Bartolomeo Spina · 1523
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Bartolomeo Spina (c. 1474–1546) was a Dominican theologian who would become Master of the Sacred Palace. His Quaestio de strigibus, first printed at Venice in 1523, is the Dominican answer to the sceptics: it holds that the strigae are real, that they travel bodily to their gatherings, copulate with demons and murder infants, and that they are therefore heretics and apostates whom the secular arm must burn.
The Quaestio argues from Aquinas and the canonists, but its most striking pages are the depositions: cases from Ferrara, Bergamo and the Val Camonica that Spina had heard of at first or second hand and sets down as evidence. The volume also carries his Tractatus de praeeminentia sacrae theologiae, in two tractates, and four Apologiae against the jurist Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio, who had argued that the witches’ flight was a dream and that the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over it.
Spina’s reply to Ponzinibio is one of the fiercest exchanges of the Italian witch debate. It turns on the question that divided the learned for a century: whether what the accused confessed had happened in the body or only in the mind, and so whether it was a crime at all.
The source is the Rome collected edition of 1576, from the Bavarian State Library, translated in full: the Quaestio, the De praeeminentia and the four Apologiae. No digitization of the 1523 Venice first edition was located.