The Basque Seroras explores the intersections between local community, women's work, and religious reform in early modern northern Spain. Amanda L. Scott illuminates the lives of these uncloistered religious women, who took no vows and were free to leave the religious life if they chose. Their vocation afforded them considerably more autonomy and, in some ways, liberty, than nuns or wives. Scott's archival work recovers the surprising ubiquity of seroras, with every Basque parish church employing at least one. Their central position in local religious life revises how we think about the social and religious limitations placed on early modern women. By situating the seroras within the social dynamics and devotional life of their communities, The Basque Seroras reconceives of female religious life and the opportunities it could provide. It also shows how these devout laywomen were instrumental in the process of negotiated reform during the Counter-Reformation.

In June 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called the Pays de Labourd. In four months, they executed up to 80 women and men for the crime of witchcraft, causing a wave of suspects to flee into Spain and sparking terror there. Witnesses, many of them children, described lurid tales of cannibalism, vampirism, and demonic sex. One of the judges, Pierre de Lancre, published a sensationalist account of this diabolical netherworld. With other accounts seemingly destroyed, this witch-hunt – France's largest – has always been seen through de Lancre's eyes. The narrative, re-told over the centuries, is that of a witch-hunt caused by a bigoted outsider. Newly discovered evidence paints a very different, still darker picture, revealing a secret history underneath de Lancre's well-known tale. Far from an outside imposition, witchcraft was a home-grown problem. Panic had been building up over a number of years and the region was fractured by factionalism and a struggle over scarce resources. The Basque Witch-Hunt reveals that de Lancre was no outsider; he was a local partisan, married into the Basque nobility. Living at the Franco-Spanish border, the Basques were victims of geography. Geo-politics caused a local conflict which made the witch-hunt inevitable. The same forces eventually sent thousands of religious refugees from Spain to France where they, in turn, became new objects of popular fear and anger. The Basque witch-hunt is justly infamous. This book shows that almost everything historians thought they knew about it is wrong.

Devout laywomen raise a number of provocative questions about gender and religion in the early modern world. How did some groups or individuals evade the Tridentine legislation that required third order women to take solemn vows and observe active and passive enclosure? How did their attempts to exercise a female apostolate (albeit with varying degrees of success and assertiveness) destabilize hierarchies of class and gender? To the extent that their beliefs and practices diverged from approved doctrine and rituals, what insights can they provide into the tensions between official religion and lay religiosity? Addressing these and many other questions, Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World reflects new directions in gender history, offering a more nuanced approach to the paradigm of woman as the prototypical "disciplined" subject of church-state power.

Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia draws on recent research to underscore the various ways Iberian women influenced and contributed to their communities, engaging with a broader academic discussion of women's agency and cultural impact in the Iberian Peninsula. By focusing on women from across the socioeconomic and religious spectrum--elite, bourgeois, and peasant Christian women, Jewish, Muslim, converso, and Morisco women, and married, widowed, and single women--this volume highlights the diversity of women's experiences, examining women's social, economic, political, and religious ties to their families and communities in both urban and rural environments. Comprised of twelve essays from both established and new scholars, Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia showcases groundbreaking work on premodern women, revealing the complex intersections between gender and community while highlighting not only relationships of support and inclusion but also the tensions that worked to marginalize and exclude women.

This book revises what we thought we knew about one of the most famous witch hunts in European history. Between 1608 and 1614, thousands of witchcraft accusations were leveled against men, women, and children in the northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre. The Inquisition intervened quickly but incompetently, and the denunciations continued to accelerate. As the phenomenon spread, children began to play a crucial role. Not only were they reportedly victims of the witches’ harmful magic, but hundreds of them also insisted that witches were taking them to the Devil’s gatherings against their will. Presenting important archival discoveries, Lu Ann Homza restores the perspectives of illiterate, Basque-speaking individuals to the history of this shocking event and demonstrates what could happen when the Spanish Inquisition tried to take charge of a liminal space. Because the Spanish Inquisition was the body putting those accused of witchcraft on trial, modern scholars have depended upon Inquisition sources for their research. Homza’s groundbreaking book combines new readings of the Inquisitional evidence with fresh archival finds from non-Inquisitional sources, including local secular and religious courts, and from notarial and census records. Expanding our understanding of this witch hunt as well as the history of children, community norms, and legal expertise in early modern Europe, Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates is required reading for students and scholars of the Spanish Inquisition and the history of witchcraft in early modern Europe.

Women: Icons of Christ traces the history of ministry by women, especially those ordained as deacons. The author demonstrates how women were removed from leadership, prevented from using their voices, and eliminated from official ministries in the life of the Church. And she refutes arguments against restoring women to the ordained diaconate.

In An Overview of the Pre-suppression Society of Jesus in Spain, Patricia W. Manning offers a survey of the Society of Jesus in Spain from its origins in Ignatius of Loyola’s early preaching to the aftereffects of its expulsion. Rather than nurture the nascent order, Loyola’s homeland was often ambivalent. His pre-Jesuit freelance sermonizing prompted investigations. The young Society confronted indifference and interference from the Spanish monarchy and outright opposition from other religious orders. This essay outlines the order’s ministerial and pedagogical activities, its relationship with women and with royal institutions, including the Spanish Inquisition, and Spanish members’ roles in theological debates concerning casuistry, free will, and the immaculate conception. It also considers the impact of Jesuits’ non-religious writings.