From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 11.2 (1991): 7-25.

Copyright 1991, The Cervantes Society of America

ARTICLE

Of Witches and Bitches: Gender, Marginality and Discourse in El

casamiento engaoso y Coloquio de los perros
CARROLL B. JOHNSON

N THE Casamiento engaoso the syphilitic soldier Campuzano reveals that the jewelry
his wife had stolen from him was all false. But this doesn't necessarily mean that he is poor. His real
wealth is discourse, first the oral narration of his marital adventures, and then the manuscript he
offers his friend Peralta the lawyer to read, a literary text. Campuzano's real talent (in the Biblical
sense of wealth given him) is as a teller of tales. He is rather like Cervantes himself in this.1
Campuzano is the last in a series of sympathetic but impotent soldier-poets who appear
throughout Cervantes' works. He recalls Ruy Prez de Viedma, who narrates his experiences as a
captive in Algiers and runs into his brother, the successful
1

Julio Rodrguez Luis makes this explicit, noting that el apellido Campuzano empieza con el mismo signo y tiene
igual nmero de letras que el de Cervantes. Novedad y ejemplo de las Novelas de Cervantes, v. 2 (Madrid: Jos
Porra Turanzas, 1980), 53, n. 11.

7
8

CARROLL B. JOHNSON

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lawyer, in Don Quijote I, 39-41. He is also a more elaborated version of the soldier-poet in La
guarda cuidadosa, who woos the girl with love poetry and the record of his military service but
loses her to the sacristan.2 There is also a relation between Campuzano and Toms Rodaja/Rueda in
El Licenciado Vidriera, who tries his best to be a man of letters but is derided and rejected, and
forced finally against his will into the profession of arms, where he wins fame (as a soldier) and
death simultaneously. Otis H. Green once postulated that Licenciado Vidriera has an
autobiographical dimension; certainly Casamiento/coloquio does.3 Finally, Campuzano is a remote
descendant of Elicio in La Galatea, who mobilizes an army of soldier-poets to rescue poetry itself,
allegorized in the person of Galatea, from the clutches of the Portugese.4
We are accustomed to read the Casamiento narrative from some kind of moralistic high ground
and to judge Campuzano from that perspective. Mauricio Molho, for example, makes much of what
he calls le pech de Campuzano.5 Is he a liar? Can we trust the Coloquio story in view of his selfconfessed deceit in the other one? If we read the Casamiento narrative instead as a story artfully
told, characterized by the narrator's withholding and anticipating information, hinting at moral
purpose only to undercut it, as he says so often encendiendo el deseo, in short
2

Eugenio Asensio laid out the grounds for this identification only to reject it. Eugenio Asensio, prologue to his
edition of Cervantes, Entremeses (Madrid: Castalia, 1970), 32-33. Francisco Mrquez Villanueva has no difficulty with
the autobiographical reference. In fact, he draws attention to it. See Tradicin y actualidad literaria en La guarda
cuidadosa, in his Fuentes literarias cervantinas (Madrid: Gredos, 1973), 95-108. Mary Gaylord has also written about
this: La poesa y los poetas en los entremeses de Cervantes, ACerv 20 (1982), but her observations have more to do

with poetry (verse as opposed to prose) and literary theory than with the evocation of a portrait of the artist.
3
See Otis H. Green, El Licenciado Vidriera: Its Relation to the Viaje del Parnaso and the Examen de ingenios of
Huarte, in A. S. Crisafulli, ed., Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of Helmut A. Hatzfeld (Washington D. C.,
1964), 213-220.
4
Mary Gaylord has dealt with poets in La Galatea in The Language of Limits and the Limits of Language. The
Crisis of Poetry in La Galatea, MLN 97 (1982), 254-271, but not in this precise context. More to the point is Leslie
Deutsch Johnson, Three Who Made a Revolution: Cervantes, Galatea and Caliope, Hispanfila, no. 57 (1976): 23-33.
5
Maurice Molho, ed., El casamiento engaoso y coloquio de los perros / Le mariage trompeur et colloque des
chiens (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1970), Remarques, pp. 71-72; 75-78.

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Of Witches and Bitches

establishing a complex and dynamic rhetorical relationship with his hearer-reader, that is, if we
don't judge Campuzano morally, but artistically, the Casamiento story appears in a new light, much
more positive or at least morally neutral. If becomes the hook Campuzano uses to bring us into the
orbit of his world of discourse and what allows him finally to offer us the written (and therefore
more prestigious/ambitious?) text of the Coloquio. L. J. Woodward has worked this out with precise
references to the precepts of rhetoric. The Casamiento is the inductio to the Coloquio. It proceeds
according to the prescribed method ordo artificialis, with the short illustrative story about
Campuzano and Doa Estefana, the proverb about Don Simueque and his one-eyed daughter, and
the sententia from Petrarca.6
Campuzano, the man of arms, tells his stories to Peralta, a professional of letters, literally a
letrado. Now what happens here? The man of arms becomes the man of letters. It is he who proffers
texts to be reacted to, not his friend the lawyer, who makes a good living by manipulating words but
whose manipulations never become part of any text we read. The man of letters is silenced. In
this sense, as Campuzano's story, the last of the Novelas ejemplares is the story of a writer trying to
become one.
In fact, maybe this is Cervantes' final or most detailed or most profound statement about the
artist (i.e. himself) in society.7 But there are several portraits of the artist in this text. There is
Campuzano who addresses Peralta, there is Berganza who addresses Cipin, there is Caizares who
addresses Berganza. And there is also a narrator who addresses the reader.
There is a nexus between the dogs' speech, the witches' speech, and Campuzano's oral and
especially written discourse. All these speakers have in common that they are supposed to remain
mute. Campuzano's text (the Coloquio) is about giving voice, that is, speech, real membership in the
community, to those marginated elements whose status is so insignificant it
6

