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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe
- [00:35]
Hayden
howdy, howdy ho and welcome to Fantasy Fanfellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [00:43]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [00:47]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [00:56]
Stephen
That's right. Hey hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [01:01]
Hayden
And along the way we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [01:08]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday and you can find Fantasy Fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:15]
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- [01:45]
Megan McCardell
Has the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McCardell and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post Opinion called Reasonably Optimistic and it's an antidote to the pessimism that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.
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Howie Mandel
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- [02:11]
Megan McCardell
Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Julia Tafana is often described as one of history's most notorious female serial killers. A 17th century poisoner who allegedly helped hundreds of women murder their husbands using a colorless, tasteless toxin known as Aqua Tofana. It's a story that has proved irresistibly durable, but part true crime, part moral panic, part Gothic legend repeated and embellished for centuries. But when we look more closely, Julia begins to blur. The archival record is fragmentary, contradictory, and full of silences. Was there really a single mastermind behind a vast underground network? Or are we dealing with a story stitched together from fear, gossip, and the prosecution of. Of a group of women caught in a moment of crisis? At its heart, the Julia Tofana story is not just about poison. It's also about power, secrecy, and the narrow confines of women's lives in early modern Europe. It forces us to think about marriage as a legal trap, about violence that left no easy escape, and about why poison, slow hidden and domestic, became such a charged symbol of female transgression. The legend endures because it sits at the intersection of real suffering and exaggerated fear, where genuine acts of desperation were transformed into warnings, myths, and monsters. To ask who Julia Tofana really was is to ask how societies turn women's survival strategies into stories of terror and why those stories continue to haunt us. In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Katherine Kemp, author of A Poisonous Tale, for a conversation about violence and survival, fear and exaggeration, and about what historical fiction can do when the legend is louder than the evidence and the archive refuses to tell us everything we want to know. I'm Professor Susanne Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from History Hit. Katherine, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:56]
H
Thank you so much for inviting me here. It's great to be here.
- [05:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, I love talking to historical novelists about their work and the stories and historical evidence that underpins that, and also the sort of imaginative leap that you need to take when you're writing fiction. So let's start with some of the history. Cause that's what we're here for. Who was Julia Tofana?
- [05:21]
H
I think that's not really the question to ask. We have to ask, was there Julia Tofana? If you've read A Poisoner's Tale, you'll know that I've chosen to stick with the Legend, actually, of Giulia Tofana. And to say that, yes, she was a woman who dealt poison and mayhem to the men of 17th century Italy, but whether she actually existed, you know, in terms of, you know, real stark history, that's something that's still debated. There has been new evidence come out that perhaps she was a composite of various different poisoners and different women of the time who actually died in 1651. So Julia herself may be a composite character made up of several known and real poisoners, women who were working at the time, potentially in a circle of poisoners, certainly the five women that stood on the gallows on the 5th of July, 1659. Julia Tofana, her name was not among them and certainly not part of the trial documents. The woman said to be her daughter Gironima, or Diralama, as she is in the book, was there, but we don't have Julia as standing on that gallows, unlike my book.
- [06:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So, Mr. Mysterious. So give us a sense then of the legend that's grown up around her, which the story that you're drawing on for your novel.
- [06:39]
H
Yeah. So, I mean, the legend, you know, as we would know it today, and there are many different versions of the legend, but that. But the kind of composite legend is that Julia was born in sort of the 1620s or so to Teophania d' Adamo in Sicily, in Palermo in Sicily. And actually it was her mother who created the poison and used it, potentially without giving too much away in the book, but used it to poison her husband and Giulia's stepfather, Francesco. And the legend goes that Acrotofana, and so named because of Teophania, because in Sicily there's sort of naming rituals around, particularly around interesting parental names. So Acrotefana was based on arsenic, belladonna and lead. And it was Julia, who then fled to Naples, then to Rome, who bought the recipe and the poison with her. So that's what we're kind of dealing with when we think about the sort of the general legend of Julia and that she was based in Rome. And in Rome, she had a circle of female poisoners who were healers and midwives and women branded witches who were outsiders and rebels, basically, who worked in the city to dispense this undetectable poison to the abused wives of Rome, women who could not divorce their husbands. Divorce was inconceivable. It was only available to the very sort of upper classes. And it was called an Italian divorce. That's how they did it.
- [08:06]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Brilliant. Why is she supposed to have killed so many people. Why?
