Dan Snow's History Hit - The Salem Witch Trials

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

The Malleus Maleficarum, or the 'Hammer of Witches', was a 15th-century book that sparked mass hysteria about the existence of witches in Europe - and it wasn't long before North America had fallen for the same obsession.In a special Halloween episode, Dan is joined by the co-host of the Gone Medieval podcast, Eleanor Janega, to take us through the most famous example of a witch-hunt in action. Eleanor explains how old grudges and grievances boiled up as the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts turned on one another. Hundreds of people were accused of witchcraft and just shy of two dozen were executed for it. So what happened in Salem? Why were almost all of the accused women? And what was a witch anyway? Tune in to find out.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In the 1480s, the German clergyman Heinrich Kramer published a remarkable book that proved very popular. It was called the Malleus Maleficarum, translated as the Hammer of Witches. It's about witchcraft, but actually I think it's more about Heinrich's own journey. He was obsessed with witches. He blamed women for his own lust. He went way beyond the church's official position on demonology and got ticked off by the faculty of Cologne and the Inquisition. It's in this book that you get the suggestion that witches should be tortured until they confess. And in this book in which he suggests that witches should suffer the same fate as heretics. They should be burned alive at the stake. In retrospect, he was a very complicated man. He was obsessed with witches, which he defined as the devotion of the whole body and soul to evil.

Witchcraft is manifested by having sexual relationships with incubi, renouncing the Christian faith, the sacrifice of unbaptised children, infants, to Satan. There are passages in there that are clearly fantasies of a pretty pathological nature. He describes a witch feeding oats to a nest of castrated male members. Witches were an existential threat to Christianity. They were the devil's army here on earth, and they needed his damping out. This book helped to fan the flames of the witch panics of the early modern period, particularly in the 16th century. But on this episode, I want to talk about the most famous witch hunt of them all, that in Salem, Massachusetts, at the end of the 17th century.

Eleanor Jarnager is on the podcast. She is a brilliant historian. Every time she appears on History Hit TV, those documentaries smash all the records. She is the host of the Gone Medieval podcast, and part of her teaching includes courses on witches and witch hunts. She is going to talk me through the witch trials that took place in 1692 and 1693 in Salem, Massachusetts, after a community tore itself apart with accusations of witchcraft. It is a wild story and one with a very important legacy. Enjoy. black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Eleanor, thanks very much for coming back on the podcast.

Oh, you can't stop me, Dan. I'll be back here the next time you close your eyes. I wouldn't dare. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't dare try and stop you. Can I ask you a question? You are a passionate advocate for the medieval, right? And you've often said to me, lots of the worst stuff that people think happened in the medieval period actually happened on the other side. Like a lot of early modern nonsense goes on. And this is an example of that, right? Witch hunts, which people think are like, ah, witch hunts, burn the witch. It's all pitchfork wielding kind of peasants in Central Europe. This is the 17th century. We're edging into the age of enlightenment here. So what the heck's going on?

Yeah. Well, the thing is that early modern people are wiling out, which is a technical term. And what we really see, especially with Salem, is an anomaly even with that. Because by this time, end of the 17th century, witch trials had even gone out of fashion in Europe. It was kind of beyond the pale. Everyone sort of agreed we were going to stop doing this. And it's a real function of this part of the early modern period where things just kind of get a lot worse, which no one is really expecting. You know, everyone's kind of expects that history is this one march towards like a progressive future, a better future, and everyone gets better rights. But for women, especially, things get a lot worse in the early modern period. And

you see a lot of rights being taken away. You see a big push to get women into the domestic sphere and out of public spaces. And that's also kind of linked to what we call confessionalization, which is the process of basically creating Protestants, right? So the minute you create Protestants, there becomes like this big push between Protestants and Catholics as well. But Protestants go for a little bit harder of proving how holy they are, right? They're like, we're the right kind of Christian. Purity tests. We've got some purity tests going. Okay. And so they're saying, I'm the right kind of Christian. We've got to put a stop to like

the works of the devil. And now suddenly witches are real, right? Okay. So in the 16th century where you see kind of witchcraft, witchcraft trials reach their zenith, it's a product of Protestant evangelical ideas sweeping across the continent, is it? That's fascinating. Yeah. So basically they're saying, look, all of these witches have been allowed to thrive because Catholicism didn't do a good job of mopping those things up. And this has kind of been left to fester without anyone looking into it. And sure, there are things like the Hammer of Witches or the Malleus Maleficarum, the Witch Hunter's Manual that is produced earlier on. That's made by a Catholic guy. But when it comes out, everyone is like, sir, this is bonkers. And nobody believes that it's real.