L. J. Woodward, El casamiento engaoso y el coloquio de los perros, BHS, 36 (1959): 80.

Alban Forcione claims, however, that La Gitanilla and Pedro de Urdemalas present the full biography, the
apprenticeship and triumph, of the Cervantine figure of the poet. Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the
Persiles (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), 306. Lesley Lipson has recently challenged Forcione's categories in La
palabra hecha nada: mendacious discourse in La Gitanilla, Cervantes 9.1 (1989): 35-53.
7

10

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Cervantes

renders then infans and thereby deprives them of membership. Campuzano's text is designed to
make the unspoken speak, to raise the repressed (collectively, the things society doesn't want to
think about) to the level of consciousness. We should consider Caizares, as witch and as woman,
and her speech first. The prevailing viewpoint is exemplified most forcefully in recent

Casamiento/Coloquio criticism by Alban Forcione.8 Forcione considers the Caizares episode a

monstrous embodiment of disorder (61). Caizares herself is the monster at the center of the
labyrinth (59). Whether or not Cervantes actually believed in witches . . . it is nevertheless clear
that he was well aware of the imaginative power of the myth of witchcraft, that he effectively
introduced its vision of annihilating energy and its vocabulary of horrible inversion at the moment
of climactic disintegration in his narrative, and that he exploited its theological implications to
pursue to its most profound depth his major theme of the nature of evil (71).
Mara Antonia Garcs has recently offered a more modern and marginally less moralistic version
of Forcione's thesis. Largely because she insists on Caizares as a sexual being (a characteristic
Forcione shies away from), her vision of the old woman as the monstrous locus of evil is even more
virulent that his. Garcs also situates the problematic of Berganza's encounter with Caizares within
the context of Lacan's theories of accession into language and the Symbolic order. This is a voyage
into the womb, a descent into the abyss where the monster lives, . . . a face to face encounter with
the void epitomized by a woman's genitals. Caizares is the most repulsive invention of the
maternal, a desecration of that saintly body which represents the highest construct of the Christian
civilization regarding human conception and nurturing. . . . Therefore corruption sexuality,
syphilis and sin is identified from the onset with the feminine, of which the maternal is the real
support.9
The association of Caizares the witch to a fearsome crone who is somehow also a mother need
not proceed from the theories of Julia Kristeva, whence Garcs derives it. Caizares the crone may
also be considered as the debased, degraded and disempowered
8

Alban Forcione, Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984).
Mara Antonia Garcs, Berganza and the Abject: the Desecration of the Mother. A paper presented at MLA,
Washington D. C., December 1989.
9

11.1 (1991)

Of Witches and Bitches

11

remnant of the Great Mother, who was worshiped throughout the ancient Near East and whose
worship fell victim to patriarchal religions in the second or first millennium B.C. She is identified
with the earth, with the generative principle, and with the seasonal and life cycles. There is a lively
debate among scholars both feminist and otherwise concerning whether her worship signified a
matriarchal socio-political order, or simply reflected matrilineal reckoning of descent, and whether
the Goddess was ousted by the discovery of paternity, by Indo-European barbarians, by the
institution of private property, or just what.10 Barbara Walker divides the Goddess into three aspects
not unlike the Trinity familiar to Christians. This many-named Goddess was the first Holy Trinity.
Her three major aspects have been designated Virgin, Mother, and Crone (21). Around the fifth
century A.D. Christianity incorporated her worship or at least her veneration, but with significant
modification. The Virgin and Mother aspects where merged into the familiar figure of Mary. The
Crone aspect, traditionally considered essential to the comprehension of the trinitarian goddess and
the logic of the natural cycles she presided, was simply amputated. This tactic allowed the fact of
death to be replaced by the promise of eternal life, and it made female sexuality disappear behind
virginity and nurturing.
There is accumulating a body of feminist analysis of the silencing of women by the patriarchal
order. Elaine Showalter observes that It was because witches were suspected of esoteric knowledge
and possessed speech [possessed is an adjective modifying speech] that they were burned.11
Showalter's apparently offhand observation about witches is the fruit of an alternative, almost an
underground tradition of attempts to explain the phenomenon of witchcraft from the perspective of

the witches instead of that of their persecutors.

In 1862 in a book entitled La Sorcire, Jules Michelet explained the rise of witchcraft in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance precisely as the only means of revolt possible for women against
10

I have found the following particularly useful: Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford UP,
1986); Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976); Barbara G. Walker,
The Crone. Woman of Age, Wisdom and Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).
11
Elaine Showalter, Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, in David Lodge, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory. A
Reader (New York: Longman, 1988), 340. Widely available elsewhere as well.

