(Super creepy painting look at those weird creatures. James and Hermogenes. Musee Valenciennes)
Also everything was out of proportion. The poor servant, Alice Kyteler, was executed for sorcery because of a family dispute on land distribution (KP 121). People were just dropping demons and sorcery around to get their way. So selfish, what a terrible lot of people. Remember kids, if your getting bullied just tell a higher authority that they are practicing witchcraft and you can watch your bullies get roasted on a stick. Wow, what a win win.
I was also horrified at the thought of women eating their own children. It was said that they kill them and sometimes ( if not their own child) place them back into their beds like it was an accident. Or that they boil them and grind them and like put the goo on their skin or drink it ( KP 157). It makes my stomach churn, I hope this really didn't happen and that it was just an exaggeration gone wrong. And of course if I was in the wife's position and (probably actually innocent) was being burned at the stake I would also be cursing all of those guys too. I understand the giant age gap and the hysteria with devil worshiping, yeah it's scary, but also just because a woman is cursing you while she is being tortured and burned at the stake does not mean you made the right decision, sorry bro. I do not worship the devil and I would still curse someone to hell if I was being burned alive, just saying.
Ri
Oh that Gregory. But he's got nothing on some of these other guys...I know this is kind of getting ahead of the readings, but I'm working on reading chapter 8 of Kors/Peters for the leadership discussion and this quote from Jean Bodin is relevant: "The difficulty, however, very often lies solely with the proof, and judges find themselves hampered only by that. If then there are no valid witnesses, or confessions by the accused, or factual evidence, which are the three proofs we have described on which a death sentence can be based..." (K/P p.294) He then goes on to talk about the circumstances in which it's perfectly fine to sentence someone to death based only on presumptions and literally no actual evidence. So, not only is he throwing the death sentence around (and calling anyone who disagrees a witch as well), he's revealing that a lot of (if not all, let's be honest) of the evidence of horrible acts of witchcraft comes from either people blaming each other, or people confessing to any crazy thing under brutal torture. Nooot the most reliable sources. And many people were burned alive from these!
ReplyDeleteI agree with your feelings in the last paragraph - I know they were trying to scare people into rooting out suspicious people, but did they have to get THAT graphic with the children and the murders? Oh, and if I were being murdered for something due to such shaky evidence, you bet I'd be cursing the killers' names with my dying breath. At least it would give 'em a good scare or something.
Yeah I think this is about the time in history where the whole "'tis a witch!!" thing starts getting out of hand, but at least there's SOME semblance of restraint, with the Pope allowing certain forms of divination. However, that amount of hold back is not nearly enough to call any of this any form of civil, it's just madness. Madness I say!
ReplyDeleteAs Geoff said, people will say pretty much anything you want them to if you're forcing off their finger nails and ripping apart their limbs. I actually read this autobiographical story (I forget what it was called) about a war prisoner in I think either Vietnam or Korea, and he had to go through a lot of torture himself. He basically said "Anyone can be forced to say anything under torture, so long as the torturer knows what he's looking for."
Yep.