And everyone is like, witches aren't real. You seem to be kind of like sexually obsessed with women and we're going to ignore this. And then, you know, a couple decades later, Protestants sort of pick up on it and they say, oh, you see, the excesses of the church, even when people are trying to do the right thing and do stuff about witches, they just ignore it. And we are going to be the ones who cleanse the world of the sins of witchcraft. And it doesn't hurt that various Protestant leaders are really into it, like King James I, that's his whole deal. He really, really believes in witches and thinks that witches are out to get him, and that they're causing storms to wreck his boat and things like this. So there's also a kind of

pressure from the top of the social scale to bring this into the fore. James VI and I maybe preferred the company of men. Yeah. It's one of these, me think the monarch doth protest too much sort of things. If you start asking everyone to look after what women are doing and aren't they awful and witches and something, something, and please don't pay attention to what I'm doing over here, kind of deal, you know? And I'm guessing, given the sort of history of misogyny more generally, being a witch, it's a pretty broad basket, right? It's defined by men and you can work out a way to include pretty much any female activity you disapprove of into it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, to be clear, men are also killed in the witch panics and it kind of really depends on what society you're in. So like if you're in Iceland where they've got a real broad tradition of magic coming from the sagas, more men get killed. But on the whole, it's women. And so basically you get to see women get done for things like mouthing off, owning too much property while being a widow, being a midwife who performs abortion services, just kind of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being poor, people don't like that. And being rich is also an issue. So you're kind of damned if you do damned if you don't either way. Okay. And so we've got these witch

trials sweeping across Europe in particular in the 16th century. But you're saying that people sort of come to their senses, that they go out of fashion, do they, into the 17th century? Yeah, in the 17th century, especially, I mean, the Salem witch trials happened late in the 17th century. And by then, everyone's kind of, you know, whole villages in Sweden have been killed. In Scotland, things have got really quite out of hand, like all sorts of people have been killed. And everyone goes, well, wait, this seems kind of silly. And we don't really have any proof. You know, there were all of these particular judicial moves that had to be done in order to try witchcraft, like saying, oh, children can suddenly testify in court

or spectral evidence, quote unquote, where you're like, oh yeah, I looked in my mind, I got a vibe of who was witchcrafting me. And it was this woman who lives down the street. You know, all of these things that would have never been allowed, for example, in medieval courts were suddenly on the table and ready to go. And so everyone then kind of said, wait, all of these people have been killed. And this isn't really compelling evidence. And everyone just kind of comes to their senses. It's a real panic. evidence. And everyone just kind of comes to their senses. It's a real panic. And all you have to do is kind of look back to, I don't know, the 80s and the satanic panic that happened then where

people were convinced that, you know, rock bands were putting backward messages and songs and things like that in order to see how these things take hold, where people's imaginations can really, really get the better of them. So in Europe, we're kind of getting into a more enlightenment vibe at this point in time. We're saying, okay, we really need to move past this. But the thing about Salem is, you know, it's got that kind of specific immigrant culture, where oftentimes, when you have a group of people who move to a new place, they kind of cling to the older culture that they've come from, because they say, oh, this is the defining thing about us as a group is we do X.

Right. And so you've got that as an issue over in Salem. And then also they are Puritans. And Puritans have also rather gone out of fashion in Europe at this point in time. You know, England was sick of them. That's why they're all over in Salem. Right. So everyone was like, I'm not sure about this whole no dancing, no fun kind of style of Christianity that you're going with. And because they have such incredibly stringent beliefs about how society should be run, what religion is, they are pretty likely to pick up on witch trial issues because they really, really, really don't like women and they really do believe

in Satan. And so that's kind of the perfect mix. And the people who were going to these places were among the most puritanical, among the most evangelical of these European Protestants. Absolutely. So it's a kind of perfect storm. Yeah. And a lot of them are kind of really trying to prove something. One of the big sources that we have is written by this guy, Cotton Mather, who specifically goes over there and is like, right, we are about to Puritan it up even harder. I am going to show the world that actually this is the way to run a society. And he writes all these pamphlets about how witchcraft definitely is real and documents the trials in pretty obsessive detail. And he thinks he's about to prove to

the world how Puritans have really cracked it. And you see witches definitely do exist. And it's read by everyone else as exactly the opposite, where everyone in Europe kind of gets a hold of these and is like, what are you guys doing over there? This is horrifying stuff. And so there's this really particular context in Salem where these are a bunch of people who are incredibly religious and they have something to prove. And that kind of makes it even worse. The idea of a world in which Europeans are disturbed by religious zealotry coming out of North America is just a really unfamiliar world to me.

