What 3,000 trials reveal about language, power, and sex

BarcelonaJoana Pares, of French origin, was expelled from Terrassa because she was convicted of witchAt the trial, which took place in 1602, he declared an inventory of his possessions. He was "destitute." He owned only a used box with several pieces of linen and wool cloth, a pepper-colored garment (a dark green garment), a used bodysuit, and several small pots of stews and sauces. In 1562, Guillem Parllebí was sentenced to the galleys (there is a rather explicit drawing) for sodomy committed with a cow. The accused, according to the sentence, had his underpants soaked. He defended himself by saying that he was embracing the cow to masturbate her. In 1618, there was a trial against Guillem Pujol, of French origin, Joana Casteta, a widow and exile, and Joana Teixidora. The two women were accused of conspiring and paying Pujol to kill Teixidora's husband. As in most trials, the women came out looking bad. Casteta was accused of being a widow, a woman of ill repute, and of living dishonestly. The truth is that Teixidora's husband abused her.

In 1833, Maria Farell accused Pau Clemente of slander"She's being screwed over as much as she wants, and the bachelors of Sentmenat have bored her," the documents read. In the same year, Rita Girbau filed a complaint against Miquel Roca because he had stormed into her house in a rage, armed with a club. He accused her of witchcraft and of being responsible for the disease entering his home. He threatened to butcher her and make sausages from her flesh. In the exchange of insults in 1824 between some carpenters in Terrassa, all with the surname Sagret, expressions such as chicken, rogue and thief, and abandoned whore of the devil.

These are literal transcriptions of the nearly 3,000 trials preserved in the Vallès Occidental Regional Archive, spanning more than three hundred years of history, from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Reading them is like eavesdropping on a street of humble neighbors and listening to how they spoke, because the scribes transcribed every response verbatim without any corrections. Some names have disappeared, like Montserrata, because until the 19th century, the name Montserrat was commonly used by men. It's an immersion into daily life, but also into society, because all the prejudices of the time come to the surface, from those related to sex to those related to foreigners, especially the French. They were the immigrants of the era. They had left the Pyrenees and southern France because they were overpopulated or for religious reasons. The court proceedings offer many clues about political events and confirm that Catalan gradually declined until it practically disappeared from legal documents.

"It's the only way to know how the humblest people spoke in the street," emphasizes archivist Alan Capellades. Most of the producers of documentary material are white, Catholic, bourgeois men. There is a very large information gap about society. "For this reason, if we want to know how Catalan was spoken in the street in the 16th or 17th centuries, we have to go to the court records and see the transcripts made by the scribes of the interrogations," adds Capellades.

The disappearance of Catalan in trials

In the legal proceedings of the 16th and 17th centuries, Catalan was very present, as was Latin, which was used to formulate some questions and write judgments. During those centuries, mayors were also civil and criminal judges. They administered justice in less important cases, but from the 18th century onward, they gradually lost power. After the defeat of the Habsburgs in 1714, with the Nueva Planta Decrees imposed by Philip V, justice passed into the hands of the Royal Audiencia and the corregidores, within a centralized Bourbon system. The disappearance of Catalan from legal proceedings became much more radical after 1820, with the Liberal Triennium, when the judiciary was separated from local political power, and professional, modern judges dependent on the State were established. "There was an attempt during the Second Republic to increase the use of Catalan in the judiciary and in legal documents, but it was unsuccessful," says Xavier Gayán, director of the Vallès Occidental Regional Archive. From that moment on, Castilian Spanish became the standard language in official documents.

"The cases that appear in these documents deviate from the norm of everyday life. But, indirectly, you see what daily life was like, and also what people's emotional impulses were. From a sociological point of view, the mentality of the time is evident. There are many crimes that reflect the prevailing attitudes of the time: concubinage, bestiality, or sodomy. Society must prosecute them because, otherwise, it becomes a moral sin that affects everyone, because tolerating or permitting it is also a sin."

The sad story of Margarita Tafanera

Soler thoroughly studied the trials and persecution of women accused of witchcraft in Terrassa. "It's a story of fear, of collective fear against a group of women who, at the beginning of the 17th century, because of their attitudes, their customs, and simply for being outsiders, were accused of witchcraft, which led them to become the tragic protagonists of a truly sordid episode in the town of Terrassa," she explains in the publication. One of the accused women, who was hanged in 1619, was Margarita Tafanera, who lived on Calabruixa Street. This Terrassa resident had had arguments and fights with some neighbors and had been reprimanded for walking on the rooftops. She became increasingly isolated, and after much pressure and torture, she finally confessed that she was in contact with the devil, who took the form of a man, wore a red cap, and played a flute with a snoring sound reminiscent of sardanas (a traditional Catalan dance).

Poor Tafanera escaped half-dead from the hospital, where she had been treated because she was in very bad shape after all the torture. She thought no one would be there and that she could take refuge in her house, but a mob of more than two hundred people from Terrassa, which at that time had about 1,500 inhabitants, was waiting for her. They stoned her and beat her severely.

Tafanera was one of the few women who suffered torture. "Of the nearly 3,000 trials, there are only a little over 40 involving torture, because two people had to be paid: the executioner and the doctor. The mayor paid for it, and it was too expensive," Soler points out. Rape also appears in the court records of the Royal Alcaldía of Terrassa. "This is yet another expression of gender violence, but in the mindset of the time, it constituted one of the most serious offenses that could be inflicted on a woman. Rape implicitly entailed rejection by the men in her circle and by society as a whole," explains Capellades. Gertrudis Rovira was repudiated by her fiancé after being raped by two men. The consequences of this infamy drove her to madness. "This stigma explains the reluctance of many victims to report the crimes," adds the archivist. That is why most of the cases refer to attempted rapes, because these did not imply dishonor.