Wisewomen: Italian folk healers
As recorded by the Roman Inquisition in 16th century witch trials
An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest. —Spanish proverb
An ounce of mother-wit is worth a pound of clergy. —Scottish proverb
In France, groups of men attacked old women accused of causing illness or misfortune, clubbing them to death. At Metz, officials burned them as weather-blasters. Italian inquisitors tortured them into making confessions in boilerplate demonologese. Here batterers and rapists feared women working impotence magic on them; there clergy accused midwives of dedicating babies to the devil, and even of murdering them.
While in some places people still said that women went with the Old Goddess and her spirit hosts on the Ember nights, courts now regularly tried them on charges of flying off to have sexual congress with the devil. These deadly accusations were used to smear women who had been arrested on charges of soothsaying, healing, herbalism or enchantment of belt thongs.
Areas policed by the Inquisition were hardest-hit early on, notably eastern France, southern Germany and northern Italy. (But see note at bottom.) Italian women healers lived in fear of diabolist trials. Just in Brescia diocese, five thousand people had been denounced within a few years. Sixty-four were burned as streghe and many more were imprisoned and tortured. [Sanudo’s Witch Trials, in Bonomo, 94]
Benvenuta Pincinella gathered herbs, practiced medicine, midwifery, and folk charms in the mountain town of Navi, near Como. The sixty-year-old widow had done healing work in the area for about 25 years. She had a successful practice; even noblemen and officials were among her clients. Her specialty was curing bewitched people with magical prescriptions and charms. The trial transcript claims she learned them from the devil. One witness said that she used thongs from sick people’s belts to diagnose their ailments. [Bonomo, 89-99; see also Carlo Bondí (1989). The healer’s name was Benvegnuda, but most sources use standard Italian.]
Benvenuta often used herbal charms. She told her interrogators that the herb rue, which she respectfully called Madonna Ruta (Lady Rue) could be invoked to remove curses, scare off bad spirits, protect from sorcery and the evil eye. Italian folklore preserved the same belief, prescribing prayers and sacrifices when gathering the plant. [Bonomo, 99] Benvenuta, who cured sorcery afflictions, must have found it strange to be tried for causing them.
The first time the Inquisition tried this medichessa, they punished her by forcing her to publicly abjure her “errors” by standing at the church door over many Sundays wearing a penitent’s shirt emblazoned with red crosses. This public humiliation scared away clients and degraded her standing. Soon afterwards, rumors began to circulate that she went in strigozo [like a witch] and did evil. In 1518, the inquisitor ordered that whoever suspected this woman to be a witch should come bear witness against her.
A male neighbor stated that Benvenuta was a witch who had cast spells on people, harmed children, raised storms, and ascended to Mt Tonale to dance with the devils. Paschina Cumini testified that Benvenuta had treated her with many remedies, and that her mother had been healed by her. (Thus showing that even people she had helped responded to the inquisitorial demand to denounce her.) The public notary said he had heard her pronounce protective charms while holding a thong. He thought it incriminating that some of her charms were inaudible. (This common accusation implied that she was invoking non-christian powers, assumed to be demonic.)
Another male accuser said that Benvenuta dealt in love spells. With some transparent dissembling, he admitted consulting her himself about whether a girl was interested in “someone” (the answer was no). He also claimed that she knew how to make “a scattering powder” which would procure abortion. [Bondí, 68-73] In his turn, the archpriest from her hometown called her a known witch who dealt in love magic. Some of her charms were intended “to cause a person to wish another well, and to make husbands wish their wives well and not to be able to beat them, even if the women cuckolded their husbands.” [Bondí (1989); Bonomo, 89]
After these accusations were made in secret at the Dominican convent at Brescia, Benvenuta was arrested and taken “to the prison of heretics and witches.” She admitted to having broken the injunction to stop practicing, because the mayor had called on her to treat his daughter’s stomach problems. (She cured the girl with a syrup of elder leaves given three days in a row.) Benvenuta tried to improve her position by telling the inquisitors that this treatment included praying before image of Mary, and that she had learned from a man 50 years before.
