Authoritative Sources: Hagiography, Local History, and the Antisemitic Child Murder Libel in Early Modern Spain

This article focuses on the role that early modern printed works played in the preservation and dissemination of two child murder narratives in Spain that have endured to the present day: those of Dominguito de Val and the Holy Child of La Guardia. It seeks to address the following questions: how did the narratives of Dominguito de Val and the Holy Child of La Guardia survive through the early modern period (broadly 1500 to 1800); were such tales transmitted primarily via antisemitic polemics or rather via authoritative sources whose purpose was not primarily antisemitic? To begin, this article examines the presence of these narratives in explicitly antisemitic polemics produced in the early modern Iberian Peninsula. Starting with an analysis of the transmission of the narrative of the Holy Child of La Guardia and then of Dominguito de Val, this article proceeds to analyze the role played by other forms of printed media, particularly hagiographies and local municipal histories, in their circulation and how some printed texts became authoritative sources of knowledge.