Dear Beelzebub, I just can't get my cauldron to stop rusting every time I wash it. Is cast iron for me. Signed, Alice. Welcome to Your Wrong About. I am your host, Sarah Marshall. And today we are learning...
Naturally, about medieval witch Alice Kittler with Molly Aitken, author of Bright Eye Burn, a novel about Alice. I wanted to do this episode because... I, as so many of us are, am fascinated by witch trials and by witches, witch hunts, and the fact that a witch hunt is not, as so many people have attempted to claim in America the last few years.
what it feels like to be accused of something by women, but in fact... a fascinating and it would appear not entirely over historical movement based on attempting to separate women from power and property by accusing us of being pure evil. This is one of the episodes when we go deeper into the history than the 90s. We will be in medieval Ireland. But the story, the characters, and the gender dynamics are, in my opinion, something that could just as easily happen.
today. And so this is an episode for you if you were a witchy person, if you are supportive of the witches in your life, and also if you just sometimes like to go, good for her. We also, of course, have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and on Apple Plus subscriptions. And our bonus this month is about my favorite cookbook, Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cookbook, an early 60s icon.
of regular old survival housewifery and what it is like in a very candid way to try and feed your family or yourself despite everything else going on in the world. It's one of my favorite books. It has, in my opinion, truly good recipes, and I got to talk about it this month with our dear friend of the show, Sarah Archer. So if that's your kind of thing, I hope you join us for it. And finally, we are...
Finishing up our January massive seance shows, me and the gang from American Hysteria. And we'll be doing our massive seance, our live podcast show slash history lesson slash Fleetwood. Wood Mack tribute concert in Los Angeles at the Regent Theater on Friday, January 24th. We hope you can be there. And more than anything, we are thinking about LA, a place that...
We love and hold dear. And home, of course, to our show's beloved producer, Carolyn Kendrick. If you look in this episode's description, we have links in there for you for fire relief and mutual aid resources. We hope you check them out. And that is our intro. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for continuing into this year with us, whatever it may bring. Here is your episode.
Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we talk about what a witch hunt really is and how it is not, as some people seem to think, men being hunted by witches. And with me today is Molly Aitken. Molly, hello. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for being here. It is a pleasure. Yeah, I'm so happy to be here with you in this stark time of year.
talking we are recording this the day after election day which i think is worth mentioning because you know yes yeah it's worth knowing why people sound the way they do I tend to suspect that you're going to tell me a story that is going to be relevant to some ongoing trends that we're thinking about today, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, there are characters in this story which are definitely...
Let's say repeated somewhat in history. So you have a book out. Tell me about that and kind of what topics you've maybe been working on previously in your career and who we're talking about today. Yeah, so I have a book out, Bright Eye Burn, which is about the first woman who was ever accused of witchcraft in Ireland.
Alice Kittler. It's a case that not many people really know about, specifically outside of Ireland. I mean, we do. We have the gossip about her in Ireland, I suppose. She would be like a... a tale that people tell kind of like a warning to women to not be like her you know as catholic school girls and that was because she was accused of killing her four husbands
Is it fair to say that she's a figure who kids are afraid of? Or is she more defanged than that? Do you know what? I don't think that she's well enough known. Interesting. And this is like... part of the problem with irish history generally we don't talk about the women much
she's one of the few women who we actually do talk about and it is a very like negative portrayal i think the children who do know about her are scared like me were you scared of her as a kid or did it just did it creep you out i was okay and when i was older i was like this is intriguing i had just got married as well when i started writing the book every time one of her husbands died she became much richer
So the landscape at that time in Ireland, it was like about 100 years after the Norman invasion. English people... French as well Welsh had all settled in Ireland but it wasn't like a kind of chill settlement like I'm sure you know but like the way empire works but you know there was a lot of warfare with the native gaelic it was a very kind of rocky period but she was born to a family of merchants they had money they were money lenders
to bankers of the day and she just kept marrying these men who were also money lenders and they had so much money so much money and there's something in that in that like usually men are the ones who are maybe getting more gain out of marriage and she kind of flipped it somehow and found her way with it well and i wonder would it make sense to start off with kind of like what is the story
in a nutshell like as you learned it as a kid as you feel like it was you know taught to girls of your age and then what is the story that you have found having now gone back to the source yeah just to like set the scene it was like Catholic Ireland, Irish school, quite traditional. You know, there was nuns knocking around. You get the vibe. And one of our teachers just sat down and told us about this.
terrifying figure from history a woman called Alice Kittler who was the first woman she said who was like a known witch a known witch in ireland the other ones had flown under the radar till then yeah literally yeah there was definitely some before but we didn't have any proof about it you know what i mean okay huh and she like she painted her as this old hag like that way that you think of which is like very stereotypical yeah which is an imagery that has been created much later but um anyway
right and she also was kind of saying like you know she made these potions she was poisoning people and she killed her four husbands and you can imagine all those girls kind of They're sort of like, oh my god, it's terrifying. It was also a very terrifying teacher. Which helped, helped a lot. And I think I kind of conflated the two.