The next day the prisoner broke down. The devil had taught her medicine and was always beside her. She went to the “sabba” on Mt Tonale and had sex with the devil. Her initiation had happened 24 years before, on a Thursday night when she went to someone’s house to spin in the courtyard. (Themes of night-spinning and Thursday witch-gatherings also turn up in Swiss, Basque, and other folk sources.) A spinner named Fior proposed that they all go to steal grapes. On the way they met Maria, who led them to music and dancing around the rigoletto in the fields. Demons transported them over many lands to a riverbank, where they had sex. After this, Benvenuta went to the “games” every Thursday and the first day of every month. [Bondí; Bonomo, 91]
The head of this witch-fest was called la signora del zuogo, “lady of the games.” (This title turns up in Italian witch trials in various forms: la signora del buon gioco, “lady of good play” is common.) Benvenuta described her as a beautiful lady dressed in black velvet. She added, “Everybody said she was a goddess, and everyone went before her and saluted her, saying ‘Welcome, madonna, with your people,’ and saluted her with four or five bows.” [Bonomo, 91] But, this signora does not escape the demonization enacted in the torture chamber; she is described as ordering the witches to do evil whenever they can.
The prosecutorial judges accused the healer of possessing a secret powder that harmed people and caused babies to fall sick, and of teaching different kinds of incantations. Like many other tortured witches, Benvenuta was made to say that she learned medicine from devil so she would have money. We see her casting about for ways out, trying to awaken a spark of compassion. She even tried reverse psychology, reporting that the devil told her that the friars want to burn her—all to no avail.
The tribunal declared Benvenuta a relapsed heretic, enemy of the faith, and turned her over to the civil authorities to be burned. “However, we benignly ask... the secular judges that as to the shedding of blood and the death penalty, they will moderate their sentence.” [Bondí, 84] (This formal recommendation pretended that the church wanted mercy but in reality the inquisitors expected that the secular arm would burn whoever they condemned. In 1462 Benvenuta Pincinella was burned at the stake with seven other women who had also been declared “impenitent witch heretics.” [Bonomo, 94]
Another well-known healer with a successful practice was Bellezza Orsini of Perugia. In 1540 someone secretly denounced her to the Inquisition. Once she was imprisoned, various accusers came forward. A mother testified that her son had died saying that Bellezza had bewitched him when he helped her off a horse and that her touch had killed him. A ferryman attributed a four-month illness to his having refused to loan her eight ducats, though he admitted that her charming had cured him. He repeated rumors that she had killed four children, including a baby she said she wasn’t able to cure. This admission was taken as a refusal, and proof that the healer was trying to harm the child. [Bondí (1989)]
The third informer was a priest who called Bellezza “one of the biggest witches and slatterns in the world, witch, mother of witches.” He claimed she had made him sick; a priest-magician, a “streone,” had told him so. The priest un-witched him with ointments, words and “certain things which he made me drink, made me spit up many things and showed me that she had given me to eat male sperm and women’s menstrual discharge...” [Bondí, 94]
Bellezza was no fool. She knew the risks she ran; folk healers like her were being accused of baby-killing and burned all over northern Italy. She had tried to protect herself by using churchly prayers and wearing the habit of lay Franciscans, but this was like fighting a firestorm with a bucket. Bellezza tried to flee when the count’s soldiers came to arrest her. They brought her to prison, to face interrogation by inquisitors. The healer denied that she had harmed people with sorcery: “... I never made anyone sick, but healed them and treated them with my flower oil.” [Bondí, 100] With the frankness of a paisana, Bellezza told the Inquisitors:
I cure and treat all evils, all diseases. I know how to heal the French sickness [venereal disease], broken bones, whoever is clouded with any evil shadow, and many other infirmities... I am not a sorceress, and I treat everything and do everything with a flower oil of mine. [Bonomo, 110]
She testified that she made her ointment by chopping into olive oil “a quantity of flowers that nature engenders from all trees and herbs.” She cured this mixture for 50 days over heat from the compost heap. Bellezza said that with this oil she had healed many people, some from as far away as Rome.
The judges insisted on hearing where and how she had studied medicine, knowing it was impossible for her to have studied at the university, closed to all women and nearly all peasants. Bellezza responded that she possessed a marvelous book of secrets, 180 pages long; “with this I have learned and taught others and lent it to great masters and lords.” (She was not the only accused witch who hoped association with noblemen might exonerate her.) She offered to let the inquisitors examine her book, saying that it would give blessings. But they were only interested in the sorcery charge, which she stoutly denied.
