The little guys show up in medieval marginalia hunting mice & being cute

October 30, 2023 9:48 AM

First of all, I would like to ask which “religious leaders” this cat account thinks condemned cats in the fourteenth century. You would see some kind of documentation, because a mass cull of cats would represent a huge 180 from standard medieval practice surrounding the animals, because medieval people fucking loved cats.
posted by spamandkimchi (37 comments total)

Well it's about time.
posted by y2karl at 10:02 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Kind of weird that the author implies there were no "religious leaders" in the area around present-day Kyrgyzstan, just because it wasn't under the influence of the Christian church.

I mean, yes, the original cat account talks specifically about Europe, so they are presumably talking about the medieval Christian church. It just struck me as weird to imply that are area populated mostly by Muslims and animists didn't have religious leaders.

Buuuuuut, anyway, I'm just picking nits. I am glad this blog exists and enjoyed the tone. Gonna check out some more stuff on that site.
posted by asnider at 10:10 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

In fairness, as a long-time cat fan and a reader of "factoid" type books, I heard this same explanation of witch hunters causing the plague back in the nineties. It's an old bit of misinformation. The cat account is probably just gullible, not generating new errors.
posted by Scattercat at 10:13 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here is some background, and there is a lot if misinformation out there that also downplays witch-hunting by religious leaders.
posted by Brian B. at 10:22 AM on October 30, 2023

Every once in a while I get to ignore the feral kittens born under my banana tree. It's heartbreaking but their lives will go on to be nasty, brutal, and short. That's not the case for the the domestic and working cats, which are well taken care of.

There is nowhere near the shelter space necessary, so the city just puts out poison for them and picks up the bodies later. It's an ongoing effort that never makes any real headway against the feral population.

What I'm saying is that the idea of mass culls of cats is not incompatible with cherishing and loving some of them. People may attach stories about superstitions or health, but a feral cat population needs to be controlled one way or another.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:32 AM on October 30, 2023

Cats in the Middle Ages (World History Encyclopedia)

Once the cat was associated with Satan, it was regularly tortured and killed either to ward off bad luck, as a sign of devotion to Christ, or an integral part of rituals involving ailuromancy (using cats to predict the future). Cats were condemned by popes and massacred by entire villages and would not regain even half their former status until the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. The Victorian Age of the 19th century would see the cat's full restoration in status.
posted by Brian B. at 10:40 AM on October 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

I loved this. I hate when people mischaracterize people from prior generations-especially medieval people-as a bunch of fools. It’s so lazy and ignorant.
posted by vorpal bunny at 10:52 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Kind of weird that the author implies there were no "religious leaders" in the area around present-day Kyrgyzstan, just because it wasn't under the influence of the Christian church.

Secondly, you may notice that the prevailing idea of the emergence of the Black Death currently locates it in present-day Kyrgyzstan which, notably, isn’t really under the influence of the medieval Church. The nebulous “religious leaders” that the cat video warns you about? Not present on the steppe, where you largely see Muslim, animist, and Buddhist influences, though we certainly have Nestorian Christian graves which state that the inhabitants of said graves died of plague.[4] But, notably, the Church doesn’t control the Nestorian branch of the faith.

I read this as specifically referring to the nebulous "religious leaders" that the cat video warns you about, i.e. those of the medieval Western Church, not having influence on the steppes.
posted by zamboni at 10:52 AM on October 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Look, not that I disagree with any of this, but if you're going to base your argument entirely on early depictions of cats, they do have some things to answer for.
posted by The Bellman at 11:02 AM on October 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'm sorry for this, but it is a poem by an anonymous 9th century Irish monk translated by Seamus Heaney

Pangur Bán

Pangur Bán and I at work,
Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:
His whole instinct is to hunt,
Mine to free the meaning pent.

More than loud acclaim, I love
Books, silence, thought, my alcove.
Happy for me, Pangur Bán
Child-plays round some mouse’s den.

Truth to tell, just being here,
Housed alone, housed together,
Adds up to its own reward:
Concentration, stealthy art.

Next thing an unwary mouse
Bares his flank: Pangur pounces.
Next thing lines that held and held
Meaning back begin to yield.

