The Witches' Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609-1614

Gustav Henningsen is a historian, and this University of Nevada Press book is his standard academic study of the Basque witchcraft trials of 1609 to 1614 and, in particular, of Alonso de Salazar Frias, the Spanish Inquisition investigator whose skeptical field visitation and reports pushed the Inquisition toward a far more cautious stance on witchcraft accusations. Its strength is direct archival work with the Inquisition's own case records and Salazar's own reports, letting Henningsen reconstruct both the trials and, unusually, an inquisitor's own internal argument against the reliability of confessions and accusations. Its limit is that it centers on this one specific set of trials and this one investigator's intervention, so a claim about European witch trials more broadly, outside the Basque and Spanish Inquisition context, needs a source with that wider geographic scope.