonology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Pg. 69.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pg. 501.
- Russell, J.B. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972. Pg. 43.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pg. 102.
- Bullough, Vern L. The Subordinate Sex. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Pg. 154.
- Scot, Reginald. Discoverie of Witchcraft. Yorkshire, England: Rowmand & Littlefield, 1973. Pgs. 15, 16,21.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pgs. 43, 104, 503.
- Lea, Henry Charles. The Inquisitionof the Middle Ages. New York: Citadel Press, 1954; unabridged version published by MacMillan, New York, 1961. Pg. 125.
- Kramer, Heinrich & Sprenger, James. Malleus Malificarum. New York: Dover Publications, 1971. Pgs. 226, 125.
- Smith, Homer. Man and His Gods. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952. Pg. 290.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pgs. 103, 482-83, 309.
- Plaidy, Jean. The Spanish Inquisition. New York: Citadel Press, 1967. Pg. 157.
- Coulton, G.G. Inquisition and Liberty. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959. Pgs. 54-55.
- Russell, J.B. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972. Pg. 221.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pgs. 18, 508.
- Smith, Homer. Man and His Gods. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952. Pg. 287.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pgs. 303-4.
- Ewen, C. L'Estrange. Witchcraft and Demonianism. London: Heath Cranston Ltd., 1933. Pgs. 122-23.
- Smith, Homer. Man and His Gods. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952. Pg. 285.
- Kramer, Heinrich & Sprenger, James. Malleus Malificarum. New York: Dover Publications, 1971. Pgs. 149.
- Plaidy, Jean. The Spanish Inquisition. New York: Citadel Press, 1967. Ch. 8.
- Smith, Homer. Man and His Gods. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952. Pg. 286.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pg. 346.
- Summers, Montague. The Geography of Witchcraft. New York: University Books Inc., 1958. Pgs. 496-97.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pg. 450.
- Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. Pg. 64.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pg. 506.
- Ewen, C. L'Estrange. Witchcraft and Demonianism. London: Heath Cranston Ltd., 1933. Pg. 124.
- Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1959. Pg. 509.
- Scott, Sir Walter. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1884. Pg. 240.
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