right because you're getting like a visual demonstration exactly that you can merge with the story exactly those are the best storytellers okay so she's an ancient hag who killed four husbands through witchcraft what was the of other than witchcraft was it just evil or does it matter well i can tell you all of the accusations which were extremely detailed but
Actually, before I go there, I should probably set the scene a little bit more. Yeah. So where are we? And what's going on? So she married these four men. They were all wealthy. for different reasons before they died all of them would quit claim which means like sign over all their earthly goods all their money to alice and her son from her first marriage even though they all had children from previous marriages and then soon after they would die and this was something that
over time you can imagine the stepchildren didn't didn't like very much you know right yeah if you're cutting a lot of people out of a lot of money then yeah that's when they start to care yeah feels risky so actually when she married her second husband in 1302 her and her second husband were briefly tried for having killed her first husband but that
case was thrown out partly because they both had such influential and powerful friends within Ireland at that time and after that they just like went went about their business it doesn't seem like anything else was kind of said about it certainly nothing that we have in court records or in history she married again and again and then in 1317 a new bishop came to Kilkenny And he had been in France in Avignon with the Pope. And this was a time of flux within the church's understanding of...
Witchcraft. Understanding is a kind word to give to them. They're views on witchcraft. So before about 1315,
The views of the church about witchcraft was that it was mostly benign. It became a legal matter if... maleficium was involved and maleficium was like the intent to do harm to others but then this changed okay what happened was that they decided that all witchcraft was a crime all witchcraft was heresy can i ask like how long had the church been around and was their previous approach to it based on to any degree on a sense of like
we're coming into witchcraft's turf and we have to tread a little lightly for a few hundred years? There's nothing that I've seen. It was just that they would sometimes bump up against. legal cases where someone would bring a thing to a court and be like This woman is the reason that there was a storm and this ship sunk. And in the earliest cases, I think the earliest one is around 1090, the church was just like, their vibe was like, this is annoying.
why are you bringing this to it like we don't care about witchcraft right they're like we have other stuff to do whatever that is yeah
Like, we don't care. This is just like women doing things. Like, can you not? And so it just, it did seem like they didn't have like a huge opinion about it. So the Pope in Avignon, he seemed to be like getting... a little bit antsy about witchcraft his opinion was that they were out to get him okay to me this just seems like a guy who was like weirdly nervous about women but sure Oh, no. If you get someone into the highest office who's weirdly nervous about women, something.
Could occur. Yeah, is it feeling familiar? Yeah. The new bishop who came to Kilkenny had been with this pope, and he had seemingly really enjoyed this kind of new... turn against witchcraft now i should say 10 years before so 1307 the church had burned at the stake of the the knights templar in france and What is interesting about that is they were accused of things that were kind of related to witchcraft. They were accused of denying Christ and spitting on his cross.
obscene kissing now can you imagine what that is i mean i have guesses yeah is it boy boy yeah i mean we don't know we can only guess at it oh right yeah because we can't ask these people there are details about like where it was and it seems like it might have been around the penis area so that's that's a possibility but we don't know for sure I mean, it's a nice area. Yeah. It does feel like there is...
A well-known trick by this point of finding out someone is gay, not liking it, and throwing in accusations of witchcraft or devil worship just to kind of make your point stick. Yeah.
or to kind of, I don't know, I've just been thinking about that extra the past little bit, and how it does feel like that is... currently a very big part of politics in America, in the United States, of feeling so oppressed by someone else's gender or sexuality that in order to... convey the depth of your feelings to somebody who doesn't care about that you just have to accuse them of of any old horrible satanic crime you can think of yeah because
It's all you can do to put them in the correct dehumanization bucket, I guess. Yeah, it dehumanizes them. And also, you don't need any real factual evidence. Right. It's like throwing a slur at them. Because how do you prove witchcraft or Satan? Like, there's no proof, really. How do you prove a negative in this case? It's kind of like...
Yeah, it's a really great way to tarnish somebody's name in a way that can't be disproven, because you just can't prove the absence of Satan, you know? I will never be able to prove that to people about myself, and I have to live with that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so they were also accused of wearing a belt with a strange idol inside it made of a cat and a head with three faces. I love to think that this is a time traveler who just came back wearing Levi's with some weird logo.