12

CARROLL B. JOHNSON

Cervantes

the oppressive feudal-patriarchal order. It is easy, especially for a man, to dismiss Michelet's
melodramatic account of the peasant bride and the feudal lord who abuses and humiliates her by
exercising his droits de Seigneur on her body as hyperbolic docu-drama, but contemporary feminist
theory finds his hypotheses congenial and rewarding. Helne Cixous, Catherine Clment, and
Marguerite Duras all return approvingly to Michelet's theses on the origins and meaning of
witchcraft. When Xavire Gauthier founded her feminist literary review in 1976 she names it
Sorcires. For Gauthier all women are sorcires. The figure of the witch is a kind of hyperbolic
trope, the extreme case of woman's situation in man's society.
The French feminists' attraction to witchcraft is based on a perception of witches as powerful
liberated women. Their attributes:
direct contact with nature, with their body, with the body of others;
practices, ideas, and a language that are presented as positive models for a specifically
feminine, as opposed to an oppressive masculine culture;
a halo of mystery and secrecy that evokes the notion of a private territory or kingdom where
women are queens.
Witches were subversive because of their alliance with the devil, their medical practices, and
their sexual activities, imagined or real, especially during the Sabbath orgies. . . . Witches as
healers, poisoners, aborters, and midwives knew about plants and the body . . . because they had
studied them practically. If witches used plants effectively it is because they classified them and
experimented with them, and that is a scientific approach. It is not a better practice because one
calls it scientific, but it means that witches used their brains in the same way as men, who later
monopolized medicine.12
Across the channel, Catherine Belsey observes that witchcraft can be considered as a practice
offering women a form of power which was forbidden precisely by orthodox concepts of the
family.13
12

An anonymous collective contribution to Questions feministes, no. 1 (November 1977). In Elaine Marks and
Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 220.
13
Catherine Belsey, Literature, History, Politics, in David Lodge, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader
(New York: Longman, 1988), 405. Widely available elsewhere as well.

11.1 (1991)

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13

Michelet's theses have been favorably received by at least a segment of competent clinical
opinion in this country as well. Thomas S. Szasz considers that witches were silenced and hounded

out of existence because they competed, rather too successfully, with the established order and its
corollary of male supremacy. By aiding the weak, he writes, the witch tended to undermine the
established hierarchies of dominance of priest over penitent, lord over peasant, man over
woman.14
Marxism, which shares with feminism a vision of society divided into oppressors and victims,
also shares the alternative approach to understanding witchcraft. Marja Ludwicka Jarocka bases her
discussion of the witches in the text and their place in Cervantes' society on Michelet's theories.15
Jarocka notes that Caizares is not the only witch in our text. Rather, she belongs to an entire
subculture composed of marginated women.
The witches also competed with the new science of medicine, and exclusively masculine
practice restricted to university graduates and encoded in the Latin language.16 It has even been
argued that this competition alone was responsible for the systematic hunting down and
extermination of witches precisely during the period of the formation of modern medicine. Thomas
Szasz observes that the sorceress acquires, by experimenting with drugs extracted from plants, a
genuine knowledge of some powerful pharmacological agents (85). Among these he lists
belladonna, a term that was coined precisely to name the wise woman who understood its use.17
Julio Caro Baroja comes perhaps as close as a man could in 1961 to identifying witches'
behavior with their status as women. Like Marja Jarocka, he considers the witch as a woman on the
margin of society. He evokes women who find themselves belittled by their surroundings, perhaps
left with a complejo de
14

Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 86.
See Marja Ludwicka Jarocka, El coloquio de los perros a una nueva luz (Mxico: UNAM, 1979), 39-43; 98-115.
16
Juan Blzquez Miguel observes that cualquier vieja o joven, sospechosa de cualquier heterodoxia, por ligera que
fuese, social o religiosa, era acusada de bruja, y nada digamos si se dedicaba al curanderismo. Blzquez Miguel, Eros
y Tnatos. Brujera, hechicera y supersticin en Espaa (Toledo: Editorial Arcano, 1989), 20.
17
Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 83.
15

14

CARROLL B. JOHNSON

Cervantes

impotencia after a series of failed amorous relationships, and concludes that las hechiceras
antiguas formaban como una sociedad secreta de mujeres.18
Juan Blzquez Miguel traces what he calls a proceso de satanizacin de la mujer beginning in
the twelfth century, a tendency to blame women for everything from outbreaks of plague to
ecclesiastical schism.19 The enormously influential Malleus maleficarum of 1486, for example,
identifies witches as women because all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is
insatiable.20 As a Spanish example Blzquez Miguel cites Martn Castaega, writing in 1529:
Cristo, conociendo su naturaleza perversa, las apart de sus sacramentos, mientras que por lo
mismo el Diablo les dio libertad para sus excrementos; son ms fciles de engaar por su natural
simpleza; son ms curiosas para saber y escudriar cosas ocultas; son ms habladoras y se ensean
unas a otras; como son menos fuertes tienen mayor propensin a la ira y son ms vengativas; al
llegar a la vejez tienen apetitos carnales que no pueden satisfacer y piden ayuda al diablo.21
Having noted the general tendency to equate women and their alternate healing arts with
witchcraft and the Devil, we can proceed to the specific historical context of Cervantes' witches.
Everyone has noted the presence, by name, of a real witch, Leonor Rodrguez, La Camacha de
Montilla. Leonor Rodrguez and her sister (?) Catalina were both tried for witchcraft and
condemned at the auto of 8 December 1572. The proceedings have been published by Rafael Gracia
Boix.22 The material published by Gracia Boix is only very tenuously related to Cervantes' text,
except for the name La Camacha, which figures so prominently in it. Neither of the historical

