Invoking the Akelarre by Emma Wilby

Author:Emma Wilby [Wilby, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845199692
Google: zL65vgEACAAJ
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2019-01-15T03:26:15+00:00

While we do not know how much time Acevedo and Valle spent in Valladolid, particularly after the former’s promotion to inquisitor general in 1603, we can surmise that these factors would have impacted on Valle in a range of ways. Since his promotion to the bishopric of Valladolid in 1601 (and probably before) Acevedo would have been engaged with missionary efforts in the New World at the highest level, with the records stating that he was the principle consecrator for Juan de Valle y Arrendondo, Bishop of Guadalajara, Mexico and also Ignatius Loyola’s grand-nephew, Martín Ignacio de Loyola, Bishop of Paraguay – a widely-travelled cleric of great zeal who had twice taken his missionary efforts to China.49 His engagement in this respect is further intimated by the fact that in 1606, just five years after taking the bishopric in Valladolid and two years after becoming inquisitor general, Valle’s employer was further decorated, this time by King Phillip III of Spain, with the honorary title of ‘Patriarch of the West Indies [the Americas]’.50 Although it held no jurisdictional significance, the title was unique and prestigious, elevating Acevedo above his episcopal peers and linking him imaginatively with a large and challenging patriarchate in the New World. We do not know how far this role impacted on Acevedo’s preoccupations and workload, but it is fair to assume that it would have intensified his intellectual and practical engagement with American missionary work. It is also fair to assume that it impacted on Valle. As Acevedo’s confidential secretary, Valle would have been deeply involved in the research, discussion and compiling of letters and reports necessary to further his employer’s efforts to ‘build a new Christendom’ among the ‘savage man-munching people’ of the New World. Of course, there is not enough evidence to chart the degree to which these factors may have influenced Valle’s subsequent engagement with the Basque witch-craze. But it is surely a coincidence that the man who was primarily responsible for generating the most New-World-like accounts of feast-cannibalism to emerge in any European witchcraft trial, had previously worked so intimately with the man who was the bishop of the city that served as the epicentre of Spanish interactions with the Americas and, even more importantly, had been formally appointed the ‘patriarch’ of this newly discovered realm.

From this vantage point, we can begin to see why feast-cannibalism may have emerged to such prominence in the Basque accounts. In an environment where both suspects and interrogators brought an enhanced consciousness of New World anthropophagy into the interrogation chamber, any reference to the cannibalistic proclivities of witches would have been collaboratively embellished and developed through mutual recourse to these imaginative lodes. Through this cocreative process, suspects and interrogators would have created accounts of cannibalistic witches that – while evoking the predatory and man-eating proclivities of heretics, spirit-hosts, ogres and hell demons – were ultimately defined by their capacity to process, cook and consume human corpses with all the clinical, ritual industry of the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil.

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