Okay, what do you make of this? Is this case specifically kind of, is this a turning point for the church, do you think? Yeah. Are people being burned at the stake over this? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So it's using accusations and circumstantial evidence to prove that somebody needs to be... burned alive yeah doesn't seem good historians believe that the king of france at this time was trying to get money from them so there was like a financial element to it as well but anyway the bishop
whose name beautifully was La Drede. Yes. Okay, JK Rowling. It seems like one that you might want to change. I know. You don't want people to see you coming from that far away. But then also, you know, you might be like, well, this guy's name is LaDrede. He must be really... even handed with a name like that you know he'd really try and work against it yeah not in this case no surprisingly not so he he came to kill kenny and he had this in his mind like
We have an account of the witch trial case against Alice, and the most likely author of it is Le Dred. And there's a kind of energy in it that he's just really into. accusing women of things, but also that he's really into torture. Uh-huh. Well, that's fine. Just find a proper outlet for it and make it your work, you know? Just, like, get some safe equipment and... do it in your free time in your free time yeah so we get this vibe that he's like come with a mission and like he wants to find
heretics he wants to find a witch well when you're a steak everything looks like a witch yeah exactly yeah unsurprisingly like people don't like him for it but anyway i'm getting ahead of myself I'm excited to get to that part. Yeah. So he came with this mission, this holy mission, we should say.
I'm bearing in mind that which trials had barely happened before this. Not officially anyway that we have like records for. Right. There's like a couple of other cases but nothing on the scale of this one. Okay. And where are the other cases? Are they in Europe? Yes, they're all in Europe. Okay. So there was one in Denmark in 1090.
and this was where women were accused of sinking ships and this seems actually to crop up a couple of times in witchcraft history within scandinavia there's a lot of like witches sinking sinking boats i mean has it occurred to these people that there's a lot of weather where they live
So there were cases before, but... it wasn't the hot cool thing yet like that would take off much later right it's like you know we have these songs that are kind of you can hear the beginnings of rock and roll yeah but it's not buddy holly you know
So we have all these stepchildren which have been like disenfranchised. They're lacking the money that they had expected to get from their wealthy fathers. And in 1324, Alice Kittler's... last final husband husband number four is sick and he's like properly sick his nails are falling out he's kind of got a like a yellowish pallor and now based on these descriptions we think
that it was arsenic poisoning. So her husband appears to be dying from arsenic poisoning. And the stepkids, they go to the bishop and they say, we think our stepmom... is poisoning our dad and we believe that she's using witchcraft to do this and we believe that she did this with all her previous husbands
Do you think they felt they need to bring witchcraft into the mix in order to get someone to take it seriously? Yeah, I think so, because there was no way to really prove murder. There was no toxicology reports. Who knows for sure? Again, we're talking about a long time ago. But there was that time when she was accused of killing her first husband and the case was thrown out. So possibly they were thinking about that as well.
Right. I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, well, arsenic and husband poisoning generally because it's a... I find that field very interesting. No, wait. But to my understanding, and I think this is based on two books, which I've read in the past. One is Women Who Kill by a writer, I think, named Ann Jones.
is Lady Killers by Tori Telfer. I think both of them get into this concept of like, you know, there was this... long period where you couldn't really test if someone had died because they had been poisoned and especially a period you know much later than when we're talking about but when the first kind of commercial rat poisons were made available and when it was suddenly very easy to get poison that you could kill somebody with but they're
wasn't really the widespread forensic testing to determine that that had happened when it was really kind of it was kind of a free-for-all for a minute there but I just hope I never marry someone who dies mysteriously because this is making me look really bad. But I find husband poisoning very interesting because, and again, this is a point Tori Telfer makes.
I think we underrate how scary it is because it seems like a lot of the time when you would poison a spouse or, you know, a husband in these cases, and that was frequently, I think. It's something I find a lot more sympathetic because it is often, I think, something that you would do to escape.
potentially a bad situation or just because it was the only way to get any kind of economic freedom, that you would often have to poison someone continually over a long period. And that is a really fucked up thing to do and in many ways I think it can be more cold-blooded than just you know killing someone fast did arsenic work that way I mean what is your kind of speculation about
what was going on and sort of your understanding of this whole area. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I am also fascinated by husband poisoning. I mean, it's just so interesting.
So arsenic, in the case of Alice's husband, he took weeks to die. It's interesting because it is this, like you say, this repetitive thing where it's adding the poison to the food day after day after day and also tending them while they are sick yeah it's weird and pretending that you care that they are sick yes which is really really messed up it is the creepiest thing I would rather kill me somewhere else please thank you if anyone's listening to this and thinking about it
Yeah, it seems like one of the worst ways to die, in fact, because it's long drawn out, it's painful. It's psychologically manipulative, which you always like to avoid. Ideally, yeah.
Yeah, and it takes a certain type of person to have... the stamina yeah to poison someone like this like it does yeah because it's a yeah and it is like and then if you change your mind then it's too late i would assume yeah there had to have been some women throughout history who like poisoning their husbands and then we're like oh never mind and then it was just he just never knew why he yeah and it was just that you know just that weird ailment that one time
With Alice Kittler specifically, we don't know 100% if she killed all her husbands. Now, it does seem quite likely that she was poisoning her last husband. Right. There's no way to know for sure. But my interpretation is that she probably did. Yeah. Well, this is kind of my favorite type of story where it's like, look, did she do something terrible?
Probably. But did she do the hundred other things we accused her of? No. And, you know, we still deserve to know what happened. Like, personally, I feel like the way that she is remembered in Ireland is still... Has that flavor of misogyny, which we just love. We just love. But yes, I can tell you what the charges were that were laid against her, if you like. Yeah, absolutely. So...