Camachas is remotely appropriate as a modelo vivo for anyone in the Coloquio de los perros,
although there are some similarities, which should be noted. Like Caizares in the story, both
Catalina and Leonor were condemned
18

Julio Caro Baroja, Las brujas y su mundo (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1961. Rpt. Madrid: Alianza, 1966), 317.
Juan Blzquez Miguel, Eros y Tnatos. Brujera, hechicera y supersticin en Espaa (Toledo: Editorial Arcano,
1989), 20.
20
Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Krmer, Malleus maleficarum (1486), ed. Montague Summers (New York: Dover,
1971), 47.
21
Martn Castaega, Tratado muy sutil y bien fundado de las supersticiones y hechiceras y varios conjuros
(Logroo, 1529).
22
In Autos de fe y causas de la Inquisicin de Crdoba (Crdoba, 1983), 91-96.
19

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Of Witches and Bitches

15

to volunteer work in a hospital. Catalina was to serve cinco aos en Crdoba en el hospital que se
le sealare (94), and Leonor los dos primeros aos de los diez [of her exile] en un hospital en
Crdoba, cual se la sealare (96). Both women, as indeed all the witches who were tried and
condemned on the same occasion, devoted a good part of their professional practice to what we
might call magical alcahuetera, arranging for certain men to come into the presence of female
clients, including the celebrated apparition of a certain Don Alonso de Aguilar in the client's garden
in the form of a horse (Bernarda Alba, watch out!), but neither of them is noted as a midwife, and
there are no references to childbirth in the proceedings. Similarly, and this is even more curious,
there are no references to witches' sabbaths or aquelarres. Thus the two most crucial aspects of
Caizares' intervention in the Coloquio are missing from the Camacha proceedings.
In spite of the textual prominence of the Andalusian Camachas, it seems that of all the
manifestations of the European witch craze of 1450-1750, the one that most probably bears on
Cervantes' text is the famous Logroo auto of 1610. The largest such event in history, it attracted
some 30,000 spectators. An extensive relacin was published in the same year by Juan de
Mongastn, which Cervantes surely must have read.23 In this context it is perhaps not insignificant
that Caizares herself directs attention away from Andaluca to Navarra when she remarks that she
and La Montiela habamos estado las dos en un valle de los Montes Perineos en una gran jira.24
She refers to an aquelarre in the Basque country. The word is of Basque origin, suggesting the
prominence of that region in both the production and persecution of witches. Akerr is macho
cabro, and larre is prado, the goal and the site respectively of the witches' clandestine
gatherings. The question has
23

Ameza, for one, seeks to minimize the importance of this event, because he believes the Coloquio was written no
later than 1605, and probably in Fall 1604, when Cervantes was living in Valladolid. He is willing to admit, however,
that Cervantes could have incorporated some details from the 1610 relacin into last-minute revisions of his text.
Ameza, Cervantes creador, II, 452. All Forcione says is: Various Cervantists have connected the genesis of the
Caizares episode with the famous auto de fe of Logroo in 1610. (Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness, 68, n.
14). He then remits to Ameza's edition of Casamiento.
24
ed. Sieber, vol. II, p. 340.

16

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Cervantes

always been whether the women were actually physically transported to the rendevous with Satan
or whether they merely dreamed it. Ever since Dr. Andrs Laguna identified some of the ingredients
of the soporific unguent the women smeared on their bodies, clinical opinion has favored a
chemically induced hallucination as the explanation for their accounts of where they went, what
they did and with whom.25 But clinicians were in short supply in the sixteenth century.
Pedro Ciruelo's Reprobacin de las supersticiones y hechiceras (1530) ascribes the normally
impossible events, real or imagined, to the Devil. The Reprobacin was reprinted nine more times
before publication of the Coloquio: in 1538, 1540, 1541, 1547 (three editions), 1548, 1551, and
1556. It is difficult to believe that Cervantes was not acquainted with it. Ciruelo's description of the
witches' visible behavior is strikingly reminiscent of Berganza's. Tambin las cosas que hacen las
brujas, o jorguinas son tan maravillosas que no se puede dar razn dellas por causas naturales. . . .
Otras destas en acabndose de untar y decir aquellas palabras se caen en tierra como muertas, fras y
sin sentido alguno, aunque las quemen o asierren no lo sienten. Y dende la dos o tres horas se
levantan muy ligeramente y dicen muchas cosas de otras tierras y lugares adonde dicen que han
ido. . . . Esta ilusin acontece en dos maneras principales: que horas hay que ellas realmente salen
de sus casas y el diablo las lleva por los aires a otras casas y lugares; otras veces ellas no salen de
sus casas, y el diablo las priva de todos sus sentidos, y caen en tierra como muertas y fras, y les
representa en sus fantasas que van a las otras casas y lugares. Y nada de aquello es verdad, aunque
ellas piensan que todo es as como ellas lo han soado, y cuentan muchas cosas de las que all
pasaron.26 Ciruelo clearly believes
25
M. J. Harner has recently observed that all the famous unguents are found to contain atropine, a powerful alkaloid,
as well as mandragora and henbane. The broom the witches were said to mount served to apply the atropine bearing
mixture to the sensitive vaginal membranes. The result of this application is said to be a trip in the modern sense of
drug culture slang. M. J. Harner, The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft, Hallucinogens and
Shamanism (London, 1973), 124-150. Other unguents have been found to contain aconite or monkshood, cinquefoil and
belladonna. This combination is said to produce cardiac arrhythmia, which in a sleeping person would give the
sensation of falling or flying. Blzquez Miguel, Eros y Tnatos, 23-24.
26
Pedro Ciruelo, Reprobacin de las supersticiones y hechiceras (1530), ed. Alva V. Ebersole (Valencia: Albatros,
1978), 37.

