You're Wrong About - Alice Kyteler and the First Witchcraft Trial in Ireland with Molly Aitken

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

In County Kilkenny, Ireland, in an early year of a century not too long before our own, Alice Kyteler was accused of witchcraft. But the story doesn't end there. This week, Molly Aitken—author of BRIGHT I BURN—is here to tell us a tale where the more things* change, the more they stay the same. (*Men)Read Molly's books:https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2204198/molly-aitken/This month's bonus episode on Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121131515?pr=trueLINKS! for fire relief and mutual aid:https://5pmlucky.substack.com/p/direct-fundraising-for-los-angelesSupport You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks:https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2204198/molly-aitken/https://5pmlucky.substack.com/p/direct-fundraising-for-los-angeleshttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodSupport the show

Dear Bielzabab, 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 house wifery 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 Mac 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 Your 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 dark time of year talking. We are recording this the day after election day,

which I think is worth mentioning because, you know. Yes, yes. It's worth knowing why people sound the way they do. I tend to suspect that you're gonna tell me a story that is gonna 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 and who we're talking about today. Yeah so I have a book out Brightside Bone 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 like the gossip about her in Ireland, I suppose. Like she would be like 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 like kids are afraid of? Or is she more de-fanged 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 was 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 then 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 a hundred 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 and they were money lenders, so 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 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 what it makes 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 set the scene, it was like Catholic Ireland, Irish school, quite traditional. And 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 Kitzer, 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, which is an imagery that has been created much later. But 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 sat there sort of like, oh my god, it was terrifying. It was also a very terrifying teacher who was telling stories, which helped, helped a lot. And I think I kind of conflated the two. Right because you're getting like a visual demonstration that you can merge with the story.

Those are the best storytellers. Okay so she's an ancient hag who killed four husbands through witchcraft. What was the motive other than witchcraft? Was it just evil or does it matter? 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 like 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 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. give to a... there are views on witchcraft, should we say. 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 Malifikium was like the intent to do harm to others. But then this changed. 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 the 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 us?

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? 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 Cookenny 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

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. 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 like 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 any old horrible satanic crime you can think of 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? Like you 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.

Yeah, 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 like the, you know, Levi's with a like some weird logo. But 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 sort of like accusations and circumstantial evidence to kind of prove that somebody needs to be burned alive.

Yeah. Doesn't seem good. Historians believe that the king of Perazza 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 Le Dredd. 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 Le Dread. 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 came to Kilkenny 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 Dredd. And there's a kind of energy in it that he's just really into accusing 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? 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. Yeah, I surprisingly 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. Yeah. So he came with this mission, this holy mission, we should say. I'm bearing in mind that witch trials had barely happened before this. Huh. 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. 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, 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 Kitler'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 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 an intoxicology report. 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 on two books, which I've read in the past, one is Women Who Kill by a writer, I think named Anne Jones. And one 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 there 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 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 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 messed up.

It is the creepiest thing. I would rather kill me some way 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 to poison someone like this. It does. 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 started poisoning their husbands and then were 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 a hundred percent if she killed all her husbands. Now it does seem quite likely that she was poisoning her last husband right but 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 Le Dredd 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 one. They were just marginally involved. So number one, denying the power of Christ on 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 a 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. And I'm sure people were. 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 rusting every time I wash it. Is cast iron for me? Signed, Alice. I meant number four, having carnal relations with a demon

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 gosh. You know, there's racism within that, of course. Right. Yeah. They're like, it's terrible.

He turns into an animal or someone from Ethiopia. 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 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. It's kind of like demon element. Yeah. So again,

I think the Lajred 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 any 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 don't know, it's just really nice to know when the first one happened.

Yeah, I mean, there was plenty more after. Plenty more after this, but that was the first. 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 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 trials, 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, 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. 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? Like, what's the sort of state of the records? Well, we have this one very detailed account that we think is written by the dread of the accusations and then the trial. And then there are some kind of like 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 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 Le Dread loved to 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 I think this was like his magnus, like 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, which there had been nothing like this before. So you feel like you had a lot of imagination to create it. But this was really all that I had about the trial. It was nothing from women. Wow. Nothing from Alice. But it was very difficult. 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, people are used to death a lot more. And so does that make your 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 all human.