Before I go into them, I should say that they're like wildly fantastical. There hadn't really been anything this like imaginative that we had. seen before but there was also someone who clearly had a theological understanding who was authoring let's say these accusations which is why historians really believe that ledred was the author of them
So there were seven charges. I should say they were not only brought against Alice. They were also brought against her accomplices, which was 10 other people, including a couple of men. But she was like the prime. She was the prime one. They were just marginally involved. So number one, denying the power of Christ and the church.
So they're bad Christians. They don't attend mass. Terrible. It's just insecure behavior on the part of the church to be so bothered by that. Yeah. I'm sure like plenty of people were doing the same thing. Number two. sacrificing living animals to demons and scattering their body parts around crossroads. And that is quite interesting.
Because it's like Crossroads is like that liminal space. I mean, that's interesting to me because it's like a crime or a charge where intent is like 100% of the law because you could also kill animals and distribute them as a... butcher yeah and i'm sure people were yeah so it's about thought crime i guess is what that shows three is asking demons for advice on witchcraft
I'm guessing maybe Alice didn't know enough, so she needs some help. Dear Beelzebub, I just can't get my cauldron to stop resting every time I wash it. Is cast iron for me. Signed, Alice. I meant number four, having carnal relations with a demon. Okay. called robin artisan or robin son of art so we're getting very specific here robin son of art yeah he's got a name
And it was alleged that he often took the form of animals while they were, you know, having their carnal relations. A cat or a dog specifically. Cats have barbed penises. That can't be fun. i don't know why that's my response that's horrendous yeah or he would take the form of an ethiopian oh my god you know there's racism within that of course right yeah they're like it's terrible he turns into an animal or yeah someone from ethiopia no yeah yeah
Exactly. La dread. La dread. The worst. We la dread you. And then they say she's enthralled to the power of this demon. and that would have been like very frightening to people within this society like to us like you know demons were like whatever but people within medieval society would have heard about demons and these types of things happening in other places yeah you know the way gossip spread back then and so and so it would feel like a real threat this kind of like
demon element yeah so again i think ledred knows what he's doing here in adding this to the accusations and also what is interesting about this demon here in this context is that it was the first time someone was charged with actually having sex with a demon before that no one had been charged with having sex with a demon as far as we know you know
It's not like I would have said that I thought no one had been charged with that before this conversation, but I never thought about it. And now I'm, I don't know, it's just really nice to know when the first one happened. Yeah, I mean, there was plenty more after.
wow yeah and the idea of like sex with demons or just the sort of the sexual aspect of the witch in our growing mythology is um is saying too many things to name i guess but yeah it's very interesting yeah it is it is i think particularly with alice because when she was accused she would have been in her early 60s i imagine At that time, the thought of like an older woman having sex would have been quite horrifying to people. As it is today to so many men. Yeah, true.
And yet I can't imagine anyone who could be better at it, you know, because you'd certainly have had time to learn exactly what to do. Exactly. It's also really interesting to me that so consistently in our kind of modern depictions of these stories and just like even the crucible, you know, which is, I think, a really in a way like a really great depiction of the Salem witch trial.
But it is an ahistorical one. And one of the things that it does, which is kind of a hacky move, is to age up Abigail Williams and the accusing girls from kind of tween to sexually mature.
young hotties you know and then in other kind of popular depictions of Salem specifically I'm thinking you know because the people who were accused were generally older women like post-menopausal senior citizens you don't see that in a lot of fictional depictions and we usually now are you know If we have an old witch, it feels like we often want to have it as somebody who needs the blood of the young to achieve her beautiful young form.
But then we get to look at her for the whole movie and see her be all young and hot and know that she's motivated by her desire to be young and hot at any cost. And why would she want that? Yeah. Even if it's the only way we can stand to look at her. Why do women want to be young and hot? They're so stupid. That's the subtext. to me yeah 100 and it's been going on for 700 years at least yeah the fact of her age I guess is just interesting to me because it feels like
she'd accumulated, I'm sure, a good amount of power with all that money. Yeah. Boy, well, how much do we know about this trial? What's the sort of state of the records? Well, we have this one very detailed account. that we think is written by Ladrette of the accusations and then the trial. And then there are some kind of little pieces of notes about the trial as well. But mostly it's just from this one account written by him.
which I find quite frustrating in general when it comes to women's history because so much of it is told through the lens of men and often men who hated women. Right. And are there sources that you've looked at where you're sort of you're not able to take a frontal approach and you have to sort of work your way in sort of through the back door in a sense? Like I'm thinking of just you saying that makes me think of.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, which is, you know, a book kind of reconstructing the life of this midwife in colonial Maine named Martha Ballard, and that it was sort of this text that had been overlooked by male historians until...