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Of Witches and Bitches

17

that the Devil, and not some chemical agent or the imagination of the individual concerned, is
responsible for what happens.
Caizares: Hay opinin que no vamos a estos convites sino con la fantasa, en la cual nos
representa el demonio las imgenes de todas aquellas cosas que despus contamos que nos han
sucedido. Otros dicen que no, sino que verdaderamente vamos en cuerpo y en nima; y entrambas
opiniones tengo para m que son verdaderas, puesto que nosotras no sabemos cuando vamos de una
o de otra manera, porque todo lo que nos pasa en la fantasa es tan intensamente que no hay
diferenciarlo de cuando vamos real y verdaderamente. Algunas experiencias desto han hecho los
seores inquisidores con algunas de nosotras, y pienso han hallado ser verdad lo que digo (340).
When Caizares says that the Inquisitors have conducted experiments and found both of two
contradictory propositions to be true (Do we really go there, or do we imagine it?), she is
probably reflecting, in a general way, the double explanation proposed by Ciruelo as long before as
1530, and in a more immediate and empirical context, the antagonism and opposed interpretations
of the Inquisitors whose investigations led to the famous Logroo proceedings of 1610. These were
the hard liners Alonso Becerra Holgun and Juan Valle Alvarado on the one hand and Alonso de
Salazar Fras (the witches' advocate) on the other. On 20 April 1611, concurrently with the

Becerra/Valle and Salazar Fras debates, and at the request of the Inquisitor General, the humanist
Pedro de Valencia offered a reaction to the recently published account of the 1610 auto. Either the
witches' meetings were real, and took place with the cooperation of the Devil; or the witches'
meetings were dream-visions produced by the witch unguent; or the witches' meetings were
sometimes real and sometimes only dreams, but in any case involved the cooperation of the Devil.27
Salazar Fras had violent disagreement with his two hard-nosed colleagues, which led to a series
of position papers and mutual recriminations in the years following the 1610 proceedings.
27

Valencia's observation remained unpublished until 1900, when Manuel Serrano y Sanz published them as the
Discurso de Pedro de Valencia acerca de los cuentos de las brujas y cosas tocantes a magia, Revista de Extremadura 2
(1900), 189-303; 337-347. Summarized in Gustav Henningsen, The Witches' Advocate (Reno: University of Nevada,
1980), 7. (See also the testimony of Mara de Lesaca reported by Idoate.)

18

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Cervantes

In 1612 Salazar Fras himself offered a summary of his disagreements with Becerra and Valle,
which makes reference precisely to the points at issue in Caizares' discourse. Se encuentran los
ms principales diciendo cada uno de esta manera: Ellos, que todos los confitentes han visto o
cometido real y corporalmente cuanto de s mismos y de las dems, respectivamente, testifican. Yo,
que aunque sea posible en mucha parte de ello, ninguno de todos los papeles presentes tal
persuaden. Ellos, que las probanzas de esto son perfectas con evidente verdad. Yo, que las mejores
de ellas tienen la incertidumbre que todos los tiempos y gentes han hallado.28
The testimony of the witches themselves is instructive. A certain Mara de Lesaca, 68 years of
age, gave her deposition at Elgorriaga on 3 May 1611. Some of the things she says bear an uncanny
resemblance to things Caizares says.
Preguntada por el tercer artculo, dijo este testigo que puede haber cuarenta y ms aos que es
profesa en el arte de bruja, y que ha ido a los aquelarres y juntas que el demonio ha hecho al circuito
del dicho lugar. Y en ellos, del dicho tiempo a esta parte, ha visto muchas gentes que se juntan de
muchos lugares de esta valle, y ha conocido a muchos y a otros no conoce. Y les ha visto ir en
cuerpo y en alma, y vestidos, y danzar en las dichas juntas y hacer reniegos de Dios y de la Virgen
Mara, como lo hizo este testigo y tiene confesado ante los comisarios de la Inquisicin.
Preguntada si iba en cuerpo y en alma y con sus vestidos, o si quedaba adormida, y el demonio
por lo que deca y le haca parecer . . . crea y se afirmaba en ello, y tena aquello por fe y verdad,
dijo que el demonio afirmadamente le ha hecho con creer en todo el tiempo dicho, que ha ido
corporalmente. Pero que a otra parte, ha estado considerando y perpleja e incrdula, que no debe ser
sino ilusin, y que a las veces que en este ministerio e imaginacin se ha ocupado, habiendo venido
a su noticia del demonio, le ha atormentado y hecho creer que van en corpreo. Y as, en esta
vaguedad e incredulidad ha estado.29
28

AHN, Inquisicin, legajo 1679, nm. 239. In Florencio Idoate, La brujera en Navarra y sus documentos
(Pamplona: Diputacin Foral de Navarra, 1978), 421.
29
AGN, Procesos de 1611, nm. 506, fols. 31-32. In Florencio Idoate, La brujera en Navarra y sus documentos
(Pamplona: Diputacin Foral de Navarra, 1978), 386-387.