Yeah. The past is a different place, right? Okay. So let's get into it. February of 1692, we have these two girls and they start having fits. What's going on? So the fits are a really interesting one because they don't really track with anything that we can really understand. They begin shouting randomly. They flap their arms around like birds. This is a big one. They say they feel as though they're being pricked with pins and needles. And in general, they become incredibly disruptive, right? And this is what sort of catches everyone's eyes because this is the exact opposite of what a Puritan children in general are supposed to be and whatitan children in general are supposed to be

and what Puritan little girls are supposed to be. Because children are to be seen and not heard. You're supposed to be being very, very quiet. And suddenly there's little girls yelling in church. It's very disruptive, right? And everyone says, oh, well, take them to the doctor. The doctor says, well, I can't see anything that's particularly wrong with them. And that's when they get it into their heads that they have been bewitched. And they start saying that they've been bewitched. But it's one of these things where it's very difficult to tell. Have they been kind of prompted to say that they've been bewitched or have they come up with this on their own?

But as a general rule of thumb, we kind of think that at this point, maybe they're just kind of like looking for a little bit of attention because the two girls in question, it's Betty Paris and Abigail Williams and their cousins. Betty's dad, Samuel, is Salem's new preacher, right? And so this kind of seems like a really good way if you're a nine-year-old like Betty and you're growing up in this really oppressive society that just doesn't even want you to be a kid, suddenly, oh, you're yelling in church and everyone's, oh, what's wrong? What's wrong? Paying attention to you, right? And you suddenly get this big surge of power where you can kind of say, oh, I've been bewitched. And it really plays into the imaginations of the adults around you.

And you become kind of like a star in a way. Yeah. As a parent, I can relate to this kind of surge of empowerment among kids. I've seen it. I've seen it in their eyes. And it's like that thing about kind of throwing a tantrum, but they're also sort of allowed because the moment you say, oh, I've been bewitched, it's like, oh, well, they've been bewitched. The whole good behavior thing is completely out the window. Nobody cares. And then one of the neighbors gets this bright idea, which is to do another form of magic, question mark, which is called making a witch cake. And they say, oh, I know what you do. You collect the urine from the two little girls who've been bewitched and you make a cake with barley flour and you feed it to a dog. And then the dog will be able to know which witch has cursed these children because the dog will run up to them.

And then surprise, who are the witches that the dog kind of finds out or whatever? It is the enslaved maid of the Paris family, a woman named Tituba. You've got a woman named Sarah Good, who is kind of an impoverished woman in the parish. She's got a little four-year-old daughter who also gets arrested and accused of witchcraft and is in prison for months on end. And basically it just ends up being all of these women who are a little bit off. And another thing that kind of happens with the accusations is that at this time in Salem, there were massive arguments between the various families over land and property because the people in Salem were just a bit wild about how inheritance

works. It was like, oh, it couldn't necessarily go down through your family. And then maybe the city, if someone dies, gets to control it. And certain women who get accused of witchcraft are widowers who have tons of land. And they are in land disputes with other of the prominent families. And suddenly, oh, yeah, I think that she's a witch. That's a bad lady as well. And so all of the people who kind of get brought forward, it's like a who's who of exactly who you would expect. If you were going to come up with most stereotypical accusations of like,

oh, that woman's a witch. It's, you know, the old lady with a bunch of money, the Catholic lady who is a bit garrulous with her husband, the broke woman and the enslaved Native American, right? Cool. And so these are the people who all kind of get brought before the court. And they're people who don't go to church very regularly, or they just don't act in the way that people expect them to. And that's really easy for little girls to kind of pick up on, right? As people to accuse, because it's like, oh, well, I've heard my dad trash talk on this person. Then you go, yeah, she's a witch. And then it's like, oh, it makes dad happy. You get to keep yelling in church.

