CARING CONJURERS AND DEMONIC DIVINERS: GENDER AND THE
UNSTABLE POSITION OF PEASANT MAGICAL PRACTITIONERS IN
CATALONIA, 1300-1330
by
Larissa Clotildes
B.A., University of Northern British Columbia, 2014

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
IN
HISTORY

UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
December 2016
© Larissa Clotildes, 2016

ii
Abstract
This thesis compares visitation records from the dioceses of Barcelona and Tortosa from
1303-1330 to analyse gender and peasant magical practises. It argues that peasant magic
reflected gender norms that associated nurturance and passivity with women and protection
and activity with men, but also reversed these norms through the greater publicity of
women’s magic. Furthermore, bishops’ perspective of women shaped their interpretation of
peasant magic as either a demonic threat to Christians’ souls or mere foolishness and
superstition. By examining how the feminine stereotype of peasant magical practitioners
differently manifested in Barcelona and Tortosa, and contrasting the stereotypical image to
the real numbers of men and women who performed magic, the language of magical practice,
and the community roles and characteristics of magical practitioners, this thesis contributes to
understandings of not only the belief and practise of magic in the medieval world, but also
the flexibility of medieval patriarchy.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract

ii

Table of Contents

iii

Acknowledgement

iv

Introduction
Historical Context
Sources
The Bishops
Historiography
A Note on “Magic”
Plan for this Thesis

1
7
11
16
19
23
25

Chapter One: The Image of the Lay Medieval Magical Practitioner
Creating the Image: Magic, Gender, and Peasants
Expectations Meet Reality in the Visitation Registers
Conclusion

28
31
42
55

Chapter Two: Unravelling the Vocabulary of Magic in Medieval Catalonia
Conjuring
Sorcery
Maleficia
Divination
Fetilla
Ligamentis
Encortation
Conclusion

57
59
64
70
74
79
82
85
88

Chapter Three: Recognizing the Diversity of Medieval Magical Practitioners
The Ones Everyone Expected: Lower-Status Women
Lower-Status Male Magical Practitioners
Marriage and Marital Status
Not-Quite Necromancers: Literate Male Magic
Non-Christian Magical Practitioners
Conclusion

90
93
102
106
110
118
122

Conclusion

125

Bibliography

129

Appendices

137

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Acknowledgements
In trying to find the words to express my gratitude to the people who have supported me
through the process of writing this thesis, I find that the eloquence that comes so easily in
talking about people long-dead fails me when I try to speak of the living. Family, friends, and
mentors have their own kind of magic, and my discussions of the importance of medieval
communities could not have been what they are without the very great influence my own
community has had on me.
Thank-you to my parents; to my Mom for making me an unashamed reader and avid writer—
your commitment to your own writing and revisions has many times borne me through the
pain of re-writing and editing my own work. Thank-you Dad for showing me what it means
to do a project right, for your patience in listening to me rant about my thesis, and for making
me realize the importance of getting excited about what I work on through your own
example.
To Seamus, long-suffering partner and friend—you’ve heard more about this project than
anyone else, lived through the smiles and the tears it’s evoked, and yet you’ve never shown
boredom which is reason enough for thanks! You deserve particular thanks for your very
material help with finding some mathematical logic in my unweildy piles of data. For your
patience, love, support, and science brain, thank you.
To the UNBC history faculty, my committee members, and the other scholars who have
helped me through this project, for your mentorship and support. To Dr. Holler for teaching
me to be unapologetic in my writing; to Dr. Swainger for some of the best writing advice I’ve
ever recieved (“be patient”); to Dr. Binnema, whose comments have always dramatically
improved research proposals; and to Dr. Bryce for always reminding me of the importance of
historiography. Thanks go also to Drs. Casas Aguilar and Armstrong-Partida.
To all the other grad students I’ve worked with as a TA or attended conferences with,
especially Launi and Rina, for making this whole adventure even more adventurous!
To the staff of the Prince George Public Library, particularly Patricia, for realizing the
popular appeal of this project and providing an outlet for it, Jeff, for always being most
forgiving of my wonky schedule, and Maddison, for “what’s with the badger?”
And finally, to Dr. Dana Wessell Lightfoot, for always believing in me and pushing me to
greater heights, as well as volunteering the time to teach me the languages I needed to
complete this project. In the second year of my undergraduate degree you talked to me at the
busy confluence of building 8 and the Bentley Centre about doing an Honours degree, and
changed everything about what I thought I could become.

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Introduction

Ponç de Gualba, Bishop of Barcelona, conducted the first tour of his new diocese in
1303. As he visited the parishes, he tonsured new clerics, met with the local clergy, inspected
the churches and altars, and assembled groups of male parishioners to question concerning the
lives of the clergy and laity alike. It was in Sabern (probably the modern village Lavern, located
approximately 35 km east of Barcelona) that he first heard of a woman who would become the
focus of several extraordinary documents concerning divination, conjuring, and healing:
Gueraula de Codines, of the parish of Subirats.1 De Gualba did not visit Subirats on this tour,
perhaps because it was inconvenient for his scheduled route, perhaps because he initially had
no interest in this diviner, or perhaps because business in Mallorca drew him away early. 2
Whatever the case, the encounter between the bishop and Gueraula waited until 1304, when he
summoned her to the monastery of Saint Cugat.
Upon his return to Barcelona, the bishop accused Gueraula of being “publicly known
for the crimes of sorcery and divination” and that “many in the surrounding parishes” knew

The documents concerning Gueraula de Codines are available in several forms. Transcriptions of
Gueraula’s appearance in 1303 are available in both Josép Martí Bonet “Visitas Pastorales y los 'Comunes' del
primer ano del Pontificado del Obispo de Barcelona, Ponc de Gualba (1303),” Anthologica Annua 28-29 (198182): 671 and Josép Martí Bonet, L. Niqui Puigvert, and F. Miquel Mascort, Processos de l’Arxiu Diocesà de
Barcelona (Barcelona: Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 1984), 64. The manuscript for
the 1303 visit is held at the Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona (ADB), Visitationes s.n., f.13v. Transcriptions of
Gueraula’s 1304 and 1307 appearances before the bishop are available in Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 716-718;
Bonet, Puigvert, and Mascort, Processos, 109-111 and Josép Perarnau i Espelt, “Activitats i formules
supersticioses de guaricio a Catalunya en la primera meitat de segle XIV,” Arxiu de textos catalans antics 1
(1982): 67-70. Original manuscripts of the 1304 and 1307 documents are at ADB, Visitationes s.n., f.42v-43v.
Transcriptions of the 1328 and 1330 documents are available only in Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 72 and in
manuscript form at the ADB, Notule Communium 4, f.172v and f.251r. There is no published transcription of
the 1314 visitation; I accessed the manuscript held at the Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona, Visitationes 2, f. 42v. I
am grateful for having had access to microfilmed copies of all original manuscripts at the Hill Museum and
Manuscript Library (HMML), St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN.
2
I have been unable to discover what this business entailed.
1

2
this.3 Gueraula readily admitted that she had “for diverse sicknesses done conjurations and
invocations of God,” and that she used the sign of the cross, the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria,
and the Creed in healing.4 She also displayed a sophisticated knowledge of urine examination,
a diagnosis technique usually associated with formally educated physicians, which she used to
determine the severity of a person’s illness and whether it could be cured through behavioural
changes such as fasting and abstinence, or required the attention of “greater doctors.” 5 After
hearing these confessions, Ponç de Gualba released her under the condition that she publicly
renounce her previous magical acts and travel to the Church of St. Mary of Montserrat to say
two hundred prayers—but this latter penance was postponed until after she had given birth, for
at the time of her interrogation Gueraula was pregnant. De Gualba furthermore forbade her to
administer any “conjuration, divination, or medication” thenceforth.6

“...dominus Poncius Barchinone Episcopus citavit personaliter venire ad se Gueraulam de Codines de
parrochia de Subirats que erat publice diffamata de crimine sortilegiis et divinacionis per plures circumvicinas
parrochias...” in Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales” 716; Bonet, Puigvert, and Mascort, Processos, 109; Espelt,
“Activitats i formules,” 67; ADB, Visitationes s.n., f.42v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f.42v.
4
“...jurata dixit et confessa fuit se pro diversis infirmitatibus fecisse coniurationes et invocaciones dei
et sanctorum dicendo ‘credo in deum’ et ‘pater noster’ et ‘ave María’...” Ibid.
5
“Item, interrogata fuit si scit aliquid de arte medicine dixit se nihil scire excepto quod in urina dixit se
congnoscere infirmitatem pascientis. Interrogata per quod signa aqua dixit quod quan est febris continua est
aqua citrina, quan est terciana est quasi vermeyla, quando quartana post accesionem est quasi rubia post non
aparent signa infirmitatis in ea quando est apusstema est aqua spumosa et alba.Interrogata cuiusmodi remedia
adhidebet in predictis dixit quod in terciana et continua mandat ieiunare et abstinere apostematis autem dicit
esse periculum et quod vadant ad edicos majores et idem dicit quartanariis .”Ibid.
6
“Et cum dicta Gueraula esset publice diffamata ut supra dicitur, dominus Episcopus recepto primitus
sacramento ab ea quod de cetero non utatur aliqua coniuracione divinacione aut medicamento et cum fuerit
confessa se aliqua in veritate nescire et par consequens posset esse et fuerit perculum aluti animarum et
coporum iniunxit ea quod per tres dies solempnes scilicet in proxima die Nativitatis domini et die
Circumcisionis et Apparicionis sequentibus stet iuxta presbiterium post quam feverit preces sine capa en tors et
dicat quod ipsa nihil scit de predictis nec habet aliquam fidem nec credit aliqua utilitatis afferre et quod aliua
persona ad eam de cetero non veniat et si aliquis scienter veniret ad eam pro occasione predicta sciant quod
dominus Episcopus eos denunciabit excommunicatos. Et dominus Episcopus iniuncta sibi penitentia quod post
partum quem gerit in utero visitet ecclesiam beate Marie de Monte Serrato et quod dicat C. pater noster et
totidem ave María, hinc ad unum annum absolvit eam. Ita tamen quod si de cetero ad premissa rediret pro
voncincta haberetur omnimo super terminibus antedictis et mandavit B[ernardo] Messeguerii et A[rnaldo] de
Peralba ebdomadariis de Sobirats quod si dicta Gueraula nollet predictam penitentiam umiliter complere quod
cesset a divinis quoia diu ipsa fuerit in parrochia sua.” Ibid.
3

3
Two and a half years later, in 1307, Gueraula reappeared before the bishop “of her own
motive,” requesting that he modify her previous sentence and allow her to return to practising
the examination of urine.7 She revealed that many parishioners sought her expertise in this
skill, and that “a foreign doctor” had trained her in it in her girlhood.8 After consulting two
other learned men, one a physician, Ponç de Gualba agreed to the modification, though he
heavily stressed that she could only advise patients, not prescribe treatments, and she remained
forbidden to use any conjuring.
Following this injunction, Gueraula disappeared from the historical record for over two
decades, save for a brief appearance as a sorceress in a 1314 document produced by Ponç de
Gualba’s vicar-general, Hugo de Cardona. Cardona, seemingly unaware or uninterested in the
fact that he had encountered a recalcitrant conjurer, left no record indicating that he ever
attempted to correct Gueraula’s behaviour. When she fully resurfaced, it was in a very different
context of ecclesiastical thought about magic—and one that was far less gentle about correcting
those who used it. In 1328, a newly criminalized Gueraula appeared in a bail document for
having used, “under the veil of medicine, divinations and sorceries.”9 Her son pledged his
goods in exchange for her release from episcopal prison, but two years later Gueraula was
again the subject of ecclesiastical censure.10 In 1330, Gueraud de Gualba, Ponç de Gualba’s
nephew and vicar-general, sent a letter to a local Catalan inquisitor, Felipe Alfonse, denouncing
Gueraula as one of two “infamous women who many times have used and do use many and

“Gueraula de Cudinis venit ad dominum Episcopum proprio motiu alias non vocata nec citata.” Ibid.
“…quondam medico extraneo qui venit per mare ad Villam Francham nomine en Bonfi bene sunt
XXX anni.” Bonet, Puigvert, and Mascort, Processos, 110. Espelt’s transcription is identical, except that he
records Gueraula’s teacher’s name as as “En Bofim.” The manuscript is quite clear that the name is “Bonfi,” a
common name with many cognates in the medieval Christian Mediterranean.
9
“…quod utebatur, sub velamine medicine, divinations et sortilegiis.” Espelt, “Activitats i formules,”
72.
10
Ibid.
7
8

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grave sorceries, among which are certain that savour of manifest heresy.” 11 By this time,
Gueraula was in her seventies and her lifetime of healing conjurations and divinations took on
the mantle of heresy in the eyes of the Church. While there is no record of her trial by the
inquisition, if, indeed, Felipe Alfonse ever followed up on Gueraud’s tip, the denunciation
itself reveals the extreme limits of tolerance for magic by bishops in early fourteenth-century
Catalonia.
Gueraula’s repeated encounters with ecclesiastical officials resulted in a complex and
dramatic story. In some ways, she was unusual for a rural magical practitioner of her time—
few of her peers were trained in urine analysis, and of the 170 magical practitioners who form
the evidence of this thesis, Gueraula was the only one who definitely faced the possibility of
an inquisitorial trial. However, in many other ways she was very much a typical peasant
magical practitioner. Like many other laypeople who performed magic in early fourteenthcentury Catalonia, Gueraula was a member of a rural community that valued her skill, as
evidenced by her many clients. She used Christian prayers and symbols as powerful elements
in her conjurings, a theme that repeatedly emerged in descriptions of peasant magical activity.
Finally, she was a peasant woman, whose social status and gender placed her among the most
common and most visible of medieval Europe’s magical practitioners. This image, however,
did not reflect the full reality of peasant magical practitioners in early fourteenth-century
Catalonia, one-third of whom were men.
Gueraula’s story also exemplifies the fluidity of the concept of “magic” in the late
medieval period. Many of Gueraula’s activities were not very different from acceptable prayers
and medical practices, yet she, the bishop, and the parishioners of Subirats all identified certain

“…diffamatas quod multis temporibus use sunt et utuntur multis et gravibus sortilegiis, inter que
sunt quedam que sapiunt heresim manifeste…” Ibid, 72-3.
11

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of her actions with the concept of magic. Throughout the medieval period, Christian elites
maintained that magical effects occurred when a demon performed illusions to cause seemingly
impossible results, and the demon’s involvement could happen with or without the human
magician’s awareness. In contrast, peasants and other laypeople had not a theory or definition
of magic, but rather a set of practices and beliefs largely based on Christian concepts, that
helped them navigate the visible and invisible worlds. There have been numerous studies of
the gulf between elite and lay understandings of magic in the medieval world, which
particularly emphasize how this gulf contributed to the creation of the early modern witch
stereotype.12 While recognizing the differences between elite and lay ways of thinking about
magic is important, it is also necessary to recognize that there existed enough commonalities
for bishops and peasants to confidently identify magical practitioners who seemingly matched
both mentalities.13
The process of identifying magical practitioners reveals how elite concepts of magic
and the people who practised it shaped the ecclesiastical record of interactions with actual
magical practitioners. In this thesis, I compare visitation record sources from the dioceses of
Barcelona and Tortosa from 1303 to 1330 to analyse how and why these tensions manifested

For example, see Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundation in Popular and
Learned Culture 1300-1500 (London: Routledge, 1976); Michael Bailey, “From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical
Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages,” Speculum 76 no.4 (2001): 960-990; José Vincent Boscá
Codina, “Sortílegas, adivinas, y conjuradoras: Indicios de una religiosidad prohibida,” Revista d’Historia
Medieval 2 (1991):63-76.
13
Such commonalities and crossovers have usually been studied in the context of medical magic, using
medical texts that include charms (some of which have clear elite backgrounds and others of which appear more
popular in origin). For example, see Maaike Van Der Lugd, “The Learned Physician as Charismatic Healer:
Urso of Salerno on Incantations in Medicine, Magic, and Religion,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87, no.3
(2013): 307-346; Audrey Meany, “Extra-Medical Elements in Anglo-Saxon Medicine,” Social History of
Medicine 24, no.1 (2011): 41-56; Lea T. Olsan, “Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and
Practice” Social History of Medicine 16, no.3 (2003): 343-366. For specifically Iberian studies, see Maxim
Kerkhof, “Sobre Medicina y Magia en la España de los Siglos XIII-XIV” Cuadernos de CEMYR 8 (2000): 177197; Michael McVaugh, “The Experimenta of Arnald of Villanova,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance
Studies 1 (1971): 107-118.
12

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in the ways they did. I argue that peasant magic in early fourteenth-century Catalonia reflected
gender norms that associated nurturance and passivity with women and protection and activity
with men, but also reversed these norms as women’s magic was more public than men’s. I
further argue that bishops’ approach to peasant magic was fundamentally shaped by their view
of women, which informed whether they viewed peasant magic as a whole as feminine and
threatening or as mere misguided superstition, which reveals the pervasiveness and flexibility
of the patriarchal image of women in medieval society. These patterns both confirm and
complicate current ideas about the relationship between gender and magic in the medieval
period. On the one hand, the associations of femininity with magic and of women with
nurturance reflect well-established historical understandings of gender in medieval society. On
the other hand, a deeper analysis of these relationships in early fourteenth-century Catalonia
reveals that the gendering and practise of magic went far beyond the simple image of the old
herb-woman. Not only did many peasant men practice magic, but there was also no impassable
barrier between masculine and feminine magics. The assertion that magic was a feminine
activity assumes that it caused suspicion, and was a blow to the practitioner’s reputation, but
its widespread practice and the high visibility of women as magical practitioners in early
fourteenth-century Catalonia indicate that magic was not only a common practice, but a normal
and even essential one for medieval peasant communities. Furthermore, while elite bishops
saw peasant magic as cause for censure and condemnation, the practitioners themselves used
their magic as both a means of directly communing with the divine—something extremely
difficult for lay peasants, and particularly peasant women, to achieve by legitimate means—
and a source of secular power by means of the prestige and influence that a skilled magical
practitioner could gain among her or his peers.

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Historical Context
Barcelona and Tortosa shared many of the same conditions in the early fourteenth
century—they were both ruled by Jaume II, spoke Catalan, were predominantly Christian, and
had large rural populations and an agrarian-based economy. However, there were also distinct
differences between the two dioceses. The Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula had
affected the two regions differently; while Muslim control of Barcelona did not long outlast
the eighth century, Christian forces only conquered Tortosa in 1148. Consequently, medieval
Barcelona had a tiny Muslim population, mostly composed of slaves brought north from the
frontier zones, while Tortosa had a considerably larger number of Muslims who lived mostly
in the rural areas surrounding the city.14 Tortosa was located inland on the Ebro River in the
Kingdom of Aragon, part of the larger political body of the Crown of Aragon.15 Barcelona was
a coastal city ruled directly by Jaume II who there held the title of count. He was a talented
diplomat who successfully mended the rift his two predecessors had rent between the Crown
of Aragon and the papacy.16 This easing of the relationship between the monarchy and the

14
Gunnar Knutsen has shown that this division influenced the way that Christians accused of
witchcraft in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries constructed their confessions. Those from areas with a
long history of Islamic control and with formerly high Muslim populations drew on motifs common in Arabic
folklore, such as using spells to seek hidden treasure, while those in the northern areas of Catalonia followed
confession patterns that reflected those found in the rest of Europe. Gunnar Knutsen, Servants of Satan and
Masters of Demons: The Spanish Inquisition’s Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona 1478-1700
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 1.
15
In the early fourteenth century, the Crown of Aragon consisted of the County of Barcelona and the
kingdoms of Aragon, Mallorca, Sicily, and Valencia. The count-king ruled each region largely independently
of the others, and each region had its own cort (governing body), judicial system (in addition to ecclesiastical
judiciaries), and other structures of government. See J.N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms 1250-1410, vol. 1, 2
vols., The Spanish Kingdoms (Oxford, 1976).
16
This rift began during the reign of Pere II, who collaborated with rebels against Charles of Anjou in
Sicily. This lead Pope Martin IV, ally of Charles of Anjou and overlord of Sicily, to formally depose Pere and
name Charles of Valois (the younger son of Phillipe III of France) as King of Aragon. This state of affairs and
its inevitable accompanying wars continued through the reigns of Pere II and is son Alfons II, and passed to
Alfons’ brother Jaume II. Jaume II renounced the Aragonese claim to Sicily in 1297 in exchange for a papal
alliance and the kingdoms of Sardinia and Corsica, which he held as vassal to the pope. J.N. Hillgarth, The
Spanish Kingdoms 1250-1516, vol. 2, 259-266.

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Church took place within a context of both a weakened papacy and a directed attempt at
pastoral reform.
The early fourteenth century saw a rigorous crackdown on what had been an emerging
tradition of academic magic among some educated Christian men. Inspired and partially
informed by Islamic and Jewish texts and practices, but ultimately working within a Christian
framework of divinity and nature, some men (typically clerics) attempted to summon and
control demons in a practice labelled necromancy.17 They argued that contrary to the Catholic
Church’s long-held beliefs, it was possible for human beings to assert dominance over demons
if they prepared themselves with appropriate cleansings and rituals. The university in Paris was
somewhat of a hotbed for these controversial magical ideas, and the archbishop of Paris
published a condemnation of necromancy in 1277.18 Natural magic, a competing brand of elite
magic, appeared at the same time. It held that certain natural forces could be manipulated
without resorting to demonic interference.19 Natural magic purportedly functioned by
accessing the innate, natural qualities of certain objects, and was particularly influential in
astrology. Ultimately, neither necromantic nor natural magic much reflected the charms and
spells so popular among lower-status Christians, yet it was the existence of and debate
surrounding these elite magics that inspired some ecclesiastics to look more closely at lay
magical practices.
Alongside this changing landscape in the perception of magical practices, the
fourteenth century also saw the maturation of the ideas and pastoral innovations established
during the landmark council of Lateran IV in 1215. Three of these innovations are particularly

Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6-9.
Ibid., 157.
19
Ibid., 9.
17
18

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important regarding the way ecclesiastical elites and laypeople interacted over issues of magic:
annual episcopal visitations, regular confession for the laity, and the medieval inquisition. In
theory, episcopal visitations meant that bishops were supposed to take an annual tour of all the
parishes in their diocese, correcting any irregularities of belief or practice they encountered
and generally seeing to the spiritual well-being of their flock. In reality, it seems that these
visits were irregular and often incomplete, and the first recordings of such visits do not appear
until the early fourteenth century, nearly one hundred years later. However, by the 1300s a
century of emphasis on the importance of confession as a sacrament had increasingly allowed
clergy to become familiar with the magical practices of the laity, and condemn them as
superstitious. In addition to implementing annual episcopal visitations and mandatory
confession, Lateran IV gave birth to the medieval inquisition, used to investigate and correct
the worst of the errors that visitations and confessions discovered. The medieval inquisition
arose to investigate cases of “manifest heresy” that were too widespread, too well-established,
or that involved persons too highly placed for bishops to deal with on their own. Inquisitors
initially targeted the south of France alongside knights of the Albigensian Crusade, where the
Cathar heresy had firmly rooted among the nobility and peasantry alike in the early thirteenth
century. Catharism had also spread into Catalonia, which neighboured France, and in 1233
Jaume I of Aragon invited inquisitors into the Crown of Aragon in order to root out the
heretics.20 This invitation made the Crown of Aragon unique in medieval Iberia, for the other
kingdoms did not have an inquisition or inquisitors until the Spanish Inquisition in the late
fifteenth century, and the Portuguese Inquisition in the early sixteenth.

20

Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 135, 152-3.

10
Since the Church held that magic operated through the cooperation of demons, it was
always a potential inquisitorial interest, but only cases where the perpetrator explicitly invoked
the name of a demon counted as “manifest heresy.” While this clarification clearly included
most forms of necromancy, it did not reflect lay magic, which usually employed explicitly
Christian elements. The relationship between lay magic and necromancy changed in 1326
when Pope John XXII expanded inquisitorial powers concerning magical offences beyond
“manifest heresy” to any magical activity at all. This change was fueled by Pope John’s
(perhaps justified) fears of magical conspiracy—after all, the bishop of Cahors, Hugh Géraud,
had reputedly attempted to magically murder Pope John in 1317.21 Magical plots and
accusations of sorcery among Europe’s elites increased in frequency and caused greater panic
during the early fourteenth century. Phillip IV of France accused Guichard, Bishop of Troyes,
of using sorcery to poison the queen, Joana of Navarre, and cause her death.22 He also accused
the Order of the Knights Templar of sorcery and communing with demons, though the resultant
trials, executions, imprisonments, and dissolution of the order had clear political results that
favoured the king.23 The early fourteenth century, therefore, was the pivot point at which new
fears and concepts of magic emerged among Europe’s elites. While it is possible that it took
the strain of mid-century crises such as the Black Death in order for these fears to disseminate
throughout the European population, the early fourteenth century was a key moment in the
development of how elites thought about magic and therefore in how they viewed the magic

Keickhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 97.
Karen Jolly, Bengt Ankarloo, and Stuart Clark, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle
Ages, vol. 3, 6 vols., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2001), 220.
23
Catherine Rider, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2006), 146.
21
22

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of the laity. In investigating lay magic, however, elites did not always recognize its distinct
differences from necromancy, as show by the inquisitors Bernard Gui and Nicolau Eymeric.
During the fourteenth century, clerics and particularly inquisitors such as Bernard Gui
and Nicolau Eymeric unintentionally conflated elite necromancy and lay conjuring. Both of
these men wrote inquisitorial manuals that included direction on dealing with magical
practitioners, but Michael Bailey has shown that the type of magic Gui and Eymeric discussed
did not differentiate between elements associated with elite necromancy and those associated
with the laity. 24 Instead, Eymeric, Gui and other inquisitors and theologians grafted the image
of magical practitioners as peasant women onto the powers and heretical practices attributed
to necromancers. Since these two inquisitors both worked and wrote in Catalonia and southern
France (which shared many similarities with Catalonia in the medieval period), it was the
magical practices of people like Gueraula that they unintentionally melded into their
understanding of elite necromancy.25

Sources
The main body of sources I have consulted in writing this thesis comprises a
combination of published and manuscript visitation records from the dioceses of Barcelona
and Tortosa. The diocese of Barcelona is home to some of the earliest extant visitation
collections in Europe. I consulted the four earliest visitation registers from Barcelona, three of

Bailey, “From Sorcery to Witchcraft,” 960-990.
In the early fourteenth century, Catalonia and Provence functioned, in many ways, as a cultural unit.
Catalan and Provençal are closely related languages, and many thirteenth century Catalan troubadors used
Provençal words and stylistic devices in their poetry. These relations also extended into the economic, political,
and even religious arenas, with southern France being an important site of trade for Catalan merchants, a long
tradition of familial alliances between the Counts of Barcelona and those of Provençe, and Cathar heretics
passing frequently across the Pyrenees. See Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 204-5; Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray, 30th Anniversary Edition (New York:
George Braziller, Inc., 2013).
24
25

12
which were available to me only in manuscript or microfilm form at the Hill Museum and
Manuscript Library (HMML). These spanned the years 1303 (published and HMML
microfilm), 1304-1310 (HMML microfilm), 1312-1314 (manuscript, courtesy of the Arxiu
Diocesá de Barcelona), and 1323-1328 (HMML microfilm).26 I chose these registers because
they covered the episcopate of a single bishop, Ponç de Gualba. To complement the records
from Barcelona, and due to their own abundance of reported magical practitioners, I also used
the María Theresa Garcia Egea’s publication of the 1314-1315 visitation of bishop Francesc
Paholac of Tortosa because of its chronological overlap with the Barcelona record, and the
abundance of magical practitioners present in its pages.27 Where the Barcelona registers
provide depth of detail about magical activities, the Tortosa register records the breadth of
magical practice.
Visitation records are, in many ways, the product of a unequal collaboration between
bishops, scribes, clerics, and lay parishioners—in the cases of the Barcelona and Tortosa
visitation records, the vast majority of these parishioners were peasants who belonged to rural
parishes outside the cities of Barcelona and Tortosa themselves. When conducting a visitation,
the bishop (or his delegate) would select representatives from among the local parish clergy
and male laity (usually these laymen had some local importance or status), whom he would
swear to truthfulness and then interview either individually or collectively, depending on his
preference. In Barcelona, the tendency seems to have been to interview all local representatives
together, whereas in Tortosa the bishop preferred to interview the clerics apart from the
For the 1303 register, I consulted: Bonet “Visitas Pastorales”; Bonet, Puigvert, and Mascort,
Processos; and ADB, Visitationes s.n., at HMML, microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n. For the 1304-1310 register,
I consulted ADB, Visitationes 1, at HMML, microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1. For the 1312-1314 register, I
consulted the original manuscript at ADB, Visitationes 2. For the 1323-1328 register I consulted ADB,
Visitationes 3 at HMML, microfilm no. 31953, Visitas 3.
27
María Theresa García Egea, La Visita Pastoral a la Diocesis de Tortosa del Obispo Paholac
(Castello: Diputacio de Castello, 1993).
26

