The Renaissance Times

The Beguines were a movement of independent women who lived like nuns, owned property, preached in the vernacular, and answered to no man or church…. which, predictably, the church absolutely could not stand. We work through three of the great Beguine mystics, including Marguerite Porete, who spent 18 months on trial giving the Inquisition the silent finger before being burned alive in Paris in 1310. Her book survived, was read seriously by theologians for centuries, and wasn’t definitively credited to her until 1946 because obviously a woman couldn’t have written anything that sophisticated.

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The Jews have been expelled, the lepers have been burned, and somebody clearly had a plan…. we just don’t know who. We dig into the mechanics of medieval conspiracy theories, how the same story spread across France at a speed that makes you go “hmm,” and why the whole thing is basically a template that’s still being photocopied 700 years later. Also: the Pied Piper of Hamelin was apparently a real event, and the rats didn’t show up until 275 years after the fact.

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The King of France issues a royal edict blaming the lepers for poisoning the wells…. conveniently leaving out the Jews, who had just paid him 150,000 livres – roughly a third of the entire royal annual revenue. Pure coincidence. We also get a forged letter from the future, a secret room full of incriminating ram-skin, and a dragon that God apparently sent to signal it was time to murder somebody.

The post A Goodly Sum – The Renaissance #240 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We’re still talking about the Great Leper Scare of 1321 and now we’re deep into the trials. We’ve got lepers across France being rounded up, tortured into confessions, and burned at the stake, because Jesus loves nothing more than the smell of burning human flesh. Under torture, we’ve got Jews implicating the the Muslim King of Granada, the Sultan of Babylon, and a tall dark man with a scimitar who was apparently just standing around at the conspiracy meeting ready to cut heads off. We also drill down into immurement. That’s where you brick someone up inside a wall. Medieval Christian love and compassion at its best.

The post The Tall Dark Man with a Scimitar – The Renaissance #239 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We’re still talking about the Great Leper Scare of 1321 – where lepers, Jews, Muslims, and the devil himself are allegedly conspiring to poison the wells and topple Christendom. It’s the juicy tale of how a rumour spiralled into a pyramid scheme of scapegoating that ended with 160 Jews burned alive in a ditch. Today we talk about how it was connected to the Great Famine of the early 14th century and a bunch of Christian teen beggars who decided to force Jews to convert.

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