It keeps going this way. Wow. I didn't realize the extent to which these young girls, they would have experienced an element of kind of freedom and agency that would have been exhilarating for them. Yeah. And there's no way that children within Puritan culture would be allowed this level of power ordinarily, and certainly, certainly not little girls. We listened to Dan Snow's history here. We're talking about the Salem witches, or rather Salem people who were accused of witchcraft, unfairly, because witches don't exist. More after this. who were accused of witchcraft, unfairly,

because witches don't exist. More after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And so how do we move from that to actual trials? How is justice dispensed in this society? Is there a sort of state or does it feel like community justice? There is a state and very interestingly, they set up a very specific court just in order to oversee this. So it's called the Court of Oyer and Terminer. And it's kind of like a system of assize judges. And so basically they're saying, okay, we're going to bring these guys together. It's been like the magistrate who said that this is going to happen.

And then you kind of have local accusations are made and then some examination, aka torture, often goes on. And then that's brought up to the court itself more particularly, which is seen as superior that does the judging, as it were. So it does have the apparatuses of a state. And that's kind of one of the things that the Puritans use to kind of pat themselves on the back about what they're doing. They're like, oh, well, yeah, we're saying that the devil slept with all these women and that they're bewitching nine-year-olds into yelling in church. But we have jurisprudence and here is the way that we are overseeing everything. So actually, it's fine. It's completely fine that all of this is happening.

And they really lean back on saying there's a procedure that makes all of this okay. And what is the result of these trials? A lot of people die, not to put too fine a point on it. But in the end, you have something like 85 people are killed, a bunch more die in prison. Some women are imprisoned, but they're pregnant. And they're like, oh, well, we can't actually, we're not going to hang a pregnant woman. And then kind of by the time they give birth, it's gone away. You have people who have to basically just run out of town, flee town, and leave everything that they have behind where their family will kind of smuggle them out. You have the husbands of women who are accused, who are killed. There is one man, there's an 81

year old man who is tortured to death. His name was Giles Corey. He had, again, a lot of land and they arrest him. And they do this thing where they crush him to death by putting a lot of rocks on him slowly, like weighing him down more and more. And he refuses to admit that he's a witch. And so he's just killed without trial while being tortured because they're trying to extract a confession. And it is a full blown panic. Everyone's accusing everyone. If you have even the slightest beef with a family who has more money, suddenly you can just say, oh, that person's a witch and they will get arrested. And hundreds of people are arrested and they're not all killed.

A lot of them are, you know, let off or seem to be innocent. But then you also will have women, for example, who are arrested, put on trial, and then they're found innocent. And then when their husband dies, they're arrested again, put back on trial and then killed. There are all these kind of layers to it where it becomes almost a free for all where everyone is kind of accusing everyone in both of these towns. And when we say panic about a witch panic, that's really what it is. These people are kind of running around like chickens with their heads cut off and they do seem to really believe this. Okay, to be fair.

And this kind of all goes back to their religious worldview as well. And there's this way of thinking about the world and women where men are kind of logical and able to resist the snares of the devil and women are illogical and unable to do that. And this all gets turned up under Protestantism. and unable to do that. And this all gets turned up under Protestantism. So they'll say, oh, well, men and women are equal in the eyes of God, but they're not equal in the eyes of the devil, right? And the devil has an easier time seducing women than men. So the devil intentionally seeks out and targets women to bring them over to his side. And that's kind of like the worldview that they're working with. And they're also working within a world where the Puritans really believe that the devil is working in the world and that you have to resist him at all times in your actions.

And they're also living on a frontier, right? They're living in a world that they see as hostile to Christians. They are living in the woods very far from their original home. They are surrounded by Native American people who they see as pagan and therefore under the influences of the devil, who are, surprise, surprise, fighting back because they don't quite enjoy being pushed off their land. You know, there are a lot of wars with Native Americans going on at the time, so they see themselves as kind of being besieged by the real army of Satan. And there's also this kind of European thing going on there as well. You know, they're in this wilderness and Europeans, and this is true in the middle ages as well, really see the forest as kind of