- [08:12]
H
So the legend says that somewhere between 600 and 1,000 men were butchered by Julia and her circle during the period leading up to, obviously to their trial and execution. This is true or not obviously, is another matter. But plague was raging through Rome at the time, and so there was a kind of an idea that they could hide these deaths. And what women were doing were they were going to mass and they were going to the washing streams, and they were going to the general areas that women congregate. And they were dispensing this poison, mostly for free, to women who came to them saying, you know, I'm beaten by my husband, or he's having an affair, or he wants to leave me and take everything. Or, you know, women were treated really badly. Women are treated really badly. And there was literally no kind of legal or financial route to escape. And so this is what they did. And they walked a very dark path to kind of, you know, they saw themselves as kind of female vigilantes, you know, helping women to. To flee their abusers. Whether we would look at it this way, you know, today is another matter.
- [09:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So in other words, poison was something that seemed like a credible option for women at the time if they wanted to escape a marriage which under Catholic law, was lifelong and indissoluble.
- [09:29]
H
Yes, exactly. Yeah. There was no other way for many, many women. And of course, you know, at that time, women either took the veil, they became nuns, or if they were wealthy enough, they were chosen a husband, and that was potentially much older than them. Obviously, men went through two or three wives because women died very frequently in childbirth. And so there were kind of lots of women were literally stuck with men who were very much older, who were very bad to them, and there was no other way out.
- [09:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, it's certainly the case across Europe at this time that the physical chastisement of wives, servants, and children by men was not only accepted, but also expected. So we know that many women lived with violent husbands. I mean, in my case work that I did on women in France, I came across neighbors protesting against it. They would only protest against it, though, when it happened so regularly, or the woman was beaten insensible, or the man did it when he was drunk. Those were the sort of conditions under which it became unacceptable. Which means that all of those things which are just south of that were considered absolutely fine in the society at the time. And I suppose we can assume the same for 17th century Italy.
- [10:57]
H
Yes, I think so. And I think that we wouldn't recognize daily life in in that sense, nowadays, that. That women were expected to take beatings. You know, this was part of marriage. And it was part of the fact that they were chattels. They were owned by their husbands, and before that they were owned by their fathers and brothers. So women were really seen as property, much like animals or houses or things. So disobedience of any kind was frowned upon, you know, deeply, was deeply wrong. And men were seen as being above women in the eyes of God, and they were closer to God. And so what they had to do was this kind of, you know, this sort of sense of a domestic justice. And that's why they did what they did. I imagine, you know, they had to have been pushed to extremes to be able to take this path.
- [11:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what options were available to women at the time if they wanted to get away from a violent husband?
- [11:52]
H
You ran away, you threw yourselves on the mercy of other people who may or may not want to help you. And obviously, if you ran away, then there was nothing to say that your husband wouldn't hunt you down. You were, after all, his property. Particularly if he bought you, if there was a dowry involved and he'd bought you, he would hunt you down. And some of that comes into play in the book, particularly in the Sicilian, Part of a poisonous tail. But, you know, woeba tide, if you were caught, you know, if you were hunted down and caught, you know, your life was in danger. You know, you may be beaten to the point that you would actually, you know, you would be killed as a result. So, you know, it's hard to imagine the kind of extremes that women had to go to in order to potentially save their own lives.
- [12:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm struck by the thought that running away, of course, means that you leave behind your children, which is probably unthinkable.
- [12:47]
H
And it isn't just your children. It's. It's the whole community. It's your financial well being. You know, you would have nothing and nobody. You know, you become outcast, in effect. And, you know, to us that makes no sense. We can, you know, we can always kind of maybe find a way to go. But, you know, if you were alone and unprotected and you didn't have the protection of your family name and, you know, your parentage, then what became of you?
- [13:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, and it's difficult enough for many women today, but you are absolutely right that there's just no route to safe employment or to producing a livelihood, or there is no alternative.
- [13:25]
H
And yet part of the legend is, is that Julia set up an apothecary shop, or some have it, that it was a cosmetic shop. And the circle, they did actually work together and they produced, you know, medicines and ointments and they formed their own living. And I think that's a really important part of this story, as that they actually were living as independent women. They became a huge threat to the whole idea of the church and the state. And in the end, it was the Pope himself who hunted them down because this kind of rebellion, this kind of independence and this self sufficiency, even in producing poison, could not. It could not exist.
