They Were Not Witches, They Were Women

European Witch Trials

Beginning in the 15th century, witch-hunt fever swept continental Europe. On the Iberian peninsula, Catalunya is the place where more women were tried, convicted and executed than anywhere else.

Accused witches in the Middle Ages often fit a particular social profile. They were usually older women, widows, immigrants, without economic means, sometimes working as a midwife or healer to make ends meet. These women were often licensed by the local or regional governments to practice their trade and were valuable to their communities.

However, their in-depth knowledge of the properties of plants and the body made them vulnerable as the tide of religious traditions turned more and more dogmatic. Anything that appeared to be linked to magic or sorcery outside of the Church’s healing powers could be labeled as suspect. Unfortunate occurrences were often associated with the Devil’s presence or God’s punishment. When crops failed, a local child got sick or disaster struck, these women’s precarious circumstances made them the perfect scapegoats for the misogynistic, superstitious, largely uneducated Medieval society.

Placing Blame

During the 14th century, all of Europe was devastated by a series of events that caused a severe crisis. Crop failures resulted in desperate food shortages between 1315 and 1317, and the Black Plague decimated millions upon millions of people only thirty years later. Social and economic tensions ran hot, and as is often the case in times of unrest, marginalized members of society often bore the brunt of the population’s fear and frustration.

The now infamous Inquisition, which had sprung up in the 12th century to fight the increasing emergence of “heretical movements”—Christian sects whose ideas clashed with official Church dogma—was a major player in the eventual pan-European obsession with hunting witches, the Devil’s supposed agents on earth. Peter T. Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, compares the Church's enthusiasm for witch hunting during this period to weaponized us-versus-them discourses utilized by 21st-century political candidates in an attempt to create loyalty amongst their base by ramping up fears about the danger of the “other.” The persecution of witches was intended to paint the Catholic Church in the light of the protector to the masses during a challenging time in history.

In Catalunya, there were nearly a thousand witch trials that reportedly took place throughout the Middle Ages.

The No Eren Bruixes Initiative

Various initiatives designed to promote historical justice by recognizing the names of ancient witch trial victims have recently taken place in countries such as Scotland, Switzerland and Norway.

Clàudia Pujol is the director of the magazine Sàpiens, a Catalan magazine that covers both ancient and modern history and culture. She says that learning of the movement in Scotland calling for an official apology to those who had been persecuted as witches was the spark for the magazine’s interest in collaborating with historian Pau Castell Granados—one of Catalunya’s foremost experts on the witch hunts of the past—on an atlas of Catalan witch hunt victims, called No Eren Bruixes (“They Were Not Witches”).

Granados is the author of a census that was the basis for the atlas, published as a special edition of Sàpiens in March 2021. Over a period of ten years, he compiled an extensive database of cases of women persecuted as witches—it includes the results of research and analysis of both published works and archival information from the past 150 years. 

With the assistance of Castell and specialist Agustí Alcoberro, the Sàpiens team was able to publish information on more than 700 people (mostly women) who were tried over a period of two centuries in Catalunya and Andorra. Most of the entries contain the name of the person or persons tried, the year or years of the trial, the court where the trial took place and the sentence. While other articles and books have been written about the Catalan witch trials, this atlas is the most exhaustive and complete documentation assembled to date.

However, the atlas itself was not the end goal of the No Eren Bruixes project. Its mission statement says the people involved want to “recover the memory of all these innocent women, without prejudice or falsehoods. To repair their reputations and dignify them through acts of reparation throughout the territory, in the name of all women who have been oppressed throughout history.”

They created a manifesto reclaiming these women’s memories, which quickly attracted over 12,000 adherents and has garnered the support of dozens of public and private institutions. It has been signed by a long list of town halls, cultural centers, women’s associations, and countless professors, historians, journalists and other private individuals. The project’s website, created by Caterina Úbeda and Sandra Lleida with the help of Pau Castell, also includes an interactive map showing the location of hundreds of women who were tried and executed as witches, organized by counties, historical period and other data, often with names and details about the victims.

In Barcelona, where the Inquisition had a branch office, there was a particular concentration of cases. Clicking on just one of the many grey dots denoting an Inquisition trial in the city yields the following:

“Inquisition (1517-1784). A man and several women of unknown origin were tried by the Holy Office of the Inquisition of Barcelona between 1522 and 1673. The man was Guillem Veçerola, tried in 1537, and of the women we know the names of were Maria Puig, Joana Pomarada, Joana Rasquells, Margarida Lasarda, Caterina May, Sibil·la Queixigar, Isabel Castellasa, Joana Escoch (all tried in 1537), Fulana Navarra (tried in 1667) and Fulana Barras, Margarida Soler and Maria Compte (tried in 1673).”

Witch-hunt fever was not limited to the Inquisition; local religious authorities and secular courts often responded to accusations. Way off to the southwest on the map, in the countryside, a lone red dot tells the story of what happened in Favara de Matarranya in 1616: “Eight local women were tried in the lordship of Favara. At least three were executed by hanging.” 

The map contains hundreds of such stories. 

There are also dots that represent spots where “diabolical gatherings” were thought to have taken place, as well as a timeline titled “Repression, in Dates” framing the evolution of witch-hunting between 1471 and 1673 in its historical context. The research for the project is ongoing, and new information is constantly being added.

The Future: Reparations and Awareness

The results of the campaign have already born fruit. Since the Spring of 2021, Sàpiens in conjunction with multiple city councils from cities around Catalunya have organized acts of symbolic recognition, symposiums, history lessons and debates to educate the community about this dark aspect of Catalunya’s past, and revindicate the memories of the accused women. There have even been instances of towns changing the names of streets, parks or playgrounds to name them after victims of the witchcraft trials. 

In November of 2021, a motion was registered with the Catalan Parliament to push for official regional reparation measures, with the hope of having them approved by January of 2022. That same month, the project will also release a documentary film called Brujas, La Gran Mentira (Witches, the Great Lie).

Clàudia Pujol says that it is important to the project’s goals to focus on the women in this tragic tale, not because there were no men who were persecuted unjustly, but because of the overwhelmingly lopsided numbers. 

“The witch hunts were full-blown femicide,” she says. ”They were probably the most important institutionalized femicide in the history of mankind. Some historians put the number as high as 60,000 women across Europe, and Catalunya was one of the places where the persecution was most frequent and most intense. It is important to make what happened visible, so that this can never happen again.”

While the idea of modern-day witch trials in the western world may seem ludicrous, we’re living in strange times filled with political, social, economic and environmental tensions. Pujol assures us that if conditions were just right (or just wrong), there’s nothing to prevent similar persecution from taking place unless we learn from our past.