13
laymen. The number of representatives could vary widely, depending on the diligence of the
visitor, the size of the parish, and the availability of parishioners eligible for questioning. In
some parishes, only the rector of the church spoke for the whole parish, while elsewhere dozens
contributed to the interview. The visitor inquired into the performance and morality of the
parish clergy and especially their observance of celibacy, for Catalan clergy were notorious for
their sexual relationships.28 He also inspected the state of the parish church, its books, and
materials. His final duty was to inquire into the lives of the parish laity themselves, and correct
any irregularities of belief or practice he encountered. During this question period, the bishop’s
scribe would either simultaneously translate into and record the representatives’ spoken
Catalan responses into Latin, or take notes in Catalan and later compile a formal Latin copy.
Finally, the bishop might summon any suspect parishioners for a verbal correction, but this
element appears irregularly in the registers themselves, possibly because the visitor did not
bother to correct the person, because the person was unavailable for correction, or simply
because the scribe did not record the correction itself. In general, the Tortosa register contains
a more consistent record of correction than do the Barcelona registers.
Visitation records are extremely useful sources for understanding medieval lay
Christians’ beliefs and practices. Unlike penitentials, synodal statutes, theological treatises,
and other sources that may mention lay beliefs and practices (or the writer’s assumptions about
lay beliefs and practices), visitation records reflect an actual encounter between an
ecclesiastical representative and members of the laity. Both elite and lay people contributed to

Michelle Armstrong-Partida, “Priestly Marriage: The Tradition of Clerical Concubinage in the
Spanish Church,” Viator 40, no. 2 (2009): 221–53; Michelle Armstrong-Partida, “Priestly Wives: The Role and
Acceptance of Clerics’ Concubines in the Parishes of Late Medieval Catalunya,” Speculum 88, no. 1 (2013):
166–214; Marie Kelleher, “‘Like Man and Wife’: Clerics’ Concubines in the Diocese of Barcelona,” Journal of
Medieval History 28, no. 4 (2002): 349–60.
28

14
the information it contains—elites by seeking specific types of information, and laypeople by
responding with their understanding of what the visitor was trying to discover. Furthermore,
unlike inquisitorial and other judicial records that might also inquire into lay beliefs, visitation
records more easily allow for an expansive survey of beliefs and practices in a specific region
during a specific time period.29 The Tortosa records are a prime example of this quality—in
just one year, Francesc Paholac encountered one hundred and twenty-one magical practitioners
in fifty-three different parishes (he visited eighty-four parishes in total).30 Such numbers offer
a forceful testament to the widespread vibrancy of magical practices among the laity.
Despite their valuable and useful qualities, visitation records also come with notable
weaknesses. Foremost among these are the multiple layers of authorship inherent in them.
While visitation records are useful for understanding lay religious experience and practice,
they are far from first-hand accounts. Not only do the sources contain the doctoring of scribal
translation from Catalan to Latin, but even the way that parishioners understood and chose to
answer the bishops’ questions might cause ideas to become lost in translation, unable to be
communicated effectively between a lay speaker and an elite listener (or the reverse). The
possibility exists that some parish representatives chose to lie, or to omit information from their
answers, though the practice of collective interview was designed to encourage honesty and
allow for the verification of the representatives’ statements. Furthermore, the visitation record
itself was often little more than a list of delinquents, their respective sins, and whatever penalty

Since inquisitorial records are very detailed, they are extremely useful for tracing relationships and
specific information about particular cases of heresy. The actual court might operate only for a few years in a
given area (the medieval inquisition was not a permanent institution, but rather worked wherever problems
arose), but witness testimony often covered many years, and even decades. However, these same characteristics
mean that inquisition records are typically very long, and therefore unwieldy in large numbers. In the case of
medieval Catalonia it is the decided dearth, rather than length, of inquisitorial records, that makes visitation
records the best sources for understanding lay beliefs.
30
Egea, La Visita Pastoral.
29

15
or correction the bishop ordered them to perform. Details of the actual practices magic-doers
performed were included erratically and recorded largely by chance—the visitor was less
interested in determining precisely what magical practitioners were doing than he was in
identifying and correcting them in the first place.
It is also important to recognize that visitation documents present only a partial record
of pastoral activities, and that the Barcelona records, specifically, were created to work in
tandem with the Notule Communium collection.31 This is apparent in the case of Gueraula de
Codines with which I opened this thesis, for the complete record of her encounters with
ecclesiastical officials only appears if one consults both Visitation and Communium sources.
In particular, the Communium records often include information about the consequences for
crimes and misdemeanours that came to light during episcopal visitations, which has particular
bearing in Chapter Three, where I discuss the rates of correction for various magical
practitioners. Fortunately, two fourteenth-century Communium registers have been published
at least in part, and I have consulted these (the first, published by Jocelyn Hillgarth and Giulio
Silano, covers 1345-1348, and the second, by Richard Gyug, covers 1348-1349).32 Neither of
these publications, however, includes documents that mention magical practices, making it
difficult to determine the relationship between the two collections as specifically concerns
magic.
Finally, my access to these sources depended both on accurate reading of the
manuscript (in some cases, damage or a poor scribal hand makes this difficult) and translating

See Richard Gyug, The Diocese of Barcelona During the Black Death: The Register “Notule
Communium” 15, 1348-1349 (Toronto: Pontificial Institute of Medieaval studies, 1994), 26, 38-39; J.N.
Hillgarth and Giulio Silano, The Register “Notule Communium” 14 of the Diocese of Barcelona (1345-1348)
(Toronto: Pontificial Institute of Medieaval studies, 1994), 3-4, 9.
32
Ibid.
31

16
them from Latin (and, occasionally, medieval Catalan) to English. While some of the records
I used exist in published forms, I have preferred the manuscript version wherever possible, and
have used the publication as a reference to aid in deciphering difficult passages. In effect, using
visitation records requires reading through paleographic, linguistic, ideological, and temporal
veils at all times to best interpret the information they contain. A perfect reconstruction of
peasant beliefs is impossible, but by carefully sifting through these layers and identifying
inconsistencies and patterns, it is possible to come to an understanding of how themes of
religion, gender and community interacted in medieval ways of thinking about and practising
magic.

The Bishops
This study is based on works produced during the concurrent reigns of two Catalan
bishops: Ponç de Gualba of Barcelona (1303-1334) and Francesc Paholac of Tortosa (13101316). The former was an active record-maker who left a substantial collection of documents
from his term as bishop. The latter left far scantier material. While continental and regional
contexts influenced the situation of magic in the fourteenth century, it was the attitudes,
interests, and gendered interpretations of these local bishops that had the greatest immediate
bearing on how magical practitioners were treated by ecclesiastical authorities. These bishops’
choices decided whether they would see and approach magic in the traditionally benevolent
fashion that assumed the innocent foolishness of magical practitioners, or with a new and
vigorous harshness that viewed women as both easily tempted and dangerous temptresses.
Francesc Paholac’s episcopate left little impression on the documentary record. His
father, Don Francesc Paholac, had earned wealth and status helping Jaume I conquer Morella

17
in the thirteenth century, and appeared as a witness or participant in several charters.33 Coming
from this privileged background, Francesc Paholac followed the typical path of the medieval
bishop. He became a priest in 1286, canon of the Cathedral of Tortosa sometime thereafter,
and bishop in 1310. During his short term, he founded the confraternity of Saint Lazarus as a
leper house, and presided over two diocesan synods. He went on his first (and only) visitation
tour in 1314-1315, and died in 1316. His decision to change the time of year for diocesan
synods from the second week of November, which was difficult for priests due to the “rain,
cold, and other troubles of the season,” to two weeks after Easter reflects a certain
pragmatism.34 The same pragmatism colours the visitation register he produced—at the
beginning of this record appears the list of questions that he asked in the parishes he visited.
Furthermore, the questions are divided into whether they refer to the local clergy or laity, and
each query is clearly numbered. The entries of the visitations themselves largely follow the
same order, with the answers to the different questions explicitly labelled in the manner:
“Concerning question four, they said....”35 Overall, Francesc Paholac seems to have been a
man less motivated by pious fervour than by a simple desire for efficient practicality and
thoroughness. Ponç de Gualba was also concerned with efficiency, but was less detail-oriented.
Ponç de Gualba was an energetic administrator involved in a variety of projects during
his term as bishop of Barcelona. He was from a family of Mallorca, but Gueraud de Gualba
(probably his uncle) was bishop of Barcelona until 1300.36 The position of bishop remained
empty for three years after Geraud’s death, until filled by Ponç in 1303. One of his most notable
The following information about Franscisco Paholac is based on: “Francisco Paholach” in Ramon
O’Callaghan, Episcopologio de La Sancta Iglesia de Tortosa, 85-87, (Tortosa: Imp. Catolica de G. Llasat,
1896). Egea does have a biographical discussion of Paholac’s life, but it is based on and identical to
O’Callaghan’s.
34
“Francisco Paholach” in O’Callaghan, Episcopologio de La Sancta Iglesia de Tortosa, 87.
35
“Super IV, dixerunt...” Egea, La Visita Pastoral.
36
Bonet, Puigvert, and Mascort, Processos, 17.
33

18
achievements as bishop was the complete restructuring of the diocesan archives in Barcelona
into the Communium, Visitation, Collationes, and Registra Ordinatorum collections, which
remain four of the main archival organization categories at the Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona
today.37 Ponç de Gualba’s attitude towards his role as bishop was enthusiastic and wellintentioned, but he had a habit of involving himself in extra-diocesan matters and other
distractions. He interrupted his first visitation tour in 1303 to return to Mallorca. He also
became entangled in the political scene of the Crown of Aragon, and was exiled to Mallorca
from 1311 to 1314.38 His extra-diocesan involvement extended to an aborted attempt to create
a school of liberal arts in Barcelona to replace the defunct college at Lleida. 39 Overall, his
career was characterized by ambitious projects, not all of which he completed.
Ponç de Gualba and Francesc Paholac’s styles of managing their dioceses are very
telling of their ways of dealing with magical practitioners among their peasant populations.
Francesc Paholac was content to do the job efficiently and thoroughly, as it had been done for
centuries—his records are clear, organized, and highly repetitive. He rarely asked for details
about the magical practitioners he encountered, and corrected as many as he could with simple
and predictable measures. Ponç de Gualba’s records, on the other hand, fluctuate dramatically
between impassioned fervour leading to irregular but generally quite harsh corrective
measures, and apathetic dutifulness (particularly in the records from after 1310). Together,
these two bishops show the range of reactions ecclesiastical elites could have to peasant
magical practitioners—not only did different bishops react differently, but a single bishop’s

Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 585.
Roser Salicrú i Lluch, “Les primeres visites pastorals a les parròquies del castell de Mataró: Mataró i
Llavaneres (1305-1310), Acta Historica et Archaeologica Mediaevalia 11-12, (1990-1): 330.
39
Josép Perarnau i Espelt, “L’Ordinacio studii Barchinone et rectoris ejusdem’ del Bisbe Ponç de
Gualba (8 Novembre 1309),” Revista Catalana de Teologia 2 (1977): 151–88.
37
38

19
attitude could change dramatically over time. Gender was a key factor in determining the two
bishops’ reactions, since it was their view of the relationship between femininity and magic
that most shaped their approach to lay magical practitioners more broadly. By comparing two
bishops whose ways of dealing with peasant magic varied so greatly, and by foregrounding the
difference that gender played in their work, it is possible to gain a clearer understanding of
peasant-elite encounters concerning magical practices in the early fourteenth century. Having
established the historical context of this work, I will now discuss the historiographical context
into which my research fits.

Historiography
This work is simultaneously a gender history and a history of medieval magic as it
occurred in the context of the early fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon. In my focus on
gender and Catalonia, my work relates to Theresa María Vinyoles i Vidal’s 1970s research on
medieval Catalan women’s lives. She published her seminal work on the subject, Les
barcelonines a les darrieres de l’edat mitjana, 1370-1410, in 1976, and has since followed it
with several other books and articles on the situation of women in the Catalan areas of medieval
Iberia.40 Recent English-language scholarship on gender in the medieval Crown of Aragon has
tended to focus on women’s relationship to the law, both in terms of their legal status and their
use of the legal system. For example, Dana Wessell Lightfoot’s Women, Dowries, and Agency:
Marriage in Fifteenth Century Valencia explores lower-status women’s experience of marriage
through their acquisition and legal defence of their dowry property. Marie Kelleher’s The

40
Teresa-María Vinyoles i Vidal, Les barcelonines a les darrieres de l’Edat Mitjana, 1370-1410
(Barcelona: Fundacio Salvador Vives Casajuana, 1976). The first English-language work on medieval Iberia is
Heath Dillard’s Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), but this study focuses on Castile, rather than the Crown of Aragon.

20
Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon explores women’s roles
more broadly as actors in the judicial systems of the Crown of Aragon.41 Following a different
route, and one of greater relevance to my study, is Michelle Armstrong-Partida’s work on
clerical concubinage in late medieval Catalonia, not only because her time period, regional
focus, and emphasis on the peasantry and rural clergy align with my own, but also because her
use of visitation records provided me with a valuable example of how to use these complex
sources.42 There is, therefore, a reasonable (though by no means abundant) groundwork for
scholarship on medieval Catalan women’s lives. However, there is a distinct lack of
scholarship (and particularly English-language scholarship) on the gendering of medieval
Catalan magical practices.
Richard Kieckhefer, one of the most prominent historians of medieval magic,
developed the useful concept of magic as a “crossing point”—it is a never so much a historical
subject as it is a historical intersection, because “magic” incorporates elements of religion,
science, medicine, social behaviour, gender, common knowledge and belief, and various other
characteristics of human communities.43 The study of medieval magic has always had close
ties to the study of the early modern witch hunts, a topic which feminist historians have pursued
with great interest because of the particularly virulent and violent forms that early modern
misogyny took in witchcraft theory and persecution. However, due both to the historical reality
that Spain escaped the uncontrolled persecution and execution of witches found in northern

Marie Kelleher, The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Dana Wessell Lightfoot, Women, Dowries and Agency: Marriage in
Fifteenth Century Valencia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
42
Michelle Armstrong-Partida, “Priestly Marriage,” 221–53; “Conflict in the Parish: Antagonistic
Relations Between Clerics and Parishoners,” in A Companion to Pastoral Care in the Late Middle Ages (12001500), ed. Ronald J. Stansbury, vol. 22, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition (Boston, MA: Brill
Publishing, 2010); “Priestly Wives,” 166–214.
43
Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 1-2.
41

21
Europe, and the historiographical reality that feminist history has been slow to take hold among
Spanish scholars, such studies are rare for Iberian regions. The best study of gender and the
witch hunts for early modern Spain is María Tausiet’s Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain:
Abracadaba Omnipotens.44 She examined and compared ecclesiastical, inquisitorial, and
secular court cases concerning magic from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Saragossa to
argue that while men’s magic typically involved money-making schemes and women’s tended
to be love magic, both sexes were essentially concerned with improving their economic wellbeing through the gendered avenues available to them.
Theresa María Vinyoles i Vidal’s 2010 article “De medicina, de magia y de amor:
saberes y practicas femeninas en la documentacion catalana bajomedieval” is the only study of
medieval magic that places gender—or rather, femininity—as a central theme.45 This work
focuses exclusively on female magical practitioners, but as I have consulted many of the same
sources as Vinyoles, I find her failure to acknowledge the huge minority of male magical
practitioners (one third of all who practised magic) troublesome. However, given Vinyoles’
common motivation in her research is to improve the visibility of medieval Catalan women,
her emphasis on women’s magic and its particular manifestations is understandable. Pau
Castell i Granados is the only scholar who has extensively studied medieval Catalan magic. He
has published several articles on the subject in various languages, including the curious choice
to publish in French a study of the etymological development of the Catalan word for witch,
“bruxa,” in “Sortilegas, divinatrices, et fetilleres: les origines de la sorcellerie en Catalogne.”46

María Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain: Abracadaba Omnipotens, trans. Susannah
Howe (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).
45
Teresa-María Vinyoles i Vidal, “De medicina, de magia y de amor: Saberes y practicas femeninas en
la documentación Catalana Bajomedieval,” Clio y Crimen 8 (2011): 225–46.
46
Pau Castell Granados, “Sortilegas, divinatrices et fetilleres: Les origines de la sorcellerie en
Catalogne,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes 22 (2011): 217–41.
44

22
He has examined the early fourteenth-century visitation records, and the case of Gueraula de
Codines (the healer-diviner with whom I opened this introduction) in “E cert te molt gran fama
de bruixa e se fa metgessa e fa medecines: la demonización de las prácticas mágicomedicinales femeninas (siglos XIV-XVI).”47 Valuable as this study is for its overlap with my
own, I do find that Granados’ approach to the gendered element of medieval magic is rather
weak—like Vinyoles, he assumes the femininity of magical practitioners despite ample
evidence of men’s involvement in certain magical practices, and does not explore in detail the
different ways that gender played out in early fourteenth-century reports of magic.
Focusing on the femininity of magical infractions dramatically oversimplifies our
understanding of who medieval magical practitioners were and, consequently, why they
performed the magic that they did. One third of the magical practitioners who appeared in the
visitation records from Barcelona and Tortosa in the period between 1303 and 1330 were men.
While Vinyoles and Granados are correct in recognizing that the majority of those who
reportedly performed magic were women, to focus only on female magical practitioners risks
conforming to presentist stereotypes about medieval magic as an irrational yet noble feminine
activity doomed to destruction under the misogyny of the witch hunts. At the same time, to
assume or over-emphasize the femininity of medieval magic tends to homogenize and congeal
the images of medieval magical practitioners. Recognizing that there were multiple ways in
which the association between femininity and magic affected the real lives of magical
practitioners, and recognizing men as a significant component of medieval magical

47
Pau Castell Granados, “E cert te molt gran fama de bruixa e se fa metgessa e fa medecines: la
demonización de las prácticas mágico-medicinales femeninas (Siglos XIV-XVI),” Studia Historica Medieval 31
(2013): 233.

23
practitioners, destabilizes these assumptions by reorienting magical activities as highly
mutable and constantly reinterpreted in terms of gender.

A Note on “Magic”
Before I conclude the introduction of this thesis, I need to comment on my use of the
word “magic” throughout the discussion, as using a modern term to describe practices and
beliefs from the fourteenth century requires certain qualifications. The bishops of Barcelona
and Tortosa did not use the word “magic,” but rather the terms “conjuration,” “sorcery,”
“divination,” “encortation,” or “fetilla,” sometimes in combination.48 Jan Bremmer has
thoughtfully explored the implications of attempting to define “magic” in order to use it in
studies of times and places where it was not (or at least not commonly, or not synonymously)
used.49 His discussion emphasizes that the opposition of religion and magic is the historical
product of nineteenth-century historiography and social sciences, which contrasted the
“savage” magic of the colonized with the “civilized” religion of the colonizer.50 As such, to
study magic and religion as opposites, both with their own immutable definitions, is to ignore
the development and historical use of the two terms, neither of which fully emerged as distinct
concepts from the dense fabric of western European social organization until the late early
modern period.51
I have used the specific vocabulary applied by bishops in discussing particular cases as
much as possible, as these terms best represent the record-makers’ meanings. However, I use

I discuss the specific meanings and connotations of these terms in greater detail in Chapter 2.
Jan N. Bremmer, “The Birth of the Term ‘Magic,’” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 126
(1999): 10-12.
50
Ibid., 11.
51
Ibid.
48
49

24
the terms “magic,” and by extension “magical practitioner,” as collective nouns throughout
this thesis for two reasons. The first is the lack of an effective collective noun in the visitation
registers—the terms “conjuration” and “sorcery” come closest to such usage, but both of these
terms also have individual connotations that disqualify them as truly representative of peasant
magical practice. Alternatively, I could have used the term “superstition,” since this was the
heading under which most magical practice existed in medieval canon law, but it is too broad,
encompassing blasphemy, sacrilege, and other sins of belief. I likewise excluded the terms
“heresy” in discussing medieval peasant magic because bishops did not pursue most magical
practitioners as heretics (Gueraula being an exception), and “witchcraft,” which did not achieve
its mature definition until at least a century after my documents were produced. The second
reason I prefer “magic” and “magical practitioner” is precisely because of their implied
dichotomous relationship with religion—the practices I analyse in this study are those that
bishops and other ecclesiastical officials identified as incompatible with orthodox Christianity,
even if the practitioners thought of themselves as good Christians. The definition of magic I
use is not “lack of religion,” or “paganism,” but rather a deviation from ecclesiasticallyapproved religious practices by means of verbal formulas, gestures, and/or the creation of
objects that either blended religious and secular words and symbols, or took religious words
and symbols out of their normative contexts. As will be clear in the following chapters,
medieval magical practitioners were Christian—they used Christian prayers, words, and
symbols, and called upon the Christian God, Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the host of saints.
When I refer to “magic” and “magical practitioners,” I mean those practices and people whom
elite bishops—themselves supposed to be paradigms of holy orthodoxy—found that did not
meet their own view of proper peasant piety.

25
Plan for this Thesis
This thesis consists of three chapters, which together work towards explaining and
analysing the complex relationship between elite and lay concepts of magic in the visitation
records from early fourteenth-century Catalonia, using gender to reveal the important role that
individual bishops’ expectations and attitudes played in the interview process. Chapter One
establishes the context necessary for the latter two chapters, and explores how long-standing
ecclesiastical beliefs about magic, gender, and socio-economic status influenced the way
bishops thought about magic and magical practitioners. After identifying the key elements of
the image of the medieval peasant magical practitioner, Chapter One analyses two examples
of how this image worked in practice to both help and hinder bishops’ inquiries into the magic
of their parishes. This chapter emphasizes the ideological similarities of the bishops of
Barcelona and Tortosa, whereas later chapters focus more on their differences. It is these
underlying similarities that make the differences highlighted in later chapters so significant,
because they reveal the important role that individual understandings of the relationship
between magic and gender had in determining how bishops interacted with peasant magical
practitioners. The bishops’ reactions were not robotic responses steeped in ecclesiastical
tradition or mechanical reactions to the Church’s changing attitude towards magic in the early
fourteenth century; instead, their manner of dealing with lay magical practitioners reflected
their critical interpretations of the threat that female magical practitioners posed to society.
Chapter Two embraces the multiplicity of medieval magics by exploring the diverse
vocabulary applied to magical practises and practitioners in the visitation records, and shows
that rural men and women in early fourteenth-century Catalonia practiced gendered forms of
magic that served themselves and their communities in different ways. It examines individually
the various words that signified magic in the visitation records, and analyses their etymological

26
development, gendered implications, frequency and context in the records, and association
with elite and/or lay concepts of magic. There is greater variety in the terms used in Tortosa
than in those used in Barcelona, revealing that Francesc Paholac recognized the desirability of
using peasants’ language when correcting their beliefs whereas Ponç de Gualba—able
administrator that he was—preferred to use consistent language that he could easily understand
even if that language did not precisely match what the parishioners said.
Chapter Three investigates how the patterns of correction applied to different magical
practitioners reflect the local bishop’s interpretation of long-standing ecclesiastical beliefs
about practitioners of magic, primarily focusing on their gender and social status. These
patterns reveal that female magical practitioners in Barcelona were more likely to face
correction than were men in Barcelona, or women in Tortosa. This chapter argues that both
bishops held a gendered image of magical practitioners as female, but that while Ponç de
Gualba viewed this as evidence of the dangerous threat magic posed to orthodox Christian
society, Francesc Paholac took it as evidence of the foolishness and relative harmlessness of
peasant magic. Collectively, these chapters explore the meaning of magic to medieval Catalans
as transmitted and recorded during the visitation interview.

Medieval magic itself is difficult to study—the largest body of practitioners left little
evidence of the actual practices they engaged in, why they did so, and how they thought it
worked. From the visitation records it is clear that peasant men and women practised magic
along gendered lines. Men’s magic dealt actively with private property and animals and
women’s magic was both passively confined to nurturance roles, yet simultaneously functioned
as a public and valued service. It is also apparent that there are few exclusively gendered
categories of peasant magical practice, as I discuss in Chapter Two. However, it is also

27
necessary to study elite ecclesiastical ideas of magic and analyse how these changed or
remained the same when faced with the real situation of dealing with peasant magical
practitioners. Early fourteenth-century Catalonia, with its rapidly evolving ideas of the severity
and function of peasant magic, and its abundance of visitation records, provides a fertile ground
for exploring the relationship between magic and gender as differently understood by both
different ecclesiastics, and by elite and lay people. In the following chapter I will explore the
basis for the assumptions about magic, gender, and social status that these bishops brought
with them, in varying degrees, to their visitation interviews with peasant parishioners.

28
Chapter 1: The Image of the Lay Medieval Magical Practitioner

In 1314, Bishop Francesc Paholac asked the parishioners of Morella if anyone in their
parish blasphemed, committed sacrilege, or performed sorcery. They reported that María Paüls
went “with the good women.”52 The bishop met María Paüls and questioned her about this
belief, but she claimed she “did not know what that meant.” Strangely, his correction required
her to swear “never to perform any conjuration,” but did not mention the “good women.” 53 In
a similar example, the parishioners of Pobla de Nülls told the bishop of a woman who “does
sorcery” and “goes with the good women.”54 The bishop’s reaction to this response was to
summon her and, again, make her swear not to use conjurings, but he entirely ignored the
mention of the “good women.” These brief exchanges reveal a telling gap in the
communication between lay Christians and the bishop who interviewed them when both
attempted to discuss magic. For the laity, the act of “going with the good women” was itself a
magical practice that they felt obliged to report to the bishop. However, for Francesc Paholac,
“going with the good women” was merely an indication that a person probably engaged in
conjuring or sorcery, and was not, in itself, concerning. This disjunction between elite
ecclesiastical and lay peasant understandings of magic powerfully influenced the way
ecclesiastical elites and peasants communicated about magic in their parishes. The following
chapter will explore some of the ideas and stereotypes that formulated elite understandings of
lay magic, and explore some of their influences on visitation documents.

Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 156.
Ibid.
54
Ibid., 237.
52
53

29
Both bishops and lay parishioners came to the visitation interviews with pre-existing
ideas about the form and function of magic, but these ideas were not the same, nor do the
visitation records present them with equal weight. Since visitation records were ultimately the
creation of the bishops and other ecclesiastical officials who produced them, they favour the
views that these men held concerning gender and socio-economic status. How these men
related gendered and peasant stereotypes to magic had a heavy impact on the representation of
lay magical practitioners in the visitation records, particularly in how they approached
feminine magics. Gender stereotypes created an image of magical practitioners as mostly being
women, because women were presumably more easily tempted and tricked by demons. 55 At
the same time, stereotypes presented male peasants as particularly dim-witted and lacking in
assertive qualities and female peasants as cunning and ambitious, which reinforced the idea
that women would be more likely to perform magic.56 Not only were women more susceptible
to demons, as gender stereotypes suggested, but socio-economic stereotypes suggested that
peasant men were both incapable of the gumption required to successfully perform magic in
the first place, and incapable of controlling women who did use magic to advance their own
ends. Due to these stereotypes, bishops thought of peasant magical practitioners as women,
and represented and treated them according to these images despite encounters with peasant
men who also practiced magic. This chapter will establish the details of these stereotypes, and
argue that bishops interpreted peasant reports of magic to align with elite ecclesiastical ideas

Eleanor Commo McLaughlin, “Equality of Souls, Inqeuality of Sexes: Woman in Medieval
Theology,” in Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary
Ruether Radford (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 255.
56
Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999),
159.
55

30
about magic, which were fundamentally influenced by ideas of gender and women’s propensity
to engage in magic.
I have divided this chapter into two main sections. The first part explores the
stereotypes that influenced the way ecclesiastical elites thought about peasant magical
practitioners by examining the main elements of these gender and socio-economic stereotypes
against the backdrop of how the medieval Catholic Church understood magic. The shifting
notions the Church held about the relationship between humans and demons coloured the ways
that gender and socio-economic stereotypes influenced the image of the medieval magical
practitioner. One of the constants in these elite images of both women and peasants was an
emphasis on the foolishness and misguided ambition of those who practised magic. The second
half of this chapter explores two specific appearances of these stereotypes in the visitation
records. The first is the wording of the questions asked during the Tortosa visitation interviews,
and the second is the case of the “good women” with whom I opened this chapter. The Tortosa
register’s questions reveal which other sins and crimes, such as blasphemy, sacrilege, and—
more surprisingly—murder, that Bishop Francesc Paholac associated with magic. These
related crimes provide a comparative framework for understanding how severe an offence he
considered magic, and how he understood the differences and similarities between the lay
magical practitioners he encountered and the few rural parish clergy who also practised magic.
The example of the "good women," or bones dones, on the other hand, provides the clearest
evidence for the communication gap in how bishops and parishioners thought about magic. In
these few cases, the bishops attempt to understand the act of “going with the good women” as
evidence of conjuring or other magical activities that made sense according to their own
understanding of magic. The parishioners, however, presented the act of going with the “good
women” as magical in and of itself. Together, the two sections of this chapter establish the

31
interaction between the theory and practice of magic and gender in encounters between
ecclesiastical elites and lay parishioners.

