The Renaissance Times

We’ve been building up to witches for a while now, and this episode we take a detour back to the second century CE…. because of course we do. Before Christians started accusing Jews of ritual murder, cannibalism, and orgies, Romans were accusing Christians of exactly the same thing. The stories just get recycled. Then we get into women flying at night with the goddess Diana, Herodias engineering the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and how 1,500 years later she somehow ends up co-leading the witches. Next episode: werewolves.

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We finally get to the witches. Only took us a couple of hundred episodes. The trail leads through the Black Death, tortured confessions about poisoned powders and boiled infants, a German theologian named Nider who wrote the first book on witchcraft in 1435, and a judge who apparently knew an extraordinary amount of detail about secret devil-worshipping covens…. under torture, of course, which is famously reliable. By 1438 the template is basically set: broomsticks, covens, babies in pots, and 700 followers on the verge of becoming lords of the country. Between 1400 and 1775 roughly 100,000 people would be prosecuted. About 80% of them women.

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Twelve Genoese galleys dock at Messina in 1347 carrying rats, fleas, and Yersinia pestis…. and within weeks Europe is looking for someone to blame. Spoiler: it’s the Jews. Also the beggars. Also, possibly, the planets. Pope Clement VI tries to point out that Jews are dying of the plague too, which you’d think would settle the matter.

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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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