- [14:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So Julia Tofana may have been a real person, may have been a name that was used to sort of as a kind of collective for a number of women who are acting. Tell me about the intersection between the legend and history here. What sort of evidence do we have? What kind of things have historians uncovered in recent years?
- [14:24]
H
So until 2021, there really wasn't very much. I actually started writing this book. I mean, I sort of came across Julia or the Legend of Julia about 10 years ago, and I decided to write a nonfiction piece that's the book was meant to be. And then of course, very quickly sort of hit a point of realizing that there was nothing in the archives. And then in 2021, an academic called Craig Monson delved into the Inquisition, the hidden part of the Vatican's archives, and he found some of the trial documents. And there are hundreds and hundreds of pages of trial documents that he uncovered. And thank goodness, at first it seemed that it sort of. It threw out the story and the legend of Julia because she wasn't there. She wasn't there on the paper. And in some ways it was at once kind of, you know, unsettling and also gave me the kind of creative space to start working with Julia as my character and as my composite of women of that time. But, you know, we. We see, you know, the lengths that the notary went to record the transcripts from the trial was. Was extraordinary. And, you know, we see women talking to each other and they were. That they were interrogated in groups so that we can see the dynamics between them and we can hear the kinds of phrases that would have been said. We can hear the kind of accusations of abuse that they suffered. And it's really a window into an extraordinary part of Italian history. And of course, the Pope, he said, you know, Pope Alessandro VII actually ordered that the transcripts be hidden and that they're not accessed because it was such a kind of a scandalous part of the past.
- [16:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Why did they need to be hidden. Hidden. Why were the archives sealed up?
- [16:11]
H
I think the, I mean there was, there were various versions. I mean, the Pope himself didn't want the recipe getting out.
- [16:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The recipe for Aqua Tofana.
- [16:19]
H
The recipe for Aqua Tofana, yeah. He didn't want to know how people were being poisoned, how men were being poisoned. At the time. Posters were kind of put up around Rome with the sort of remedy for it when the women were kind of captured to sort of, to make everyone sort of, you know, calm down and for reassurance because this was a huge, as you said, a moral panic and a physical panic. Men literally didn't know, know if there were drops of arsenic in their, in their broth or in their wine. So we had posters going up with lemon and vinegar being a kind of antidote. I don't know how much help that would be against arsenic. But yeah, the Pope ordered that they were hidden, I think as much because it had caused a huge scandal across both Italy and Europe. And it was a case of burying something that was deeply unpleasant, deeply rebellious. These women had, they had challenged the role of men in society. They'd challeng the authority of men and that could not happen.
- [17:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How had suspicion been raised in the first place about these women's activities?
- [17:21]
H
It came down to, it was a woman confessing to her priest that she had got something from these saviors of women, that's what they were called, the circle of poisoners. She'd got a vial of poison from them and she had put it into her husband's soup and then changed her mind and dramatically kind of knocked the soup off the table away from him, confessed to him. He obviously thought he beat her, obviously forced her to confess to her priest. And, and obviously they thought, you don't know if this is a one off or whatever. But over the next sort of weeks and months, more and more women started confessing to their priests that they were doing the same thing or they had done the same thing. Plague was still raging. There were lots of bodies in the morgues. There seemed to be an awful lot of men. And the legend also said that the corpses of the men actually looked more vivid and healthier than when they were alive. So there was this whole kind of legend around them looking sort of ruddy faced and more alive, even though they're dead. So there were all these things happening. And then suddenly the Pope realized that the streets of Rome were filled with widows, particularly young widows.
- [18:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Given that so many women confessed, how important was the role of torture in this Trial
- [18:41]
H
foreign.
- [18:47]
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- [19:16]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan. Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [19:24]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [19:28]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [19:37]
Stephen
That's right.
- [19:37]
Fin AI Advertiser
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Stephen
Hei. So each week, you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [19:42]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [19:49]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
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- [21:13]
H
Again, that's. That's something that's debated. Some members of Circle of Poisons were tortured and some weren't. There was an idea that it would make a mockery, that because these women were witches, it would make a mockery trying to torture them because they would withstand it and not. Not talk. And I believe that Jeronima or Diralama Spanner did exactly that. She was tortured and didn't say anything. So they decided that actually, and you had to have a confession to be able to be executed. And there's a suggestion that the women knew this and that. So they were with. They were withstanding this terrible torture. I mean, they were on the strappado. They had all sorts of horrible things done to them. And the Pope actually did a special decree saying, actually, you don't need to be tortured, we're just going to execute you anyway. And, you know, he kind of bypass the law because, you know, like witchcraft and poison, this was both a civil and a church matter. You know, the sort of. Both sides of the kind of the legal and the. Both the secular and the religious side of the courts came together. They were heretics, and that was both, you know, a sin and a crime. So when it was decided that they were going to be executed, they were told and it went from there, and within a day they were dead.