Creating the Image: Magic, Gender, and Peasants
The image of the medieval magical practitioner as understood by ecclesiastical elites
drew on several sources. The first set of ideas applied to this image came from the Catholic
Church’s traditional ways of understanding magic as an action that involved demonic
participation in some form. The way the Church conceptualized the meaning and threat of this
relationship changed over time, but the basic premise of equating magic and demons remained
constant. The second influence on the image of the medieval magical practitioner drew from
gender stereotypes that established women as more susceptible to demons, and therefore more
likely to practice magic. The final component of this image emerges from medieval concepts
of social status and the stereotypical images of the peasant as boorish, gluttonous, and foolish,
and the female peasant in particular as lustful and cunning. All together these ideas about the
process of magic, feminine weakness, and peasant stupidity created the image present in the
early fourteenth century of the peasant magical practitioner.
The early fourteenth-century clerical attitude towards magic was founded on a long
tradition stretching back to the fifth century. In the early medieval period, when pagan
(particularly Roman) belief systems still presented real alternatives to Christianity,
missionaries regularly condemned the supernatural beings of pagan religions, called daemones
in Latin, as evil demons.57 Their power lay in supernatural speed, cunning, and cleverness,
which they used to trick humans into worshipping and following them. Once Christianity had

Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 37-39; Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early
Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
57

32
established in Europe, a process mostly completed by 1100, the overtly pagan characteristics
of many magical acts vanished to be replaced by overtly Christian elements. A well-known
example of this lamination of Christian symbolism onto pre-existing pagan magics is an early
German charm sometimes called the Wodin Prayer, which replaced the pagan god Wodin with
Christ in a sympathetic healing formula, but otherwise remained unchanged in its pre- and
post-Christianization forms.58 This Christian magic held an ambivalent position in theological
logic—on the one hand, it was perfectly appropriate for Christians to apply to God, Christ, the
Virgin Mary, and other legitimate saintly figures for aid. On the other hand, churchmen might
not approve the manner in which medieval lay Christians made their applications, if they
included suspicious words or activities not required in simple prayer. Catholic clerics viewed
lay magical practitioners as pitiably stupid, with a well-intentioned non-comprehension of how
to approach God that often led them into the clutches of demons.59 While ecclesiastical elites
still maintained that magical practices only worked through demonic cooperation, they now
viewed the human practitioners as foolish dupes of cunning demons. The blame for the
sinfulness of magical activities shifted from the human performers to their invisible, assumed,
demonic aids. Ecclesiastical elites maintained this attitude in most situations where they dealt
with lay magic such as conjuring, healing practices, and various other superstitious activities
well into the fourteenth century. However, the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw certain
developments that slowly began to change the way churchmen viewed all magic, including
that of the laity, which they had formerly tolerated.
Greco-Roman and Islamic texts entered the Christian European intellectual scene in
unprecedented volume during the Crusades in the Middle East and Iberia in the late twelfth

58
59

Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 45.
Michael Bailey, “From Sorcery to Witchcraft,” 964.

33
and thirteenth centuries, and along with this well-known flood of scientific, mathematical,
medical, and literary sources came those dealing with magic.60 These texts influenced the
development of two streams of intellectual magic in Europe: natural magic and necromancy.
The former drew on Greco-Roman natural philosophy, and argued that natural yet mysterious
(“occult”) powers existed in the world, and that learned men could harness these powers if they
had sufficient skill and training.61 Since these powers were natural, they were part of God’s
creation and therefore legitimate objects of human manipulation. Necromancy, on the other
hand, committed to the belief that, with the right precautions, human beings could control
demons without coming to harm themselves. Since necromancy required a high level of
literacy, and often a sophisticated understanding of Catholic Christian sacramental practices
and materials, university-educated men (and therefore clerics) were its main practitioners. As
a magic of the educated elite, necromancy left in its historical wake an array of texts, most
condemning its practice and tenets.
Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential theologians of both his own and later
times, dedicated some space in his extensive writings to the subject of magic. In the Summa
Contra Gentiles, which he wrote in the middle of the thirteenth century, he established the
principles of necromantic magic that characterised the dominant Church attitude towards it in
later centuries. First, he argued that magic was not the result of the performer’s innate talent,
for words and symbols had no inherent power until interpreted by another intelligent being;
second, he established that this intelligent being must be evil, because magicians were often
immoral and used magic for immoral means and no virtuous power would aid the performance

60
Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 116-118; Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Withcraft, Sex,
and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 349.
61
Kieckhever, Magic in the Middle Ages, 12-14, 149-50.

34
of evil.62 Elsewhere in the Summa contra gentiles, he specified that these intelligent beings
were demons, and explicitly defended the existence of demons against those who “say that
sorcery has no existence and that it comes simply from lack of belief or superstition, since they
wish to prove that demons do not exist except insofar as they are the creatures of man's
imagination.”63 Aquinas’ conclusions about the role of demons in performing magic and their
undeniable evilness supported many arguments condemning necromancy in the fourteenth
century.
In 1398, the University of Paris (incidentally, where Aquinas had studied and taught
over a century earlier) published a condemnation of various necromantic beliefs and practices.
The crux of this condemnation lay in the belief that “the demon is judged to be an undaunted
and implacable adversary of God and man,” which assumed both of Aquinas’ key points:
demons enabled magic, and demons were evil, therefore magic was evil. 64 This condemnation
came seventy years after Pope John XXII’s direction to inquisitors to seek out and bring
necromancers to ecclesiastical justice. Necromancy, therefore, remained a problem throughout
the fourteenth century despite repeated and increasingly strict attempts by the Catholic Church
to eradicate it. Despite the concern about necromancers among the highest levels of the church,
however, the early fourteenth-century visitation records for Barcelona and Tortosa provide
only one clear case of a man, Gueraud from the parish of Codines in Barcelona, who seemed
to engage in necromantic practices.65 Given the near-complete absence of true necromancers
in visitation records, it is necessary to look to other sources to explain the elements that
“St. Thomas Aquinas: Scholasticism and Magic,” in Brian P. Levack, ed., The Witchcraft
Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2003), 37.
63
Alan Kors and Edward Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History, 2nd
ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 95.
64
Levack, ed., The Witchcraft Sourcebook, 36.
65
See Chapter Three for a detailed discussion of Gueraud, in the parish of Codines (Barcelona), who
was excommunicated for magic involving a sword and for subsequently keeping demons in 1307.
62

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contributed to the image of the medieval magical practitioner whom bishops did meet. This
image, unlike that of necromancers, was neither male nor elite, but rather the opposite.
The medieval attitude towards women’s propensity towards magical practice drew on
clear patriarchal concepts about the inferiority of women, but it did not regularly approach the
virulent misogyny of early modern witchcraft literature. Women were an undisputed problem
in medieval theoretical works. They were variously malformed, monstrous, foolish, cunning,
greedy, or lustful—yet also nurturing, passive, in need of protection, and part of God’s creation.
Medieval theologians had inherited the concept of women’s monstrosity and intellectual
inferiority from Classical philosophers (most notably, Aristotle), yet they combined this image
with the essential Christian belief, found in both biblical writings and those of Church Fathers
such as Augustine, that both men and women were made in the image of God and possessed
rational souls.66 While no woman could ever achieve the perfection of Mary, the ideal woman,
a virgin mother, and so perfect that God chose her to raise his mortal son, proper medieval
women were supposed to aspire to this ideal. Whether they followed the usual path and
married, or pursued a life of holy celibacy as a nun (an option open to only those who could
afford it), a proper medieval woman was encouraged to pursue a life of chastity, modesty,
industry, obedience, and nurturance in imitation of the Virgin Mary. Of course, the reality of
most medieval women’s lives did not reflect this ideal at all, but it was one half of the essential
paradox of medieval femininity. The other half represented far less complimentary
characteristics, and explained the belief in women’s tendency to engage in magical practices.
Medieval arguments maintained that, despite having equal souls, women were weaker
than men, and the reasons for this weakness were heavily associated with their sexual organs.

McLaughlin, “Equality of Souls, Inqeuality of Sexes,” 213–66. See 254-55 especially for a
discussion of the link between feminine stereotypes and witchcraft.
66

36
For example, the medieval medical treatise on women’s health, the Trotula, assumed women’s
embodied frailty, stating “because women are by nature weaker than men and because they are
most frequently afflicted in childbirth, diseases very often abound in them especially around
the organs devoted to the work of Nature.”67 Another widespread, if bizarre concept relating
women’s bodily weakness to intellectual weakness was that of the “wandering womb.” This
medical theory reached back to classical times and asserted a woman’s uterus was liable to
wander throughout her body causing pains, fever, difficulty breathing, and extreme emotional
upheaval (hysteria)—thus proving women’s ultimate subjugation to their own physicality.68
Due to this supposed inability to overcome the limitations of their bodies, women represented
materiality and physicality at a broader symbolic level, and greed, lust, and avarice by
extension. These general traits that elite male thinkers attributed to women—ignorance, lust,
and greed—created an image of women as people who would be particularly easy for demons
to seduce into performing magic because the magical power offered by demons was a great
temptation to those who appeared to have little natural power. Additionally, an even more
specific element of medieval femininity characterized women as potential magical
practitioners: the precedent Eve established in Genesis.
As the acknowledged cause of humanity’s fall from divine grace, yet the simultaneous
first mother of humankind, Eve was a paradoxical figure in medieval Catholicism. She was the
first woman to face a demon’s temptation, and not all the ages of biblical mythology and human
history could erase the guilt that she and, therefore, all women bore for her failure at this first
test. The third-century theologian Tertullian addressed women, saying “you are the devil’s

67
Monica Green, ed., The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s
Medicine, trans. Monica Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 65.
68
Vern L. Bullough, “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women,” Viator 4 (1973): 493.

37
gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine
law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.”69 By
succumbing to the devil’s temptation, Eve established that women were singularly susceptible
to demonic influence. This initial susceptibility combined with ideas about women’s natural
ignorance and intellectual weakness, which prevented them from realizing that a demon’s
promises were false.
Despite this stereotype, which was constructed by elite men, most of them ecclesiastics,
women performed essential social roles, particularly as caretakers and nurturers. Across the
Crown of Aragon, Christian widows were considered the default guardians of their underage
children, and many men named their wives as executors of their wills.70 Daughters could inherit
property, or even be their parents’ sole heirs.71 Women’s roles within the peasant household
economy included not only cooking, tending hearths, and fetching water, but also minding
animals, gardening and (seasonal) fieldwork, washing clothes and household fabrics, spinning,
brewing, and various other casual or irregular jobs both for the private household or for market
exchange.72 Among these jobs was the expectation that when a person became ill or enfeebled
through injury or age, a female relation would nurse that person until either their recovery or
death. The role of women as tenders of the sick spanned social strata, with elite women also
taking on the role of nurse for their ill friends and family.73 This association was so strong that

69
Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, eds., Eve and Adam: Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 132.
70
Rebecca Lynn Winer, “Family, Community, and Motherhood: Caring for Fatherless Children in the
Jewish Community of Thirteenth-Century Perpignan,” Jewish History 16 (2002): 29; Kelleher, The Measure of
Woman, 67-77; Lightfoot, Women, Dowries and Agency, 128-129.
71
Mercé Aventín i Puig, La societat rural a catalunya en temps feudals: Vallés Oriental segles XIIIXVI (Barcelona: Columna Edicions, 1996), 550-558.
72
Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 141-155.
73
Montserrat Cabré, “Women or Healers?: Household Practices and the Categories of Health Care in
Late Medieval Iberia,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 1 (2008): 28-29.

38
even forbidden and unofficial unions, such as those between clerics and the local women they
frequently took as concubines, produced cases of concubines or former concubines tending
elderly or ill clerics.74 The female caretaker was an important symbol of health, linked to the
likelihood of recovery, and the association of nurturance and nursing with women helps explain
the types of magic they engaged in.
It would have been a small step for many medieval Catalan women to move from
simply tending the sick to actively seeking to heal them.75 Cut off from formal medical
education as they—and most men—were, they would naturally employ such remedies as had
reputations for success among their acquaintances. Prayers, penance, and fasting were
important parts of these remedies, and sometimes receiving communion was, in itself,
sufficient cure.76 The ingestion of (or mere proximity to) certain herbs, animal parts, or stones
also formed parts of some healing practices.77 University-educated physicians lamented such
empirical practices and in the fourteenth century began a concentrated effort to push women
out of medical practice.78 While ecclesiastical elites generally took the side of the physicians
in this argument, since they shared social and intellectual traditions, the Church continued to
prescribe penance and prayer as the key to restored health. Often, penance and prayer were
precisely what the women scorned by physicians prescribed. In 1304, Gueraula de Codines

Armstrong-Partida, “Priestly Wives,” 191.
Monica Green has defined female medical practitioners as “women who at some point in their lives
would have either identified themselves in terms of their medical practice or been so identified by their
communities.” However, she acknowledges the “fuzzy areas” on the edges of this definition, which included
wetnurses and midwives, whose practices were associated with nurturance but not necessarily medicine. Green
argues that this boundary between nurturance and medicine was highly permeable and recognition of the
intermittent and part-time nature of women’s healing activities is essential to better recognizing female medical
practitioners in medieval documents. Monica H. Green, “Documenting Medieval Women’s Medical Practice,”
in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West, ed., Monica Green, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 2000),
335-6.
76
Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 79-80.
77
Ibid, 11.
78
Monica H. Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West, 51-57.
74
75

39
explained that for certain fevers, she advised her patients to undertake a period of fasting and
abstinence (though she used conjurations for other illnesses).79 Gueraula’s case also provides
evidence for the irregular ways in which women obtained their healing knowledge, for she told
Bishop Ponç de Gualba of a conjuration that she had memorized, but did not know how to
use.80 Given the strong association between women and nurturance roles, and the very high
numbers of women corrected for various magical offences in the fourteenth-century visitation
records from Tortosa and Barcelona, and the scarcity of trained physicians in rural areas, it
seems likely that most medieval women either performed or sought out magical medical
practitioners at some point during their lives. Indeed, the value and popularity of female healerconjurers in peasant communities will become apparent in the following chapters.
The stereotypical image of the medieval male peasant was more similar to the
stereotype of women than it was to that of non-peasant men (including elite men, certainly, but
also residents of urban settings and rural dwellers of non-peasant status). Upper-status men,
both clerical and lay, considered peasant men foolish, materialistic and driven by uncontrolled
natural urges, but also somewhat childish and innocent in their very stupidity. 81 For example,
Paul Freedman recounted a story by Jean Bodel (twelfth-century), wherein a peasant’s
stupidity led him to donate his cow to the parish priest after literally interpreting a biblical
passage wherein God promised to repay twofold all that was given in his name. The peasant’s
79
“Item, interrogata fuit si scit aliquid de arte medicine dixit se nihil scire excepto quod in urina dixit
se congnoscere infirmitatem pascientis. Interrogata per quod signa aqua dixit quod quan est febris continua est
aqua citrina, quan est terciana est quasi vermeyla, quando quartana post accesionem est quasi rubia post non
aparent signa infirmitatis in ea quando est apusstema est aqua spumosa et alba. Interrogata cuiusmodi remedia
adhidebet in predictis dixit quod in terciana et continua mandat ieiunare et abstinere apostematis autem dicit
esse periculum et quod vadant ad medicos majores et idem dicit quartanariis.” Bonet, “Visites Pastorales,” 717;
Bonet and Puigvert, Processos (110); Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 69; ADB Visitationes s.n., f. 43r at
HMML microfilm no. 31950, f. 43r.
80
“Item dixit se scire sequentem coniurationem, setse ea usam non fuisse: Un rey moro, III fiyles avia
la una taylava, laltra cusia, laltra de mal de vives et de terzo fahia. sez si casus sibi acadissez, bene usa fuisset.”
Ibid.
81
Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 214-18.

40
ignorant charity was rewarded when the cow returned on its own and brought the priest’s cow
with it.82
Paul Freedman’s extensive study, Images of the Medieval Peasant, emphasizes that
medieval literature often depicted the peasant man as either an animalistic descendant of a
cursed Biblical figure (usually Ham, sometimes Cain), or an admirably industrious labourer
whose humble lifestyle bespoke his inner virtue.83 The image of the Catalan peasant has an
added layer of complexity, for there tradition justified peasant servitude by arguing that
peasants were the descendants of those Christians who (through lack of initiative or sheer
cowardice) failed to answer Charlemagne’s call to rise up against the Muslim leaders of
Andalusia.84 While not exactly traitorous, this mythical failure exemplified the peasant man’s
innate lack of that forcefulness, assertiveness, and activity that was supposed to be the
trademark of medieval men.85 To complete this unflattering image of stupidity and boorishness,
medieval literature also portrayed the male peasant as ugly, malformed, and dirty, little better
than the animals he tended.86 It is important to recognize that the stereotypes attributed to
peasant men were different from, and in fact opposed to, those associated with elite medieval
masculinity.87

Ibid., 150-1.
Ibid, 91-93.
84
Ibid, 108-109; Paul Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
85
Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 157-159.
86
Ibid., 143-149.
87
Freedman’s exploration of the discourse about peasant men lists several characteristics about them
that ran counter to courtly masculinity, such as their supposed ineptitude at romance, lack of sexual energy,
military incapacity, and cowardice. See Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 160-63, 178-81. Other
studies of medieval masculinity have emphasized the multiplicities of medieval masculinities. See Ruth Mazo
Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, n.d.); D.M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe, Women and Men in History (New
York: Longman, 1999); Clare A Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages,
Medieval Cultures 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
82
83

41
The stereotype of the peasant man is important for my study in its own right because
of the large numbers of men who practised magic.88 These stereotypes therefore came to bear
on how bishops viewed the magic of peasant men—it reflected their nonsensical ideas about
the world, their desire for material welfare, and their stupidity.89 Freedman does note that
among the many characteristics attributed to the medieval peasantry, paganism was not one of
them—in fact, their very Christianity problematized their subjugation to their lords.90 The fact
that peasants were recognizably Christian did not mean that they were good Christians—
typically, they were perceived as ignorant of proper belief and worship, often not
comprehending even the most basic Christian tenets—but it did make them objects of disgust
or pity rather than fear. One might argue that the image of peasant women must have existed
under a double helping of this foolishness, since both peasants and women laboured under
those traits; however, this was not the case. Instead, the image of the peasant woman was a
selective combination of features applied to either stereotype—they were described as
exceptionally lustful, conniving and prone to employing cunning to achieve their ends.
The stereotypical peasant woman was not merely a combination of the traits associated
with peasants and with women, but rather a more complicated figure. While the peasant man
was represented as stupid, materialistic, and malformed, the peasant woman often appeared in
literature as cunning (but not clever), ambitious, exceptionally lustful, and possessing a rustic
beauty.91 A late twelfth-century tale in which a peasant wife tricks her husband into believing
he is dead so that she can commit adultery in front of him with the parish priest captures the
See Chapter Three for a detailed analysis of the gendering of magic and magical practitioners in
fourteenth-century Barcelona and Tortosa visitation records.
89
Interestingly, there is some evidence that peasant men’s magic tended to focus on the protection and
preservation of material goods, which would lend some credence to the image of the materialistic peasant. I
discuss this more fully in the discussions of encortation in the following chapters.
90
Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 137-139.
91
Ibid, 159, 163-166.
88

42
double image of the cunning, lustful peasant woman and the foolish, bumbling peasant man.92
The peasant man’s magic, therefore, was the result of being too stupid to recognize a demon
when he saw one, whereas the woman’s, while potentially the result of her feminine
foolishness, could also suggest the greater danger of magic motivated by a cunning plan for
gain. The peasant woman was thus seen as potentially more suspect and troublesome to bishops
when imagining the magical practitioners they might meet on their visitation tours, even as the
Catholic Church focused on clerical necromancers in the early fourteenth century. Over the
preceding pages, I have established the general contours of the image of the lower-status
medieval magical practitioner, both male and female. Now it is time to look at how this image
influenced the specific visitations I consulted in my research.

Expectations Meet Reality in the Visitation Records
In the introduction to the Tortosa register, Bishop Francesc Paholac listed and precisely
numbered all the questions that he addressed to the clergy and the laity in each parish he visited.
This was not a unique practice; other medieval Catalan visitation records are known to have
included such lists, though none survive for fourteenth-century Barcelona.93 Many of these
questions inquired not about individual offences, but rather short lists of offences that the
bishop believed similar enough to address in a single inquiry. Furthermore, since the order of
the questions reflects groupings of similar topics, it is possible to develop a comparative

This fictional tale was written by Jean Bodel in the style of the French fabliaux, which were short,
often satirical or humorous (by medieval standards) tales about rural life. In this particular tale, the wife and her
lover, the parish priest, were enjoying a romantic evening together when her husband unexpectedly returned.
Thinking quickly, the wife put on a show of concern about her husband’s ill appearance that was so convincing
he believed himself to be actually dead and incapable of interfering with the living. The wife and the priest then
continued with their amorous entertainments. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 161.
93
For example, questionnaires also survive for Girona (1329), Valencia (1383 and 1388), Tortosa
(1409), Barcelona (1413-1414), and Zaragoza (1425). Joaquim M Puigvert et al., eds., Les Visites Pastorals:
Dels Origens Medievals a l’Epoca Contemporania (Girona: Diputacion de Girona, 2003), 54.
92

43
understanding of where lay conjuring and other magical practices fell among the other errors
bishops addressed on their tours. The bishop of Tortosa used one of two different lists of
questions, depending on whether he was inquiring about the clergy or the laity. Since he
interviewed clergy and laity separately and asked both sets of questions of each group, each
visitation typically had four sections—clergy answering questions about clergy, clergy
answering questions about laity, laity answering questions about clergy, and laity answering
questions about laity. Both of these lists included questions that asked about the presence of
magical practitioners. This method of questions in itself is interesting, for it reveals that the
bishop of Tortosa expected he might find magical practitioners among either the laity or the
clergy, and therefore reveals that the peasant laity and rural clergy engaged potentially in
similar magical practices. I will first consider the wording and placement of the two sets of
questions separately, and then compare their similarities and differences when inquiring about
lay versus clerical magical practitioners.
One of the questions that Francesc Paholac asked concerning the lay parishioners was
“if there is any blasphemer, sacrilegus or sorcerer or anyone who goes to diviners, or is an
incortator.”94 This question equates several possible offences that seem, at first glance, to be
decidedly different from each other. Blasphemy and sacrilege both relate to the misuse of the
sacred—blasphemy being a verbal sin, whereas sacrilege involved material artefacts. Sorcery,
divination and encortation (spelled incortation in the documents) both align more with the
typical modern understanding of magic—they were specialized actions or phrases that
mysteriously fulfiled the doer’s intentions. I discuss the significance of the vocabulary applied
to magical activities further in Chapter 2, but for now it is sufficient to note that while this

“Item, si est aliquis maledicus, sacreligus vel sortilegus vel qui vadat ad devinos, vel sit incortator.”
Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 102.
94

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question uses “sorcerer” as a catch-all label for a magical practitioner, it also singles out
diviners and encortators for special attention. Bishops, therefore, differentiated between
distinct lay magical practices even as they equated such practices to blasphemy and sacrilege.
There are some very logical reasons for the specific sins listed in this question. All
these offences share the common feature of superstition as defined by medieval churchmen—
a misuse or misunderstanding of the sacred.95 The verbal or material elements of sorcery,
divination, and encortation often incorporated sacred words, names, phrases, or symbols in
ways that the Church disapproved of, and therefore labelled as superstitious. In short, a person
who used divine words and names in a verbal formula designed to find a lost object, or a person
who placed a cross in his stable as a protective measure, was committing the same type of
offence as a person who exclaimed “my God!” in a moment of surprise or irritation rather than
pious fervour. The wording of this question, therefore, reveals that Bishop Francesc Paholac
viewed magical offences as reprehensible, but also rather common or even petty, sins deserving
correction but little further concern.
This conclusion gains further support from the placement of the question in the list. It
was the fifth of eleven questions concerning the laity, ranked neither as an issue of primary
importance nor as a mere obligatory check. The inquiry began with three separate questions
into sexual or marital offences: whether any parishioners kept concubines, whether any man
did not live with his legitimate wife, and whether anyone was married within the prohibited
bounds of consanguinity or affinity. The bishop next inquired about usurers, a question that
almost always elicited a response. The fifth question, as I have discussed, asked about
blasphemers, committers of sacrilege, and sorcerers, followed by a question about the presence

95

Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 184-5.

45
of heretics or heretical sympathizers. The seventh question inquired as to whether anyone
behaved incorrectly or dishonestly in the church. The next three questions investigated the
observance of fasts, support of pious causes, and paying the tithe. The last question was the
only one of its kind, and asked whether there were any previously reformed or corrected
persons in the parish—such an inquiry helped the bishop determine how to deal with first-time
or repeat offenders in the absence of written records of earlier visitations. The organization of
these questions reveals an inherent logic. The first three address sexual or marital offences, the
fourth through seventh investigate whether parishioners engaged in prohibited or inappropriate
practices, the eighth through tenth evaluated the parishioners’ observance of necessary
practices, and the eleventh determined whether there were any previously corrected
parishioners.
The question about magical practitioners, blasphemers, and committers of sacrilege
falls into the second group of questions, alongside questions identifying usurers, heretics, and
the impious. The proximity of the question about magical practitioners to that about heretics is
particularly noteworthy. While in later centuries ecclesiastical elites linked the concepts of
magic and heresy, with all magic being heretical (though not all heresy being magical), these
were separate offences in the early fourteenth century.96 The proximity of the two questions to
each other in Paholac’s list reveals that the bishop considered them similar in nature, but the

Magic transformed from superstition to heresy over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries as ecclesiastical ideas about the relationship between humans and demons changed. This change was
the product of an exchange between theory and practice, as demonstrated by Michael Bailey in “From Sorcery
to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages.” As concerns about elite necromancy
(which, with its devotion to demons was obviously heretical) grew, the papacy expanded the jurisdiction of
inquisitors to investigate magic more broadly for signs of heresy. As inquisitors pushed the boundaries of these
expanded limits they encountered many lay magical practitioners, whose practices they interpreted according to
the elite necromancy they were trained to identify. Concern about these lay magical practitioners resulted in
further legislation against magic, and fed the conflation of lay sorcery with elite necromancy in intellectual
thought, which merged into the image of the early modern witch.
96

46
questions themselves clearly indicate that while the magical activities of sorcery, divination,
and encortation were equal to the common sins of blasphemy and sacrilege, all of these
offences were distinct from outright heresy. Heresy was the conscious refusal to believe and
behave according to the tenets of the medieval church, a much more serious offence than
merely misunderstanding how to be a good Catholic.97 Though ecclesiastics found
parishioners’ superstitious and indelicate use of religious phrases and symbols reprehensible,
these acts and words did not signify to either visitors or parishioners that the person rejected
the Catholic Church’s teachings. For the most part, therefore, Francesc Paholac and other
bishops saw magic as further evidence of peasant ignorance of basic Christian tenets, similar
to their sexual offences, which fed and drew from the stereotype of the stupid peasant incapable
of detaching himself from his bodily desires enough to appreciate a pious elevation of spirit.
The question concerning the laity who practised magic certainly produced more
numerous responses than did that inquiring about clerical magical practitioners, yet the
wording of this question is worth examining in its own right. When inquiring about the clergy,
Francesc Paholac asked “if there is any blasphemer, murderer, sorcerer, or sacrilegus.” 98 As
with the question asked concerning the laity, the one asked of the clergy lists blasphemy,
sacrilege, and sorcery, showing the linkage between the three offences. However, there is also
an important difference in the two questions, for while the question about the laity further
specifies divination and encortation as forms of magic, that about the clergy instead inquires
about the presence of murderers.

97

2007), 64.

98

R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
“Item, si est aliquis blasphemus, homicida, sortilegus vel sacrilegus.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 101.

47
The appearance of murderers in this list seems a peculiarly secular concern next to
those of blasphemy, sacrilege, and sorcery, until one recognizes the possibility of death magic
and its association with clerical necromancy. Not only had the early fourteenth century seen a
wave of dramatic accusations of death magic among Western Europe’s elites, but also
jurisdiction over clerical murderers was always a contentious point between the various courts
of the Crown of Aragon.99 The phrasing of this question therefore created an implicit argument
that clergy who murdered by any means were, in all likelihood, guilty of some superstitious or
even necromantic offence. Francesc Paholac asserted his right to judge such cases by framing
murder as a potentially magical, and therefore spiritual, crime. In doing so, he also suggested
that clerics’ magic was particularly harmful, or even fatal. The addition of murderers to the list
of offenders in the question of clerical sorcery does not simply imply that Francesc Paholac
considered all rural clerics who engaged in superstitious practice as necromancers, but rather
that he considered necromancy a possibility in their case that did not exist in the cases of lay
sorcerers because they, unlike most of their parishioners, were at least nominally literate. The
position of this question in the overall structure of the list supports this interpretation.
Despite the differences in language and associations present in the questions
concerning the magical practices of the laity and the clergy, they occupy identical places in the
overall lists. The first eight questions concerning the clergy all address the clergymen’s
attentiveness to their positions—whether they dwelt in their parish, administered the necessary

For example, the trials of Dame Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, Ireland, accused of murdering her
husband in 1324, of Hugh Géraud, bishop of Cahors, who apparently attempted to murder Pope John XXII
using wax dolls in 1317, and of Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, who was accused of murdering Joana of Navarre,
queen of France, in 1305. For Kyteler, see Brian P. Levack, ed., The Witchcraft Sourcebook (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 40-42. For Géraud see Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 21. For Guichard, see Jolly,
Ankarloo, and Clark, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages, 220. For a discussion of conflicts over
judicial jurisdictions in the medieval Crown of Aragon, see J.N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms 1250-1410,
vol. 1, (Oxford, 1976), 94, 97-98.
99

48
sacraments at appropriate times, and otherwise served their roles. These questions perform a
similar function to those about the marital lives of the laity, for both evaluate how well those
concerned fill their expected vocations as either spouses or clergymen. As with the list
concerning the laity, questions concerning the clergy’s fulfilment of their duties preceded
questions inquiring into what prohibited activities they engaged in. Again, separate questions
asked “if there is any blasphemer, murderer, sorcerer, or sacrilegus,” and “if there is any heretic
or any who believe heretics or who receive them publicly or secretly.”100 These questions also
included those asking if any clergy dressed inappropriately or went untonsured, kept a
concubine, gambled, engaged in usury, had obtained their positions through simony, or had
insufficient licensing.101 The final question in this list reflects the pervasiveness of clerics’
sexual relations, for it asks “if the son of the rector or vicar or another priest administers at the
altar with him.”102 Altogether, this list does not give the impression that Francesc Paholac had
great confidence in the parish priests and other clergymen serving in his diocese.
This lack of confidence springs from the reality that parish clergy were far more similar
to their parishioners than they were to the bishops who governed them. Parish priests and other
clergy often came from within the communities in which they practised—they worked land
that bordered that of their parishioners, had family among those who attended mass, shared the
community’s concerns for prosperity, and not infrequently had relationships with parish
women. Their expressions of masculinity, as Michelle Armstrong-Partida has amply
demonstrated, mimicked (insofar as their position allowed) the masculinity of peasant men in

100
“Item, si est aliquis hereticus vel credens hereticis vel qui eos recipiat publice vel occulte.” Egea, La
Visita Pastoral, 101.
101
Ibid., 101-2.
102
“Item, si filius rectoris vel vicarii seu alterius presbiteri ministrat eis in altari.” Ibid., 102.