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 like children die really young often, do you have like 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, 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, you know, closed casket or cremation, which is, you know, 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. 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 a 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, not living in times of colonization and conflict even, but just sort of in daily life in the 1300s that there, yeah, it 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 gonna 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 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 says women menstruated because they lacked the bodily heat to quote, dry up the bad humours in them.

Humours being blood, phlegm and bile. So men are just full of dried blood. Where do they keep that? Yeah. 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 how the uterus works now. 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 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 smaller 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 were 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 or? 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 the rulers of Ireland at this time.

Both of them didn't like each other because both were powerful and they weren't particularly connected. And this becomes much more relevant later in the case because after Alice is accused, then big Irish men, as we say, big powerful Irish men kind of stand up and 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 Lepore, 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 Dredd to kind of drop the case and Le Dredd was like no this is my special case and I really like it and I put a lot of work into it and and then Arnold Lepore imprisoned Le Dredd in Kilkenny Castle and was like you can't leave until Alice's trial is dropped and Le Dredd in Kilkenny Castle was like, you can't leave until Alice's trial is dropped.

And Le Dredd was actually quite clever about this. He asked for the host to be brought into him. And then he could say that Arnold Blapoer was holding Christ as well as the bishop. And that was illegal. Oh my God. And so Arnold Lepore was then forced to release him. But actually, Le Dredd 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

like, you know, 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, like, you know, 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 am 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 just 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, basically. That'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's very clever. Unfortunately. He's clever. He's, what is the thing my dad used to say?

Cunning is a shit house 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 mad. 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 subverting the power of the church and the marital 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. Okay. 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. L'Adrede 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, genius. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm so creative. And also it's just like, isn't the husband killing enough? Like, I, well, I guess they don't have enough evidence. So they have to accuse her a bunch of like 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 husbands 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. Like 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 showing herself. Also a pipe. It's like my first thought is like, oh, he's smoking some weed. I don't know. Yeah. Well, I think they like they didn't really have the words

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 husband's 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 dread like secretly into her? Because this was like the first time a woman had been accused of having carnal relations with a demon.

A lot of it is to do with kind of like sexual wiles and like seducing men. And it's just, 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. 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.

Yeah. 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 like reached the heights that he could possibly reach and yet he can actually

experience sex or pleasure with another person. 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. 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 gonna 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 Ladred tortured her servant, who was a woman called Petronella of Meve. 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. 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.

Right. Like 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, Petronello was burned in November the 3rd, 1924. So just over 700 years ago. Yeah. So yeah, we're talking on November 6. Did you do anything a couple of 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 theater play and just lots of talks and things and unfortunately I couldn't get over there for it but it has been honoured 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 because 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 Dread by John Quinn wrote, it was not seen or heard from times past that anyone in Ireland

before her suffered the legal penalty of death for heresy. And later, Arnold Bepoer said in Alice's defense in Dublin, that, you know, 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 just, you don't want to be a country that burns women. Yeah. 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 that like I think we visualize it or are encouraged to visualize it as like 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 Petronillalla but also it was because people didn't like Ledredge. 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 called then to court in Dublin and he fled the country. He fled to England and was, you know,

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 Dredd 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 like pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable for the church to do at the time. So he told William like to get out of jail you have to do penance, which was hear a mass three times a day for a year, go on a pilgrimage, feed the poor. And time goes by, but Lodred 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, some other money change hands as well. So you get the sense that like, the dreaded is like being paid off. Yeah. But then ironically, after re-doing the roof of the cathedral, it fell down, it collapsed in 1332, presumably from the weight of this new lead roof, and destroyed the cathedral. And I just feel like there's some kind of poetic justice. And I just feel like there's some kind of poetic justice. Yeah. Because that was the cathedral was where like Léger did his like, 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 psychodrama, 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. Yeah.

Molly, thank you so much for this conversation and for spending this day with me talking about everything. Just tell us again, what is your book? Where can people find it? What else can people find of yours? Or any of that. Any recommendations you have too. It doesn't have to be...

I feel like self-promotion is hard for authors 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 I 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 read it. It's brilliant. Amazing. 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 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, could 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. You