Ulrich worked on it because they had sort of seen it as like, well, it's just this list of like where she's going every day and what she does and who owes her money and sort of the weather and labor and delivery. There's not really anything there and that it took.
in this case, a female historian, to see the something that was there. And I wonder if there's been anything, especially in the process of writing this book, that has involved having to be a little bit crafty in terms of how you use your sources. Yeah, I think in general women's history is so fragmented because often women didn't write. Or if they did, they didn't have time. especially within like medieval Europe, the people who were writing were the clergy.
Which, obviously, there's always men. And they were the ones who could kind of, like, put their feet up more and just write stuff. Like, Ledred loved to write. Like, he was kind of poetic. Like, he used to write songs. He liked himself.
in that way like i think he saw himself as an artist in some sense and and i think this was like his magnus like his his great show wow yeah and you really feel that within these accusations because it's very descriptive you get like this kind of hubble-bubble toil and trouble There had been nothing like this before, so you feel like he had a lot of imagination to create it. But this was really all that I had.
about the trial right it was nothing from women wow nothing from alice but it was very difficult it was very difficult to imagine what alice's life would have been like there were some things like It was an extremely violent time. You know, there was...
constantly these wars between the native Gaelic and the settlers, the Anglo-Norman settlers. So that kind of made me feel like, you know, people are used to death a lot more. And so does that make your attitude... attitude to killing your husband different I don't know like I don't have the answer because I think some people would just say like no like we're always human
and i've spoken to like you know other history nerds who have been like no like it feels the same but i do wonder that if you're in a very violent climate and people are dying from diseases all the time and children die really young often. Do you have a different attitude to death? And I think probably you do. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that one of the weird things about today, and especially in kind of the non rural United States, which is where most people live at this point is
That like death is all around, but we're very shielded from having to see it or encounter it. You know, most people don't die at home. Most people don't. aren't in the room with somebody when they die. Most funerals are closed casket or cremation, which is not that we have to necessarily bring kids to look at a dead person. I'm not saying that that's...
Great. There does seem to be a lot of sad coming of age literature about it. But I feel like it was just much more typical historically. Not that our ancestors were particularly happy. No. Like, I don't think that. we need to be eating like them or doing very many things like them. Because in terms of kind of what we're evolved for, I think that it was normal for people to kind of grow up seeing death because you would have to hunt for subsistence and then as things got started you would
grow up in some kind of an agrarian setting where there would be animal slaughter and there would be, you know, just in raising livestock, like there's a lot of uncontrollable stuff and like things go wrong, you know, animals die in ways that.
you can't predict and isn't your fault and I think that there was just sort of like in a normal healthy way and sort of you know not living in times of colonization and conflict even, but just sort of in daily life in the 1300s that there, yeah, would just be probably, I would imagine, a greater sense of sort of...
The cycle of life and death. And is that effective mitigation at a trial where you're accused of killing your husband? No, but like, I do think that we, the idea that we have today that kind of. It is this wild injustice for anyone to die ever is hard to imagine people having in the Middle Ages. They absolutely didn't.
feel that way about it yeah because if they did i don't think they could go on as well right well and then you know to get into the fact of how many people had babies and children who died and how that was effectively the norm
And I don't think that people felt things less because of how hard things were. But I think that that amount of grief... felt as something that is kind of statistically average yeah that like that does change people and I don't know what that's like but it has to be different I think from what things are like now
Yeah. Speaking in political context, it is like there's so much death and trauma, I think, that goes with pregnancy and abortion and desired pregnancy and miscarriage and birth, you know, that whole area of life where there is so much. grief that I think people don't know how to talk about and that there is very little space for conversation for.
It's important to me to encourage people to whatever extent possible. The fact that grief is all around us means that it's something that we get to share with each other and become more connected to each other by finding ways to talk about. And I think... Having a seat at the table for grief and pouring out a little cup of wine for it, but nothing too expensive. It's going to be good for all of us. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think actually, when you were talking about...
bringing it to the present and to now, you know, the cycle of pregnancy or not. Women, I think perhaps have always been more connected to death in some way. I mean I'm not a man so I don't know but even like if you're going through your monthly cycle and you're not pregnant and you're not planning to you're kind of aware of this like I could have had a child and I didn't.
Yeah, it's something that is always present for us, even now. And that's good, that's healthy in a way. But I think in the past specifically, and even now, men were afraid of that that women had this yeah i i do believe that and i do think that you know historically i tend to speculate that that is where some of the witchcraft accusations came from and still come from right yeah
this fear also of women working as midwives and women having this sort of power that the growing sort of male dominated medical field was trying to take back. Or to take, you know, they'd never had it to begin with, but to take for the first time. And yeah, I think sometimes witchcraft as an accusation is a way of naming the feeling of like, you know more than us and we don't know why and it scares us.
yeah yeah yeah and actually like within medieval europe there was like medical men who were trying to explain the body and women and i have something here which It says, women menstruated because they lacked the bodily heat. to, quote, dry up the bad humors in them. Humors being blood, phlegm, and bile. Some men are just full of dried blood. Where do they keep that? Use your head. They were also a bit confused about it.