49
terms of household management, virility, and division of labour.103 It should, therefore, be
unsurprising that when rural clerics became entangled in magic (whether their own, or by
seeking someone else’s service), it was the magic of the rural peasantry and not that of the
clerical elite. Francesc Paholac’s questions indicate a partial recognition of the situation of
rural clergymen. On the one hand, the questions inquire into a wide range of practices that were
inappropriate for clergy, but common among the peasantry. On the other hand, the association
of magic practiced by clergymen with murder suggests that the bishop considered clerics’
magic at least capable of very sinister ends, even if it did not always fulfil them.
What these questions and evidence from parishioners’ responses serve to show is that
the breakdown of medieval magic into clerical necromancy and lay sorcery is highly simplistic.
It is apparent that there were two distinctly different streams of practices that both, to some
extent, warranted the label of magic from medieval theologians. One method required literacy,
the use of luxurious objects such as crystals and swords, complex ablutionary procedures, and
demonic invocation. The other, passed on orally or invented as needed, used everyday objects
such as spindles and rope, and simple verbal formulas and prayers. Rather than comprehending
this difference as a cleric/non-cleric dichotomy, it is more useful to consider the point of
departure the education and social status of the performer, rather than whether or not he was
tonsured. The bishop of Tortosa’s question scheme indicates that he recognized this distinction.
While he found clerics who practiced magic troublesome, there is no evidence that he
considered them, by default, necromancers simply because they were clergy. This example
therefore shows the considerable flexibility that bishops were capable of employing when
thinking about the magic they might encounter on their visitation tours, but this flexibility was

103

Armstrong-Partida, “Conflict in the Parish,” 177.

50
not limitless. I will now return to the cases of the bones dones to reveal the limits of bishops’
abilities to think about lay or rural magic.
The case of the bones dones serves as an example of the different ways ecclesiastical
elites and lay parishioners thought about magic. In the records from Tortosa, three women
appear for “going with the good women.” Since all three of these visitations record the phrase
as the Catalan “bones dones” rather than translating the phrase to Latin, it is clear that this was
a vernacular phrase with an idiomatic meaning, rather than a mere description translatable into
Latin. The scribes who created the Barcelona records encountered similar reports, recording
(in Latin) the cases of two women reported to “go out at night with phantoms.” It is difficult
to discover whether this difference in language stems from the Barcelona scribes’ solution to
the linguistic problem of the bones dones by equating them to phantoms, or the residents of the
parishes near Barcelona using a different name than did their counterparts in Tortosa. Pau
Castell i Granados cited the example of a 1341 visitation from Barcelona wherein Elicsendis
Solera appeared as a diviner and the parishioners reported that “it is said that she walks with
the good women [bonis mulieribus].”104 This example suggests that the earlier reports of
“phantoms” were the result of a translator’s manipulation, rather than the original language of
the parishioners, because the phrase “bonis mulieribus” presents a literal translation of the
Catalan bones dones, proving the name did exist in Barcelona.
This concept of “going with the good women” consisted of several key characteristics:
the person accused was always female, as were her supernatural companions, they undertook
some sort of physical or spiritual travel, and this travel occurred at night. These same
characteristics appear in relation to a wide array of medieval popular beliefs, which can be

104

Granados, “Sortilegas, divinatrices et fetilleres,” 224, n. 21.

51
traced to the tenth-century document, the Canon episcopi. This text became far more widely
distributed in the twelfth century, when Gratian included it in his canonical compilation, the
Decretum. The Canon episcopi links the concepts of femininity, magic, and going about with
supernatural beings. After first warning bishops to be vigilant against practitioners of
“sortilegium and maleficium,” the text continues:
It is also not to be omitted that some wicked women, who have given
themselves back to Satan and been seduced by the illusions and
phantasms of demons, believe and profess that, in the hours of the
night, they ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of pagans,
and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the night
traverse great spaces of earth...105
The cases of the bones dones bear remarkable similarities to this phenomenon: both are
recorded as feminine offences, both involve participation with a group of supernatural beings,
and both travel with that group. While the visitation records are not nearly so specific as the
Canon—there is no indication that a goddess or anyone else led the group, the distances
traversed and size of the host seem to be more reserved, and the mode of transport is unclear—
the similarities are strong enough to indicate a continuance of elements of the same belief
recorded in the Canon.
The fourteenth-century visitation records are only one case where elements of these
beliefs appear in medieval and early modern European history. The association between this
idea and the image of the witches’ sabbath, when witches flew to their meeting-place with the
devil to worship him and perform their evil acts, has been well-explored by historians.106

As I discuss in Chapter Two, sortilegium and maleficium both carried the connotation of harmful
magic, though this was more dramatic with maleficium. Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700,” 62.
106
Violet Alford and Rodney Gallop, “Traces of a Dianic Cult from Catalonia to Portugal,” Folklore
46, no. 4 (December 1, 1935): 350–61; Fabián Alejandro Campagne, “Witchcraft and the Sense of the
Impossible in Early Modern Spain: Some Reflections Based on the Literature of Supersticion (1500-1800),”
Harvard Theological Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 25–62; Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and
Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
105

52
However, most historians have assumed that these tales were the wild inventions of persons
under torture, their words twisted by witch-hunters to conform to fears of diabolical
conspiracy.107 An alternative (and now entirely discredited) thesis, proposed by the early
twentieth-century anthropologist Margaret Murray, claimed that these tales were evidence of
the survival of pagan religions among the rural peasantry, finally and brutally suppressed under
the label of witchcraft.108 Following Murray, in 1935, Violet Alford and Rodney Gallop
published an article about the appearances of a “Dianic Cult” in medieval Iberia. 109 It is rife
with examples of beliefs in nocturnal female spirits present among medieval Iberian
populations, and reveals that such beliefs were widespread and highly varied in Iberia—a
conclusion supported by the appearance of the bones dones in the visitation registers.
In 1983, Carlo Ginzburg bridged these two camps—on the one hand, those who claim
the tales of nocturnal travel and gatherings were complete fiction, on the other, Murray’s
argument that such gatherings literally took place. In The Night Battles: Witchcraft and
Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, he examined beliefs in spirit travel
in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friuli region of Italy.110 He presented convincing
evidence that peasants in that particular region did retain certain superstitions that powerfully
evoked pre-Christian beliefs. Ginzburg has also exhaustively documented the possible origins,
historical spread, and range of these ideas in Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath,
wherein he traced beliefs associated with supernatural travel into pre-Classical Europe and

1983); Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990); Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials.
107
For an excellent exploration of the link between torture and confession in witch trials see Lyndal
Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (London: Yale University Press, 2004) 44-51.
108
Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921).
109
Alford and Gallop, “Traces of a Dianic Cult,” 350–61.
110
Ginzburg, The Night Battles.

53
across the Eurasian continent.111 Essentially, Ginzburg’s work complicates the picture of
beliefs in women who engaged in supernatural travel, because he places it as something that
both ecclesiastical elites (in his sources, inquisitors) and humble laypeople believed in, but in
very different ways.
Just as these beliefs had continuance among the rural peasantry, so had the Catholic
Church’s view of them remained unchanged over the centuries between the writing of the
Canon episcopi and the early fourteenth century. The Canon was adamant that
Satan himself, who transfigures himself into an angel of light, when he
has captured the mind of a miserable little woman and has subjugated
her to himself by infidelity and incredulity, immediately transforms
himself into the species and similitudes of different personages and
deluding the mind which he hold captive...leads it through devious
ways.112
This diabolical deception meant that “while the spirit alone endures this [the illusions] the
faithless mind thinks these things happen not in the spirit but in the body.”113 Due to the
influence of Gratian’s Decretum this belief in the illusory (and therefore impossible and false)
nature of this sort of female supernatural travel formed the official ecclesiastical opinion about
such matters.114
Francesc Paholac and Ponç de Gualba followed the standard ecclesiastical skepticism
about this belief. Both dismissed the accusations of “going with the good women” or
“phantoms” out of hand, but instead focused intently on whether the woman accused of such
nocturnal wanderings (and therefore a proven target of demons) was involved in any magical
activities. For example, when María Paüls’ neighbours reported her reputation for “going with

Ginzburg, Ecstasies.
Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, 62.
113
Ibid.
114
The Decretum was the main text used for teaching canon law beginning in 1150. Ibid., 60.
111
112

54
the good women”, Francesc Paholac summoned her for correction.115 She responded that “she
did not know what they meant, nor knew what that was, namely, the bones dones.” Undaunted,
the bishop “corrected her also regarding conjuration and she swore not to use it.” The
parishioners of Pobla de Nülls similarly accused a woman named Gueraula of both “sorcery”
and going “with the bones dones.”116 However, when the bishop later summoned Gueraula, his
concern focused entirely on her reputation as a sorcerer, rather than any physical or spiritual
wanderings—“she was corrected and sworn not to use conjurings.”117 The unnamed daughter
of Paschal Folquer of Batea also reputedly went “out with the bones dones.”118 While there is
no record that the daughter faced correction, her family may have had superstitious leanings,
as the parishioners also denounced the wife of another Folquer for attending a Muslim diviner,
and reported that Miro Folquer knew how to “bind and release.”119 The association of magical
activity and philandering with phantoms is strong in the two examples from Barcelona. In
1304, the parishioners of Molins del Rey reported that na Salvatge “goes with two women who
are evidently phantoms, and does divinations herself.”120 As is typical of the Barcelona
visitations, there is no record of correction. Finally, parish representatives of Biges stated a
woman named Elicsende made “many medicines, and it is said that she goes with phantoms in

“María Pauls vadit ut dicitur ab les bones dones et moratur iuxta domum de N’Uguet. Fuit correcta
et negavit et dixit quod nescit quid dicunt nec scit quod sit illud videlicet bones dones. Fuit correcta etiam de
coniuratione et iuravit de cetero non uti.” Egea, Visita Pastoral 156.
116
“Super V dixerunt quod quedam mulier facit aliqua sortilegia et dicit se ire ab les bones dones.”
Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 237.
117
“Fuit vocata Gueraula, que dicebatur esse sortilega et correcta et fuit sibi iniunctum quod non
uteretur coniurationibus.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 237.
118
“Super V dixit quod filia Paschasius Folquer, vadit ab les bones dones.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral,
181.
119
“Item, dixerunt quod Bernarda filia quondam Domineci Albanell, uxor quondam Martíni Folquer,
ivit ad sarracenam de García , ratione devinationis.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 181. “Super V dixerunt quod
Miro Folquer scit ligare et desligare.” in ibid.
120
“Item dixerunt quod na Salvatge vadit cum duabus videlicet fantasmatibus et facit se divinaticem.”
ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 29r at HMML microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 29r.
115

55
the night.”121 The Barcelona documents show a strong inclination to associate healing
activities, such as making medicines or examining urine, with magic—possibly because the
line between legitimate healing and illicit magic was a very thin one. All of these examples
show the strong linkages between the ability to partake in nocturnal travel with supernatural
feminine companions, and a propensity to engage in some sort of magical activity.
Bishops and parishioners disagreed over the exact relationship between these two
beliefs. Bishops’ ways of dealing with women who reportedly went with the bones dones or
other supernatural beings provide evidence that they considered such women more than usually
susceptible to demons, and therefore more than usually likely to practice magic with a demon’s
aid, parishioners believed that going with the bones dones was, in and of itself, a magical
activity. In the cases of both María Paüls and the daughter of Paschal Folquer, parishioners
responded to the question of whether there were any “blasphemers, sacrilegus or sorcerers or
those who go to diviners, or who are incortators,” by naming women who went with the bones
dones. They did not elaborate on this with any specific accusation of conjuring, sorcery,
divination, or even healing. For lay Christians, going with the bones dones was evidence
enough of magical behaviour.

Conclusion
These examples make it clear that while bishops approached the idea of magical
practitioners in their parishes with a reasonably open mind regarding their motives and
intentions, they remained inflexible in their understanding of how magic functioned and what
was possible by magical means. They structured their questions to catch the broadest possible

“Item dixerunt quod Elicsende...[illegible]...aliquos medicinas et dicitur quod vadit cum
phantasmatibus de nocte.” ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 84v at HMML microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 84v.
121

56
interpretation of magical offences. At the same time, they sifted and interpreted the evidence
that parishioners gave them through the lens of their own beliefs about how magic worked—
since they accepted that going with the bones dones was impossible, they concluded that these
women were deluded by demons into performing some sort of sorcerous activity, and corrected
them accordingly. In the following chapter, I will complicate this picture further by exploring
the vocabulary of magical terms that appear in the visitation records, and compare how the
bishops of Barcelona and Tortosa differently applied these stereotypes in their visitation
interviews. Though bishops did not understand magic in the same way as the people they
interviewed, the visitation records from Barcelona and Tortosa reveal a strong attempt to
untangle reports of peasant magic and record them in ways that made sense to elites. They
achieved varying degrees of success in this endeavour. While the example of the bones dones
is the most telling example of a disconnect between the two groups, other types of magic
recorded in the visitations likewise reveal how confidently or tentatively bishops
comprehended the magic of the laity they met during their visitations.

57
Chapter 2: Unravelling the Vocabulary of Magic in Medieval Catalonia

Gueraula de Codines, whose dramatic and unusual story appeared in the introduction
to this thesis, was a woman from Subirats whose several encounters with Bishop Ponç de
Gualba of Barcelona left a substantial set of historical documents dating between 1303 and
1330. At various points over this almost thirty-year period, the records labelled her as a
“diviner” and “sorcerer,” who practiced “conjuration,” “invocations,” “divination,” and
“medication,” which eventually resulted in the vicar general handing her over to the local
inquisitor for the crime of “manifest heresy.”122 The broad vocabulary used to refer to the
charges against her reveals the complicated set of beliefs and practices that composed medieval
magic. Furthermore, it shows that a single individual might be engaged in a variety of magical
practices, and that observers used language that captured this multiplicity. This chapter will
explore the gendered vocabulary of magic in visitation documents by identifying the different
terms used to describe it, discussing how these terms relate to their counterparts from ancient
and early modern Europe, and analyzing the ecclesiastical and lay influences on the recording
of these terms in the visitation documents.

This language carried heavy gendered

connotations—divination, sorcery, and conjuration were three of the most feminine, and their
combination in Gueraula’s case typifies their usual use in visitation records.
Visitation record creators, both bishops and their scribes, had great power in choosing
the words with which to present and record the information given to them by the lay
parishioners they interviewed. Their goal was not usually to produce a verbatim report, but
rather to summarize, in Latin, select information provided by Catalan-speaking parishioners.

Transcriptions available in Espelt, “Activitats i formules ,” 67-73; Bonet, “Visites Pastorales,” 716718; Bonet, Puigvert, and Mascort, Processos.
122

58
However, the two bishops approached this goal differently, and this affected not only the
language of their records, but also the gendered effect of their inquiry. Francesc Paholac and
his officials used a varied selection of words drawn from both Latin and Catalan to describe
magical activities in an attempt to match the language of the record to the language of the
parishioners. The Barcelona records reveal a very different episcopal approach, whereby
Bishop Ponç de Gualba used a limited set of Latin words, all of which described highly
feminine magics. Ponç de Gualba consistently used highly feminine terms and terms that
evoked the dangerous and subversive nature of magic to describe peasant magical activities,
while Francisco Paholac used a broader vocabulary of magic that presented peasant magic as
an activity engaged in by both men and women, and rarely in highly threatening ways. I argue
that these vocabularies not only reflect the gendered nature of peasant magic, which
emphasized the qualities of nurturance or harmfulness for women and protectiveness for men,
but also the bishops’ interpretation of the threat peasant magic posed based on its association
with women.
This chapter is divided into two sections that will highlight the similarities and
differences in the vocabulary used by the two bishops to record magical offences in the
visitation records. In the first section, I will compare terms used by officials from both
Barcelona and Tortosa, and examine what their use reveals about the perception of magical
practitioners. The first term I will discuss is conjurar (“to conjure” and its derivatives), as this
provides an excellent platform for understanding the broad contours of both elite and lay
understandings of medieval magic. Conjuring was the most common of all charges for magical
activity, and it often functioned as a generic term for magical activity in both Barcelona and
Tortosa, yet it was also strongly associated with women’s magic. I will follow the discussion
of conjuring with an analysis of the use of “sortilegia” (sorcery), “maleficia,” (which also

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usually translates as “sorcery,” though with a different connotation) and “divinacione”
(divination) in the records, as both of these terms also appear frequently in both sets of
visitations—all three are feminine, some dramatically so. The second part of this chapter will
analyse those terms that only the Tortosa records use, though I will present evidence that such
practices also existed in Barcelona, subsumed under the more general language. These terms
include ligamentis, encortation, and fetilla, and with them the simple relationship of femininity
to magic breaks down. Ligamentis was a Latin term typically associated with the doing or
undoing of harmful anti-fertility magic, and, as with sorcery and maleficia, women were more
often associated with the harmful effects, while men were usually presented as desligators.
Encortation and fetilla were both Catalan words that the Tortosa records used to identify
specific types of magic, though unfortunately the bishop seems to have known what the words
meant, for he did not ask for descriptions and therefore left little recorded evidence of what
these practises entailed. Encortation is the only clearly masculine magic, and was
overwhelmingly practiced by men, which—given the bishops’ lesser interest in peasant men’s
magic—helps explain why it received so little explication in the records. Fetilla was similarly
unelaborated, but was a definitively feminine magic.

Conjuring
Charges of conjuring were by far the most common magical offences in the visitation
records from both Barcelona and Tortosa. In Barcelona, conjuring represented a solitary
offence in seventeen cases, and one of a set of magical practices in ten cases (Table C,
Appendix I). Of this total of twenty-seven cases, twenty-two identified women as the culprits,
while only five named men. In Tortosa, twenty-four magical practitioners were recorded only
as conjurers, while an additional twenty-one had conjuring listed as one of several offences in

60
which they reportedly engaged. Again, the vast majority were women: thirty-seven of the fortyfive. These numbers must be taken in the context of the total numbers of practitioners from
each diocese. Barcelona counted a total of forty-nine magical practitioners (Table A), though
some of these appeared more than once throughout the registers—the total number of
accusations, including repeated accusations, is fifty-seven. Conjuring was therefore an offence
listed for approximately half of those accused of magical practices in the diocese of Barcelona
between 1303 and 1330. The total number of practitioners for Tortosa was 121, with the fortyfive accusations of conjuring representing approximately one-third of all offences. One way to
see the difference in the ratios is to conclude that magical practitioners in Barcelona were more
likely to practice conjuring, but an alternative possibility is that the Tortosa record-keepers
were less likely to hide specific language beneath the generic term “conjuring.” A detailed
analysis of how “conjuring” was used in the visitation records and its definition in the early
fourteenth century suggests that the latter was the case.
The classical Latin conjurare meant only “to swear together” or “combine together by
an oath,” which could have either the benign meaning of “to be united,” or the negative sense
of a plot or conspiracy.123 As I discussed in Chapter One, the influence of Christianity on
classical society resulted in a swift redefinition of all magic as, at best, mere trickery and deceit,
or at worst, effective only through demonic participation.124 As a word describing an
agreement, conjurare came to signify this implicit or explicit agreement between a human and
a demon by the fourteenth century, though the fear of an organized human-diabolical

Charlton T. Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1993), s.v. “coniuro.”
Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 8-17. Kieckhefer further states that intellectuals
distinguished between demonic magic and natural magic, which involved the manipulation of hidden but
ultimately natural elements of an object’s character. However, he admits that not all intellectuals recognized this
distinction, and that “natural magic” never gained the official recognition that demonic magic did.
123
124

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conspiracy that drove the early modern witch-hunts was not yet present. The medieval Catalan
definition of the equivalent verb, conjurar, does retain meanings of “to make an oath” and
conspiracy, but explications that emphasize the magical and demonic implications of the word
eclipse these more benign meanings.125 These include the possible interpretation of conjurar
as “to pray to or in the name of something sacred or of great authority,” and “to obligate (a
devil, spirit, elemental, etc.) to appear and obey, by the invocation of a sacred name or
magic.”126 In this Catalan definition, conjuring was a magical act that required an agreement
between a human and a demon—the same relationship that women were supposedly so prone
to. Since the medieval Catholic church held that no magic was possible without demonic
cooperation (whether the human agent was aware of this cooperation or not), all magic was
therefore a form of conjuring. While the visitation records use the Latin form conjurare, the
Catalan definitions capture the new meaning of the word in the medieval period.127
Gueraula Codines provides an excellent example of the vernacular use of “conjurar”
and its subsequent Latin incorporation into the visitation records. She reported using the verbal
formula “I conjure you drop, I conjure you all, I conjure you by God, and by the Madonna
Saint Mary, by the male saints and female saints that you shall not be able to stop here or there,
neither to be broken nor to strike at soft parts, nor give a prick, nor put root, by the celestial
court so that from this penalty there is no harm.”128 The scribe recorded this formula in Catalan,
125
A.M. Alcover, Diccionari català-valencià-balear, s.v. “conjurar,” accessed December 10, 2015,
http://dcvb.iecat.net/
126
Ibid.
127
It is common to find Latin words used with vernacular meanings, rather than their classical
definitions, in the visitation records. The degree to which this occurred depended on the scribe’s competence,
the strength of the association between the vernacular word and its Latin antecedent, and other factors.
128
“Conjur-te, gota, conjur-te tota, conjur-te per Déu e per madona sancta María per los sens e per les
sentes que avia: que asi no pusques aturar ni esses caschar ni popa machar ni dia passar ni punt donar ni raïl
metre. Per la cort celestial, que aquesta persona no aia mal.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 717; Bonet and
Puigvert, Processos, 110; Perarnau, “Activitats i formules,” 68; ADB Visitationes s.n., f.42v at HMML
microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f. 42v. The word “gota” could translate as either “gout” (ie: dropsy) or “drop.”
Perarnau translates it as “gout,” as it is a healing charm, but cannot explain why a general healing charm would

62
which provides strong evidence that these words were ones Gueraula actually used—conjuro
in the Catalan sense of commanding a supernatural (or at least invisible) force. However,
elsewhere in the document the framing text reports, in Latin, that Gueraula “confessed that she
had for diverse sicknesses done conjurations and invocations of God and the saints.” 129 The
Latin definition of conjurare makes no sense in this context, and it is therefore clear that when
visitation records used the Latin word conjurare, they intended the Catalan definition.
The visitation records provide extensive evidence that when the bishops and their
scribes confronted unclear magical activities, or when they simply wished to encompass all
magical acts in a single word, they typically turned to conjuration as their word of choice. For
example, when the rector of Marçà in Tortosa claimed, “Ramonda Spinoza and Gueraula
Spelta do certain divinations,” Gueraula “was called and swore not to use conjurations.”130
Conjurationes was a convenient shorthand for a wide range of possible magical activities, and
was widely used in both the Barcelona and Tortosa visitations. However, Gueraula de
Codines’s use of the word “conjurar” in her incantation indicates that the word was also in
circulation among the Catalan peasantry, and therefore complicates attempts to discern where
the parishioners used it themselves and where the scribes may have inserted it as a
generalization.

address only one disease. I suggest that translating “gota” as “drop” rather than “dropsy” or “gout” makes sense
given that the structure and intent of the spell was to constrain the illness and expel it. Translating “gota” as
“drop” could therefore suggest that Gueraula commanded the disease whether it was only a drop (a small piece
of itself, an early manifestation, etc.) or whether it was whole (“tota”). This translation would make “gota” both
the inverse and rhyme of “tota,” creating the sort of pleasing symmetry found in other medieval charms, and
would eliminate the confusion as to why she addresses only one disease in a general healing spell.
129
“…iurata dixit et confessa fuit se pro diversis infirmitatibus fecisse coniurationes et invocations Dei
et sanctorum…” Ibid.
130
“…Raimunda Spinosa et Gueraula Spelta faciunt aliquas devinationes…Fuit vocata Raimunda
Spinosa que inventa fuit degerasse et fuit correcta…Fuit correcta Gueraula Spelta et iuravit non uti
coniurationibus.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 165-166.

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Gueraula’s incantation reveals that the popular meaning of “conjurar” was one of
compulsion and command of invisible forces, in this case, disease. Other records of conjuration
from Barcelona support this conclusion, and further indicate that orality was a key
characteristic of conjuration as the peasantry practiced it—conjurations were always spoken
formulas. For example, Catalana of Sant Boi, in the diocese of Barcelona, admitted in 1303
that she used “conjurations of the eyes with the Pater Noster and Ave María and some secular
words mixed with the divine words that she said.”131 Similarly, in 1310, Benvenguda de
Malnovell of Masqueroles, also part of the diocese of Barcelona, claimed she knew four
specialized conjurations for various maladies that she used among her neighbours to great
effect. The Tortosa records reveal a similar practice performed by María Garsia of Vilafranca
in the diocese of Tortosa, who reported that she used a complicated verbal conjuration along
with specific actions to heal sick animals.132 While certain non-verbal actions (such as
exhaling) or materials (particularly shoe-laces) occasionally accompanied conjurations, the
conjuration itself was always a spoken act.133
These examples also reveal that conjuring was heavily associated with healing, a
nurturing activity, which explains its feminine association. Since women were associated with
nurturance and the tending of the sick, and conjurations were often employed to heal illness,
there is a logical link between women’s gendered roles within parish communities and the
magic they were reported to perform. While there were great variations in the details,

“…dixit Catalana per sacramentum se uti conjurationem oculorum cum pater noster et ave María et
quibusdam verbis profanis mixtis cum verbis divinis que dixit.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 709; Bonet and
Puigvert, Processos, 101, ADB Visitationes s.n., f.37v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f. 37v.
132
“Fuit vocata María Garsia et fuit interrogata quas coniurationes sciebat facere et dixit ad morbum
animalium sic una dona bona hostes li van de fora, feu-la's he de bona, enfre dues guaengues noves, axi com
saca cap e formiga sanc, ne peyx rijo, aytal mal aja bestia dadives ne de toixo cum Pater Noster III vicibus.”
Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 137.
133
For an example of the first, there is na Cardona of Caseres, Tortosa, who “throws down prunes and
blows over conjurations,” (“proiecit prunas et badayla super coniurationibus.”) Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 196.
131

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formulations, and accompanying gestures associated with these women’s conjurations, their
orality and the fact that all described healing activities reveal the two core characteristics of
medieval conjuring in practice. The association of conjuring with women may be an effect
rather than a cause of these characteristics—since peasant women were rarely literate and were
often commissioned with caring for the ill, the magic they employed reflected this situation.
The spoken nature of conjurations was problematic for bishops, who believed that
demons performed all magic, whether the human practitioner was aware of their involvement
or not. Certain persons, such as exorcists with papal licences or exceptionally holy persons,
might be able to battle demons with divine aid, but Gueraula, Catalana, María, and
Benvenguda—being laypeople, peasants of questionable orthodoxy, and women—were not
them. According to this logic, the only way a layperson could command a spiritual force was
with the aid of a more powerful spirit, and hence the greater her success, the greater her
sinfulness. The femininity of conjuring was a further problem for many bishops—while
“conjuring” could indicate a generic term used for any magical activity, the examples above
and the broader data provided in Table C indicate that conjuring was a feminine activity. Given
the prominent role lower-status women played as healers and caretakers, and the association
of conjuring with healing, this association between women and conjuring fits logically into
both the structure of magic and of gender in medieval peasant communities. Sorcery was
similar to conjuring in its conformity with gender stereotypes of magical practitioners, but very
different in its connotations.

