Magia e Inquisición en el siglo XVIII: prácticas y espacios.

In the eighteenth century, magic and witchcraft were used as a means of resolving people's everyday conflicts, anxieties and uncertainties. Practitioners of magic and their clients made use of both public and private spaces, ‘appropriating’ them for purposes very different from those which they were really meant to serve. The performance of magic rituals in public and private spaces meant that both were used as places in which to source ingredients for the rituals themselves. Such spaces were also where potential customers, seeking to avail themselves of sorcery, were directly approached and enticed by its practitioners. The magic rituals performed there were supervised by witches who engaged in magic secretly while professing to reject it in public. Generally, they liked to do their work in places that were symbolically in keeping with the magic they practised, and with the relationships they wished to establish with their clients. In other words, they exploited their chosen milieu for their own particular ends. The people, actively or passively superstitious, who were opposed to a world in which they were expected to obey the accepted norms of moral conduct and in which they found themselves judged harshly by others more submissive to society's rules of behaviour, discovered in witchcraft adaptable ways in which to give expression to their true inclinations while avoiding the risks of openly defying the prevailing views of the society to which they belonged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]