Because menstruation was also seen as a good thing because it would nourish an embryo during pregnancy and menstruation produced breast milk. Who knew? All right. Yeah. I love that they're just kind of like, uh... It's, uh, this is the thing I thought of today and it's, and it's how the uterus works. I thought of it and I'm pretty sure that's it. We haven't come up with dissection yet. So yeah.
yeah and that again i'm just thinking now like it goes back to things that women did for themselves but also witches in the medieval period were often women and men have to say that they were sometimes men who would give people abortions and that is interesting because for the most part before it became like illegal to practice witchcraft they were just as you had said earlier like they were providing healing right and you know they were probably a lot smarter than these medical men
who I'm putting like air quotes here who had their opinions about how to heal people but like most of these witches had like herbal knowledge And we're like giving people quite simple cures for things, but they could also give an abortion or give you poison to poison your husband. You know, it's just good to have a responsible licensed poison dealer in the neighborhood. Better to have it and not need it than vice versa or whatever. Exactly.
Okay, so it's the trial of the sanctuary. Yes. The 14th sanctuary. Yes. 1324. Reading this guy's record of his own prosecution slash persecution, like... Does he feel that he did a really good job? I mean, you get the sense from reading it that he's really arguing his case.
because he must have known that he was kind of pushing the bounds of what was legally possible at that time. You also had this kind of... push for power between the church and like the rulers of Ireland at this time and both of them didn't like each other because both were powerful and they weren't particularly connected And this becomes like much more relevant later in the case because after Alice is accused, then big Irish men, big powerful Irish men kind of stand up.
defend her some of them the relatives of her dead husbands so the Chancellor of Ireland roger outlaw was probably her brother-in-law from her first marriage the sentinel of Kilkenny Arnold Lepoer was a relative probably a cousin of her last husband and he actually really went out to bat for her to his own detriment really initially he kind of
asked Le Dred to kind of drop the case, and Le Dred was like, no. This is my special case, and I really like it, and I put a lot of work into it. And then Arnold Lepore imprisoned Le Dred. In Kilkenny Castle, it was like, you can't leave until Alice's trial is dropped. And Le Dred was actually quite clever about this. He asked for the host to be brought into him. And then he could say that Arnold Blapower was holding Christ as well as the bishop. And that was illegal.
Oh my God. And so Arnold Lepoa was then forced to release him, but actually Le Dred refused to leave until his vestments, his fancy shiny clothes, you know. were brought to him and a crowd had kind of come and he basically had a parade out. Optics. And so he was really like... I hate to admit it, but he thought about what he was doing in that case. Yeah. Because the people of Kilkenny kind of turned to him. He had like...
suspended the church within Kilkenny as well while he was in prison. No one could go to church. And that's quite terrifying at that time if you can't go to church. Right. you've cut the phone line to god until you can have your way wow yeah yeah so i think alice got caught up between these two powers and it became this struggle that
she would not have anticipated, most likely. And honestly, no one could have anticipated this case. I'm sure her stepchildren, when they brought the case to the bishop, would have had no idea where it would lead. They had no idea it was exactly what he was looking for. It would seem. This is such a silly cul-de-sac that I just have to ask because I'm so curious because like in my experience.
Taking communion in Episcopalian churches in the United States anyway, it's like the host is always because this little like round wafer that they make in like a factory in Rhode Island. What was it in the 13th century? Did you just have a piece of?
nice rustic bread yeah yeah basically it's what I've always wanted so I think it was like actually better quality yeah what you were getting in your childhood yeah so okay so like I don't like this guy but he very clever unfortunately he's clever he's what is the thing my dad used to say cunning as a shithouse rat yeah and this case became a real blueprint for the later trials that happened in europe and then they then led to the trials in salem so he was really setting out a blueprint
for how to do this wow i actually didn't tell you all of the accusations oh my god they get more mad they get more okay so number five holding nocturnal meetings in the church without permission. Like today, it would be like a group of women with wine, like chatting shit about their husbands. In this case, they were excommunicating their husbands in the church after hours. And this is like this idea of like women.
converting the power of the church and the merits of the relationship. Like, really terrifying. Yeah. Fascinating. Six, using the skull of a robber. to mix up potions from multiple ingredients, including the clothes of unbaptized baby boys, worms, animals that they sacrificed. The hair from the arseholes of children. Fingernail clippings from dead people. And all of this was said to kind of corrupt their husbands, Alice's specifically.
first of all that can't have been an existing statute and second it's like if there's one thing i know about a large group of women it's that We're going to cut some corners if we all have to bring ingredients for a big soup. You're going to get the easiest thing available. And the fingernails of dead people is not that easy. No. Like Ina Garten would say, like, live fingernails are fine, probably. Yeah.