The judges put the healer to the torture, tying her hands behind her back, lifting her up high on a machine, then dropping her the length of the rope, tearing ligaments and dislocating her shoulders. [Bonomo, 110-1] The sixty-something woman withstood three rounds of torture. Her appeals grew desperate: “I’m dead, kill me quickly, don’t make me bear it, don’t make me die....” Even at this point, the transcript shows Bellezza attempting to convince the judges of her healing skills and knowledge. Her son Giovanni tried to help her, requesting that the inquisitors suspend her trial while he appealed to the count of Pitigliano, but in vain.
Unable to bear the torture, Belleza began to “confess”—tying a “witches’ knot” to attract a married man to her, making her son kill a man who had slandered her—mixed with retractions. She said she had been initiated by Lucia di Ponsono (previously tried as a witch) 30 years before, who taught her all she knew, to make the flower oil, but now diabolist baby-killing and making of powders were interspersed in her protestations of healing work. Afterward in her cell, disheartened at having succumbed to the torture, Bellezza slashed her throat with a table knife. The trial was suspended while she recovered. [Bondí (1989)]
Realizing that the torture would not end until she “confessed” what the judges wanted to hear, Bellezza surrendered. She had made people sick and then cured them for money. She had gone to the Noce de Benevento (an early pagan tree shrine that was turned into the mythic destination of Italian witches). She asked to be let down from the strappado because she was going to tell all, if she could just “rest a little.” [Bondí, 105-6] With great bravado, she instructed the scribe to bring lots of paper because she was going to tell them volumes about witchcraft. Then she threw an inventory of demonological fantasies at them: wild stories of the devil “Maumetto,” sodomitic sex with demons, unguents made out of dead babies and other horrible ingredients. “The accused proceeds like a river that has burst its banks and pours forth before the tribunal all the stories that were told of witches.” [Bonomo, 113]
It wasn’t enough for them. The inquisitors sent Bellezza back to her cell, telling her she’d have to do better. The next session fills seven tightly scripted pages: sending cats to put out lights so they could suck babies’ blood, naming names of women who belonged to the battalions of witches. Even at this stage, the old peasant woman worked justifications of her work and culture into the torture-extracted “confession.”
Bellezza said that Befania, goddess of the Italian peasantry, was queen of the witches’ society. She informed the inquisitors that the witches met at her city, Rieti, on November 1, All Souls Day. Though Befania was good, the devil was more powerful than her. So she fought the devil in secret (much like Bellezza’s own strategy for dealing with the Inquisition). Befania protected the witches who violate the devil’s law by curing and healing: “otherwise I would not have been able to cure so many people as I have who were bewitched, because it is against the law.” [Bondí (1989), Bonomo, 115. The latter (on 118) comments that Befana’s secret resistance is done “with typical feminine tenacity and patience.”]
In other words, Bellezza presented a veiled defense of a pagan-peasant worldview which saw the witches as good, and as revering an animist goddess who is connected to healing, prophecy, and pagan holy days. The continuity is clear between this goddess and women’s accounts of witches paying reverence to Signora Oriente in an inquisitorial witch trial of 1390.
Similar connections are visible in other trials. In 1549 Margreth Thüttinger was denounced as having attended a All Souls Day gathering of a hundred witches from all over Switzerland at the “witches’ meadow” at Pratteln. [Burghartz, 82, n. 18] Later in the century, the Inquisition accused Neopolitan women of going in janaria, a term harking back to Diana and the faeries named for her, the ianare. [Romeo, 276-88]
Bellezza gives a subversively consensual rendition of the obligatory devil-sex. The devil “started to play with us and did whatever he wanted and that we wanted and we satisfied each other touching all over our bodies.” When he took the witches to dance rounds under the walnut trees at Benevento and Todi, they stamped the ground underneath, so that nothing grew there, as folk tradition said of places where the faeries danced. [Bonomo, 112-3]
Bellezza made one last desperate bid to placate the inquisitors. She claimed to have been absolved by the papal vicar and doing penance by paying a fine, abstaining from meat and eating three pounds of dirt a year for three years. [Bonomo, 116] She could see that the judges didn’t buy it, and were going to burn her. She succeeded in cutting her throat with a nail. The jailors found her half-dead in her cell. She told them nothing mattered to her anymore but to give up her life and escape from this world. [Bondí, 109]
The herbal oils that Bellezza made were integral to Italian women’s medicine, and she was not the only woman to be tried by the Inquisition for using them. (These oils also fell under suspicion as possible flying ointments for witches’ gatherings.) Beatrice de Rise, tried at Napoli in 1578, made her living by spinning, cooking, and curing, along with a bit of divination. The judges questioned Beatrice closely about the medicinal oils that she compounded. She testified that:
I make this unguent on the day of the Ascension; after the sun rises, I go to the park with my neighbors, gathering all the good herbs; and after I have collected these herbs I put them all in a cauldron to boil along with water, wine, regular oil and all kinds of special oils. And after these herbs have boiled I strain them and pour the liquor into flasks and then give it to some poor person with the male di canna. [Romeo, 216. This is either arthritis or malaria.]