All the while, his round bright eye
Fixes on the wall, while I
Focus my less piercing gaze
On the challenge of the page.

With his unsheathed, perfect nails
Pangur springs, exults and kills.
When the longed-for, difficult
Answers come, I too exult.

So it goes. To each his own.
No vying. No vexation.
Taking pleasure, taking pains,
Kindred spirits, veterans.

Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,
Pangur Bán has learned his trade.
Day and night, my own hard work
Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.
__
posted by MonsieurPEB at 11:08 AM on October 30, 2023 [29 favorites]

This is the feline version of the "R2D2 is the main protagonist of the Star Wars saga" theory.
posted by donio at 11:39 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

It doesn't contradict anything in the article, but I can't read this sort of thing without remembering The Great Cat Massacre which aims to interrogate why people in 1730s France thought killing a bunch of cats was funny. And if you dig in the joke is mostly on the cats' owners but thankfully the cat-murder would not be considered a funny punchline today.

Cats in the Middle Ages (World History Encyclopedia)

Once the cat was associated with Satan, it was regularly tortured and killed either to ward off bad luck, as a sign of devotion to Christ, or an integral part of rituals involving ailuromancy (using cats to predict the future). Cats were condemned by popes and massacred by entire villages and would not regain even half their former status until the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century.

So I tried to track down some of the stuff in this article. It seems a common pop-history claim that the Papal Bull Vox in Rama in 1233 (mentioned in the encyclopedia) condemned cats. But it also seems false! And is frequently debunked. The Bull is against a specific cult that exist at the time; in the course of condemning it they describe a ritual in which a black cat was involved. (A toad was also involved FWIW.) It's not a call to arms against cats, it's a call to suppress a Lucifer worshipping cult. (One example source.)

The claims they make about the medieval belief in witchcraft also differ from those in the original post and also seem wrong. They claim "women who kept cats were especially vulnerable to a charge of witchcraft as scholar Virginia C. Holmgren" and quote a passage, but AFAICT (and not to gatekeep) she was primarily a writer of YA books and birding guides; she never published on witchcraft. (The quote comes from "Cats in Fact & Folklore," which seems to be a slender volume of fun stories pitched for a general reader, along the lines of her "Owls in Folklore and Natural History".)

Actual cites in the piece are pretty thin around the Middle Ages and I'm going with the medievalist's take on this. The World Encyclopedia article sounds like an educated generalist saying "I remember reading this stuff about medieval cats" and linking to one or two things he read, rather than someone who knows the sources and scholarship.
posted by mark k at 11:55 AM on October 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

this made me think of the Cat Colony on Parliament Hill

I got to visit the colony/sanctuary in the early 2000s, and it made me so happy.
posted by elkevelvet at 11:59 AM on October 30, 2023

List of common misconceptions about the Middle Ages: Cat massacres and the subsequent plague

Nevertheless, the idea that a hatred developed against cats among Christians in the Middle Ages, followed by a subsequent massacre of cats enacted by the Catholic Church that would then promote the spread of the Black Plague due to flourishing rodent populations in the absence of cats, goes back to and was popularized by a 2001 book by the historian of ancient Greece, Donald Engels, titled Classical Cats: The rise and fall of the sacred cat.

posted by zamboni at 12:06 PM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I keep wondering if some of this stems from people jumbling up an old Disney cartoon about cats, the plague, and witchcraft. It's possible the Disney version isn't any more accurate than the recent version, but the latter seems to squash everything from the former into the medieval period. The cartoon version has "cats good, helped suppress the Plague" and then "some time later during witch hunt stuff, people got weird and murdered cats."
posted by queensissy at 12:18 PM on October 30, 2023

I hate when people mischaracterize people from prior generations-especially medieval people-as a bunch of fools. It’s so lazy and ignorant.

People living now are a bunch of fools; why would the people a few hundred years ago be any different?
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:34 PM on October 30, 2023 [15 favorites]

thank you for mentioning that, mark k, because I was also remembering the Great Cat Massacre and squinting in confusion, and a quick lit search mostly turned up pieces on the topic of the development of the cultural status of pet-keeping.

