The Book of Knowledge from the Mishnah Torah of Maimonides

tions of witchcraft and of a policy of dampening, rather than fostering, such panics. This development was not, of course, achieved by Salazar single-handed, important though his activities were; he was helped by the sceptical Bishop of Pamplona, Antonio Venegas de Figueroa, who carried out investigations in his own diocese and communicated the results to the Suprema, and, still more important, by the Inquisitor General, Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, a patron of Cervantes, and also of Salazar himself, from about 1590 onwards. It is evident from instructions (p. 256) sent by the Suprema to the inquisitors at Logrono as early as 1608, at the beginning of the Basque panic, that this all-powerful, central tribunal of the Inquisition was already in favour of careful, sceptical, fact-finding investigations of massaccusations of witchcraft, in particular, of trying to establish whether the witches' meetings, the aquelarres (i.e., Sabbaths), really took place, or were merely illusions or dreams. This last point was especially important, since most of the accusations came from children under twelve who named people they had seen at the Sabbath, to which, on their own testimony, they had been unwillingly transported, while asleep. The diabolic goings-on they claimed to have seen at the aquelarres derive almost certainly from the slightly earlier panic on the French side of the border, where the notorious mission of Pierre de Lancre had established a very full mythology of the Sabbath. Salazar's visitation of the infected area of 1611-1612 established beyond all reasonable doubt, or at least, more importantly, beyond the doubt of the Suprema, that there was no factual evidence at all for any regular meetings of witches, and that the great majority of confessions of attendance at Sabbaths, made by both adults and children, were the consequence of intimidation, powerful suggestion, or, when not consciously mendacious, vivid dreams. Since Henningsen himself (p. 390) considers that this epidemic of "stereotyped" dreams was one of the main causes of the Basque witch-panic, it is odd that he does not discuss Carlo Ginzburg's I Benandanti (though this is mentioned in a footnote), also based on inquisitorial records, which describes a similar dream-epidemic in north-eastern Italy, and provides the only solid evidence in favour of Margaret Murray's hypothesis that the witches' Sabbath derived from a beneficent pagan fertility cult a theory which Henningsen spends some time in refuting. My only other criticism of this excellent and important book is that, owing to the extreme abundance of his source materials, the narrative is sometimes not easy to follow, and that the index is defective. But I look forward to the promised publication of the documents relevant to this book, and to further studies based on the archives he has so thoroughly explored. D. P. Walker Warburg Institute University of London