The judges challenged Beatrice about why the herbs had to be gathered on the feast of the Ascension. She answered straightforwardly that that was how her mother had taught her, and she had also seen neighbors do it this way. Beatrice had been denounced by a man responding to the church’s call to expose lay healers. He said that had seen her go to treat sick children. He also named “madamma Fraustina” as another witch who had performed many cures. [Romeo, 215-16]
Italian women had a custom of blessing olive oil and wine, which they used in anointing the sick. They accompanied this with prayers and “signing” over those to be blessed or cured, making crosses and other passes over them. In 1577 the archbishop of Naples tried Antonia de Giglio on charges of using words, signing the cross, reciting prayers and saluting angels, all for medical purposes. Her prayers were unintelligible, spoken in a low voice, and thus suspected of being non-canonical. Why did she not say them out loud, if it was just the Our Father or Ave Maria, unless she was trying to hide something?
Antonia la Medica had originally been denounced as one who “publicly professed to heal with pieces of cloth and rags, and with some words she uttered.” Her specialty was curing sores by tying on bands and praying over them. The archbishop issued an edict against these folk practices, although Antonia could continue to pray over people on the condition that she said her prayers out loud, so that they could be monitored for orthodoxy.
The Neopolitan medica was also a devotee of a local holy grotto named for its healing powers, the shrine of Santa Maria della Sanità (“of health”). Antonia had cured a fugitive’s head injury at the grotto by “the hidden virtue of the holy image of the Virgin, which was at the time underground.” The common people flocked to this cave sanctuary. There was a brisk trade in oil that had burned before Santa Maria della Sanità, and in the milk of goats that had been “signed” with her image.
The archbishop mounted an attack on “false relics” at this shrine, ordering the oil lamp to be thrown to the ground and struck with a sword. A struggle ensued between priestly supporters and attackers of the sanctuary. [Romeo, 207-12] Would the people succeed in catholicizing their animist tradition, or would it be utterly destroyed? The shrine continued to flourish, but women’s leadership of healing rituals declined under attacks by bishops and inquisitors. In the last decades of the 1500s, Neopolitan women were forced to discontinue using their traditional Ascension ointment—or possibly prepared it in much greater secrecy. [Romeo, 220]
The Tuscan healer Gostanza of San Miniato also used medicinal oils, especially an olio di pilatro (Hypericum perforatum, also known as St John’s wort). She treated people across three dioceses, and people came to fetch her to their relatives’ sickbeds. Her medical work earned her a church-run witch trial, complete with torture, in 1594. Many peasants testified that she practiced medicine. [Cardini, 6--10] Mona Gostanza fixed broken bones, gave medicines, and delivered babies. She received her payment in goods, especially food. [Cardini, 135-7]
While some deponents called her a bawd and blamed her for bewitchments, her relatives and neighbors characterized her as “a poor person who spun and medicated with herbs and often obtained good results in these activities.” [Cardini, 40] Her persecutors questioned her about the herbs--betony, hypericum, madreselva--and the alembics filled with medicinal oils they found in her house. [Cardini, 80]
In the 1569 trial of Lucrezia de Grosso, a Neapolitan dyer testifed that people still preferred the medical treatment offered by old women and matrons over that of doctors. As happened in northern Italy, that trust was in the process of being crushed by church persecution. A 1565 synod at Naples warned against those who treated the sick with incantations (incanti). The bishop of Treviso used pastoral visits and witch persecution as weapons against folk medicine. A vicar of Aquileia vituperated against the “horrid medicines” of “women half devil-ridden.” [Romeo, 204; 234-6]
In 1578, Aquilina de Grazzano was called before the patriarch of Aquileia for doing cures called preenti in the dialect of Friuli. He ordered her to stop her practice or she would be punished. She persisted and was tried again. [Romeo, 231] Domenica Boare, who had previously been authorized to “sign” by the vicar of Treviso, fell into difficulties in 1580 when the bishop cross-examined her. She pronounced Latin prayers incorrectly—instead of da nobis hodie (“Give us this day”), she said Dona Bisodia. This sounded as if she was invoking a “Lady” (donna), like the witch-goddess that medieval churchmen had dubbed Bensozia (“good society”).