Sorcery
The use of the word sortilegium (sorcery) in the visitations was not as frequent as
conjurare (to conjure) and its variations. There were eighteen people accused of sorcery in

65
Barcelona—for seven it was the sole offence, while eleven others were accused of sorcery
alongside other magical activities. The gender breakdown was similar to that of conjuration—
fifteen of the sorcerers were women, and only three were men. The story for Tortosa is
different, for not only was sorcery a far less common term in the records, but there were also
no men accused of it at all. Rather, six women appeared for the single charge of sorcery, while
another six practiced sorcery along with some other named offence. While “sorcery” seemed
to be a broad and ill-defined term, it had a heavily gendered connotation in actual use that
reflected bishops’—and some parishioners’—uneasiness about women’s magic and its
potential for disruption and harm. It often indicated some form of harmful or suspicious magic,
and was therefore more likely to be levelled at women, and especially women in Barcelona
where Ponç de Gualba tended to view and punish women more harshly than did Francesc
Paholac in Tortosa.
Though the classical definition of sortilegia merely meant “divination,” it, like
conjurare, had come to suggest demonic magic by the fourteenth century. In the definitive
medieval Catalan dictionary, Diccionari català-valencià-balear, A.M. Alcover explains that
the Catalan equivalent of sortilegium, sortiller simply meant “sorcery” or “diabolical
fetillas.”134 As with conjuring, while the documents use the Latin form of the word, it is the
Catalan meaning that best expresses their intention. Unlike the definition of conjuring, that of
sorcery makes explicit the diabolical association of magic. It is unclear whether the
parishioners themselves ever identified a particular magical practitioner as a sorcerer, or
whether the use of sortilegia or sortilegus/a reflects the record-makers’ influence on the
document. It is, however, clear that many individuals identified as sorcerers were also marginal

See below for a definition and discussion of fetilla. Alcover, Diccionari català-valencià-balear, s.v.
“Sortiller, -era.”
134

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or even undesirable women. There was a clear correlation between magical practitioners’
degree of integration into the community, their gender, and the language used to describe their
magical activities.
Nowhere is this relationship between charges of sorcery and the marginality of the
accused clearer than in the case of na Hanon and her daughter, Jews reported in the visit to the
parish of Santa María de Pi, in the city of Barcelona, in 1303. The parishioners complained
that “na Hanon, Jewess, and her daughter, is a public sorcerer to whom the Christians go
publicly for sorceries.”135 Not only did their situation as Jews and women doubly marginalize
these women in the eyes of the Christian community, but the many complaints against the
Jewish community in this visit also indicate that tensions between them and their Christian
neighbours were uncomfortably high at the time of Ponç de Gualba’s visit.136 These complaints
may have been related to tensions caused by the increasing prominence of Jews in the credit
market during the thirteenth century, and the “saturation” of that market by the end of the
century.137
The nature of such slander throws the entire possibility that na Hanon actually practised
any sort of magical activity into doubt, for the parishioners’ denunciation of her may have been
entirely fabricated as yet another reprehensible act with which to smear the Jewish community.
However, there is also evidence to the contrary, the foremost of which is that the charge against
135
“Item dixerunt quod na Hanon iudea et filia eius est publica sortilega ad quam publice pro sortilegiis
veniunt christiani et de hoc est multipliciter diffamata.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 667; Bonet and Puigvert,
Processos, 60; ADB Visitationes s.n., f. 11v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f.11v. The singular
Latin is odd since this report introduces two women. Presumably na Hanon was the sorcerer.
136
In the same visit the parishioners complained that the Jews put holes in the walls in diverse places in
order to introduce women into their homes and commit acts of bawdiness (“Item iudei Barchinone
perforaverunt murum in diversis locis per cuius foramina et diversoria introducuntur mulieres in eorum
dominibus et fiunt ibi multa lenocinia et latrocinia et alia inhonesta.”), and that they do not properly distinguish
themselves from Christians through their clothing (“Item dixerunt quod non portant capas nec habitum suum
conversando inter christianos ut deberunt.”), among other various other charges. Ibid.
137
Elka Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2009), 170.

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na Hanon included her name. Most of the other complaints—including breaking holes in the
walls through which entered women for lewd activities, and entering Christian homes under
the “veil of goodness” for malicious reasons—mention only “certain Jews” as the
perpetrators.138 This vagueness suggests that to the degree that the Christian interviewees
honestly believed Jews had perpetrated such actions, they had learned of it only through rumour
and general reputation. That na Hanon was both named and reported with a familial connection
(her unnamed daughter) indicates that the report of her activities was more solidly based on
fact than the other charges.139 Magical practitioners often marketed their services among their
communities, and relied on their reputation to attract clients. Na Hanon, therefore, likely
engaged in this sort of unremarkable magical practice, but due to the evident tensions between
the Christian and Jewish communities, the Christian parishioners cast her activities in a more
sinister light than they might otherwise have done. Certainly, if na Hanon was “a public
sorceress to whom Christians go publicly for conjurations,” not all Christians found fault with
her practice.140 The anti-Semitic sentiments so clearly expressed in this visitation would have
made a charge of sorcery, rather than mere conjuring or divination, an easy step for Christians
dissatisfied with their Jewish neighbours.

The full list of complaints runs thus, “Item dixerunt quod iudei fecerunt multa habitacula et domos
in quibusdam domibus qui sunt heredum Iacobi mazellarii et sunt ante domos B[ernardi] Zabaterii capsoris
quod redundat multum in periculum animarum christianorum circumvicinorum. Item iudei Barchinone
perforaverunt murum in diversis locis per cuius foramina et diversoria introducuntur mulieres in eorum domibus
et fiunt ibi multa lenocinia et latrocinia et alia inhonesta. Item dixerunt quod iudei et iudee sum velamine
quorumdam bonorum que portant ad vendendum intrant domos christianorum et ibi tractant lenocinia et multa
mala et inhonesta. Item dixerunt quod iudei se faciunt tractatores matrimoniorum quod est valde inhonestum et
perniciosum. Item dixerunt quod non portant capas nec habitum suum conversando inter christianos ut
deberent.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 667; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 60; ADB, Visitationes s.n., f. 11v at
HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f. 11v.
139
“Item dixerunt quod na Hanon iudea et filia eius est publica sortilega ad quam publice pro sortilegiis
veniunt christiani et de hoc est multiplicitur diffamata.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 667; Bonet and Puigvert,
Processos, 60; ADB, Visitationes s.n., f.11v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f.11v.
140
Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 667; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 60; ADB, Visitationes s.n., f. 11v
at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f. 11v.
138

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Two further cases demonstrate the relationship between charges of sorcery and the
marginality of the accused, and both of these also involve women. The first is “a certain
woman, who is called na Dolceta, [who] is a sorcerer and conjurer” identified by the
parishioners of Gandesa, in the diocese of Tortosa, in 1314.141 Her marginality is not apparent
in this accusation, but a charge of usury against “a cripple named Dolceta” appears later in the
visitation.142 Disability in the medieval period could symbolize a degenerate spiritual state, and
different physical impairments represented different spiritual problems—for example,
blindness suggested an inability to see the truth of Christianity.143 When, Dolceta “was called
and corrected, she denied what was proposed against her” but the bishop still extracted a
promise from her not to use “it” (sorcery or usury?) again. 144 Usury, the illegal lending of
money at interest, would be an ideal means for a person of unsound body to sustain an income.
Though it was forbidden by the medieval Church, the frequent appearance of usury in the
visitation records indicates that many Christians found it a profitable venture.145 Dolceta could
use sorcery and conjuring to improve her situation in a multitude of ways—to compel (by
enticement or threat) someone to be generous to her, bring good fortune to her own business
dealings, locate treasure, steal goods, or even ensnare a man’s mind and force him to marry
her.146

“…dixerunt quod quedam, que vocatur Na Dolceta, est sortilega et conjuratrix.” Egea, La Visita
Pastoral, 184.
142
“quedam clauda nomine Dolceta.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 185.
143
Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment During the High
Middle Ages, c. 1100-1400 (Routledge, 2006):37-64.
144
“Fuit vocata Dulcieta et correcta, tamen negavit que posita fuerant contra eam et iuravit non uti.”
Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 186.
145
By the fifteenth century, a multitude of financial mechanisms had evolved that allowed Christians to
skirt the boundaries of illegal usury in particular, credit instruments known as censals and violaris. See Jeffrey
Fynn-Paul, “Civic Debt, Civic Taxes, and Urban Unrest: a Catalan Key to Interpreting the late fourteenthcentury European Crisis”, Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of John H.A.
Munro, eds. Ivana Elbl, Martín Elbl, and Lawrin Armstrong (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 132-135 and Arcadio García
Sanz, “El Censal”, Boletín de la Sociedad Castellonense de Cultura 37 (1961), 281-310.
146
Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain, 30.
141

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A parallel example from the diocese of Barcelona further supports this association
between sorcery and disability. The parishioners of Subirats identified an unnamed “cripple”
who “does illusions and divines with sorcery near Martorell” in 1304. Dolceta and the unnamed
sorceress’s physical infirmities suggested to able-bodied Christians that they lacked spiritual
integrity, and they furthermore feared that the weakness and desperation of these women might
lead them to succumb to the temptation of improving their situation by illicit or diabolical
means. Gender compounded these fears because it formed the pre-established links between
women and magic and demons—a link even more likely in women with disabilities to suggest
their insufficient faith and spur their desire to improve their situations. As with na Hanon, the
otherness of Dolceta and the “cripple” from Martorell, layered over the existing stereotype of
women as magical practitioners, contributed to the charge of sorcery rather than mere
conjuring.
Sorcery was a poorly defined action—it is unclear what these women did (if anything)
that made their activities visibly different from those of more benign conjurers—and it centred
on the practitioner’s reputation and acceptance in the community. This may explain why na
Eiximena of the parish of Benaçal in Tortosa, named as a sorceress in 1314, “denied that she
did any sorcery, or knew anything of that sort.”147 Since magic was a common practice among
the laity, and Francesc Paholac was particularly lenient in his dealings with magical
practitioners, few parishioners ever denied that they engaged in magical activities when
questioned personally. Na Eiximena’s denial, therefore, suggests that she either feared further
marginalization if she admitted to performing magic, or that the charge against her was
fabricated based on a pre-existing marginalization that is invisible in the documents. A

“Fuit vocata na Eiximena et negavit non fecisse aliqua sortilegia nec scire aliquid de hoc facto et
iuravit non uti.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 134.
147

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reputation as a sorcerer went beyond the acceptable limits of magical practice, and suggested
that the practitioner was suspicious and perhaps even harmful. Since women were
characterized as less trustworthy than men, as cunning and secretive, and as naturally inclined
to deal with demons, their magical practices were always more likely to cross over into sorcery
than were men’s. Furthermore, the women accused of sorcery were often those who were
particularly disadvantaged within the medieval Catalan patriarchy—Jews and the disabled.
However, sorcery was still not so serious an accusation as was maleficia, even in its mild
medieval form.

Maleficia
Maleficia in the early fourteenth century, like many terms relating to magic, was
undergoing a shift in meaning. According to its classical definition, maleficia was a crime,
injury, or deception that might have been caused by sorcery.148 By early modern times, it had
become extremely specific, narrowed to “not simply a kind of magical or occult harm, but
harm wrought through a cooperative endeavour on the part of both the witch and devil, when
bound together in a particular kind of contractual relationship.”149 Because of its association
with witchcraft in the early modern period, it also absorbed a highly feminine connotation in
later centuries. The use of “maleficia” in the visitation records suggests that it was in a
transitional state between the classical and early modern definitions in the early fourteenth
century. In 1307, the parishioners of Santa María de Camino, in the diocese of Barcelona, told
the bishop of a man who after committing various maleficia claimed sanctuary in the parish

Lewis, Elementary Latin Dicitonary, s.v. “maleficium.”
Hans Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft, Theology and
Popular Belief (Manchester University Press: 2003), 23.
148
149

71
church and refused to leave.150 The meaning of maleficia in this account is that of the classical
definition, pertaining more to the fact that someone had done harm to someone else, than that
the harm came about through magic. Three examples from Tortosa, however, reveal that
maleficia could also carry the meaning of “harmful magic.”
The first is the accusation of “na Margarida, shepherdess, and María, wife of en
Canadera,” both from Xert in the diocese of Tortosa, for “binding and other maleficia.”151 This
accusation of maleficia targets two women of the parish who seem, like those accused of
sorcery, to have been marginal or at least unsavoury members of their communities.
Shepherds’ work took them out of the safe confines of civilized space, into the lonely hills and
fields where one might encounter demons and other supernatural creatures.152 If Margarida did
perform ligamentis or any other type of magic, it may have been intended to protect her flocks,
yet the relative isolation of her occupation may have lead her neighbours to interpret these acts
as secret and therefore sinister in nature.153 María Canadera, despite having achieved the
respectable status of a wife, was also an unpopular character in the parish. The visitations
record that she “does not frequent the church,” yet María herself denied all of these charges
(the bishop still corrected her).154 The parishioners must have used strong language for the
scribe to record these women’s offences as maleficia rather than simple conjuring, the preferred
term for magical activity. Since María and Margarida were from the same parish, Xert, it is

ADB, Visitationes 1, f.86r at HMML microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1., f.86r.
“…dixerunt quod Na Margarita, pastora, et María, uxor d’En Canadera faciunt ligare et facere alia
maleficia et dicta María non frequenter ecclesiam.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 159-60.
152
Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 69-88.
153
There are several examples of magic intended to protect animals. For example, Ramon de
Porquerias performed an unspecified charm to protect his sheep from wolves (“Ramon de Porquerias assignat
unum [unspecified charm] par ovium luppis in quoquo festo Beati Iohannis Baptiste ut non comebant de
residuis.”) Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 142.
154
See n.56; “Fuit vocata María Canadera et interrogata per iuramentum de hiis que posita fuerant
contra eam et negavit ea omnia. Et fuit correcta.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 160.
150
151

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possible that poor local conditions had convinced the peasantry that there was a malicious force
at work against them, and they identified two women known for magical practice and with
questionable reputations as the source of the problem. As in the cases of sorcery, maleficia
more easily applied to women’s magic because of the ease with which women’s magic was
seen to slip from the helpful, valuable, and useful Christian-infused nature of conjuring to the
harmful, suspect, and potentially diabolical nature of sorcery and maleficia.
The second mention of maleficia appears to record not the parishioners’ attitude
towards the practitioner, but rather the bishop’s application of the word in a case involving a—
notably male—cleric. The case is that of Lop de Molino, a married cleric of Burriana, also in
the diocese of Tortosa. While the initial accusation states only that he knew “how to release
bound couples,” his individual appearance before the bishop reveals a man engaged in a wide
array of activities.155 He was “called and warned and corrected that he should not use bindings
or dissolving sorceries [maleficiis] with the Gospel, whereby he conceded not only this but
also merely simple medicine.”156 In this case, “binding and dissolving” link clearly to the
original charge of ligamentis, but rather than being the charge themselves, they are merely
describing the nature of the crime of maleficia. Maleficia itself, in this case, seems to function
only in the sense of “sorcery,” because Lop does not fit the marginalized profile established
for María and Margarida. His offence was no doubt compounded by his membership in the
clergy (however minor), and he appears to have used his position and education to set himself
up as a sort of all-round healer. That he is identified as a healer as well as a desligator is
noteworthy, for it emphasizes that he was primarily involved with undoing harmful effects by

“…dixerunt quod Lop de Molino, scit desligare coniuges ligatos.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 216.
“Fuit vocatus Lop de Molino, clericus coniugatus et fuit monitus et correctus quod not uteretur
colligationibus sive malefitiis dissolvendis cum evangelio, seu aliis coniurationibus qui facere hoc concessit sed
tantummodo simplici medicina.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 217.
155
156

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whatever means proved most effective (magical or medical). While elite theologians might
claim that using magic to undo magic was just as bad as using a spell to perform evil in the
first place, this distinction appears lost on Lop.157 His apparently voluntary addition of simple
medicine to his renunciation of conjuring and maleficia suggests that the bishop’s
remonstrance came as a surprise, and it duly frightened him as a layman whose intentions were
good but whose grasp of theological particulars was weak.
There are notable differences in how the term maleficia was used in the cases of the
women from Xert, and Lop de Molino. María and Margarida were both clearly marginal
members of their communities who had reputations for knowing binding magic, a harmful
magic associated with femininity.158 The parishioners of Xert used maleficia, or, more likely,
descriptive language that emphasized harmfulness, when describing their activities. The
parishioners of Burriana, on the other hand, knew Lop de Molino as a man who could release
married couples from harmful ligamentis—this was a valued skill. In this case it was the bishop
who applied maleficia to the magical actions. In essence, these cases play on the stereotypes
of magical practitioners—peasants feared marginal women communing with demons to the
detriment of the community, but Francesc Paholac feared any who resembled a necromancer.
While elites envisioned the peasant magical practitioner as a woman, susceptible to demons
because of her feminine weakness and foolishness, Francesc Paholac was more concerned
about magic among the clergy.

157
158

Ibid.
Rider, Magic and Impotence.

74
Divination
Of all the magical terms and practices performed by laypeople and corrected by
ecclesiastical authorities in the early fourteenth century, divination was by far the most public
and rivalled healing conjurations in its popularity, usefulness, and ability to attract clients. In
particular, it appeared frequently in the Barcelona records, with twenty-four persons identified
as diviners—twenty-two of them women, and ten of those women specializing solely in
divination. Divination was a less common charge in Tortosa, but all eleven of those charged
with divination in Tortosa were women. Divination was a passive magic, one that observed or
informed without directly influencing the world, and it therefore easily aligned with concepts
of women’s weakness and passivity. Consequently, it may have been less threatening than
other forms of women’s magic, which may explain the great popularity many diviners enjoyed.
The different frequencies of divination in Barcelona and Tortosa reflect the two bishops’
emphases on the femininity of medieval magic—divination was a very feminine magic, rarely
practised by men, and so Ponç de Gualba’s focus on female magical practitioners discovered
a greater number of diviners than did Francesc Paholac’s less targeted approach. However, as
with other terms, this difference can also be attributed to the Barcelona record creators’
tendency to use less specialized language to describe magical activities.
Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, written in the seventh century, claimed to catalogue
all types of magic and magical practitioners present at the end of the classical age, but he treated
the concepts of magic and divination as synonymous—this confluence does not necessarily
reflect poor understanding on his part, but rather the abundance of divinatory magics. 159 He
divided the different types of divination according to whether they required demonic

William E. Klingshirn, “Isidore of Seville’s Taxonomy of Magicians and Diviners,” Traditio 58
(2003): 67-69.
159

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participation (furor) or practiced skill (ars) to predict the future.160 Since many of the forms of
divination he discussed required quite complex procedures or specialized knowledge, they
were probably mostly elite magics and therefore not gendered as feminine. Writers throughout
the Middle Ages picked up and modeled their own works on Isidore’s divisions, and, as a
result, often used “divination” very loosely to mean lay conjuring, confusing its distinction as
either elite or lay. Certainly, the fourteenth-century visitation records show no signs of the
complex divinatory magics of the classical age, but rather more home-spun traditions of
women’s magic. 161
In the fourteenth century, elite necromancers and astrologers (whose practices were
sometimes considered tolerable natural magic, and sometimes identified with necromancy),
concerned themselves with the predictive powers of divination—the vogue for court
astrologers at this time speaks to the popularity of divination.162 Jaume II, king of the Crown
of Aragon during the period of this study, studied alchemy and astrology.163 However, peasant
diviners in Catalonia dealt with more mundane issues—the location of lost sheep, the
identification of thieves, and determining whether a person’s love for another would meet with
success or failure. The materials they used were equally mundane and included grains, shoelaces, and spindles. Unlike the court astrologers, peasant diviners were almost always women.
In fact, the only two men appearing as diviners, Pere Belo and Berenguer Martorell, were both
from the parish of Arbúcies in Barcelona, suggesting a local peculiarity.164 Since peasant

Ibid, 71.
Ibid, 75.
162
Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 97.
163
Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 143.
164
“Item dixerunt quod en Petrus Belo filius Berengarii Belo utitur divinationibus. Idem Petrus Belo
iuravit ulterius non uti quandam coniurationem ovium. Item Berengarius Marthorela et na Valentorii faciunt
divinationes.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorals,” 695; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 88; ADB Visitationes s.n., f. 30r
at HMML microfilm no. 31951, Visitas s.n., f. 30r.
160
161

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diviners worked passively—that is, resolving something that had already occurred, or that
would occur regardless of a person’s actions—their practice functioned according to normative
views of femininity. Peasant diviners could only observe the location of stolen items, not
predict the theft in advance or apprehend the thief.
For example, na Axa, a Muslim woman in Subirats, in the diocese of Barcelona,
performed a divination for a woman who had had some items stolen from her. She held three
grains in her hands, and two of them turned black.165 In another case from the 1304 visit to the
diocese of Barcelona, the parishioners claimed that “a Castilian baptizata named Sibilia” did
“dishonest divinations with wheat grains.”166 Given the similarities between the baptizata
Sibilia’s methods and the Muslim na Axa’s, Sibilia was probably Muslim herself before her
conversion. Their practice has some parallels with early modern love magic, which often
involved casting beans.167 This love magic was divinatory in nature, since it often attempted to
answer whether the man a woman loved would marry her, or whether a straying husband would
return his affections to his wife.168 It is possible that these early modern love magics evolved
out of a more general tradition of medieval lay divination, practised by Muslim women and
women converts from Islam, since both were concerned with finding something that is hidden
or lost, whether it be a physical object, or a person’s affection. If this is true, then the visitations
also foreshadow the specialization of moriscas in love magic, for in addition to na Axa, and
Sibilia, appeared the Muslim na Pheba of García, and a “Saracen [man] of Calanda,” both in

“Dixit quod vocatur Na Axa, et illa facit divinationes et coniurationes furtorum et maleficiorum
cum corrigia, ut ipsa vidit quadam vice et audivit a quadam vicina sua, Ermessende de Cudins, que iverat ad
eam pro furto inveniendo; et retulit huic testi quod III grana frumenti accepit dicta Axa inter manus et II fuerunt
versi in nigredinem.” Perarnau, “Activitats i formules,” 70.
166
“Item dixerunt quod Sibilia baptizata castilliani et Alamanda Pastora faciunt divinationes inhonestas
cum frumento.” ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 87r accessed at HMML microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 87r.
167
Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain, 73-75, 87.
168
Ibid, 62-64.
165

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the records from the diocese of Tortosa.169 The visitations do not record Muslims engaged in
any other types of magical practices, but it is clear that they were at least engaged in providing
divinatory services for their Christian neighbours. Notably, most of the Muslim diviners were,
like their Christian counterparts, women, indicating that divination was associated with
femininity on a deep cultural level in Iberia.
Muslims may have appeared among the diviners of early fourteenth-century Barcelona,
but Christian diviners were far more prominent. Na Godalla of Sant Boi was at least known in
(and therefore probably served parishioners of) the nearby parishes of Sant Climent de
Llobregat and Gavà as she was accused in all three places, though not always as a diviner. The
parishioners of Gavà knew her as a diviner, while those of Sant Climent and Sant Boi said she
used conjurations “on people and animals,” the Sant Boi record explained. 170 While in most
cases, the visitations do not give enough information to suggest that magic was a significant
occupation for those accused, in the case of na Godalla the range of her magical activities and
her notoriety indicate that she, at least, operated as a skilled practitioner. According to the
parishioners of Molins de Rei, a na Godalla of Prohenzanna (who may or may not have been
the same person as na Godalla of Sant Boi), served na Zabatera and several other parishioners
of Molins de Rei, indicating that hers, too, was an inter-parish business.171 Marchesia of Sant
Valentí also enjoyed great acclaim, for according to the rector of the church of Pacs, “the whole

169
Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 167-8, 135. For further discussion of the role of moriscas in early modern
Iberian love magic, see Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in
Early Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 43, 55-6.
170
“Item dixerunt quod aliqui de ista parrochia vadunt pro divinationibus ad Godaylam mulierem de
parrochia Sancti Baudilii.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 706; “Item dixerunt quod na Godalla de Sto. Baudilio
donate Santi Iohannis de Viladecanibus utitur coniurationibus.” Ibid., 707; “Item dixerunt quod na Godalla facit
conjurationes hominibus et animalibus pacientibus.” Ibid., 709.
171
“Item dixerunt quod na Godalla de parrochia de Prohenzanna facit se divinatricem et quod na
Zabatera habitatrix Molendinorum Regis ivit ad eam nomine proprio et nomine A[rnaldi] Milgranerii et pro
B[ernardo] Fusterii et pro Oyoneto de Podio.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 663; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos,
56; ADB Visitationes s.n., f.8v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f.8v.

78
world goes” to her for divinations.172 Many other entries in the visitations include similar
phrases, indicating the great popularity of divination and suggesting that a successful diviner
could enjoy a steady stream of clients.
Divination was, in many ways, the most “respectable” magic that a lower-status Catalan
woman could perform. Since it only ever passively acquired information, it was not as
susceptible to parishioners’ suspicions as were more active magics such as conjuration or
sorcery. The only activity involved in a divination was the practitioner’s chosen method (be it
spindle, shoe-lace, or grain), and whatever course of action the diviner’s client chose to take
following her advice. This is not to say that diviners were less capable of gaining social
importance than were conjurers—the ability to convince a person to do something was no small
power, and perhaps a more controllable one than healing with conjurations which, after all, did
not always work. The combination of being more acceptable because its passivity aligned with
ideas of proper femininity, and its lesser likelihood of being reinterpreted as bad magic, made
divination an ideal feminine magic, which accounts for its great popularity.

Conjuring, sorcery, maleficia, and divination were terms used in both the Barcelona
and the Tortosa registers. While the different record keepers used these terms in slightly
different ways, together they represent the broadest, most widespread, or (in the case of
maleficia) most indeterminate terms associated with magic by early fourteenth-century
ecclesiastical elites. In general, Ponç de Gualba’s records reveal a use of language that aligned
with the medieval Church’s increasing alarm about magic in the early fourteenth century, as

172
“Item dixit dictus Rector quod aliqui de parrochianis suis incurrunt aliquando ad Marchesiam
mulierem divinatricem que moratur in parrochia Sancti Valentini ad quam ut dicitur tota terra concurrit.” Bonet,
“Visitas Pastorales,” 678; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 71; ABD Visitationes s.n., f.19v at HMML microfilm
no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f.19v.

79
well as a strong association between women and magic. Francesc Paholac’s records, on the
other hand, reveal language little changed in either use or meaning from its earlier medieval
precedents, and while he recognized women as the majority of practitioners in these fields, he
did not actively pursue them. Yet this does not mean that Paholac’s approach was outdated or
ineffective while de Gualba’s was cutting-edge for its time. Paholac rigorously inquired into
Lop de Molino’s magic, called maleficia, which was particularly troublesome given his clerical
connections and the rising problem of magic among clergymen. The two women accused of
maleficia, on the other hand, received the usual correction—no more or less than any other
magical practitioner. The role of gender in the language of accusation in the fourteenth-century
visitation records was complex, and becomes more so in the three Catalan terms that appear
only in the Tortosa register: fetilla, encortation, and ligamentis.

Fetilla
Fetilla was a uniquely Catalan word that appears in the Tortosa visitations in the
parishes of Arés, Vilafranca, and La Sénia, and has been defined in the Diccionari catalàvalencià-balear as “a superstitious practice to which are attributed magical virtues.”173 Modern
Catalan dictionaries translate the related verb fetillar as “to bewitch” or “to cast a spell on.”174
These definitions are not very helpful when attempting to distinguish fetilla from other
medieval Catalan magical practices, however, since it could plausibly apply to all of them. Its
etymological evolution does provide some clues that distinguish it from other practices, for it
is related to the Latin fictilia and fingimentis.175 Fictilia refers to objects made of earth or clay,

Alcover, Diccionari català-valencià-balear, s.v. “Fetilla.”
Diccionari català-anglès, 5th ed. (Barcelona: Encyclopèdia catalana, 1995), s.v. “fetilla.”
175
Ibid.
173
174

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and fingimentis to something that has been shaped, formed, or molded.176 These hint that fetilla
might involve some sort of sympathetic magic premised on similarities of shape, or perhaps,
more figuratively, that its goal was to change some aspect of its object’s form or nature. Just
as conjurare evolved a magical meaning from an originally mundane definition, fetilla appears
to have developed a magical definition during the medieval period that faintly echoes its
original classical meaning.
The visitation documents do not provide any clear indication of what fetilla was, nor
what made it different from other magics. Six of the seven people identified as fetillers were
from two remote, neighbouring parishes, Arés and Vilafranca—this suggests that peasants did
not regularly refer to magical practitioners as fetillers, but the term had currency within a
narrow geographic area. Furthermore, these six fetillers were all women, while the lone man
was the only magical practitioner reported in La Sénia. Lacking further data, it is difficult to
draw conclusions about the gendering of fetillers, though it seems they were, like conjurers,
sorcerers, and diviners, mostly women. “Fetilla” did become a more common term at the end
of the fourteenth century, when Vicent Ferrer would refer to it in his sermons against
superstition and magic.177 However, in the early fourteenth-century visitation records it was
second only to maleficia in rarity.
One of the fetilleres from Vilafranca, María Garsia, revealed a conjuration that she used
to cure animals. Recorded in Catalan, it reads, “una dona bona hostes li van de fora, feu-la’s
he de bona, enfre dues guengues noves, axi com saca cap e formiga sanc, ne peyx rijo, aytal
mal aja bèstia dàdives ne de toixó,” which she used together with the recitation of three Pater

Lewis, Elementary Latin Dictionary, s.v.v. “fictilis,” “fingo.”
Granados, “Sortilegas, Divinatrices, et Fetilleras,” 233. See also Alcover, Diccionari catalàvalencià-balear, s.v. “Fetilla.”
176
177

81
Nosters.178 The Catalan phrase is puzzling, for it is unclear if this is an action or a spoken
element of the spell, or both—typically the visitations only resorted to the vernacular when
they sought to capture the exact phrasing of incriminating language (whether of conjuring,
blasphemy, or heretical statements). However, in this case, the phrase appears at least to
partially describe an action that María undertook while speaking the Pater Noster, making it
more than a simple conjuration. It is possible that María merely spoke the formula, which told
a story with the same outcome desired by the charm—such sympathetic magic was common
in medieval healing.179 Alternately, the reason for the vernacular usage may be that María’s
action was just as unintelligible to the scribe or bishop as it appears to a modern reader. While
this case provides no firm evidence that differentiates fetilla from simple conjuring, it
nonetheless reveals the complex relationships—even leading to complete overlap—between
different forms of magic and the language used to identify them. A further example of fetilla,
and one that muddies its definition further, comes not from Tortosa, but from the diocese of
Urgell, much of which was in the Catalan Pyrenees.
Ramonda Rocha, identified as a fetillera in the bishop of Urgell’s 1310 visitation tour,
performed an action that involved winding a hair from her own head around a spindle and then
spinning it in a shallow dish on which she had drawn a cross.180 Spinning was the universal

“Fuit vocata María Garsia et fuit interrogata quas coniurationes sciebat facere et dixit ad morbum
animalium sic una dona bona hostes li van de fora, feu-la’s he de bona, enfre dues guengues noves, axi com
saca cap e formiga sanc, ne peyx rijo, aytal mal aja bèstia dàdives ne de toixó cum Pater Noster III vicibus. Fuit
iniunctum eidem per iuramentum quod de cetero non utatur.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 136-7. The first part of
the Catalan phrase appears to run thus, “[t]he hosts go to a good woman from outside, she does herself have
from the good woman, between two new blankets, such that the head shows it is a blood skin disease...” This
appears to have two sections: the first functioning as a brief frame for the actual magical activity, which begins
at “enfre dues guaengues.” I have been unable to translate the second half of the phrase, but it seems to
conclude with the illness leaving the animal.
179
See “Charms to Ward off Sheep and Pig Murrain,” in Miri Rubin ed., Medieval Christianity in
Practice, (Princeton University Press, 2009): 67. For a general discussion of sympathetic principles of medieval
magic see Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 89-90, 162-3.
180
“Raymunda Rocha est fetillera […] quod reciperet unum capillum de capite suo et haberet unum
fusum quem ligebat in capite capilli predicti et aliud capud capilli tenebat in manu sinistra et cum manu dextera
178

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chore of medieval women, and thread magic and superstitious practices around it had long
existed. For example, in Corrector et Medicus, an eleventh-century penitential handbook based
on even older works, Burchard of Worms complained about women who said spells over their
weaving to ensure the quality of the cloth.181 The purpose of Ramonda’s charm is uncertain—
the element of chance involved in spinning the spindle suggests it may have been a form of
divination, but it may also have served some other purpose.182 In its use of spinning materials,
it hearkens faintly to the sense of fabrication or crafting in the Latin precedents of fetilla.
Though it is difficult to draw conclusions from so few examples, fetilla seems to have been a
form of magic associated with women’s craft, generally textile work, in some way. This would
explain the majority of women identified as its practitioners. However, fetilla would have been
very similar to ligamentis, which I discuss below, in its use of thread and it is perhaps this
similarity that resulted in so few cases of fetilla, as parishioners in other locations preferred
synonyms.