11.1 (1991)

Of Witches and Bitches

19

A response to Salazar Fras' memorial of 1612 offers precious testimony not only to the credulity
and literal-mindedness of his antagonists, but also to the kind of stories that were flying around in
the wake of the 1610 proceedings, stories Cervantes could have picked up in the form of plaza and
tavern gossip. There are some truly spectacular reports of events that closely parallel those
recounted by Caizares, including tales of strange animal birthings. Some of these appear in a
document prepared by Valle and Becerra, abstracting testimony culled from the proceedings of 1610
and from their initial visita of 1609.30
Catalina de Porto, age 60, was impregnated no fewer than four times by the Devil. The first time
she gave birth to three toads. Y los primeros dolores le dieron estando en la iglesia un da de fiesta,
al tiempo que se cantava la Magnfica (144). After the birth, at which the Devil acted as midwife,
she los limpi y los empa a cada uno en su trapo limpio y los puso todos tres en una cesta, y los
calent al fuego y los regal como si fueran nios, y tenan las figuras como el padre (144).
Mara de Don Esteve, age 53, is even more interesting. Dice que la primera vez que el demonio
tuvo acceso con ella despus que fue bruja, la empre y estuvo muy mala del preado. . . . Y tom
un pao doblado muchas veces y se le revolvi al cuerpo, y se ech en la cama para recoger en el
dicho pao lo que pariese, y para que la sangre no pasase de la cama. Y vino a parir una cosa como
sapo, del tamao de un perrillo cuando nace, y tena el vello rojo y cola, y el rostro ni era de persona
ni de perro, y quera parecer a ambas cosas, y tena alguna semejanza a la cara del demonio del
aquelarre (146).
Mara de Don Esteve's reference to a dog is more than suggestive, especially in conjunction with
Catalina de Porto's recollection of the Magnificat, firmly tied to Caizares' discourse by Pamela
Waley in 1957.31
30

It dates most probably from 1613, and it remained in manuscript until Florencio Idoate published it in 1972.
Florencio Idoate, Un documento de la Inquisicin sobre brujera en Navarra (Pamplona: Aranzadi, 1972). Harry Sieber
calls attention to this publication, without incorporating any of its content. Novelas ejemplares (Madrid: Ctedra, 1980),
vol. II, p. 340, n. 111.
31
Pamela Waley, The Unity of the Casamiento engaoso and the Coloquio de los perros, BHS 34 (1957): 201-212.
Now see also E. C. Riley, La profeca de la bruja (El Coloquio de los perros), Actas del primer coloquio
internacional de la Asociacin de Cervantes (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1990), 83-94.

20

CARROLL B. JOHNSON

Cervantes

We might conclude tentatively that witches, signalled by Caizares' presence at the center of
Cervantes' text, are the extreme form of all the oppressed segments of the population who are
empowered, that is, given voice, made to speak, by Campuzano's speech and written discourse.
But before we get too carried away with the idea of witches as women of power who offer an
alternative to patriarchy, we should recall the facts as reported in the Inquisition documents. First of
all, witchcraft was by no means the exclusive province of women. The real witches were both
women and men, in more or less equal distribution. Carlo Ginzburg in fact begins his influential
study of the witches' sabbath with the off-handed observation that male and female witches met at
night, in solitary places.32 Second, the dominant note is the sexual submission, by both witches and
warlocks, to the often brutal phallic domination of the Devil in his guise of macho cabro. Initiation
for witches consisted in a brutal rite of both vaginal and anal penetration, a savage reaming
accompanied by great pain and bleeding. A few examples from the 1612 document, among many
that might be cited:
Graciana de Amezaga, de edad de 40 aos, dice que el demonio los conoca a todos
carnalmente, a los hombres por detrs y a las mujeres por ambas partes, y que cuando a ella la
conoci carnalmente el demonio por primera vez, era doncella y la deflor, sintiendo mucho dolor,

y le sali sangre, que llev en la camisa a su casa, y al da siguiente la tena y vio en ella.
Martn de Vizcar, de edad de 70 aos, dice que el demonio le estupr y sac gran cantidad de
sangre, que le corra por los muslos y le ensangrent mucha parte de la camisa. Y cuando su mujer
la vio llena de sangre, le dijo que de donde diablo traa la camisa de aquella manera, y l le
respondi que se haba dado un encuentro en la pierna.
Mara de Dinarte, de edad de 40 aos, dice que la primera vez que el demonio la conoci
somticamente, tuvo mucho dolor y la sali sangre, y otro da se ech de ver en la camisa.33
This is, shall we say, something less than sexual or any other kind of liberation. The point, which
even Cervantes' ponderous sense of irony could have grasped, is that in practice,
32
Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (1989). Translated by Raymond Rosenthal (New
York: Pantheon, 1991), 1.
33
Florencio Idoate, Un documento de la Inquisicin sobre brujera en Navarra (Pamplona: Aranzadi, 1972), 141.