I kicked the OP over to a medievalist friend of mine who looked at it and noted that "Europe did turn on cats, but that was in the 1600s and largely the Puritans' fault," as well as noting that Eleanor Janega is "generally reliable and I would not want to go against her in terms of scholarship, and also what she’s saying is totally non-controversial (within the field)."

This is apparently a big irritation in the field, people attributing early-modern post-Rennaisance/post-Reformation trends to medievals because, well, the Victorians kind of lumped them all together. But it makes a lot more sense in the context of considering approaches to Christianity and potential paganism, too: post-Reformation thinkers would have been really focused on theological consistency, which is part of what leads to the witch hysteria and subsequent trials, and cats come in for a lot of by-blows then as a function of being associated with the kinds of marginalized people who got accused of witchcraft, and then it all just spirals horribly from there.

And of course, when we consider the year of the Great Cat Massacre, it is a 1750-era event--not a medieval period by any stretch of the imagination, but well into the early modern period that my friend complained about being conflated with the medievals.
posted by sciatrix at 12:38 PM on October 30, 2023 [11 favorites]

Why Cats were Hated in Medieval Europe

Heretical religious groups, such as the Cathars and Waldensians, were accused by Catholic churchmen of associating and even worshipping cats. It was even believed that the name ‘Cathars’ came from cats. When the Templars were put on trial in the early fourteenth century, one of the accusations against them was allowing cats to be part of the services and even praying to the cats.

Cats also became associated with witchcraft – the 1324 trial of Alice Kyteler in Ireland for heresy included the accusation that she possessed an incubus that looked like a black cat. As the medieval period progressed. this would develop into the idea that witches (especially women) had the power to shape-shift into cats. This would even lead Pope Innocent VIII to declare in 1484 that the cat was the devil’s favourite animal and idol of all witches.
posted by Brian B. at 12:44 PM on October 30, 2023

Brian B., that source's evidence also relies heavily on the witchcraft claim. 1324 sure is early for a witchcraft trial given what my friend told me about , so I went looking for some details on this specific trial. Wouldn't you know it: that trial is actually pretty unusual in a bunch of ways--not least that it is a single sensational trial, one of very few in its time period to receive any scholarly attention, and one that starts getting discussed c. 1847? That makes me think there might be something here to the Victorian characterization and attribution of early modern post-Reformation behaviors and activities to the medieval era--not that this particular trial didn't happen, but the way that we frame and present history is a function of our current opinions, feelings, and stories about that history, and it wouldn't surprise me if that was a part of the larger pattern.

Here's the relevant paragraph from the OP link:

Of course, the cat video (the cat video) maybe presents a reason why cat owners might off their pets on the whims of an unspecified “religious leader” which is that cat owners in the fourteenth-century were accused of being witches and killed. Yeah, here’s the thing about that, which I am so so tired of having to write down: witch panics are not a feature of medieval society. Indeed, medieval people didn’t really believe in the concept at all. Even in the fifteenth century when the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, a witch-hunting guide was written it had to justify its very existence because no one believed that ol’ Heinrich Kramer was right about witches existing. This is why he starts off with a long preamble defending the belief in witches as a whole.[2] His ideas aren’t taken with any degree of seriousness until the following centuries when you are smack dab in the early modern period and also, crucially, a couple of centuries past the Black Death.

So okay, she's making a claim about general interest in witch trials and willingness to persecute for them, and the counterclaim made by this gentleman Peter Konieczny is that no really witch trials were a big thing in the Middle Ages! His scholarly credentials are, er, that he co-founded Medievalists.net and has been working to spread knowledge about medieval Europe on the internet for 20 years. That doesn't necessarily mean that his grasp of facts are correct; credentials are as credentials do, but it is worth noting that Eleanor Janega is an actively publishing historian whose most recent book was published just this year. So we have one active scholar engaging with peer review in the field, and one person who I would call a "public communicator" of scholarship whose training might or might not be super up to date on this point.

Interestingly, Janega has also written directly about the witchcraft trials that did exist in a medieval context as contrasted to witchcraft trials in the early modern era. She also cites a papal bull and her forthcoming book for more detail, but as I can't get to that right now and I'm running late for a meeting in three minutes, let's do a very quick and dirty look at comparisons in the field between medieval and early modern witchcraft trials. Here's a modern (published 2017) book: Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft. If you scroll to the table of contents, you'll notice that every single entry in the witchcraft section focuses on the early modern period, while magic and heresy occupy actual medieval time periods with a much more ambivalent description.

