The campaign of the historical magazine
Sapiens
on the review of witchcraft in Catalonia, which is entitled "They were not witches, they were women", has landed in the Parliament of Catalonia.
Esquerra, Junts, CUP and En Comú Podem will defend in next week's plenary session a joint resolution proposal that advocates "repairing the historical memory" of women "unjustly convicted, executed and repressed" for allegedly engaging in witchcraft.
The text, which already has the necessary majority to move forward, asks, among other things, that the municipalities take into account the names of victims of the Inquisition or secular justice when modifying the gazetteer.
More information
“The common people were worse with the witches than the Inquisition”
The resolution proposal signed by the pro-independence groups and the commons, which had been registered in November of last year, asks to recognize the alleged sorceresses as victims of a "misogynistic persecution". The Government is also urged that within these actions to "dignify and vindicate" the alleged witches, "promote academic studies with a gender perspective on the witch hunt and its causes."
If successful, the text will also summon the Catalan city councils to review the names of their streets to incorporate "the names of women convicted of witchcraft in their municipality, as an exercise in historical reparation and feminization of street names". One of the candidates could be Antonia Rosquellas, a resident of Viladrau. After an inhuman interrogation, suspended from a pulley and with weights on her feet, she "confessed" to attending a "coven". As Jacinto Antón explained in this newspaper, 15 years ago, that town of Girona was at the forefront in the classification of witches hunted in Catalonia: 14 hanged between 1618 and 1622. They were not burned because, at that time, they were not persecuted by the Inquisition but by the secular justice.
In 2007, the Museum of History of Catalonia hosted the exhibition
Per bruixa i metzinera
(By witch and poisoner), which gave an account of the magnitude of the persecution of women who, due to their economic situation, knowledge or ethnicity, did not fit the female archetype of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance and were systematically persecuted.
The proposed resolution also seeks to include witch hunts in the educational curriculum.