Ligamentis
The act of ligamentis or desligamentis simply means “tying” and “untying” or
“binding” and “releasing,” but these describe a particular type of magical act that relied on
physical objects in a much more explicit way than did fetilla. Ligamentis was well-known as
an anti-fertility magic in both medieval and early modern times, and, as its name suggests,
involved tying or untying knots in a string or rope. A 1466 letter from King Enrique IV of

faciebat fusum balar [dansar] in quadam scutella ubi ante fecerat crucem per extoriori.” Excerpt from the
Visitations of 1312 in the diocese of Urgell, Arxiu Capitular de Vic, Register 1, fol. 38v transcribed and cited in
Pau Castell i Granados, “Sortilegas, Divinatrices, et Fetillers,” 223.
181
John Shinners, ed., Medieval Popular Religion 1000-1500, A Reader, Readings in Medieval
Civilizations and Cultures 2 (Peterborough, ON, Canada: Broadview Press, 1997), 443.
182
Granados, “Sortilegas, Divinatrices, et Fetillers,” 223.

83
Castile lamented the activities of people who participate in “binding [ligando] fields and men
and women so that they could not give birth nor have children nor generate among them, and
perpetrating other evil things by which fields and vineyards and grapes and apple-trees and
other fruits that Our Lord gives us are lost.”183 A synodal statute from the diocese of Barcelona
included a section recommending excommunication for anyone who used “sorcery, maleficia,
or bindings [ligationes]” to impede a marriage.184 It is unclear if Ponç de Gualba was familiar
with this statute—it was surely available to him, but the statutes in the diocese of Barcelona
were disorganized and unwieldy to use before Francesc Ruffach’s compilation in 1354.185 If
de Gualba was familiar with it, then he made no distinction between binding sorcery used for
the purpose of infertility and any other form of magic. His visitation records mention four cases
of people who did conjuring, sorcery, or divination with shoe-laces, which if encountered by
another bishop may have been labelled ligamentis rather than the less specific terms favoured
by de Gualba.
The best examples of ligamentis come from the diocese of Tortosa, where seventeen
individuals appeared as either ligators, desligators, or both. There is a clearly gendered
division between those who were ligators and those who undid the harmful effects of
ligamentis, the desligators. Seven of nine women were specifically accused as ligators, and
some of these were combined with charges of maleficia or sorcery that otherwise suggested
their magic was of a harmful variety—only one woman was associated with the more benign

Granados, “‘Wine Vat Witches Suffocate Children’: The Mythical Components of the Iberian
Witch,” eHumanista 26 (2014): 184. Enrique’s concern about ligamentis was probably linked to rumours about
his own impotence. See José Luis Martín, Enrique IV de Castilla, Rey de Navarra, Principe de Cataluña
(Nerea, 2003), 312.
184
“Item, dicimus sub pena excommunicacionis ne sortilegia fiant nec maleficia nec ligaciones que
fiunt per maleficas mulieres.” J.N. Hillgarth and Giulio Silano, “A Compilation of the Diocesàn Synods of
Barcelona (1354): Critical Edition and Analysis,” Medieval Studies 46 (1986): 79, 107.
185
Hillgarth and Silano, “A Compilation of Diocesan Synods,” 79.
183

84
act of desligamentis, and another woman apparently did both. These data contrast with those
for the male ligators and desligators, who appeared in equivalent, though smaller, numbers of
four each. Ligamentis was a malicious female act—the association of jealous concubines and
cunning adulteresses with infertility magic had a long history in medieval thought and
literature.186 The data from Tortosa suggests that women were more inclined to use ligamentis
than were men, or at least that the male parish representatives who reported their activities to
the bishop believed such to be the case. Ligamentis was a particularly frightening form of
female magic, one that not only bespoke a woman’s power acquired via magic, but also
emasculated men and disrupted the gender hierarchy. Given the prevalence of sexual
misdemeanors in the visitation records, rural parishes probably did contain a number of jealous
concubines and adulteresses, but there is no evidence to prove they were the same women who
used ligamentis.
Men, as the usual targets of ligamentis, were also associated with its reversal. This
sense of the word is apparent in the case of Lop de Molino of Burriana, who reportedly knew
“how to release bound couples.”187 While from an ecclesiastical standpoint desligamentis was
just as sinful as ligamentis, from a social perspective a desligator was a valuable defender of
precious fertility, while a ligator was a fearful threat. A male desligator re-established the
patriarchal order by undoing (and therefore proving his greater power over) a woman’s
ligamentis. The most detailed example involving ligamentis is that of Ramon Stercull, from
the parish of Todolella in the diocese of Tortosa, but before examining his case it is first
necessary to introduce the final word used to identify magical practitioners in the Tortosa
visitation records: encortation.

186
187

Rider, Magic and Impotence.
“…dixerunt quod Lop de Molino, scit desligare coniuges ligatos.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 216.

85
Encortation
Like fetilla, encortation was a Catalan word, but unlike fetilla, it was written in
Latinized forms (incortare, incortatione, incortator/incortatrix) throughout the documents,
indicating that the recorders were more familiar with it. The word encortar is essentially a
synonym of encantar, “to work upon someone or something by virtue of occult powers,
principally magic words.”188 In turn, the Catalan encantar retained many characteristics of its
Latin root, incantare, “to enchant, bewitch.”189 The meaning had changed little since the time
of Isidore of Seville, who defined an incantador in his Etymologies as “those who exercise
their skill [of divination] by words,” that is, people who summoned demons through spoken
formulas rather than ritual actions.190 However, other classical Christian texts identified
incantadors as users of herbs and amulets as well as spells, and it is this sense of encortators
that appears in the fourteenth-century documents.191 Though I have been unable to locate any
etymological studies exploring the development of encortar and encantar, I propose that the
two meanings of incantator split during the linguistic evolution of Catalan so that encortation
expressed the use or creation of a magical artifact, while encantation refers to the spoken
elements of a spell. The form encantar does not appear in the visitations, but its use was not
necessary as conjurar supplied an equivalent meaning.
Thirty-three of the forty-eight named encortators Francesc Paholac encountered during
his visitation tour in 1314-1315 were men. This distribution makes sense with the association
of craftsmanship and the active making of amulets and charms with encortation, for men

Alcover, Diccionari català-valencià-balear, s.v.v. “Encortar,” “Encantar.”
Lewis, Elementary Latin Dictionary, s.v. “incanto.”
190
Kingshirn, “Isidore of Seville’s Taxonomy,” 86.
191
Ibid, 71.
188
189

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dominated in medieval crafts.192 While women could and did work in crafts, it was not a
vocation for them as it was for men—not a signifier of identity nor of success. Craftsmen were
professionals who owned or worked in shops, while craftswomen were usually their wives,
daughters, and servants.193

Unfortunately, all but one of the forty-eight mentions of

encortation in the visitation register end without further elaboration on the practice of
encortation. The one exception is the case of Ramon Stercull, but this example is complicated
by a seeming conflation of encortation with ligamentis.
Ramon appeared in the visitation to Todolella as an expert in “binding dogs and
hunts.”194 He denied this charge, but described an encortation he used for animals—“he made
a cross out of cord, which cross he hung in the door of the house.”195 While the initial
accusation against Ramon is of ligamentis, he calls his charm an encortation. This confusion
may have occurred at the point of observation, since we might presume that the process of
making a cross out of cord involved the tying of at least one knot. It is also possible that in this
case there is no fundamental difference between an encortation (which I define as a magical
act involving a physical object) and ligamentis (which involved the physical presence of a
rope-like material).
There is no stated purpose for Ramon’s ligamentis or encortation, but the employment
of a cross as an amulet and its placement over a point of entry indicates that it was protective

One need look no further than the structure of craft guilds to notice their patriarchal nature,
governed by small groups of the most prominent masters, under whom were the journeymen and apprentices.
While women did participate in some guilds, this was usually through their husbands. Karras, From Boys to
Men, 142.
193
Ibid., 109.
194
“…Raimundus Estercuyl et Bernardus eius filius ligant canes et venationes.” Egea, La Visita
Pastoral, 142.
195
“Fuit vocatus Raimundus Stercuil et negavit ea que proposita fuerant contra eum. Sed dixit quod ad
incortandum animalia faciebat quondam crucem in quondam fune quam crucem pendebat in portal hospitii de
quo fuit correctus.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 142.
192

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in nature. This is similar to a practice condemned by the eleventh-century Burchard of Worms,
who advised ecclesiastical officials to ask suspect Christians:
Have you tied knots, made incantations, or other various enchantments
that wicked men, swineherds, oxherds, and sometimes hunters do
while they sing devilish chants over bread, herbs, and certain foul
bandages, and either hide these in a tree or throw them where
crossroads meet in order either to free their animals or dogs from
pestilence or loss or to cause the loss of someone else’s?196
Looking past the condemnatory language of this description, Burchard described a charm to
protect animals, and the concurrent destruction of a rival’s livestock may be his addition to
explain why demons would bother to protect anything for the benefit of humanity. Ramon
Stercull’s charm shares certain similarities with this much older practice, as they both involve
tying knots in cords (or “bandages”), the protection of animals (especially dogs), and an
implication that this was serviceable for hunters.
This focus on animals serves as an explanation for the interchangeability of encortation
and ligamentis in the case of Ramon Stercull. While there is the occasional mention of
conjuring animals to heal them, encortation appears to have a special relationship with the
parish beasts, as six other accusations of encortation identify animals specifically as the objects
of the magic. It is unsurprising that male peasants’ magic was strongly bound to animals, since
medieval male peasants were not only greatly occupied with caring for and managing livestock,
but were also represented as grossly similar to the animals they worked with.197 There are
records from across Europe that even indicate clerical complicity with many borderline
magical practices to protect livestock, such as a complicated pseudo-religious thirteenthcentury English charm to protect sheep from skin disease. This charm involved singing a mass,

196
197

Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion, 442.
Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 53-54.

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reciting several psalms, and telling a sympathetic magic story about sheep that God had
cured—all but the last of these would have been beyond the ability of the medieval laity.198
Ramon’s encortation may have been a general protective magic that functioned well in the
preservation of animals because such simple charms did not require specialized skill or
knowledge of the verbal formulas required by more complex conjurations. If ligamentis was a
magic that was strongly (but not entirely) associated with fertility and plenitude, and
encortations aimed to ensure the health of animals in the parish, then these two magics might
work with or against each other. Encortations could shield animals from ligamentis that
attempted to inhibit their ability to flourish.

Conclusion
This chapter has displayed the extreme complexity of charges of “magic” in the
visitation records, and emphasized that such charges are irreducible to any single coherent
form. While theologians simplified all magic (in theory) to a human-demon relationship, the
features of these magics (in practice) were as varied as their practitioners. The bishops of
Barcelona and Tortosa accepted the variety of parishioners’ magical expressions with different
degrees of flexibility—Ponç de Gualba cared little for nuances of language, while Francesc
Paholac proved far more sensitive to peasant terminology for the magical practices. These
different approaches to visitation recording clearly affected and were affected by the gendered
connotations of the different terms. Ponç de Gualba’s focus on female magical practitioners
led him to use broad terms that were nonetheless gendered as feminine, while Francesc
Paholac’s broader approach not only identified more male magical practitioners but also

198

Rubin, Medieval Christianity in Practice, 68.

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captured a wider array of language including words for masculine magics. This plurality of
magic forms an important foundation for understanding the next part of my discussion—the
social situation, gender, and religious affiliation of the accused persons and how these factors
affected both the types of magic they practised and the perception of their magic by the
community.

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Chapter 3: Recognizing the Diversity of Medieval Magical Practitioners

A chaplain from Forcall, a layman from Todolella, a wife in Torrelles, an elderly
mother from Subirats, a Muslim woman, a Jewish mother and daughter from the city of
Barcelona: these people came from different parts of Catalonia, different religious identities,
and differently gendered lives, but one common theme links them together—their peers
recognized all of them as magical practitioners. The popular image of the traditional magical
practitioner has, in fact, changed little in over a thousand years—while the Canon episcopi
railed against the imaginings of “wicked” and “miserable women” in the tenth century, fairy
tales today continue to present elderly women as the bearers of magical ability and
knowledge.199 As I showed in Chapter One, the peasant woman was the prime suspect of
magical offences, because she was considered easy prey for demons due to her ignorance and
misguided ambition. However, a close examination of the types of magical practitioners who
appear in the visitation records from early fourteenth-century Barcelona and Tortosa indicates
that old Christian women held no monopoly over magical practice in peasant communities.
While many practitioners were Christian women, these women appear alongside men—
sometimes literally, as in the case of a husband and wife who both conjured eye ailments—as
well as Muslim or Jewish practitioners.
In this chapter, I analyse different groups of magical practitioners (lower-status women,
lower-status men, literate men, non-Christians) present in the visitation documents from early
fourteenth-century Barcelona and Tortosa, and discuss the patterns and silences that appear
among each group. Ponç de Gualba actively targeted female magical practitioners, including

“Canon Episcopi,” in Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, 61; Ruth Bottingheimer, Magic
Tales and Fairy Tale Magic (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).
199

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non-Christian women, because their popularity, prominence, and frequency combined with his
understanding of women’s nature to present them as potentially involved with demons.
Francesc Paholac’s broad sweep of questions uncovered many more male and female magical
practitioners, but he generally investigated cases involving prominent or literate men because
of the possibility that these men engaged in necromancy. Paholac did not target these men in
the same way that de Gualba targeted women, however, and he still discovered more women
than he did men. Paholac wanted to discover all of the magical practitioners in his parishes,
only some of whom he considered dangerous, while de Gualba saw peasant magic as a much
more feminine activity. I argue that these patterns both confirm the feminine gendering of
peasant magic in early fourteenth-century Catalonia, but also reveal that the two bishops
interpreted this gendering in different ways depending on whether they emphasized women’s
sinfulness as proof of the disruptive potential of their magic, as did Ponç de Gualba, or their
ignorance as evidence of the unimportant foolishness of peasant magic, as did Francesc
Paholac. On the one hand, women magical practitioners were represented as paradigms of sin
and disorder. On the other hand, they were the stupid victims of superstition—in neither picture
were women magical practitioners presented as valued and useful members of their
communities, though they were these to their clients, family, and neighbours. It was far more
than just the vocabulary of peasant magic that bishops struggled to comprehend and record—
rather, the disjuncture in elite and lay ways of thinking about magic extended into the value of
peasant magical practitioners as dangerous or valuable members of society.
This chapter addresses a series of case studies that illuminate the variety of people
involved in lay magical practices. It opens with a discussion of lower-status Christian women,
both single and married, which serves as a baseline for the most commonly reported magical
practitioners. This section identifies some of the similarities between these women, but also

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highlights differences among them to break down the homogenous image of the medieval
magic-doer as a female hag, one shared by modern historians and medieval bishops alike. In
this section I also examine lower-status male practitioners, who barely make an appearance in
the Barcelona visits, though there are numerous (if undetailed) cases of their magic in Tortosa.
The lack of detail in the records stems from their failure to align with either the image of the
female magical practitioner (whether viewed as dangerous or duped), or the elite necromancer.
I next consider the cases of four male practitioners engaged in magic practices that resembled
elite magic in some form, though only one of these men practised what could be called
necromancy. The final two case studies are those of a Muslim woman and a Jewish woman.
Non-Christians rarely appear in visitation records, whose role was to police the actions of the
Catholic community, yet these practitioners were still important actors in the magical services
Christians knew and used. While it is important to remember that visitation records do not
record all instances of correction arising from visitation interviews, the frequency of correction
within the visitation records combined with other evidence within the documents does
illuminate certain patterns in bishops’ attitudes towards different magical practitioners.
Together, understanding male practitioners and non-Christian practitioners breaks down the
image of medieval magical practitioners as Christian women, often envisioned as hags, and
helps return magic to the role of daily functionality and normal activity that it held in the
medieval world. Doing so also brings to light the gendered assumptions that underlay medieval
ways of thinking about magic; while it had an important place in medieval parish communities,
bishops interpreted magic as threatening or not depending on whether they viewed women as
threatening or not.

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The Ones Everyone Expected: Lower-Status Women
According to the visitation records from early fourteenth-century Barcelona and
Tortosa, 65 percent of the magical practitioners were lower-status women, typically dwelling
in rural parishes (Table A). To say that they were all of roughly similar social standing is not
the same as saying that they were all the same types of practitioners, however. These women
worked in healing, divining, and various other magical practices. Some of them were known
for their skill at a range of practices, while some were specialists in just one. Some clearly
marketed their abilities and had widespread client bases, while others appear to have practised
more privately. Some were valued community members, while others were viewed with fear
or suspicion. Some were married, some seem to have been single, and some were mothers.
They were, in short, firmly bound up in the complicated web of relationships that characterized
any medieval parish, and the degree to which their neighbours saw them as desirable or
undesirable members of that community depended on the measures of deviance (badtemperedness, uncharitable manners, foreignness, shrewishness, or promiscuity) applied to all
Christian women, and not merely their magical activities. While their neighbours tolerated or
even sought out their magical expertise, ecclesiastical elites wanted to restrict these women’s
practices, which they saw as (at best) a misguided attempt at Christian expression or (at worst)
a set of actions completely contrary to proper Christian behaviour.
While both the Barcelona and Tortosa visitation records include high numbers of lowerstatus women engaged in magical activities, the percentage of lower-status Christian women
is much higher in the Barcelona records (80%) than it is in the Tortosa records (60%), as is
detailed in Table A. While women were more likely than men to be recorded as magical
practitioners in both dioceses (possibly because there actually were more women than men
practising magic), there is much evidence to indicate that visitors in Barcelona targeted women

94
in a way that did not occur in Tortosa. First, the Barcelona records include several extremely
detailed interrogations of female magical practitioners—some of which approached the form
of an episcopal trial—but none involving men. The Tortosa records show that the bishop dealt
out consistent, mild corrections and rarely extended his interrogation beyond asking the
accused to confirm what had been said against them, which they nearly always did. Second,
Ponç de Gualba corrected a disproportionate number of women compared to men, while
Francesc Paholac corrected approximately proportionate numbers, as will be detailed below.
Finally, the corrections the bishop of Barcelona, Ponç de Gualba, dealt out to female
practitioners were noticeably harsher than those Francesc Paholac, Bishop of Tortosa,
administered. This targeting of female magical practitioners in Barcelona relied on stereotypes
of women’s inherent propensity towards magical activity, which in turn depended on the belief
in women’s evil nature and susceptibility to demonic temptation, as I have discussed in Chapter
One.200 The tendency of the Barcelona visitors to consider women’s magic as dangerous
contrasts with the bishop of Tortosa’s dismissal of peasant women’s magic as mere ignorance
and superstition.
Most female magical practitioners in Tortosa were subject to the generic “correction”
applied to the perpetrators of usury, fornication, and other common misdemeanors. This
correction was usually a verbal reprimand and the extraction of an oath that the offender would
not engage in the activity again. Women who practised magic in the parishes of Barcelona
would receive a similar reprimand, but might face additional penance including prayers,
pilgrimage, and especially the requirement to publicly renounce their magical activities and
display their humility by standing at the doors of the church during mass for a prescribed

McLaughlin, “Equality of Souls, Inequality of Sexes, 213-266; Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the
Middle Ages 33; Stephens, Demon Lovers: 127-128.
200

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number of Sundays. For example, in 1303 the parishioners of Ribes explained that Romia
Gitarda “used public conjurations with a shoe-lace on account of the illnesses of men and of
children and of eyes,” and na Orpina “made use of conjurations for goiters, which she
broke.”201 Romia confessed and was charged to “stand with a shoe-lace about her neck for two
continuous Sundays,” and not use any conjuring again, while na Orpina had to stand for one
Sunday “at the doors of the church while mass is celebrated, barefoot and without a cloak.”202
Additionally, while in both dioceses approximately 65 percent of the corrected practitioners
were women (Table B), in Tortosa this number matches the statistically predicted percentage
based on the numbers of female practitioners and corrected practitioners. In contrast, the
Barcelona records show a greater proportion of corrected women than the statistics predict.203
This weighting towards correcting women confirms that visitors in Barcelona were more
heavily inclined towards the recording and correction of women than were those from Tortosa.
The early fourteenth-century fear of elite necromancy and consequent concern about magic
“...R[omia] Gitarda per sacramentum confessa fuit se usa fuisse publice coniuracione corrigie
propter infirmitatem hominum et puerorum et oculorum.... Orpina postea veniens confessa fuit per sacramentum
se usa fuisse coniuratione en Gotornons que esclafava [MS only].” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 705; Bonet and
Puigvert, Processos, 97; ADB Visitationes s.n., f. 35v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f. 35v.
202
“Unde dominus Episcopus iniunxit [dicta Romia Gitarda] quod publice staret ligata corrigia circa
collum per II Dominecas continuas et quod ulterius non uteretur... Unde dominus Episcopus iniunxit [dicta
Orpina] ne ad modo uteretur dictam coniurationem et quod stet per primo venientem Dominecam ad portas
Ecclesite dum missa celebratur, discalciata et sine capa murruda.” in Ibid.
203
I used a modified chi-squared test, which tests for significant difference between two known
populations. So, for example, knowing that 60% of the practitioners in Tortosa were women, and 60% were
corrected, we know that at least 20% of the corrected magical practitioners had to have been women because
the total cannot be greater than 100%. 20% of the total number of magical practitioners translates to 30% of the
number of female practitioners. Conversely, at most, all of the women (100%) in the Tortosa register could have
been corrected, if the two populations overlapped completely. A completely random incidence of correction
rates for women in the diocese of Tortosa would be the midpoint between these two extremes:
100%+30%=65%. This is the same as the actual data from the records—65% of the practitioners corrected in
Tortosa were women. When the same test is applied to Barcelona, the results differ. For Barcelona, 80% of the
magical practitioners were women, and 18% of the magical practitioners were corrected. Since the sum of these
numbers is less than 100, it is possible for there to have been no overlap in their distribution. This means that,
numerically, a maximum of 18 women (100% women) and a minimum of 0 (0% women) could have been
corrected. A completely random incidence of correction of women in the diocese of Barcelona would therefore
have been 50%. However, the actual ratio is noticeably higher than this, at 65%, revealing that in the diocese of
Barcelona the bishop did preferentially correct female magical practitioners. For a data table and further
explanation, see Appendix I.
201

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met with medieval patriarchal constructions of femininity in Ponç de Gualba’s approach to
peasant magic—as such, he saw peasant magical practitioners as both female and dangerous.
This did not occur in Francesc Paholac’s records—though he, too, recorded more women than
men, this margin was narrower than it was in Barcelona. He was no more likely to correct
women than men, and certain did not treat them more harshly than male practitioners.
Paholac’s more mild attitude did not mean he approved of women’s magic or that he could
imagine women outside of the stereotypical and patriarchal structure in which they existed in
medieval Europe, however—instead, he merely focused on different elements of the image of
women: their ignorance and need for male guidance and guardianship. What these two different
emphases on the relationship between magic, sin, and femininity reveal is the inconsistency of
elite views about female peasants’ magic in the early fourteenth century. While de Gualba’s
attitude seems harsh compared to Paholac’s, in the broader theatre of medieval Europe it was
still relatively mild, as can be shown through a contemporary Irish example.
As I discussed in Chapter One, medieval women were stereotyped as mentally feeble,
prone to superstition, and vulnerable to temptation. At the same time, as daughters of Eve, they
were viewed as sly, innately sinful, and as active temptresses.204 According to either set of
characteristics, women were seen as likely to practise magic—either because they were not
intelligent enough to recognize its dangers and avoid it, or because they were drawn to the
power they could wield through exercising it. The lure and exercise of power constituted some
of the key features of the well-known trial of Dame Alice Kyteler, a woman from Kilkenny,
Ireland, in 1324. Like the women from my Catalan records, Kyteler came to the bishop of
Ossory’s attention through the visitation process—unlike them, however, she was a wealthy

204

McLaughlin, “Equality of Souls, Inequality of Sexes,” 39, 198.

97
and high-status woman, and immediately faced trial for not only sorcery (which would have
made her equivalent to Gueraula), but also heresy. One of the main charges against her was
that she used “powders and lotions” to infatuate men, “reducing their senses to such stupidity
that they gave all their possessions to her and to her own son, thus impoverishing forever their
sons and heirs.”205 This charge clearly reflected family politics, for it was made by Kyteler’s
stepchildren, the overlooked heirs of her husbands, but it does show that one of the reasons
people feared women’s magic was its potential to give women power over men and thereby
upset the social order. While there is no evidence of familial conflict motivating charges of
magic in the visitation records from Catalonia, it is certainly possible that similar tensions led
to charges such as sorcery and maleficia, notable for their implied malice. Such charges may
also have been more likely to occur in Barcelona rather than Tortosa, where the bishop’s
greater harshness would better serve a dissatisfied relation’s purposes than Francesc Paholac’s
mildness. Kyteler’s magic was also frightening to the bishop because it bore a keen
resemblance to elite male necromancy in its conscious abjuration of faith and explicit
relationship with a demon. Kyteler’s magic was therefore doubly disruptive to the medieval
gender order, for it allowed Kyteler to assume a dominant position over her several husbands,
but she did so by usurping masculine magical types. Contemporary Catalan women’s magic
also caused anxiety because it gave some women social and supernatural power, but the women
who appear in the visitation records I consulted for this thesis did not express heresy in their
practice so much as a devout (if misguided) Christianity.
The best details of early fourteenth-century women’s magic in Catalonia come from
those who practiced healing magic, which blended elements of professional medicine with the

205

Levack, The Witchcraft Sourcebook, 41.