like a place of magic and a place where things happen that are not really a part of Christendom, right? So you've got wild animals and you've got maybe demons and you have all of these things out there that you don't know what's going on and they are not under the control of God. So they see themselves as kind of in this place of real literal besiegement by the devil, by nature, by Native Americans. And it finds itself kind of acting out against themselves, right? So they feel that they need to discipline themselves to such a point that they can be seen to not be partaking in any of these things, and they eat themselves as a result of it. We humans are astonishingly good at making our own dire situations as a result of geography and demography and disease, whatever else, but making them so much worse. It's

astonishing, isn't it? To just be in this kind of beleaguered, isolated community involved in this kind of colonial project in very, very difficult terrain with antagonistic indigenous people all around you, and then decide to just turn on each other and just destroy your community. We are an extraordinary species, aren't we? It's just so, you know, like even the whole property dispute angle of it always kind of blows my mind because I'm like, I thought the whole point was you'd come over here because there was a lot more left. I don't know, go steal some more. You already stolen this. I don't understand. Just build out on the outskirts of town. What's going on? What do you mean property dispute? It just seems so silly to us.

Chop some trees down, man. Okay. So we got 200 people accused, 20 were executed, others died. What brings this to an end? Does somebody at some stage just go, this is just out of control? Basically, yes. Essentially, it just gets to the point where everyone is sick of this, where they are like, this doesn't make any sense at all. Part of it is when the various Cotton Mather publications come forth. So the wonders of the invisible is like his big kind of treaties on witchcraft and it gets to Europe and everyone is like, what are you talking about? Like, this is not, and it doesn't end up making the sensation that they think that it's going to do. It doesn't prove them right to kind of the rest of the Christian community.

And that kind of knocks them back and makes them kind of realize, oh, what is it that we're doing? There are also real pushbacks from communities that are not the Puritan community. So for example, there's a guy called Thomas Mowell, who is a Quaker, and he writes a book called Truth Held Forth and Maintained, where he's like, these Puritans are wiling out and they are just killing people for absolutely no reason. And none of this makes any sense. The Puritans go find him and arrest him just for saying that. But he eventually just kind of waits it out for a year and everyone lets him go. But this is the start of a bunch of people saying, this doesn't make sense. You cannot convince me of the rectitude of any of this.

And then so suddenly courts start saying, oh, I'm not sure I really believe this. And then by the time you get to 1696, the general court kind of realizes that they've messed up. They actually put out a statement saying, referring to the late tragedy raised among us by Satan and his instruments. And now part of that is saying, okay, yes, there were witches, but then part of that, what they're saying is, and we got a little carried away. One thing that people kind of start talking about is, well, maybe Satan did this in order to confuse us and turn us against each other. Maybe this confusion and all of this finger pointing is actually another kind of diabolical work, which works on Puritans kind of well. So you kind of also have some reverends come and

read apologies and saying that someone needs to take the blame and shame of the commission that someone needs to take the blame and shame of the commission and what they've done. And so it's just, it gets to a real tipping point. But, you know, up to that point, you know, up until the point that, you know, people are going, I just don't think that that's true. You know, you would see people arrested and accused of being witches for saying, I don't think that these people are witches. There were women who were killed and called witches because of that. Luckily, when, you know, a guy from another community does it, that's taken a little bit more seriously, even though he's imprisoned, right? And then eventually everyone kind of is like, oh, you know what? Okay, you can still accuse people of witchcraft, but we're not going to take spectral evidence into account

anymore. So you can't say, oh, I saw the figure of the person who bewitched me. And the minute you get spectral evidence, it's just like, bang, everything plummets, right? Because how are you going to explain this? Otherwise, how are you going to say that you know who bewitched you? It's just because it's not real, right? Like underlined, none of this is real. These people aren't witches and everyone is just kind of making it up. And then basically the community just sort of wake up and come to its senses. And I think part of it is that it just went so far that there was almost nobody within the community who hadn't been touched in some way. You know, there was no one who didn't have a member of the family who was arrested or accused or killed.

You know, this isn't a big community. And when you have this many people arrested and killed, that's your neighbor. That's possibly your cousin. These are people that you know. And you know that, you know, your cousin hasn't done anything wrong. And so it just kind of got to a point where they're like, no, no, no, this can't be right. And to their credit, there does appear to have been some acknowledgement that they really messed up. I got to give it to them on that one. I wish that

they'd done it a little bit earlier, but at least they kind of admit they were wrong, which is refreshing. One of the people only got exonerated in the 21st century, I read the other day, which is pretty extraordinary. So the Massachusetts legislature slowly went through exonerating the various people convicted of witchcraft. Yeah, it was really cute. That last person, there was a little project by some Massachusetts school children who they were going through and they realized that someone had been left off. And I thought that was very sweet. There's been similar movements here in the UK to kind of exonerate the various people accused of witchcraft.