11.1 (1991)

Of Witches and Bitches

21

witchcraft was not about the empowerment of women, but (pace Gauthier) about a different form of
patriarchal domination. Witchcraft as described in the documents is a kind of freudian-slip
revelation of the violent but invisible underside of the visible structures of straight patriarchal
society.
Now, what has all this to do with Cervantes' text? I think a great deal, because while Cervantes
had to have been familiar with documents such as those just quoted, or at least with verbal
summaries of the most scandalous parts, Caizares' discourse eliminates the Devil and all traces of
phallic domination. As she exists in the text, Caizares really is empowered. The crucial difference
between her and the historical witches whose testimony fills so many pages may be stated
linguistically. Caizares is a speaking subject, an I, who generates herself through her discourse.
The historical witches are robbed of discourse, they figure only as este testigo, and their
testimony is recast and recounted in the third person by that very patriarchal establishment before
which they stand accused, as objects.
This explains Caizares' discourse, but it doesn't explain the frankly negative portrait of her
offered by Berganza and enthusiastically endorsed by Cipin. And every critic has also called
attention to the dogs' depiction of her as monstrous. This may be Cervantes' last irony on the matter.
Yes, Berganza and Cipin accede to language and the Symbolic order, as everyone has noted. But
coming into language simply means that they immediately become the victims of ideology, blithely
unaware of the already gendered nature of the language (the only language) that is available to
them. Or perhaps Cervantes is the unwitting victim of ideology here, because it doesn't seem to
have occurred to him to create two talking female dogs (The B[W]itches' Colloquy?). On the
other hand, it does occur to him to create two competing discourses: the dogs' masculine-gendered
speech and Caizares' emphatically feminine version. This duplicity of discourse is what is
responsible for the duplicitous intellection of Cervantes' text and for the duplicity for resulting
critical discourse.
Forcione and Garcs, who see Caizares as a monstrous embodiment of evil, seem to be
speaking from within the discourse of patriarchy, manifesting the hysteria provoked by the terror of
that sex which isn't one. Mary Gossy, on the other hand, begins her consideration of Caizares
with reference to what she calls Forcione's paranoid descriptions of feminine sexuality
22

CARROLL B. JOHNSON

Cervantes

and observes how heterodox femininity is . . . identified with evil (70). Like Garcs, Gossy
identifies Caizares as a representation of female sexuality, and like her, she attributes the language
of the description to masculine fear of the menace and horror stimulated by the unfathomable
uncertainty. She further observes, inacurately, that Caizares is the only woman in the
Casamiento/coloquio who actually has a voice, who exercises the motherly function of generation
of discourse. Not entirely incidentally, Gossy also draws attention to the dogs' entry into language
and the Symbolic order (73), again foregrounding the situation they share with Caizares in
patriarchal society: marginalized and silenced.34
Cervantes creates a situation here analogous to that of Don Quijote I, 50, where the discourse of
the Canon, as spokesman for the Aristotelian poetics of verisimilitude resting on a clear-cut
distinction between history and poetry, is challenged and opposed by Don Quijote, who conflates
those presumably mutually exclusive categories of Aristotelian orthodoxy and generates an alternate
discourse based on a poetics of psychic, as opposed to circumstantial verisimilitude. I believe it was
Alban Forcione who first realized that the presence of Don Quijote's alternate discourse disqualifies
the Canon as a spokesman for Cervantes' own literary theories. In the same way we might conclude
that the presence of Caizares' alternate discourse disqualifies Berganza and Cipin as spokesdogs
for Cervantes' position on witches. Their hysterical aversion to Caizares' physical person and what
she represents in society can no longer be taken as normative. We are left, as usual, where
Cervantes so often leaves us, with nagging unresolved (and probably unresolvable) questions of
ambiguity and multiple perspectives, and unresolvable dialectic of competing voices.
It is possible that the immediate impulse for all these officially silenced members of society
given voice and speech by Cervantes, and especially the talking dogs, is a throwaway in Guzmn de
Alfarache, where Guzmn wants to denounce an abuse but doesn't bother to complete the process
because he's only an insignificant/infans pcaro. He concludes: Estos ladridos a mejores perros
tocan; rmpanse las gargantas, descubran los
34

Mary S. Gossy, Marriage, Motherhood, and Deviance in El casamiento engaoso / Coloquio de los perros, in
her The Untold Story. Women and Theory in Golden Age Texts (Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1989), 57-82.

11.1 (1991)

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23

ladrones (I, ii, 3). This is the significance of Berganza's last adventure, after he has taken refuge in
the hospital. He attempts to repeat to the Corregidor a plan for reducing the number of prostitutes, a
plan he has overheard from one of the marginalized, officially voiceless inmates of the hospital,
but all he can do is bark. Alc la voz, pensando que tena habla, y en lugar de pronunciar razones
concertadas ladr con tanta priesa y tan levantado tono que, enfadado el Corregidor, dio voces a sus
criados . . . , y un lacayo que acudi a la voz de su seor . . . (358). The power structure has a
voice. Indeed, in this little episode the possession of a voice is what defines the power structure as
such.
A huge accumulation of scholarship has been led astray by Peralta's refusal to take seriously the
content of the dogs' discourse, and has insisted instead on the tradition of talking dogs.35 This
critical sleight of hand almost re-enacts Campuzano's experience with Peralta, who evades the real
question (Is this a true and therefore troubling description of our society and its structural
weaknesses?) by substituting for it a trivial one (Did these dogs really talk?). In so doing he reduces
his friend's denunciation of society's ills to an entertaining fiction. Cervantes literalizes Alemn's
allegory, demonstrating what happens when the bark is turned into speech but the new speakers are

still without authority. The authority-less author's potentially revolutionary social message is
painlessly absorbed into the status quo by the simple expedient of identifying it as a fiction and
relocating it outside the realm of reality.
Antonio Rey Hazas points out that Guzmn de Alfarache engages in an imaginary dialogue with
the reader, and that Cervantes puts Guzmn's fantasy of the critical reader into the text along with
the picaresque narrator. De ah que la misma forma dialogal sea una probable respuesta pardica a
las invitaciones de Guzmn al t, al lector.36 I would go further. Some years ago I suggested that
many of Guzmn's interpellations of
35