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prayers all Christians were supposed to know from memory: the Pater Noster, Ave María, and
the Creed. This syncretism is clear in the conjurations described by Gueraula de Codines and
Benvenguda de Malnovell, both of whom took the link between women’s association with
nurturance and nursing to the level of professional magical-medical practice. While Gueraula
had been trained in urine examination to diagnose various “fevers,” she relied on “conjurations
and invocations of God and the saints, saying the Creed, Pater Noster, and Ave María”
accompanied by an incantation to actually heal.206 She also explained that to cure animals she
“said the Pater Noster and Ave María and made a cross of wheat stalks, with her little finger
and index finger over the tail of the animal.”207 Benvenguda de Malnovell of Masqueroles
reportedly employed a similar combination of prayers and incantations when Ponç de Gualba
questioned her in 1310. She claimed to have healed twenty patients suffering from pantex de
cor by wrapping and unwrapping their feet with the bark of a fig tree, saying the Pater Noster
and Ave María, and commanding the disease to “go out to pasture.”208 She also cured “pain of
“...jurata dixit et confessa fuit se pro diversis infirmitatibus fecisse coniurationes et invocaciones dei
et sanctorum dicendo "credo in deum" et "pater noster" et "ave María..." Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 716; Bonet
and Puigvert, Processos, 109; Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 68; ADB Visitationes s.n., f. 42v accessed at
HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f. 42v. See Chapter Two for an example and translation of Gueraula’s
healing incantation. Her examination of urine as a diagnosis technique is not, in itself, extraordinarily unusual,
but her use of incantations set her apart from two other women who examined urine. In 1305, na Serra Bona of
Madrona, and in 1309 na Viacula of Sitges, both in the diocese of Barcelona, appeared for “examining urine”
with no elaboration that linked this to magical activity (though presumably there was some sort of illicit activity
involved or suspected in order for Ponç de Gualba to record these cases in the visitation records). “Item dixerunt
quod Na Serra Bona uxor Pere de Serra Bona utitur efficio medici et judicat urinas.” ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 58v
accessed at HMML, microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 58v. “Item dixerunt quod Na Viacula judicat de urinis et
faciat per uyls.” ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 101r accessed at HMML, microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 101r.
207
“Item ad curtiones [sic] animalium dicit pater noster et ave María et facit crucem de palea ordio
cum minimo digito et indice super caudam animalis patientis.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 716; Bonet and
Puigvert, Processos, 109; Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 68; ADB Visitationes s.n., f. 42v accessed at HMML
microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f. 42v. The gesture of extending the little finger and index finger is a
traditional popular exorcism gesture in Italy, and probably served a similar function in Gueraula’s case. See
Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 59.
208
“Benvenguda de Maynovel, de parrochia sancti Martíni de Mosquerolis, sub virtute presitit
iuramenti fuit confessa quod utebatur ista coniuratione: cum Pater Noster et Ave María faciebat tenere pedem
illi qui habebat pantex de cor, in terra et ponebat pedem in scortice ficulne et postes scindendo conrticem circa
pedem, dicebat hoc verba: Esle e malura tot ne vaya a pastura.” Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 70; ADB,
Visitationes 1, f. 151r accessed at HMML, microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 151r. Fig sap is known to contain
acids that can relieve certain skin conditions, but pantex de cor, translated as “panting heart,” seems to suggest
206

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the head,” using a sympathetic story formula about the Virgin Mary’s healing of a man who
complained of headache.209 Similarly, she cured “Bernat de Cabres and some others” of
gutornons (goiters) with a story calling upon several saints.210 By employing Christian prayers
with their incantations, lower-status healers like Gueraula and Benvenguda presented
themselves as having a special relationship with God, contracted through their prayers, and
manifested in the incantation that cured the disease. This was a unique ability, for peasant
women were not often able to enter convents as nuns, the acceptable route for a woman to
achieve a special—though not direct, for that role was reserved for priests—relationship with
God.211 In their eyes, and possibly those of some of their neighbours, magic was not only an
acceptable but even an admirable ability as it indicated a special relationship with the divine.
However, as an elite ecclesiastic, Ponç de Gualba was unable to see the combination of prayers
with unfamiliar verbal formulas and gestures by peasant women as anything but highly
suspicious—charlatanry or even a secret code of communication with a demon. The women
may not have been heretics like Alice Kyteler, conscious of their deviation from proper faith,
but they were still guilty of severe errors of belief and misunderstanding their subordinate

that this was an internal disorder. See S. Bohlooli, et al., “Comparative Study of Fig Tree Efficacy in the
Treatment of Common Warts (Verruca Vulgaris) vs. Cryotherapy,” International Journal of Dermatology 46,
no. 5 (2007): 524-6.
209
“Item, ad dolorem capitis dicebat: En Pera Marbre sehia, mon cap m'i dolia; za ma m'i tenia. Fiylo
meu, dix Madona santa: 'vos que aviets mon cap n'i dolia jo ls vos estreyeria mas estrena[rus/us] volrria'.
'Madona mare, jo la us daria, que dona de tot lo mon[us] vos faria.” Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 70-1; ADB,
Visitationes 1, f. 151r-v at HMML microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 151r-v.
210
“Item, a foch salvatge e ab vayes, hec verba: Nou puygs puge e IX puyg devale; nou [fons/focis] hi
trobe e nou fochs na page.... Item, ad guturnos, hec verba: Sa mare de sent Archangel sancta Paula avia nom e
son pare En Fogerayn. Qui aquests tres mots dira de mal de bocha no morra.” Espelt, “Activitats i formules,”
70-1; ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 151r-v at HMML microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 151r-v. See A.M. Alcover,
Diccionari català-valencià-balear, s.v. “foc,” accessed May 6, 2016, http://dcvb.iecat.net/.
211
Lower-status women could become lay sisters working for or in capacities related to convents, or
they could attempt to lead lives of holy devotion outside of convents, but none of these roles allowed them to
directly interact with God, Christ, and the saints who were the objects of their faith and prayer. They always
required the intercession of a male priest on their behalf. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast:
The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987),
20-27.

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position to the sacred, in the bishop’s eyes. While censured by Ponç de Gualba and his officials,
both Gueraula and Benvenguda seem to have enjoyed quite prominent positions in their
parishes.
Alice Kyteler reportedly used her magic to actively assert herself over men, but
Gueraula and Benvenguda’s social power came through their reputed success as healers and
was therefore an earned position. Gueraula’s skill at examining urine was an enormous
attraction in a rural Catalan community. She had learned this technique, a key element of
professional medieval medicine, thirty years earlier, from a “foreign doctor” in Vilafranca, the
largest town in the area.212 Such knowledge must have been impressive, perhaps even more
impressive than her magical healing incantations, to rural Christians who rarely (if ever) had
the opportunity or means to have a formally trained physician tend to their health. 213 She
reported “many sick persons came to her...and especially for the evaluation of urine” even three
years after she had publicly renounced it in the aftermath of her first trial.214 Lori Woods has
argued that Gueraula’s training made her simply too valuable to exclude from medical practice,
because professional medical care was nearly absent in small rural parishes like the one in
which she lived.215 Ponç de Gualba recognized this necessity, but as a bishop, commissioned
with the care of souls in his diocese, he was also anxious that in healing bodies Gueraula did
not poison souls, hence his reminder that she abstain from conjuring in this practice. Unlike

212
“interrogata ubi didicit illam artem dixit a quodam medico extraneo qui venit per mare ad Villam
Francham nomine en Bonfi bene sun XXX anni.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 717; Bonet and Puigvert,
Processos, 111; Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 70; ADB, Visitationes s.n., f. 42v at HMML microfilm no.
31950, Visitas s.n., f. 42v.
213
Lori Woods, “Mainstream or Marginal Medicine? The Case of a Parish Healer Named Gueraula de
Codines,” in Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Essays in Honour
of Barbara Todd (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011): 106-107.
214
“Interrogata si plures infirmi veniant ad eam dixit quod sic et specialiter pro urinis iudicandis...”
Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 717; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 110; Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 68; ADB,
Visitationes s.n., f. 42v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., f. 42v.
215
Woods, “Mainstream or Marginal Medicine,” 1307.

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Gueraula, Benvenguda does not seem to have had any knowledge of professional medical
techniques such as urine examination, but her self-reported success indicates that she was a
well-respected healer all the same. According to her own account, she had cured “around
twenty patients” of pantex de cor, “Sibilia de Orta and many patients” of foc salvatge, and
“Bernat de Cabres and some others” of goiters.216 To have treated so many patients,
Benvenguda was clearly a high-demand healer.
Magic was also a way for lower-status women to earn respect and possibly even
influence in their communities, because it was a skill that, when practised effectively, conferred
a powerful reputation upon the practitioner. This is evident in the popularity both Gueraula and
Benvenguda enjoyed and the number of clients who sought their skills. The image of lowerstatus women practising magic to gain power does have some credibility, therefore, if not
always in so direct a form as that of Alice Kyteler. Women’s skills as magical healers were
valuable to their communities, viewed with respect by their neighbours and conferring on them
a prominence that they could not access through other roles. Bishops such as Ponç de Gualba
viewed these women with alarm, because they not only seemed to risk their own souls by
working with demons to perform their magics, but through their influence could also lead other
Christians astray. As daughters of Eve, after all, women had a history of leading others into sin
due to their own temptation by demons. However, such stereotypes fail to account for the fact
that magical practice was not solely a women’s activity, and that dozens of men appear in the
visitation records for various magical offences.

Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 70-1; ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 151r-v at HMML microfilm no. 31951,
Visitas 1, f. 151r-v.
216

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Lower-status Male Magical Practitioners
Unfortunately, there is no male equivalent to Gueraula de Codines in the visitation
records, and we have scanty information concerning lower-status male magical practitioners.
Since they were neither educated and therefore potential necromancers, nor women, whom
episcopal elites stereotyped as superstitious and prone to magical dabbling, these men failed to
conform to either of the two main groups that medieval bishops expected to encounter as
magical practitioners. Despite accounting for 36 percent of all magical practitioners reported
in Barcelona and Tortosa between 1303 and 1330 (with that number rising to 41 percent in
Tortosa, and dropping to 20 percent in Barcelona), these men faced correction less consistently
than did women, and the overall lack of significance attributed to their practice by both
themselves (as the parish representatives) and the bishop leaves their presence in the historical
record frustratingly limited. Two of the best examples of the sort of magic lower-status men
engaged in come from the Tortosan bishop’s visit to the village of Todolella in 1314 and
suggest that peasant men’s magic was heavily focused on animals.
The parishioners of Todolella were unusually forthcoming about the magical activities
carried out in their parish. They identified five magical practitioners by name (two women and
three men), and further stated that “there are many in the area who do encortations.”217 Two
of the men were close relatives, Ramon Stercull and his son Bernat, whom I already introduced
in the discussion of ligamentis and encortation in Chapter Two. This father-son pair was said
to “bind [ligant] dogs and hunts.”218 When summoned by the bishop for correction, however,
Ramon denied the charge, “but he said that for the encortationing of animals he made a cross
out of cord, which he hung in the door of the dwelling,” for which the bishop corrected him

217
218

“... dixerunt quod plures sunt in hoc loco qui incortatem faciunt.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 142.
“...Raimundus Estercuyl et Bernardus eius filius ligant canes et venationes.” Ibid.

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instead.219 The parishioners of Todolella also explained that Ramon de Porquerias did an
unnamed magical act on the day of the feast of St. John the Baptist to protect his sheep from
wolves—it seems that he faced a particularly ravenous pack from the phrasing “so the wolves
would not eat the survivors.”220 He avoided correction—perhaps because he was away with
his flock during the bishop’s visit. Both of these cases highlight animals as the focus of lowerstatus men’s magical activities.
That rural men used their magic to protect their animals is hardly surprising given the
fact that their livelihoods depended on agricultural success, which was increasingly difficult to
attain as crop yields worsened during the early fourteenth century.221 Ramon was not the only
man to attempt to protect his livestock through magical means. Pere Belo of the Church of
Arbúcies in the diocese of Barcelona swore to cease using “a certain conjuring of sheep” in
1303.222 Four other men also directed their magic—referred to as “encortation” in the Tortosa
records, and “conjuration” in the Barcelona records—towards animals.223 It is likely that
despite the difference in language, the “conjurings” of men from the diocese of Barcelona were
similar in practice to the “encortations” of Tortosan men, since the Tortosa records overall
reveal a greater willingness to use the vernacular to describe magical activities. The protection
of animals, therefore, was a great concern for lower-status Catalan men, and they employed

219
“Fuit vocatus Raimundus Stercuil et negavit ea que proposita fuerant contra eum. Sed dixit quod ad
incortandum animalia faciebat quendem crucem in quandam fune quam crucem pendebat in portali hospitii de
quo fuit correctus.” Ibid., 143.
220
“Item dixerunt super V, quod Raimundus de Porquerias assignat unum par ovium luppis in quoquo
festo Beati Iohannis Baptiste ut non comebat de residuis.” Ibid, 142.
221
Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude, 42, 155-161.
222
“Idem Petrus Belo iuravit ulterius non uti quandam coniurationem ovium.” Bonet, “Visitas
Pastorales,” 695; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 88; ADB, Visitationes s.n., f. 30r, at HMML microfilm no.
31950, Visitas s.n., f. 30r.
223
These were Gueraud Mas of Adzaneta, Pere Tudela and Arnaud Faura of Almenara, and Dominec
Juglar of Pobla de Nülls, all from the diocese of Tortosa. Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 127, 234, 236.

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magic (doubtless alongside other practical measures) to ensure the safety and productivity of
their livestock and work animals.
The magic men used to protect their livestock was largely pre-emptive in nature,
designed to protect, avoid mishap, and aid in managing the animals—when they lost an animal,
or when one became ill, these men required the services of other, usually female, magical
practitioners. Three men from Arés “went to a Saracen [diviner] of Calanda regarding an
animal they had lost” according to the 1314 records from Tortosa.224 Similarly, several women
appear in the records as healers of animals, for which they used various conjurations.225 These
relationships reveal the gendered nature of lower-status magic—while men’s magic worked
assertively to defend against dangers, women’s magic took on the passive role of locating lost
items (including animals) and dealing with the effects of ill fortune after they manifested
themselves. The gendered patterns of magic therefore conform to medieval gender norms more
broadly, with the more active types of magic being masculine and the more passive or nurturing
types being feminine. This division of magic also highlights the complementary nature of rural
magical practitioners, which reflects the broader division of work in peasant household
economies, with women’s and men’s work being equally important for the comfort and
survival of the family.226 Unusually, however, in the case of magic, it seems that women’s
activities were more public and possibly even more professionalized than were men’s—
divination and healing with conjurations were both highly feminine activities, and they were

“Item est fama quod Dominecus Valclara, Michael Barbera, et Balaguer Barbera iverunt ad
sarracenum de Calanda pro quam animali quod perdiderant.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 134.
225
These include Elicsendis Godalla, who described her technique for curing animals by “exarteylata
cum gladio magne blanc” (wounding [them] with a large white sword). Both Bonet in “Las Visitas Pastorales”
and Bonet and Puigvert in Processos transcribe this as “exarteylata cum gladio mange blanc,” but I have
confirmed that it is “magne” in the manuscript. ADB, Visitationes s.n., f. 73v at HMML, 31950, Visitas s.n., f.
73v.
226
The best possible situation for a peasant family was to include an able-bodied married couple and
several teenage or adult children of both genders. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, 113.
224

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also those that attracted large clienteles. Men such as Ramon de Porquerias and Pere Belo used
their magic to protect their own animals, whereas women like Gueraula de Codines and
Benvenguda de Malnovell both clearly used their magical abilities in the service of others.
A number of the characteristics of men’s magic suggest that it may be underrepresented in the visitation records, or at least in those from Barcelona. In the first place,
peasant men did not match the image of either the cunning yet foolish peasant woman
performing her charms, nor that of the dark and terrifying necromancer summoning demons.
It would, therefore, be easy for bishops to accidentally overlook them. Furthermore, their
magic seems to have been practised individually, for the protection and maintenance of their
own livestock and work animals, rather than in the professional way that some women
practised theirs. This made it less likely for other parishioners to know of or report it, and
further decreased bishops’ concern because there was less danger of a peasant man leading
other Christians astray than there was with women. Men’s magic may also have been underreported because its record relied to some extent on self-reporting since men were the parish
representatives called upon in visitation interviews. While there are some cases where some
interviewees accused another of one of the sins inquired about by the visitor, it is quite likely
that the desire to preserve social harmony and comfort frequently outweighed the desire to
report a fellow interviewee’s magical activities.227 The parish of Cabanes in Tortosa provides
some evidence for the sort of convenient ignorance such an omission would entail, as the
interviewees coyly stated that “they do not remember the names of those who are said to

227
For example, in the visit to the village of Boixar, Raimundus Ballester was sworn as one of the
representatives, but this did not prevent the others from reporting him as an incortator. Egea, La Visita
Pastoral, 118. In Culla, the same situation occured for Dominec Mulers. Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 131.

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incortare.”228 Not only did the peasant man not practise his magic in the service of others, but
he also lacked the characterization of Eve that made female magical practitioners so threatening
and could sometimes enjoy the advantage of being one of the interviewees.

Marriage and Marital Status
Neither the Barcelona nor Tortosa visitation records consistently identify the marital
status of most of the women who appear in them, and they never identify that of men, save by
happenstance.229 Those cases where it is possible to identify the marital status of a magical
practitioner, therefore, suggest interesting conclusions about the role of women’s and men’s
magic in marital relationships. Marketable magics such as healing and divination could provide
part of a household income and sustenance, and could count alongside spinning, brewing,
child-minding, cooking, and the other activities of married women.230 Since men did not often
engage in feminine-gendered divination and healing magics, which were (to judge from their
high numbers of clients) the most likely to generate income, men’s magic would not have been
an important means of income for the household. Instead, men’s magic often focused on the
maintenance and protection of a household’s existing assets. Whereas men’s productive
labour—in rural Catalonia this was largely based around agriculture and livestock—was seen
as a defining feature of masculinity and the bedrock of the household’s identity, women’s
labour was often less specialized and might include magic as either a private or public

“Super V dixerunt quod sunt aliqui, sed non recordantur de nominibus qui sciunt incortare.” Egea,
La Visita Pastoral, 211.
229
This is unsurprising, for while most medieval documentation identified women as “wife” or
“widow” of a particular man, they rarely did the same for men. Kelleher, The Measure of Woman, 8; Lightfoot,
Women, Dowries, and Agency, 6.
230
Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, 113-120; Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters: Women’s Work
in a Changing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29,42.
228

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element.231 Few men would identify as magical practitioners even though they might use
magical formulas in their daily lives, because they identified themselves by their primary
occupation. The Baralla, Ferrer, and Linars couples each provide examples of how magic
functioned openly within marriage relationships.
The parishioners of Torrelles reported to the bishop of Barcelona in 1305 that Arsendis,
wife of Arnaud Baralla, was “a conjuress of children and all kinds of illnesses and other
things,” and that Christian laypeople “convene to her from diverse places.” 232 This statement
was confirmed by the parishioners of Cervelló, who reported that Pere Costa had taken his
neighbour’s shoe-lace to “the woman Barayla, diviner of the parish of Torreyles” so that she
could work some sort of magic on it and, presumably, upon the neighbour.233 Arsendis’ marital
state does not seem to have any limiting effect on her extensive magical practice, which was
widely known. Given the Christian medieval patriarchal requirement that husbands control
their wives and correct their vices, Arsendis’ apparent freedom of practice indicates that magic
was one of many arenas where patriarchal concepts proved less absolute in practice than they
did in theory.234 Arsendis’ husband may well have approved of her practice because it
generated income and benefitted the household with the social status attributed to successful
magical practitioners. Far from limiting her magical practice, the personal respectability that
women gained through marriage would have benefitted Arsendis as a diviner and conjurer, and

Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, 113-120; Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters, 29,42; Hillgarth, The
Spanish Kingdoms vol. 2, 84.
232
“Item dixerunt quod Arsendis Barayla uxor Arnaldus Barayla es conjuratrix puerorum et
quorumden infirmitarum et ulterium et ad eam conveniunt de diversis locis.” ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 57r,
accessed at HMML, 31951, Visitas 1, 57r.
233
“Pere Costa parrochianus predictus fuit confessus dicto episcopo se portasse corrigia cuiusdam
vicine sue ad baraylam mulieram divinatrix de parrochia de torreyles.” ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 57r, accessed at
HMML, 31951, Visitas 1, 57r.
234
Michael D. Bailey, “From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle
Ages,” Speculum 76, no. 4 (October 1, 2001): 961; Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 180-185.
231

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particularly as one who dealt with such a wide range of magic, including the potentially sinister
spell Pere Costa requested of her. As a means of contributing to the household welfare,
Arsendis’ magic provided much needed income—it could also save the family the expense or
trouble of seeking out other magical practitioners. Some husbands, however, not only
encouraged or tolerated their wives’ magical practice but collaborated with them in it, as the
case of the Ferrers reveals.
According to the parishioners of San Juan de Piño of Barcelona in 1313, Guillelm
Ferrer and his wife (unnamed in the document), both knew how to “make conjurings for
illnesses of the eyes.”235 Since healing magic, like divination, was a marketed magical service,
the Ferrers may have depended on it as a part of the household economy. Furthermore, healing
magics were often feminine magics, as fourteen of the seventeen known magical healers
appearing in the visitation records were women. It is probable that this number was higher in
actuality, since identifying healers depends on the inclusion of a greater-than-normal amount
of recorded detail. Many healing magics (and particularly those relating to eye diseases) were
called “conjurations,” which may mean that many of the generic “conjurers” of the visitations
did at least some healing.236 Since most conjurers were women, as I discuss in Chapter Two,
Guillelm probably learned the conjurations to heal eyes from his wife or a female relative.

“...dixerunt quod Guillelmus Ferrarius et uxor eius faciunt coniuria ad malum occulorum.” ADB,
Visitationes 2, f. 24r.
236
For example, Romia Gitarda of Ribes, in the diocese of Barcelona, confessed in 1303 that she “used
public conjurations with a shoe-lace on account of illnesses of men and children and of eyes.” “R[omia] Gitarda
per sacramentum confessa fuit se usa fuisse publice coniuracione corrigie propter infirmitatem hominum et
puerorum et oculorum.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 704; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 97; ADB Visitationes
s.n., f.35v at HMML, 31950, Visitas s.n., f.35v. Cathalana and Elicsendis Godalla of Sant Boi (Barcelona), both
claimed to “use conjurations for eyes and glands.” “dixit Catalana per sacramentus se uti coniurationem
oculorum cum patern noster et ave María et quibusdam verbis profanis mixtis cum verbis divinis que dixit. Item
quod frangit glandulas sine coniuratione. Idem dixit per sacramentum Elicsendis Godalla predicta quod coniurat
oculos et glandulas. Item animalia exarteylata cum gladio magne blanc.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 709;
Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 101; ADB Visitationes s.n., f.37v at HMML, 31950, Visitas s.n., f.37v.
Alamanda de Guardiola of Benaçal (Tortosa) also “conjured diseases of the eyes.” “Alamanda de Guardiola
coniurat morbum occulorum,” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 133.
235

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While women’s economic activities, including the sale of magical healing services, were often
casual, sporadic, and supplemental to the household economy, the emphasis on Guillelm as the
main practitioner suggests that the Ferrers claimed a certain professional specialization in their
magical practice.237 Since the husband and wife both practised the same activity, it seems the
parishioners thought of it in the way that most professional crafts and trades were structured:
with the husband as the skilled practitioner and the wife as a helper. While both the Barallas
and Ferrers successfully incorporated magic into the overall structures of their married lives,
this sort of tolerance or cooperation was not always possible, as is suggested by the Linars
family.
Pere de Linars of the parish of Cretes in Tortosa was accused of knowing encortation
in 1314. When summoned before the bishop for questioning, he “denied that which was
proposed against him, but he said that his wife knew how to incortare.”238 Encortation was a
highly masculine magic, so it is possible that the parishioners of Cretes, knowing that an
encortator lived in the Linars household, assumed Pere to be the perpetrator. It was rare for
parishioners to contest the accusations they faced from their neighbours—when summoned to
answer the accusation before the bishop, 88 percent of magical practitioners readily confessed
to whatever activity they were accused of. The rarity of contestations and the leniency of any
punishments handed out by the visitors in Tortosa lend credibility to Linar’s denial. With little
to lose, save perhaps some dignity and the time it took to carry out any prescribed penances,
accused magical practitioners had little reason to lie about their activities. Linars’ denial was
probably genuine, therefore, but his accusation of his wife remains puzzling. Does his

Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters; Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound.
“Item, Pedro de Linars et Bernardus Ferrer, correctus fuit, incortant.... Fuit vocatus Pedro de Linars
et negavit que fuerunt posita contra eum, tamen dixit quod uxor scit incortare.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 192.
237
238

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willingness to push the blame onto her reflect his embarrassment that he’d been implicated in
her activities? Did the bishop inquire further, leading Linars to reluctantly report on his wife’s
practice? Was Linars grateful for the chance to garner a strong argument against his wife’s
magic? Did Linars believe his wife was at less risk of reprimand than himself? Did he want to
discredit his wife in order to distance himself from her? Regardless, Linars’ blaming of his
wife suggests that her magical activities were a source of some tension in their marriage,
perhaps exacerbated by his neighbours’ mistaken accusation and his own injured pride.
Medieval magic therefore was not the sole prerogative of haggard widows, as it is often
envisioned. Rather, it could be a normal part of the relationships between husbands and wives,
albeit one with peculiar qualities. Just as with any part of married relationships, it could be a
source of strength or of tension, depending on how it played out during the couple’s lives. The
Barallas and Ferrars seem to have incorporated it as a part of their married lives with some
success. Neither Arsendis Baralla nor either of the Ferrers faced correction for their magical
activities, suggesting that the probably carried on as usual following the bishop’s visit
(something that they may have done even if they had been corrected, of course). Perhaps if
they had faced correction, tensions such as those visible in Pere Linars’ case may have arisen
over the blame. These married couples also highlight the role that lower-status men played as
magical practitioners, a trend neglected by both medieval visitors and historians alike.
However, not all lower-status men engaged in magics similar or complementary to their female
counterparts—some dabbled in practices that suggested a more learned tradition of magic.

Not-Quite Necromancers: Literate Male Magic
The most detailed accounts of men’s magic in the visitation records come from a
handful of cases that, each in their own way, resemble the elite magic of clerical necromancy

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which so concerned the early fourteenth-century Church. Clerical necromancers were—by
necessity—educated men, and the magic they practised depended on texts filled with
complicated rituals and procedures.239 For example, Nicolau Eimeric’s description of the sins
committed by “invokers of demons” specifies that the instructions for the rituals are written in
books which he has seen, and direct the magicians to “sacrifice to them [demons], adore them,
offer up horrible prayers to them,” perform sacrifices of animals, and use swords, rings,
mirrors, and expensive spices.240 The literacy, material, and knowledge requirements of this
sort of magic placed it far beyond the ability (and probably the interest) of most medieval
Christians, leaving it in the hands of those clerics who ignored the Church’s warnings about
dealing with such things. The presence of such practitioners in the visitation records is tiny
compared to the multitude of lay magical practitioners who engaged in the mundane magics of
divination with shoe-laces, and healing with herbs and spoken formulas. Even those cases
suggestive of necromantic magic that appear in the visitation records strongly resemble lay
magic in various ways—sometimes their only link to necromancy is the fact that the
practitioner was literate. These examples destabilize the barriers between elite and lay magic,
both by showing moments where lay magic resembled elite necromancy as a literate magic,
and by showing how some practitioners of elite magic were members of the regular parish
community. Francesc Paholac, in meeting several of these literate magical practitioners,
recognized that their magic was not true necromancy, but also noticed its potential to become
so and corrected these men more strictly than he did other magical practitioners.

239
Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 156-165; Bailey, “From Sorcery to Witchcraft,” 966;
Stephens, Demon Lovers, 53.
240
Kors and Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, 123.

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Three men were accused of the possession of books that were either wholly or partially
composed of instructions for illicit magic. It is tempting to see these men as members of the
“clerical underworld” of necromantic activity so feared in the late twelfth and early fourteenth
centuries.241 However, only one of these men, Salvator, a chaplain of Forcall in the diocese of
Tortosa who had “a book of conjurings,” was identified as a cleric, and he apparently avoided
correction, for there is no record of the bishop’s meeting him.242 The other two, Dominec Muler
of Culla and Perico de Ponts of Gandesa (both parishes were located in Tortosa), were
apparently laymen, though both appear to have been prominent local figures. Dominec Muler
was listed as one of the persons interviewed by the bishop, showing that he was considered an
important parishioner.243 Perico shared a surname with one of the interviewed parishioners and
a local cleric, indicating that he, too, belonged to a notable local family—though one well-used
to magic, for Ramon de Ponts (the fourth Ponts identified in the visit) visited diviners.244 The
status and gender of these men explains how they came to possess such books—as locally
important figures, they had enough wealth to purchase them, and enough education to read
them. It is extremely unlikely that a woman would possess such a book herself, and even if she
stumbled across one owned by a male relative or acquaintance it is unlikely that she would be
able to read it, as female literacy was significantly lower than male literacy in premodern
Europe.245

241

151-175.

Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),

“dixit quod Salvator, capellanus, tenet quondam librum coniurationem et Raimundus Gener, qui
nunc moratur Dertuse sit [sic] incortare et ligare.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 144.
243
Bishops preferred to interview men whose status suggested respectability, on the theory that such
men would provide the best account of the parish’s spiritual state—though, as Mulers shows, local status was
not necessarily a good indication of a person’s Christian orthodoxy.
244
These were Ramon de Ponts and Anton de Ponts, who was the parish priest. Ibid, 183-4.
245
Rab Houston, “Literacy and Society in the West, 1500-1800” Social History 8, no. 3 (1983): 271;
Sara T. Nalle, “Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Castile” Past and Present 125 (1989): 69.
242

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Concerning the contents of the books themselves, the visitations are very brief, and
since they also report the bishop’s destruction of the offending volumes or pages, it is
impossible to know the exact contents. The parishioners of Culla denounced Dominec Mulers
as both an encortator and desligator; it is therefore possible they had seen his books while he
worked a spell for desligamentis.246 When Francesc Paholac summoned Muler for correction,
“his books of ligamentis were burned.”247 Perico de Ponts, like the chaplain Salvator, possessed
a “book of conjuring,” which the bishop censored by tearing out the offending pages.248 These
visits do provide some evidence to suggest that the books were not completely necromantic in
nature, but also drew from other concurrent forms of magic with which these laymen may have
been more familiar. The chaplain Salvator’s book was described as a “book of conjurings,”
which given the general nature of the word “conjure” is not very informative. As he was a
cleric, this volume may have included instructions for demonic magic. However, Dominec
Muler was accused by his fellow parishioners of knowing how to encortare and desligare.
Bishop Francesc Paholac later corrected him “for encortation and desligamentis and the books
that had ligamentis [in them] were burned.”249 Ligamentis was commonly reported in the
visitations as a form of lay conjuring, yet here seems to be a form of elite, literate magic. In
Catherine Rider’s extensive discussion of impotence magic in magical texts, she explains that
these texts included impotence magic (signified by the verb ligare), but that it was a minor
topic.250 The rarity of binding magic in necromantic texts suggests that Dominec’s books did

246

“...dixerunt quod Paschal Burguera , Petrus Vidal, et dictus Dominecus Mulers incortant et ipsus
Dominucus scit desligare...” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 131.
247
“Fuit correctus dictus Dominecus Mulers de incortatione et de desligatione et fuerunt combusti libri
quos habebat de ligamentis.” Ibid.
248
“Item, Periconus de Ponts habet quondam librum coniurationum.” Ibid, 184.
249
“Fuit correctus dictus Dominecus Mulers de incortatione et de desligatione et fuerunt combusti libri
quos habebat de ligamentis.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 131.
250
Rider, “Chapter 5: How to Bind a Man or Woman: Impotence Magic in the Magical Texts,” in
Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages, 76-89.