Yeah, it does feel like a lot of effort. Yeah, Lydred like sits down and rubs his hands together and just starts listing the evilest objects he can think of. And then he's like, that's pretty good. Yeah, it all has the feel of someone who's just like plucking things from the air and being like, oh, genius. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm so creative. And also, it's just like, isn't the husband killing enough? Well, I guess they don't have enough evidence, so they have to accuse her of a bunch of really wild stuff that they also don't have evidence for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no evidence. There's no evidence here. and then finally number seven which is probably the truest of the accusations is that she killed
her husband's to make money for herself and her son. Yeah, the one recognizable motive, really. Yeah. It was said in the trial notes that... Her house had been found with a box of potions, which had then been sent as evidence to the bishop that she was killing them. When this box was sent to him, her husband was dying in bed from... what we now think is arsenic poisoning. So that was like the one where you're like, yeah, this is what possibly she actually did, but the rest was wild invention.
Why would she do any of those things? She was an incredibly rich person. She didn't need to be bewitching her husbands. They were dying anyway. I mean, and like, if you want to bewitch your husband, you just get a new bra, you know, you don't have to go to all that trouble. An element of the case that I loved was that...
Alice was said to have had a pipe, an ointment beside her bed. And this has been interpreted as a dildo and lube. Oh, no. how dare a 60 year old woman be enjoying herself also a pipe it's like my first thought is like smoking some weed I don't know yeah well I think they like they didn't really have the words for it at that time right yeah gosh it is just yeah it's like the most we can say is that she
perhaps killed a quarter of her husbands. It's really not bad. But yeah, there does seem to be this like general horror about... an older woman's sexuality like it's very sexually focused yeah and in some ways i feel a bit like wasn't the drag like secretly into her because this was like the first time A woman had been accused of having current relations with a demon. A lot of it is to do with kind of like, you know, sexual wiles and like seducing men.
It's interesting that that is his focus in this case. Yeah, what do you make of that? I know everything we can do is speculate, but what is your speculation? I mean, at that time... The view of sex was that it was for procreation. And there was a lot of shame tied up in it. So perhaps it was that he...
was just like, this is the most shameful, horrendous thing that I can kind of accuse her of. Yeah. But from my reading, and this is just my reading of his trial account, it seemed like he was getting... some kind of pleasure out of the description because it is just so it's almost poetic he was really getting into it he was really getting creative in some ways it feels like a fantasy yeah you do
i don't know get the feeling that like that men especially in these kinds of repressive religious power structures They cannot express a healthy sexuality because they've bought into a profession or a culture that doesn't allow them to do it or just kind of an expression of religion. And so... It makes total sense to me that we have this man who can't stop thinking about women having sex with demons and then has to punish us for it. Yeah. Classic case.
Yeah, so he had reached the heights that he could possibly reach, and yet he couldn't actually experience sex or pleasure. with another person yeah and so i think there's like some repressed anger there because he was like relentless in this case and this is something that people at that time who were commenting about it were like why won't this guy just let it go and to the point where it's like this is not good for him well he should just let it go so what does a trial involve at this point
How do you convict someone of the demon sex and everything else? It's probably going to go the way that you expect. But what happened was Alice kind of got the hint that things weren't going well and she left. She took her servant Petronella's young daughter and they went to Dublin because she was like, oh, things are going good here. And all the other people who had been accused were imprisoned, including her son.
And La Drede tortured her servant, who was a woman called Petronella of Meeve. And you get the sense when reading about this torture that... He fed her the accusations and she kind of gave them back to him. You know the way torture works. Yeah. Right. Yeah. One of the most efficient things about torture is that you can get someone to say basically whatever you tell them to. Exactly. Exactly. So she confessed and that was all he needed.
and she was the first woman in Ireland who was ever burned at the stake. She was just unfortunately connected to Alice in this way. She was her servant, and I guess she didn't have the wealth. to leave in the way that Alice did. But I do find it interesting that Alice took Petronella's daughter with her. It suggests that there was some kind of connection there.
and we can only speculate what that was but right yeah like the actual the very visible horror there is in this case leaving your servant co-defendants behind to deal with it and then using someone and then torturing someone and seeing their life as disposable in that way in order to prove the story that you've invented about a witch that you want to take down. Yeah. Who is too rich?
And has too many powerful male friends for you ever to really take her down. Right. Right. So you take your anger out on this poor woman. So... Petronella was burned in November the 3rd. Jesus. So just over 700 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we're talking on November 6th. Did you do anything a couple days ago?
i know there was a big celebration is probably the wrong word but in kilkenny they've been honoring alice actually for the last week which i think is really lovely there's been a theater play and just lots of talks and things and unfortunately i couldn't get over there for it but it has been honored and i think her history the opinion about her in Kilkenny has shifted a little bit. But everyone has always felt bad for Petronella, I have to say. Even when it happens.