This is pretty good evidence to me that Janega is more likely to be up to date with the current state of the field: she's not involved with this book, but by and large its emphases support her claim. It, er, also does not help Konieczny's credibility that the name Cathars does not in any way derive from cats: the name comes from the Greek katharoi, "the pure ones," and this would have been very obvious to anyone who studied them in detail while also reading Greek. The confusion seems to have come from Alan of Lille, who was at the time engaging in a call for genocide of the Cathars as heretics. He probably cannot be considered a reliable source on this point.
posted by sciatrix at 1:26 PM on October 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

>>I hate when people mischaracterize people from prior generations-especially medieval people-as a bunch of fools. It’s so lazy and ignorant.

>People living now are a bunch of fools; why would the people a few hundred years ago be any different?

I was about to say. Do you have any idea what people will be saying about Covid 2019 in 200 years? It will make evil cats look positively tame and be absolutely true.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:32 PM on October 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

I was about to say. Do you have any idea what people will be saying about Covid 2019 in 200 years? It will make evil cats look positively tame and be absolutely true.

I totally get why someone might read "orange piece of shit" and think it was a reference to a cat.
posted by Gorgik at 1:40 PM on October 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

Sciatrix, the period began slightly earlier it seems. It first needed a theological reclassification to get the murder sprees going, mentioned in the article, perhaps just to keep the inquisitors in business after running out of religious heretics.

I hate when people mischaracterize people from prior generations-especially medieval people-as a bunch of fools. It’s so lazy and ignorant.

There were some geniuses however.

In 1615, 24 witnesses accused Katharina Kepler, the astronomer’s mother, of being a witch. The evidence: She magically appeared through closed doors; paralyzed the schoolmaster with a drink of wine; and hit a young girl on the arm, causing inhuman pain. Even Katharina’s son Heinrich claimed that she had “ridden a calf to death and prepared him a roast dish from it, [and] he himself wanted to accuse her before the authorities.” Because of these charges and others, the elderly Katharina was chained to the floor of a prison cell, where she was watched by two guards.
posted by Brian B. at 1:44 PM on October 30, 2023

I--Brian, your wikipedia link says this:

14th century
There was no concept of demonic witchcraft during the fourteenth century; only at a later time did a unified concept combine the ideas of noxious magic, a pact with the Devil and an assembly of witches for Satanic worship into one category of crime.[19] Witch trials were infrequent compared to later centuries and a significant proportion of them were held in France. [...]

Lamothe-Langon
Earlier works on witchcraft often placed a large number of stereotypical witch trials in southern France in the early fourteenth century. This is the result of Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, who published Histoire de l'inquisition en France in 1829. He described a sudden outburst of mass witch trials ending in hundreds of executions, and the accused were portrayed as the stereotypical demonic witch. He purported to extensively quote in translation from inquisitorial records. His book proved influential. Joseph Hansen included large excerpts from the book, though Lamothe-Langon's sources could not be found at the end of the nineteenth century. Through reuse by other writers, Lamothe-Langon's work established the view that witch hunts suddenly began in the late Middle Ages and implied a link with Catharism. Academics continued to rely on Lamothe-Langon as a source until Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer showed independently in the 1970s that the alleged records in Histoire de l'inquisition were highly dubious and possible forgeries. Kieckhefer notes that a 1855 publication of a summary inventory from inquisitorial records from Carcassonne did not match with Lamothe-Langon's work at all. Besides, the language and stereotypes in the supposed records were anachronistic. Lamothe-Langon also had a track record in forging several genealogies about his ancestry and his political motive was shown by his polemics against censorship. By the time that historians rejected his work, it was already firmly entrenched in the popular image of witchcraft.[23][24]

15th century trials and the growth of the new heterodox view
Witch trials were still uncommon in the 15th century when the concept of diabolical witchcraft began to emerge. [...]

