‘What about Some Good Wether?’ Witches and Werewolves in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

Strange tales can turn up from the files of an inquisitor, especially from those of inquisitors as keenly committed to the prosecution of witchcraft as was Bartolomeo Spina, in early sixteenth-century Italy. The Dominican friar and noted demonologist had been leading the tribunal of Modena for only about a month at the outset of his career as a judge. In the last days of December 1518, he received a series of unusual depositions from a number of women and men.¹ These testimonies had probably been instigated by the inquisitor’s proclamation of a period of grace, during which anyone reporting suspect behaviours or potentially heretical beliefs would have earned special indulgences, following which period they would have incurred excommunication.²