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not belong to the main body of necromantic grimoires and books of secrets, but may rather
have been brief, specialized treatises, or even homemade collections grown out of a personal
interest in binding magic.251 Whatever the contents of the books and regardless of whether
Dominec ever practised them, their condemnation to flames indicate that the bishop, at least,
saw their contents as dangerous instruments of demonic magic.
The case of Perico de Ponts is again different, and points to the wide variety of written
works through which the literate populace might encounter magical instructions. Summoned,
he appeared before the bishop and brought the troublesome book, no doubt by order. This book
does not seem to have offended the bishop as much as did that of Dominec Muler, for rather
than destroy the whole thing, he settled for tearing out the pages containing such
“conjurings.”252 Like the other books of magic that appeared in the visitations, Ponts’ volume
suggests that textual magics were not firmly divided from illiterate magical traditions. Rather,
lay sorceries such as Dominec Mulers’ ligamentis might find their way into written records,
and books of magic might find their way into the hands of laypeople. A literate layman (or,
less likely, laywoman) could very well have recorded some of the magic practised in his
community, particularly those spells that he had observed as successful and wanted to
remember, or thought might be useful for a friend or relative. This seems possible in the case
of Ponts’ book, which only had conjurations on a few of the pages—commonplace books
(homemade collections of notes, prayers, recipes, stories, information, and other miscellanea

Clerical necromancy was powerfully associated with a cult of secrecy, both because it was illegal
and because necromancers sought to protect the source of their power—books of necromancy often warned
their users to keep the books and tools of necromancy well hidden in order to prevent unworthy people from
learning of them. So strong was this association, that books of magic were sometimes called “books of secrets.”
A famous example of the redundancy of this tradition of secrecy is the title of the pseudo-Aristotelian book
Secret of Secrets. See Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 142-143.
252
“Fuit vocatus Periconus de Ponts de apportavit quondam librum in quo eram alique coniurationes et
pagine in quibus erant scripta fuerunt dilaniate et nichilominus iuravit illis nec aliis ullo tempore uti.” Egea, La
Visita Pastoral, 184.
251

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of interest to the writer) appeared at the end of the medieval period as literacy increased, and
Ponts’ book may have been something similar. While Perico de Ponts’ and Dominec Mulers’
burned and defaced pages show how lay magic could be made literate, it was also possible for
elite magic to work its way into laypeople’s knowledge, as the next case shows.
This intriguing case does not mention books, but the other trappings of necromantic
magic are clearly present. Gueraud of the parish of Codines (not to be confused with Gueraula
de Codines of the parish of Subirats) was reported to Bishop Ponç de Gualba in 1307 regarding
an incident involving the presence of a sword in the parish church (presumably for the purpose
of blessing it in a necromantic ritual, rather than violence), and for the grave offence of keeping
demons.253 Gueraud had already been excommunicated before the bishop’s arrival, and there
is no record of a correction or other form of follow-up during the visitation.254 Ponç de Gualba’s
care and attention in most elements of running his diocese indicate that he would not lightly
let pass a report of human-demon contact. As a diligent bishop, however, Ponç de Gualba
would have known that this sort of explicit relationship between a person and a demon was
within the jurisdiction of the papal inquisitors, and his later transfer of Gueraula de Codines’
case to inquisitorial justice reveals that he was willing to do so. It is therefore likely that he
handed Gueraud’s case to the inquisition, rather than investigated it himself. As such, there
may for Gueraud be a diocesan record similar to that recording Gueraula’s denunciation to the

The manuscript text is difficult to discern; my transcription runs as follows: “Item dixerunt quod
anno praedicto Incrastinus Paschatis monit dictus Rector verba dicto Geraldo et extraxit gladium [...] ecclesiam.
Item dixit eidem Geraldo nuper cum aportasse[n]t litteras ab officiali Barchinonem super praedicto [...] quod
ipse Geraldus tenebat demones in [...] et qui erat excommunicatus.” ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 74r accessed at
HMML, 31951, Visitas 1, f. 74r.
254
Ibid.
253

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inquisitor, even if the inquisitorial records themselves do not exist, but it would require
research beyond what I have done here to discover it.255
My final example of a locally prominent man’s magical practice again shows the
fluidity of magic in the medieval period. Lop de Molino was a cleric, but he could not have
claimed a very important status, since he was clearly identified as a “married cleric,” and all
important clerics were required to be unmarried and celibate.256 His magical knowledge
included “how to loose bound couples,” clearly referring to ligamentis, a lay magic that only
occasionally appeared in elite magical texts yet had a healthy tradition among the laity. 257
Unlike Dominec Muler, Molino’s knowledge was not stored in books—or at least not in books
of magic. When corrected, he swore to give up “binding and dissolving sorcery with the
Gospel,” revealing that he was literate, but that his magic came from a combination of lay
tradition and biblical text.258 Molino seems to have inflated the importance of his position as a
cleric to a degree where he claimed extensive healing powers, including the ability to release
spells inhibiting a married couple from producing children. This confusion of religious and
magical actions and goals is a key feature of lay magic, aligning Molino, despite his clerical

The record of Gueraula’s denunciation is in ADB, Communium 4. If such a document existed for
Gueraud, it would probably be in Communium 1, which covered the years 1302 to 1311 (he appeared in the
visitation from 1307).
256
The degree to which they conformed to this ideal has been explored in great detail and to great
effect by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, who has shown that the clergy of medieval Catalonia were frequently
engaged in long-term sexual relationships with women. However, these relationships were highly problematic
according to bishops, and had Lop been a cleric of such status that required his celibacy it is extremely unlikely
that his marriage would have avoided comment in the record. Therefore we can assume Lop’s low degree of
standing. See Armstrong-Partida, “Priestly Marriage”; “Priestly Wives”; “Celibacy and the Spanish Clergy:
Why a Mediterranean Model of Clerical Concubinage Is Problematic,” in American Historical Association
(Boston, MA, 2011).
257
Rider, Magic and Impotence, 86.
258
“...Fuit vocatus Lop de Molino, clericus coniugatus et fuit monitus et correctus quod non uteretur
colligationibus sive malefitiis dissolvendis cum evangelio, seu aliis coniurationibus qui facere hoc concessit sed
tantummodo simplici medicina.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral, 219.
255

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status, more closely with the wide array of lay magical practitioners rather than with educated
practitioners of necromancy.
Each of these cases reveals the limitations of assuming a clear division between elite
and lay magics, for these men were all members of lay parish communities that knew of their
magical activities. Dominec Muler’s book of ligamentis and Lop de Molino’s practice as a
desligator both indicate that the realm of impotence magic did not belong solely to women—
even though jealous old women and spurned lovers were the primary suspects in cases of
magically caused impotence.259 Lop de Molino, though a cleric, was more similar to other lay
magical practitioners who blended religion and other elements to produce magical effects.
Salvator of Forcall and, even more so, Gueraud of Codines fit the role of the clerical
necromancer more closely, yet the fact that the parishioners of Codines, a small, rural parish,
recognized Gueraud’s activities as magical and singled out his kept demons for mention to the
bishop reveals that laypeople recognized elite magic as something particularly sinister. These
prominent parish men, therefore, were part of the networks of lay magical practitioners, and
because their magic resembled necromantic magic in certain ways it was of particular interest
to visiting bishops. Technically, a bishop’s focus ought to have remained on Christians and
Christian practices, but a few occasions led Ponç de Gualba to consider the problem of nonChristian magical practitioners who attracted Christian clients.

Non-Christian Magical Practitioners
While the vast majority of magical practitioners who appear in visitation records are
Christians (since visitation records were primarily directed at regulating Christian behaviour),

259

Rider, Magic and Impotence, 44, 52.

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the occasional Muslim and Jewish practitioners who appear reveal that magic—like many other
elements of medieval Iberian society—brought together the three religious groups of the
peninsula.260 Unlike their Christian counterparts, Muslim and Jewish magical practitioners
were not subject to the visitor’s correction, and therefore it was their Christian clients, rather
than the practitioners themselves, who attracted the attention of episcopal visitors. The fact that
Christians went to Jewish and Muslim magical practitioners for solutions to their problems
shows that despite the close relationship between magic and religion, they did not see any
contradiction in seeking magical aid from non-Christians. Ironically, while baptized Christians
who engaged in orthodox Muslim or Jewish practices were considered heretics (as infamously
attested to in the Spanish Inquisition’s pursuit of “crypto-Jews” in the late fifteenth century),
Christians who went to Muslim or Jewish diviners, whether for normal magical services or
because they expected non-Christian magical practitioners to have powers Christian
practitioners did not, were penalized with fines and penance, but not considered abjurers of the
faith.261
The Muslim diviner and conjurer na Axa’s 1307 appearance in the visitation register of
Barcelona occurred under unusual circumstances, for she was not denounced (or at least not
denounced by name) by the regular group of parishioners. Rather, in the course of questioning

Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 155-214.
For example, three Christian men who went to “a Saracen of Calanda” for a divination to locate a
lost animal were required to pay six sous to the “light of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Arés,” double what they
had paid the diviner. “Item est fama quod Dominecus Valclara, Michael Barbera, et Balaguer Barbera iverunt ad
sarracenum de Calanda pro quam animali quod perdiderant.... Fuerunt correcti Dominecus Valclara, Michael
Barbera et Balaguer Barbera quia iverunt ad devinum de Calanda et dominus episcopus mandavent eidem quod
darent VI solidos luminarie Beate Marie de Aris cum devino dedisset III solidos.” Egea, La Visita Pastoral,
134, 135. Another example of interaction between a Muslim diviner and a Christian is in the case of na Pheba
and Marquesia Ermengol. Marquesia, the parishioners claimed, “goes with Na Pheba, diviner, to many places,”
and the bishop later warned Marquesia “that she should not participate with that Saracen nor any other.” Egea,
La Visita Pastoral, 167, 169. For further information about the Spanish Inquisition and its pursuit of conversos
see Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power 1492-1763 (London: Penguin
Books, 2002).
260
261

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Gueraula de Codines after approving her petition to return to medical practice, Ponç de Gualba
asked “about the state and conversation of a certain Saracen woman who lived near the castle
of Subirats.”262 Somehow, therefore, Bishop Ponç de Gualba had learned of a Muslim magical
practitioner in the area of Subirats, but did not know her name. An earlier visitation register
records what may have been the original denunciation that led de Gualba to look into na Axa’s
case. In 1304, the parishioners of Subirats had listed a number of women who engaged in
magical practice, including “a certain Muslim woman” who worked as a diviner in Subirats.
This report occurred just three months after Gueraula de Codines, also from Subirats, first
swore to give up magical and medical practice—it seems that na Axa was one of those who
stepped in to fill the void left by Gueraula’s retirement. Axa seems not to have been widely
liked, however, since the parishioners particularly emphasized the deceitful nature of her
practice, and that the Christians who attended her for her magical services were in ignorance
of her lies.263
Gueraula readily confirmed na Axa’s position as a diviner in 1307, though without
passing judgement as to whether na Axa’s activities were genuine or deceitful. Herself a
reformed diviner and magical healer petitioning for permission to practise non-magical healing
at the time she gave evidence to the bishop, Gueraula’s readiness to describe Axa’s activities
in detail probably lay in an attempt to bolster the bishop’s conviction in her own repentance by
giving information on another practitioner. At the same time, the level of detail she was able
to provide indicates that she had a personal interest in the competing diviner’s techniques. She

“Interrogata fuit dicta Gueraula Cudina super statu et conversatione cuiusdam sarracene qui moratur
apud castrum de Sobiratis...” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 718; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 111; Espelt,
“Activitats i formules,” 69; ADB, Visitationes s.n., 43v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., 43v.
263
“Item dixerunt quod quandam sarrcena qui moratur a sobiratis vaticinatur et con [...] ad eas gentes
de longere quis particibus qui ignorant sua astutia et falsitatem.” ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 23v at HMML
microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 23v.
262

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recounted how “a certain neighbour of hers, Ermessende de Codines” went to na Axa
concerning a stolen item, and that Ermessende had “three kernels of grain into her hands from
the said Axa and two turned to blackness,” presumably as part of a divinatory spell to locate
the missing object.264 Gueraula also related that “Axa lived by herself and Guillelm de Subirats,
inhabitant of the said castle, sustained her,” revealing that Axa was Guillelm’s concubine.265
Na Axa’s position as a Muslim diviner living with the support of a Christian man
deserves some scrutiny, for the Muslim population of Barcelona and its surrounding area was
negligible compared to that of the more southerly areas of Catalonia, such as Tortosa. 266 It is
quite likely that rather than be a native inhabitant of Subirats, Axa found herself there as a
slave, for most of the slaves in the Crown of Aragon were Muslim at the beginning of the
fourteenth century.267 That she was apparently free at the time of Ponç de Gualba’s
investigation of her is not surprising, for the manumission of slaves was commonly practised
for a variety of reasons in medieval Iberia.268 As she still lived under the care of a Christian
man, yet at a distance—for he was an inhabitant of the castle and she dwelt outside it—suggests
that Axa’s route to freedom was that of a high proportion of female slaves in Catalonia: via a
sexual relationship with her master.269

“...dixit quod vocatur na Axa et illa facit divinaciones et conjuraciones furtorum et maleficiorum
cum corrigia ut ipsa vidit quadam vice et audivit a quadam vicina sua Ermessenda de Cudinis que inerat ad eam
pro furto inveniendo et retulit huic tamen quod III grana frumenti accepit dicta Axa inter manus et II fuerunt
versi in nigrientem...” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 718; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 111; Espelt, “Activitats
i formules,” 69; ADB, Visitationes s.n., 43v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., 43v.
265
Na Axa and Guillelm probably had some sort of past or continuing sexual relationship for him to
support her outside of his home. “...dicta Axa moratur per se et sustinet eam Guillelmus de Sobiratis castlanus
dicti castri.” Bonet, “Visitas Pastorales,” 718; Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 111; Espelt, “Activitats i
formules,” 69; ADB, Visitationes s.n., 43v at HMML microfilm no. 31950, Visitas s.n., 43v.
266
Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms vol. 1, 32.
267
Ibid., 87. There is one mention of a Muslim slave woman in the Barcelona visitations, in the parish
of Cubeles. Bonet and Puigvert, Processos, 95.
268
Debra Blumenthal, “‘As If She Were His Wife’: Slavery and Sexual Ethics in Late Medieval
Spain,” in Beyond Slavery: Overcoming its Religious and Sexual Legacies, ed. Bernadette J. Brooten (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010): 179-189.
269
Ibid.
264

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Axa was therefore a marginal member of the community on a number of counts; as a
Muslim, as a woman, possibly as a current or former slave, and if so, as a foreigner, and, lastly,
as a magical practitioner. Yet it was her magical practice that, rather than set her further apart
from her Christian neighbours, formed the bridge through which she interacted with them. Her
otherness would have worked to her advantage in this situation, particularly after the popular
Gueraula ceased to practice in 1304. Next to the multitude of Christian practitioners, whose
sheer numbers normalized their actions, she would have appeared as an exotic and possibly
more powerful diviner. However, it was not only in terms of her magical practice that her
neighbours used na Axa’s situation to suit themselves.
As a non-Christian, Axa was a useful scapegoat when the bishop visited, a situation
exacerbated by the fact that some Christians viewed non-Christian magical practitioners with
distaste and distrust greater than that with which they viewed Christian practitioners. If we look
at the Jewish na Hanon of Barcelona, whose case I explored in detail in Chapter 2, the ease of
scapegoating and villianizing non-Christian women who practiced magic extended to a charge
of sorcery and the implication that she practised evil magic. However, non-Christian magical
practitioners remained free of the danger of episcopal correction (though they were, of course,
still susceptible to their own community’s censorship and vulnerable to the loss of Christian
clients), which meant Christians could worry less about losing their services to episcopal
authority.
This dynamic changed, of course, upon conversion to Christianity, when any magic on
the part of the convert entered the local bishop’s purview. There is only one case of a convert
engaging in magical activity in the early fourteenth-century visitation records from Barcelona
and Tortosa. This was Sibilia, a “baptizata of Castile,” whom the parishioners of Canovelles

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in the diocese of Barcelona reported to do “dishonest divinations with wheat grains” in 1307.270
The concept of dishonesty, commonly applied to non-Christian magical practitioners, here
appears in the case of a woman who converted (probably from Islam) to Christianity, indicating
that the stigma did not disappear with a new Christian identity.271 Sibilia was also a foreigner,
from Castile, which may have contributed to the Canovelles parishioners’ distrust of her.
Despite the impediments of her conversion status and her foreignness, Sibilia, like
approximately half of the magical practitioners, escaped correction—or at least there is no
record of her correction in the documents.
Na Axa and Sibilia all shared the experience of being magical practitioners distrusted
by some Christians because of their religious background. Their attraction to Christian clients
may have lain in their real or supposed ability to perform magics that Christian practitioners
did not know, but this same reason also led some Christians to fear them. The language of
dishonesty runs strong in these cases, yet it is also apparent that na Axa and na Hanon, for
certain, and also Sibilia, quite probably, provided services to clients and generally functioned
within (yet peripheral rather than central to) the network of magical practitioners of fourteenthcentury Catalonia.

Conclusion
The variety of people who practised magic in the medieval world extended from high
elites intent on summoning and dominating demons, to illiterate peasants who divined for lost
sheep. Not only were the images of these different practitioners gendered, but so were their

270
“Item dixerunt quod Sibilia baptizata castilliani et Alamanda pastora [...] faciunt divinationes
inhonestas cum frumentis.” ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 87r at HMML, 31951, Visitas 1, f. 87r.
271
For a discussion of the similarities between Sibilia and Axa’s magic, indicating the likelihood of her
conversion from Islam, see Chapter 2.

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practices. The early fourteenth-century visitation records from Barcelona and Tortosa reveal
that peasant magic was far from a homogenous entity—rather, different people participated in
different practices that were highly gendered. Women’s magic was typically that associated
with healing, or divination, which was a passive, observatory magic that nevertheless bestowed
great prestige upon its successful practitioners. Far from being social outcasts, they were
usually valued specialists whose work contributed to the overall parish welfare both physical
and spiritual. These characteristics were not limited to Christian women’s magic, with Muslim
and Jewish women participating in the magical market of medieval Catalonia in similar ways.
Men’s magic was more highly oriented towards the protection of animals, and possibly other
forms of defensive magic, reflecting men’s greater involvement in tending and working with
animals. Both male and female magical practitioners had the potential to attract the censorship
of their communities and arouse the concern of episcopal visitors, but in different ways.
Concerns about women’s magic centred on rhetorics of women’s susceptibility to demons, the
disruptive potential of magic when it gave women prominence and prestige, and community
concerns that some women (particularly non-Christians) would use their magic harmfully.
Men’s magic, on the other hand, aroused episcopal concern when the practitioners were either
literate, or clerics, or both, because literacy and membership in the clergy were both hallmarks
of potential necromantic magic.
While Ponç de Gualba and Francesc Paholac encountered a handful of men who were
literate, had some local prominence, and were engaged in literate magical practices, the manner
in which they dealt with most of these men suggests that they were small fish compared to
those the inquisitors hunted. Only Gueraud of the parish of Codines, excommunicated for his
relationship with demons, appears to have been a true necromancer. Even so, his location in
Codines, a rural parish surrounded by other rural parishes, the parish priest’s discovery of his

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attempted spell, and his lack of identification as a cleric suggest that he was a small-time
necromancer. Far more common were lower-status men and women whose magic served
practical purposes in their lives, in complementary gendered roles—the protection of livestock,
the location of lost items, and the safeguarding of health. Among the peasantry, it was women
who were viewed as the most likely to practise magic, but while Francesc Paholac took this as
evidence of the foolishness of peasant magic, and therefore of its non-threatening nature, Ponç
de Gualba saw female magical practitioners as the most dangerous because of their abundance
and popularity.

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Conclusion

Conceptualizing medieval magic as a dichotomy between literate, elite magic
performed by men and illiterate lay conjuring performed exclusively by women fails to be
useful when one begins to appreciate the variety of practitioners who populated the medieval
world. Gueraud of Codines may have been attempting necromantic magic, as attested by his
“keeping” of demons, but the evidence suggests that he was a rather unimportant person
himself.272 Benvenguda de Malnovell of Masqueroles blended common prayers with
conjurations and incantations in her healing practice, as did Gueraula de Codines, with the
additional component of elite medical knowledge.273 These practitioners and many others
provide evidence that medieval magic was a complex and inconstant blend of elite/lay, nonChristian/Christian, and feminine/masculine elements, and each individual practitioner used a
slightly different blend of these ingredients based on her or his need and knowledge. While the
image of the medieval peasant magical practitioner was feminine, this contrasts with the reality
in which men also engaged in masculine magics that conformed to neither the image of the
female conjurer nor the elite male necromancer. This contrast between the image of the magical
practitioner and the reality had important consequences when a bishop conducted his visitation
tours, for his interpretation of the intersection between femininity and magic determined his
attitude toward the magical practitioners (women and men) whom he met on his visitation
tours.

ADB Visitationes 1, f.74r at HMML microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f.74r.
For Benvenguda see Espelt, “Activitats i formules,” 70; ADB, Visitationes 1, f. 151r accessed at
HMML, microfilm no. 31951, Visitas 1, f. 151r. For Gueraula see fn 1.
272
273

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Francesc Paholac and Ponç de Gualba were heirs to long-held ecclesiastical beliefs in
the role of demons in magic, the susceptibility of women to demonic influence, and peasant
stupidity and inept piety. These beliefs coloured their interactions with magical practitioners,
and shaped how they comprehended and recorded their offences. Nowhere is this clearer than
in their inability to comprehend the peasant belief in the bones dones, and what it meant to “go
with” them. However, these two bishops were differently affected by the changes taking place
in the Catholic Church’s attitude towards magical practitioners in the early fourteenth century.
Paholac’s approach followed a centuries-long tradition of mild penance applied to all types of
lay magical practitioners, based on assumptions about the ineffectiveness of such misguided
actions since it was mostly foolish women—peasants, no less—who practised them. De
Gualba, on the other hand, was far more concerned about the possibility that peasant magical
practices concealed dangerous demonic activity because women were thought of as more
susceptible to demons, and he therefore targeted female practitioners, and particularly those
who practised publicly and could lead other Christians into their errors.
The two dioceses of Barcelona and Tortosa represent the tipping point on which elite
ecclesiastical ideas about magic rested in the early fourteenth century. The Catholic Church
had been increasingly troubled by clerical necromancers throughout the thirteenth century and
this fear came to a head in the early fourteenth century. However, this fear of elite necromancy
need not have channelled into a fear of peasant magic as well, and therefore need not have led
to the construction of the early modern witch stereotype and, consequently, the witch hunts of
the late fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ponç de Gualba’s records reflect the
attitude that fueled the shift towards harsher penalties for peasant conjurers, the dramatic
feminization of lay magic, and the fear that peasant conjurers engaged in secret relationships
with the demons who performed their work. Francesc Paholac represents the alternative

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possibility for ecclesiastical elites in the early fourteenth century. While he, too, presented a
vigorous interest in peasant magic in his visitation record, he did not find this magic
particularly threatening because instead of aligning the femininity of magic with ideas about
women’s ability to be tempted by demons and converse ability to tempt others, he instead
aligned it with concepts of feminine stupidity and ignorance. The feminization and
demonization of peasant magic were linked in the early fourteenth century, but they were not
yet inextricably entwined.
The perspective descended from Ponç de Gualba’s attitude would become dominant
during the early modern period, but Francesc Paholac’s milder approach also survived in the
rhetoric of skepticism that emerged around the witch hunts, and which had particular currency
in Iberia. The early seventeenth century provides a spectacular example of these two traditions
during witch hunts in Basque areas in the strategies and conclusions of the French judge Pierre
de Lancre and the Spanish inquisitor Alonso Salazar de Frias. Lancre condemned dozens of
people, mostly women, to the stake in the Basque area of France in the early seventeenth
century—in keeping with the most hysterically fanatical of witch-hunters, he convicted people
based on highly questionable evidence, spurred by his unwavering belief that all descriptions
of witches’ activities were real.274 For example, he justified the account of a fifteen-year-old
witch who claimed it was the Devil’s custom “to have sexual relations with the beautiful
women from the front, and the ugly ones from behind” by claiming “[w]hile she is still very
young, her youth is incapable of such a filthy invention.”275 In contrast, Alonzo Salazar de
Frias was a contemporary Inquisitor with the Logroño tribunal in the Basque area of Spain.

274
“Pierre de Lancre: Dancing and Sex at the Sabbath, 1612,” in Brian P. Levack, ed., The Witchcraft
Sourcebook, 104.
275
Ibid., 105.

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The tribunal produced approximately 500 confessions for witchcraft, but rather than spur on
the hunt as confessions did in France, they led Frias to investigate the judicial procedures of
the Inquisition.276 He concluded that “there were neither witches nor bewitched until they were
talked and written about,” and pointed out that the ease with which the devil could delude a
person’s mind was reason enough not to use witches’ testimonies to find other witches.277 Ponç
de Gualba and Francesc Paholac’s manners of dealing with peasant magical practitioners were
early forms of these much later approaches to discovering and trying witches, and they serve
as a reminder of the potential consequences that the fears of the powerful have on those under
them both in the short and long term.

276
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Appendix I
Table A: Numbers of male and female magical practitioners in Barcelona and Tortosa
Women in Barcelona
39 (80%)
Men in Barcelona
10 (20%)
Total in Barcelona
49

Women in Tortosa
71 (59%)
Men in Tortosa
50 (41%)
Total in Tortosa
121

Total Women
110 (65%)
Total Men
60 (35%)

Total Practitioners
170

Table B: Numbers of male and female magical practitioners corrected in Barcelona and Tortosa
Women Corrected in
Barcelona
6 (66%)
Men Corrected in
Barcelona
3 (33%)
Total Corrected in
Barcelona
9

Women Corrected
in Tortosa
46 (65%)
Men Corrected in
Tortosa
25 (35%)
Total Corrected in
Tortosa
71

Total Corrected
Women
52 (65%)
Total Corrected Men Total Corrected
Practitioners
28 (35%)
80

Table C: Numbers of male and female practitioners of different magical practices* 278
Barcelona
Women
Men
Total

Conjuring Sorcery Maleficia Divination Fetilla Encortation Ligamentis
22
5
27

15
3
18

1
0
1

22
2
24

0
0
0

0
0
0

0
0
0

37
8
45

12
0
12

2
1
3

11
0
11

6
1
7

15
33
48

9
8
17

Total Women 59
Total Men
13

27
3

3
1

33
2

6
1

15
33

9
8

Total

30

4

35

7

48

17

Tortosa
Women
Men
Total

72

* Includes data from practitioners who engaged in multiple named practices, therefore the total number
is 213 charges, greater than the 170 practitioners.

138
Appendix II
Table D: Methodology in determining the statistical significance of correction patterns
Barcelona

Tortosa

% of Practitioners who were
Women (=39/49)
80%

% of Practitioners who were
Women (=71/121)
60%

% of Corrected Practitioners who
were Women (=6/9)
67%

% of Corrected Practitioners who
were Women (=46/71)
65%

Total % Corrected (=9/49)
18%

Total % Corrected (=71/121)
60%

% of Women who were Corrected
(=6/39)
15%

% of Women who were Corrected
(=46/71)
65%

While the percentage of women corrected in Tortosa is higher than that in Barcelona, these
numbers must be read within the context of the overall higher numbers and higher frequency
of correction in the Tortosa record. This is easy to see by rounding the Tortosa numbers down
to 100. Assuming 100 practitioners in Tortosa, 60 of those practitioners would have been
women, while a separate 60 would have been corrected. Since the sum of these numbers (120)
is greater than the total number of practitioners (100), there is a necessary overlap between the
two groups. This means that, numerically, a maximum of 60 (100%) and a minimum of 20
(30%) of the women from Tortosa could have been corrected, given the frequency of correction
in that diocese. A completely random incidence of correction of women in the diocese of
Tortosa would be the midpoint between the possible maximum and minimum numbers of
correction—the midpoint between 100% and 30% is 65%. This matches the actual data,
wherein 46 of the 71 corrected practitioners were women. What this means is that while gender
influenced the Tortosa records slightly—there were more women reported than men, after all—
that this did not translate to a greater concern about correcting women’s magic than men’s.
The Barcelona records tell the opposite story. Assuming 100 practitioners for
Barcelona, 80 would have been women and a separate 18 were corrected. Since the sum of
these numbers is less than 100, it is possible for there to have been no overlap in their
distribution. This means that, numerically, a maximum of 18 women (100% women) and a
minimum of 0 (0% women) could have been corrected. A completely random incidence of
correction of women in the diocese of Barcelona would therefore have been 50%, or 9 out of
18. However, the actual ratio is higher than this, at 65%, revealing that in the diocese of
Barcelona the bishop did preferentially correct female magical practitioners.