1486: Malleus Maleficarum
The most important and influential book which promoted the new heterodox view was the Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer. [...] The theological views espoused by Kramer were influential but remained contested, and an early edition of the book even appeared on a list of those banned by the Church in 1490.[36] Nonetheless Malleus Maleficarum was printed 13 times between 1486 and 1520, and — following a 50-year pause that coincided with the height of the Protestant reformations — it was printed again another 16 times (1574–1669) in the decades following the important Council of Trent which had remained silent with regard to Kramer's theological views. It inspired many similar works, such as an influential work by Jean Bodin, and was cited as late as 1692 by Increase Mather, then president of Harvard College.[37][38][39]

It is unknown if a degree of alarm at the extreme superstition and witch-phobia expressed by Kramer in the Malleus Maleficarum may have been one of the numerous factors that helped prepare the ground for the Protestant Reformation.[citation needed]

Italics are my added emphasis.

How in the hell is that inconsistent with the point that the witchcraft trials are a largely early modern period phenomenon tightly linked to the Protestant Reformation?!
posted by sciatrix at 1:56 PM on October 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Sciatrix, Alice Kyteler, mentioned as a too early trial by you, was tried for heresy, not witchcraft. These demarcations you cite were not evident at the time, as it was evolving, obviously.
posted by Brian B. at 2:07 PM on October 30, 2023

Dude, I mentioned Kyteler as a function of your personal source listing her as an early trial with accusations of demonic incubus possession. You're right, upon closer reading: she was heresy rather than witchcraft, although the identification of demonic familiars is even more bizarre for a heresy declaration than a witchcraft trial of the era: heresy does not require supernatural elements and in fact usually does not.

I'm actually not sure if you're reading your own sources or not.
posted by sciatrix at 2:16 PM on October 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm actually not sure if you're reading your own sources or not.

Hers was about cats. I noted the theological reclassification being in the source, which was cited of course.
posted by Brian B. at 2:19 PM on October 30, 2023

Nonetheless Malleus Maleficarum was printed 13 times between 1486 and 1520

So, even though I've had a copy of the Malleus within arm's reach for most of my life, the timing of it had never occurred to me, but then last night (synchronicity...or something more diabolical?) I was reading the book from this thread, which points out that the Malleus' publication coincides with the explosion of printing thanks to Gutenberg. So it makes sense to me that rather than being received knowledge from the church, or folk knowledge from common people, the witch-problem was one of the first really virulent, technologically-mediated memes.
posted by mittens at 2:41 PM on October 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Malleus Maleficarum is maybe the first example of incel swatting in history, and one of the most effective. Heinrich Kramer was a gross sad little man who I hope is burning in hell for the evil he did.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:32 PM on October 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Also, you wouldn’t get Muslim leaders condemning cats; Muhammad was crazy about them; it’s an endearing feature of the man.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:34 PM on October 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also, you wouldn’t get Muslim leaders condemning cats; Muhammad was crazy about them; it’s an endearing feature of the man.

There's literally a story about him cutting off part of his robe so that he could get up without disturbing the cat that was sleeping on it.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:19 PM on October 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Bit of a derail, I'm afraid, but dammit elkevelvet I live about a mile from Parliament Hill and was all set to visit that cat colony, when I realised that it was the wrong Parliament Hill. All we have on the one here in London is kite-fliers and the occational druid.
posted by Fuchsoid at 8:46 PM on October 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Eleanor Janega is great, and Going Medieval is well worth reading! Here are a few more posts I often link.

Independent peasants' Republics/Communes.
Beauty standards.
Sodomy!
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:34 AM on October 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sodomy!

"This also means that odds are you, dear reader, have likely done sodomy at some point in your life if not earlier today."
posted by Gorgik at 10:05 AM on October 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mod note: This post is the cutest, so its been added to the Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:49 AM on November 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

The r/exmuslim kitten on the sleeve thread of Story about Mohammed cutting his clothes to not disturb the sleeping cat starts one down a rabbit hole. According to the links listed there, the stories about a kitten on Mohammed's sleeve first appeared in written records in the 20th century but never before. The story itself is much older than Mohammed's time with the earliest version going back to the imperial court of the Han Dynasty in first century C.E. China.
posted by y2karl at 9:03 AM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

(that's a different kind of kitten entirely)
posted by mittens at 10:18 AM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Indeed.
posted by y2karl at 11:23 AM on November 4, 2023