This fear that peasants were interjecting a goddess into their prayers was not limited to Friuli. Donna Bisodia turns up in faraway Sardinia as the mother of St Peter. Legend shows her trying to convince him to get Jesus to change the Paternoster to include her. Instead of “panem nostrum quotidianum dona nobis hodie,” she urged, have them say “Donna Bisodia.” She ends up going to hell. [Enna, Fiabe Sarde, 259-60]
Domenica appealed to the bishop to allow her to continue “for so many ask me [to sign], gentlemen and others, that I don’t know what to do.” Like Bellezza Orsini, Domenica hoped that invoking gentlemen’s support would help protect her, but she was ordered to stop “signing.” [Romeo, 233]
In 1565 the Modena Inqusition admonished a man named Nasella for doing ritual cures. Antonia Muliza was jailed in 1578 for ritual healing and five years later, after she was caught practicing a second time, was handed over to the state to be executed. Silvia Telesa was tried as a witch in 1586 and again in 1591, when a “confession” of diabolical pact was recorded. Telesa stood accused of using prayers as she applied medicines to wounds, but was released when she told them that the archbishop had authorized her to use prayers in this way. [Romeo, 231; 219]
Women who wanted to practice medicine without charms or “signing” also faced Church opposition. Lucrezia Marana complained to judges in 1594 that male doctors had no problems getting a medical license, but she had not been able to get one because it would displease the archbishop of Napoli. In 1596 a priest denounced the seamstress Battista da Latissana for treating nosebleeds. The Udine Inquisition let her go with a warning to desist.
Inquisitors questioned Giacoma Zavattini at Pisa in 1596. Two years later, they interrogated Bartolomea Genovese about her unguent for stomach-ache. And the Modena Inquisition tried Orazio Masaccio for witchcraft in 1598 for applying a plaster to a wet-nurse’s breast. He was retried and jailed in 1604, but was finally freed when the nurse testified that a doctor considered the ailment he was treating to be sickness, not sorcery. [Romeo, 220; 233-34]
Inquisitors at Aquileia got right to the point with Gasparina Triscola: “Interrogated if she knows how to make medicine for any infirmities.” She responded, “Padre no, unless it is that I give a little oil of rue or of Ascension or for worms, to rub on the little ones’ stomach and back for worms and fevers.” In 1596 Gasparina was prohibited to sign or use oils or give out medicines, and also ordered not to show or teach anyone her skills. [Romeo, 309-310]
Persecution of healers in Switzerland, France, and Germany
Women healers were also at great risk in French Switzerland, where witch hunts were conducted by secular courts. In this rural society, mothers still passed on herbal and medical treatments to their daughters. A number of these curers were disabled women who communed with “saints” and received healing power from them. The Rouhier woman, whose saints came every 15 days, seems to have been epileptic; “she had frequent attacks during which she fell to the ground and scraped the ground with her nails” and was incoherent afterwards. [Diricq, 18; 21]
Marie Maigre, the sorcière of Courtfaibure, was unable to walk as a child. She moved through the village streets by dragging her body across the ground. “Her saints, which she called her people, healed her, but she remained lame...” Marie said that when she was 17, two beautiful women in dark clothing came to heal her, touching her limbs, then left her. This is when she began to walk. Eight years later she cured another lame woman with their help, but her mother found out and “beat her til the blood flowed.” She probably feared for her daughter; being a sorcière was a dangerous occupation.
