SPANISH INQUISITORIAL PROCEDURES:

      The Spanish Inquisition exercised its control through a system of VISITATIONS to rural towns and villages.  Every year Inquisitors spent four months traveling throughout the country to assess the level of religious orthodoxy and compliance.  They couldn’t visit every place in every year; the goal was to visit every town every ten years, but even this was not actually achieved.  As a result, a given town could go 12, 15 or even 20 years without seeing an Inquisitor, which may be one reason for relatively low level of peasant cases like that of witchcraft.

EDICT OF FAITH:      On arrival in a town or village, the Inquisitors would publish an Edict of Faith; this was an Inquisitorial questionnaire which listed every known type of heresy on 8 printed pages.  It was read aloud at Sunday Mass in all Churches in the area, with compulsory attendance; the congregation then took an oath of loyalty to the Inquisition, swearing to expose heretics.  The reading listed the heresies, errors and their “symptoms” – Judaizers (converted Jews lapsing back into Jewish practices), Moslems, Protestants, but also witchcraft, superstition and other magical beliefs.  Everyone present was required under pain of excommunication to make a secret denunciation to the visiting Inquisitors within six days against anyone they knew who fell into any of these categories. 

      The following Sunday a declaration of ANATHEMA was proclaimed against anyone who had failed to live up to these requirements.  The denunciations were registered in the Inquisitor’s libro di visita (book of the visit), and serious cases were referred back to the central court after witnesses were interrogated locally.  The other duty of the visiting Inquisitors was to ensure that the SAMBENITOS or penitential garments worn by those previously convicted of heresy were still hanging, with labels naming their wearers, were still hanging in the parish church, in perpetuity (these had to be replaced when the cloth decomposed after a 100 years or so).

      If there was a large outbreak of heresy in a city or area, the Inquisition would hold a large, public ceremony called an
AUTO DA FÉ (or Act of Faith).  The purpose of this ceremony was 1) to reconcile penitent heretics to the faith (they would be condemned to prison terms or to wearing a Sambenito for a specific period of time); 2) unrepentant or relapsed heretics would be publicly burned at the stake after a description of their crimes had been read (which had the effect of educating the audience about what was involved, leading (for example) to a spread of information about witchcraft in Logroño after the auto da fé held there in 1610.

      An EDICT OF GRACE was a different, more lenient version of the Edict of Faith.  It was the traditional answer of the Spanish Inquisition to a mass outbreak of heresy in a given area.  All those who reported themselves with the time limit set by the edict would be promised judicial leniency and exemption from confiscation of property.  The best example for our purposes is that issued by FRA ALONSO SALAZAR after arriving in the area of Logroño, where 11 witches had been recently burned at the stake, and 20 others recanted.  During 1611, Salazar traveled throughout the northeast corner of Spain and the Basque country announcing the Edict of Grace, taking no trials but only depositions.  This process generated 5,000 thousand accusations of witchcraft and 1,800 self-accusations (of which 1,400 were children).  He took the 11,000 pages of testimony back to Madrid where he argued that “there were neither witches nor bewitched until they were written and spoken about.”

Source: Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate

See article in xerox packet by Gustav Henningsen, "The Greatest Witch Trial of Them All"