Ameza recalls, among many others, Baltasar del Alczar, El dilogo entre dos perrillos (1585?), muy breve en
su extensin y pobrsimo en peripecias, and remarks that Rodrguez Marn had already considered it the germ for
Casamiento/Coloquio (Cervantes creador, II, 414).
36
Antonio Rey Hazas, Gnero y estructura de El coloquio de los perros, o cmo se hace una novela, in Jos Jess
Bustos Tovar, ed., Lenguaje, ideologa y organizacin textual en las Novelas Ejemplares (Madrid: Universidad
Complutense, 1983), 132.

24

CARROLL B. JOHNSON

Cervantes

an imaginary reader were in fact manifestations of his own insecurity. This paranoiac self-revelation
can only cause the reader to not take seriously the social abuses Guzmn is trying so hard to expose,
and instead to feel superior to him. Cervantes remedies this, as Rey Hazas says, by transforming the
imaginary reader-critic into a real one, thus freeing Berganza from the burden of paranoia. The
reader is similarly freed to take his (both Berganza's and his author Campuzano's) expos of
society's ills seriously. But there's the rub. The presence of the critic-authority turns the social
message into a fiction and thus neutralizes it. The author (Berganza, Campuzano) isn't the authority. So in my view the real function of Cervantes' parodic response to Guzmn's invitation is to
demonstrate that even with the burden of paranoia removed, the message still doesn't need to be
taken seriously.
Let me try to work back through the hierarchy of authors from Caizares to Berganza to
Campuzano to Campuzano's creator. Mary Gaylord concludes, following an elaborate conceit with
Lpez Pinciano and Vulcan the artfice cojo, that in Cervantes' literary cosmos, the authorial deity
is a crippled god. It is striking that Cervantes chooses to dramatize the author's relation to his text in
figures which do not suggest authority, control, power, but rather contingency, limitation, even
impotence.37
It is certainly true that Campuzano is cojo like Vulcan; he is so described in the opening
paragraph (haciendo pinitos y dando traspis 281). He is using his sword as a staff. I had always
interpreted this fact in light of his recent venereal disease, as a symbolic representation of his earlier
misuse of his phallus, now perhaps rendered unusable altogether. There is no question that the
sword is a phallic object, but its signification transcends its literal sexual function. In a well known
essay Sandra M. Gilbert called attention to what has become a clich of feminist criticism, the penpenis pair as the specifically masculine instruments of both biological and literary generation. The
phallic sword is then subsumed under the pen/penis. She concludes that the pen is not only
mightier than the sword, it is also like the sword in its power . . . to kill.38 To fecundate, to bestow
life
37

Mary Gaylord, Cervantes' Portrait of the Artist, Cervantes 3.2 (1983): 102.
Literary Paternity, in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).
38

11.1 (1991)

Of Witches and Bitches

25

on the one hand and to take it away on the other, is probably the ultimate fantasy of masculine,
potency and God-like authority. But Campuzano's sword/phallus doesn't have the power to do
anything; he's dragging it along the ground, as Peralta observes in astonishment when he contrasts it
specifically to his friend's absent lance. In Cervantes' text the series of analogies elaborated by
Gilbert moves backward, from the sword/phallus to the pen/phallus, from the profession of arms to
letters, from Campuzano as de-activated cocksman to Campuzano as non-combatant soldier to
Campuzano as frustrated author. Campuzano as artist is nothing if not handicapped, limping along
like Vulcan and deprived of the normal use of his tools.
With respect to the voice that calls Campuzano into existence on the first page and finishes him
and Peralta off on the last: Y con esto, se fueron. I have always interpreted that to mean
something like: dejaron de ser (porque su ser depende de m), that is, as an affirmation of the
narrator's authority and power. But what are we to make of the fact that simultaneous with its killing
off Campuzano and Peralta, the narrative voice itself is suddenly and forever silenced? And what of
the fact that the entire book ends exactly here? Who, if anyone, is finally in charge here? Where is
the author's authority?
Might it be said that Cervantes' practice had already undone in 1613 the series of interlocking
patriarchal connections posited by Edward Said in 1975? In his mini-meditation on the word
authority at the beginning of Beginnings Said maintains that the unity or integrity of the text is
maintained by a series of genealogical connections: author-text, beginning-middle-end, textmeaning, reader-interpretation, and so on. Underneath all these is the imagery of succession, of
paternity, of hierarchy.39 Cervantes' text challenges Said's assertion on two grounds. First, as we
have just seen, the author's authority simply evaporates, vanishes, like the author himself and all his
characters, at the end of the text. Secondly, as we have also seen, Caizares' discourse demonstrates
that genealogical connections and succession need not be synonymous with patriarchy. Rather, the
reverse is true. Pater semper incertus, mater certissima.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
39

Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 4-5.
Digitized with the help of a volunteer who wishes to
remain anonymous

Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu

Publications of the CSA
URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/articf91/johnson.htm

HCervantes