People were horrified. The commentary at the time was horrendous. They just couldn't have imagined that something like this would have happened. Was this a public execution that people left records of? Yeah. Yeah. A contemporary of La Drede, Friar John Quinn wrote, in Ireland before her, suffered the legal penalty of death for heresy. And later, Arnold Bepower said in Alice's defense in Dublin, that we are not a country of heretics. We are a country of saints and scholars. Basically saying like,
We cannot allow this man to like sully our good Irish name, in a sense, by like letting this case go ahead. Yeah. Well, and you don't want to be a country that burns women. I would think. And actually because this... kind of horrified people so much we didn't really have many other cases like it there are a few but it's literally a handful and in comparison to
the rest of Europe, England, Scotland, it is really very, very little. And I think part of that is because of how horrifying people found what happened to Petronella was. My understanding of the sort of American legal system and our sense of morals is that we have maybe just from having the sense of being in a giant country and having more capacity to have more people be not our problem.
I think we visualize it or are encouraged to visualize it as a certain number of the people sharing this country with us. belong in prison or burned at the stake and we just have to wake up every day and find them and assume that they're there as opposed to like I don't know, seeing that as actually kind of a very poor review of us as a whole if so many of us are disposable in that way. Part of the reason why they made that choice as well.
of course it was because it was so horrifying and terrible what happened to Petronella but also it was because people didn't like seems like he might have been a bit of like a difficult customer and so on you know later on he would go on to like accuse
the bishop in dublin of trying to murder him and then he was caught he was called then to court in dublin and he fled the country he fled to england and was you know um discommunicated for a number of years and he eventually did come back to Kilkenny but then the people of Kilkenny tried to get him out again by claiming that he was senile. And he was old at this time, but it also seemed like they just didn't want him around. Yeah. I love these stories in history of just like...
Men who show up in the historical record because they did manage to get something done, but generally were acknowledged by everyone to be too annoying to be allowed to hang around. I love that. And yeah, this is a classic case of that. Like he was just, it was an irritating, but a dangerous guy as well. And I think we were aware of both. Yeah. So after.
Alice was accused and she then like fled to Dublin and then eventually she realized that things were not going well and she left and we just kind of like disappeared from history there's some like folklore in england that maybe suggests she was there but it also seems like it was invented much later so we don't know for sure
But her son, William Outlaw, was put in jail by the dread. And to get out, he had to admit his guilt. Wow. And you get this sense that the dread was kind of covering his back with that. He was definitely pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable for the church to do at the time. So he told William to get out. of jail you have to do penance which was hear mass three times a day for a year go on a pilgrimage feed the poor
And time goes by, but Le Dred then calls William back and is like, you know, it doesn't seem like you're doing this enough. Like, it doesn't seem like you're sad enough about this. I want to see more pain. And so he told William that he needed to pay to re-roof the cathedral, which William then did.
And this doesn't sound suspicious at all, does it? Like, you're going to come back, I'm going to take more money from you. And there was actually some other money change times as well. So you get the sense that the dread is being paid off. Yeah, but then ironically, after redoing the roof of the cathedral, it fell down, it collapsed in 1332. presumably from like the weight of this new lead roof and destroyed the cathedral oh god and i just feel like there's some kind of poetic justice yeah
Because the cathedral was where Leger did his Sunday mass. It was like his place of work. It's literally structurally unsound. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this thing of seeing these trials unfold and sort of deciding what you think happened and then getting women to confirm the crimes that you've invented for them to have committed. That also feels like the struggle in culture for...
To be able to grow up as a girl sort of into womanhood and to be given the tools to understand that you... have the capacity to exist outside of a male psycho drama, you know, that like men are always going to want to make you a character in the story they're telling to themselves about themselves, but that that isn't really you.
And that the fact that they think that is their business, and sometimes they make it your business because they have too much power, but that they shouldn't be able to. What they think is just their own problem. Yeah. yeah i love that actually because i think with alice she has been for so long this character in the dread story of her and that was another reason why i wrote it
I wanted her to be the character of her story. Molly, thank you so much for this conversation and for spending this day with me talking about... everything just yeah tell us again what is your book where can people find it what else can people find of yours or any of that any any recommendations you have to you know just it doesn't have to be
I feel like self-promotion is hard for authors. So if you want to throw in like, you know, a favorite dessert or something, I would welcome that as well. Oh yeah. Okay. So my book. Bright Eye Burn is in all good bookshops, which is every bookshop. That's true. I also have another book that came out years ago called The Island Child. You can check that out too. One book that I used for research which was amazing was The Fires of Lust, Sex in the Middle Ages.
by katherine harvey i recommend everyone reads it it's brilliant amazing favorite dessert i like a plain cake is that something that you do like an apple cake or just like like it a basic cake no i feel like that's a foreign concept to me but i feel like yeah i actually there's like this youtuber who's like an irish woman who runs a bakery who has like this series called like things people have said to me and one is someone being like
Can you get me something traditional, but I don't like apples and I don't like any of the things that you have that are traditional. that was our episode. Thank you so much to Molly Aitken for being our guest. And of course, if you liked this episode, be sure to check out her work, including her novel, Bright Eye Burn. Thank you to Taj Easton for editing help. And thank you as always to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. We'll see you in two weeks.