So Scotland's going through that process right now, like has gone through that process, I believe. And in England, we're still kind of working towards it. It's one of these things that kind of doesn't quite sit right with me as a historian a lot of the time, because we all agree witches aren't real. And we talk about the witch panics and we know that witches aren't real, but then we also kind of like them to maybe be real. Like if you go to Salem now, they call themselves witch city. The police cars have like witches on the side of them. And it's like, but they weren't witches. The entire point is that they were not witches, right? And that's literally the point. That's the point. Yeah. And so it's quite frustrating really, because there's part of our society who kind of

wants these women to have been doing something while at the same time, we admit that obviously they were all innocent. So I think that's really instructive, right? Because if we still kind of have this desire for the women to have been up to something, if there was something magical, maybe there was a witch, right? Then how much more so is that going to be true of a group of people who are absolutely over the top religious, who really believe that Satan is stalking the streets, right? So we're still doing the same thing that we get mad at the Puritans for, in a way. At the same time, some historians have argued that it was a wake-up call in the development of the early American

colonial project. And although there are two very different Americas, as you and I have talked about before, there is an America that revels in its liberal heritage, its Enlightenment heritage, the first republic governed by written constitution, history, and all that kind of stuff. But obviously, organized religion is still hugely important in American political life as well. These things are kind of parallel and both have their roots in this period. Was this the rock on which kind of American theocracy founded? Did people go, we need due process, we need rule of law, we need some rational thinking here as we start to build what will eventually become the republic? Quite so. I would say that for Americans, this is a real wake-up call,

that there needs to be less interference directly from religious councils or religious individuals. Now, having said that, again, this was a trial by magistrates, and it was all set up by what are supposed to be the ordinary legal channels. But it also kind of makes the other non-Puritans realize that they need to step in here, right? You know, so the Quakers are like, what are you talking about? Granted, the Quakers are kind of like notably the sensible Americans throughout this entire period. You know, like, I don't know about this whole enslavement thing.

Quakers are always kind of like on the right side over in America. But it also is one of those things where they kind of realize we need to be looking into this more on our own, because we cannot trust a government all the way over in England to know what is going on with these people. It's very, very difficult for a kind of movement back and forth across the pond, as it were, to come and look in on whatever it is that a bunch of Puritans are doing, right? Because the minute everyone gets wind of this in London, that's when the tide really begins to turn, right? That's when everyone's like, wait, what? And Puritans are like, what, what? You know, all of these things are called into

question. And it really, it's considered a mark of shame on the community in general, on the way things had been being done. And it is very much considered, yes, a turning point. So the, albeit imperfect, but there's a deliberate attempt to separate church and state in the Republic in the 18th century. That is partly a legacy of this kind of extremism. And it's mentioned at the time as well. You know, they're saying, do you see what happens when people get out of control? I mean, and quite right too, you know, it's pretty fresh in everybody's memory. And if what you're saying is that you are establishing an environment of quote unquote religious freedom, well, how is this free? How is it that, you know, if you are Catholic,

then your next door neighbors who are Puritan can come and call you a witch and take your land and kill you. How are we defining freedom? And it's one of these kind of real troubled spots. The American myth about its own founding is like, oh, and the Puritans came here for religious freedom. And it's like, freedom to do what? The answer is sometimes freedom to just like kill most of the women that you know, because you don't like the way they looked at you.

Right. That's intense. Okay. Well, Eleanor, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and talking all about it. You're working on the excellent sibling podcast to this one, Gone Medieval. So that's all going fine. Oh yeah. We're having a great time over there.

I can assure you. Yeah. Well, thanks. You told me about Good King Wenceslas a few weeks ago and now it's on to Witch Trials. So I don't know what's next, but I'm looking forward to it. See you next time. Thanks, thanks. You told me about Good King Wenceslas a few weeks ago, and now it's on to witch trials. So I don't know what's next, but I'm looking forward to it. See you next time. Thanks, Dan.