Marie continued to treat people anyway, and they came to her from all over. Her remedies included rubbing with oils she prepared: collecting herbs at certain times while making signs, and with pilgrimages to Dornach eleven Fridays in a row. In time her mother’s fears came true; she was arrested in 1589. Under torture, her saints turned into a man with hoofed feet dressed in black, and her paralysis was attributed to a pear given to her by a witch when she was ten. Marie was burned at the stake. [Diricq, 41-7]
Other witch trials reflected the demonization of folk herbalists. Claudine Collin, for example, said under torture that she first met the devil while gathering herbs in a field. [Diricq, 87] Marie Joly and Clauda Bruyne, burned at Neuchatel in 1568, seem to have practiced healing and divination. [Horsley, 185] No healer dared to call herself a witch, and if anyone else did, it provoked a vigorous self-defense. In the Vosges forest, for example, healers denied that they were witches. [Monter, circa 170]
The herbalist Marie Martin of Neufville le Roy in Picardy was accused around 1587. Her dramatic cures cast suspicion on her: “the healing which she did with herbs of other people who had languished a long time.” Martin was also blamed for the deaths of people and animals. She was imprisoned, but denied everything. A judge was thinking about letting the healer go, “when a sorcerer or magician came to the said Town, who recognized having seen her from some sorcerer’s assemblies.” Although he claimed to have presided over these meetings, the sorcerer was not seized and tried. He was male, and therefore treated like a colleague in witch-hunting. The judge followed his advice to shave Martin’s entire body, a procedure that qualified more as a form of torture than a search for evidence. They found a white mark on her left shoulder, and passed it off as diabolical.
The experience of this “search” dragged out confessions to “everything that is asked of her,” even the death of the judge’s father. At this point the trial was handed off to a superior court, which interrogated Martin again. The officials of Montdidier opined that she suffered from melancholy humors and perturbation of spirit, and put her in the hands of priests. The French Parlement turned down her appeal, and she was hanged, then burned. [Mandrou, 95]
North German hunts were also sweeping away women healers in this period, according to studies of Bremen and Schleswig-Holstein. [Horsley, 188, cites Schwartzwalder on Bremen and Heberling on Schleswig-Holstein.] Here as elsewhere, healers were often blamed for failing to cure someone. In 1575 Kattrine Statlander was tried for treating a man with an “evil powder.” [Horsley, 188]
Torture elicited accounts of devils supplying witches with harmful plants. In trials at Neuchatel in the 1600s, Swiss witches say that the devil took them to a mountainside to teach them about malefic herbs. In 1580, three women in a north German trial said demons took them to the side of the Brockenberg (a mountain sacred to the goddess Holle) and showed them the deadly “devil’s plant.” [Meurger, 380]
But later folklore shows that central Europeans interpreted these herbs positively. Tyroleans called the best places for gathering herbs the devil’s “gardens” or “fields.” Silesian folk herbalists paid honors to Rubezahl, patron spirit of healing. They spoke of “Rubezahl’s little garden” or the “devil’s little garden” on the east side of the Brunnberg mountain. [Ibid, 381fn]
In Austria, a considerable number of accused witches were folk healers and diviners. Trial testimony often ran down “a virtual catalog of herbs used in folk medicine,” as well as charms for love, protection, and stopping husbands from drinking. [Horsley, 186, citing studies by Byloff]
Excerpted from The Terror, Vol XIV of my series Secret History of the Witches. (See Series Contents here.) This as-yet-unpublished volume deals with the height of the European witch hunts, 1500-1700. ©1990 Max Dashu.
The next section turns to Spain, where the healers were accused of “unauthorized knowledge,” and professional rivalries (doctors versus “witches”) in Britain, with discussion of curative rites.
Note: Many people still think the burnings were all done by the church, which certainly did lead the charge in concocting diabolist ideology and the wave of inquisitorial trials; but after 1500 it was primarily the state—kings, dukes and barons, city magistrates—that took over from the papal Inquisition. In Italy, the latter was transformed into the Roman Inquisition and continued its persecutions. Spain had its own state Inquisition, operated by monks but run by the Spanish crown. The Spanish Inquisition did witch trials, and some burnings; but was preoccupied with persecuting Jews and Muslims.)
I feel like things haven't changed much given what's going on in the world right now.