- [22:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting, that parallel with witchcraft, because as you say, you either needed to confess or there needed to be two eyewitnesses to a crime in order to have a conviction. And so, like witchcraft, there's this sense that you couldn't possibly have eyewitnesses to this secret crime, and therefore, that's why you need the confession. But the parallel between witchcraft and poisoning as being women's crimes, therefore secret crimes, something that isn't carried out in. In public, but hidden away. Striking.
- [23:02]
H
Absolutely. And it's something that we consider to be a female crime. And actually, I don't think the statistics bear that out. I think that poisoning, you know, across history is actually pretty much 50, 50 with men and women. But it. Absolutely. Particularly in Italy. At the time, Italy was seen as the kind of, you know, the place to go and buy poison. You know, there were experts and, you know, women did. Women did this in secret. And actually, what other choice did they have? They didn't have access to run a sword through a man or do any of the things that they might have done otherwise. And their lives were spent in the shadows. You know, they were in the domestic Sphere. You know, this is where they were told to be and this is where they were. They were skilled with herbs because most women were the kind of medics in a household. They had to know. They had to have their books of secrets, you know, in order to, you know, have recipes to support and nurture, you know, their families. So it's a really small step from that point to administering something that is perhaps not so healthy.
- [24:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what happened to this group of alleged poisoners in 1659?
- [24:05]
H
I think there's no doubt that there were five women who were administering poison. I mean, and I don't think it was them alone. You know, I think there were plenty of poisoners active in the time. I think the fact that they were a circle of female poisoners is what caught the public's imagination. And the great fear of men, of course, at the time, was that, you know, women would upend them and that they would have this kind of terrible death at their hands and they would not know anything about it. There was nothing they could do to control it. So, I mean, the likelihood is that the five women named in the transcripts, and they were Giovanna de Grande, Maria Spinola Laura Chris Baldi, Giranima Spanner, who I've called Girolamo in the book. And who else haven't I said? Grazioza Farina. That's right. Those five women were. They were found guilty of being witches and poisoners, and they were executed at the gallows on July 5, 1659.
- [24:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, dialing back, if these women absolutely existed, and if in the legendary version, Julia Tofana is the kind of the face of female poisoners at the time, how would women have known about such female expertise? How would they have known how to get their hands on poison?
- [25:18]
H
I think word of mouth is the main thing here, that women talked about their life and their situation in the few places outside of the home that they could meet and talk to together. So that was mass. That was the washing stream. That was the market for most women. Those were really the only areas that they could, you know, talk about their life, talk about their woes. You know, they could exchange horror stories about what was going on with them. And obviously, women, you can't really hide bruising. You know, if women were being beaten, they would. They would show the kind of effects of what was going on. And so. And so certainly Graziazza Farina would go around each of the churches and actually sort of put the word out, you know, that this poison was being made, that Julia had come over from Sicily, that she'd worked in Naples. And Julia's reputation, there was a reputation for a female poisoner at the time. And there is a diarist who says that, who was, you know, a contemporary diarist who said that Julia arrived with her daughter Girolamo into Rome. So there was this. The story was circulating then whether Julia was. Was a person in her own right or a composite, that her legend was already there in the 17th century. And so word of mouth was. Exactly. There was no other way to get word out. But if you've got servants talking to other servants, you've got women talking to other women as they're praying, men very often didn't like their wives going to Mass, even though obviously it was a religious kind of. You know, it's something that you had to do because they. They knew that they would be able to speak independently and away from their control, you know, to other women.
- [26:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interest, isn't it, the power of the tongue. James C Scott called it the hidden transcripts of power, which I always found a very powerful idea in itself, that you've got the kind of dominant narrative of who's in charge and then underneath, you've got the rumors, the gossip, the stories that circulate, the satire, the mockery, the laughter. All of that is the hidden transcript. And I mean, that's exactly what's going on here. Isn't.
- [27:21]
H
Absolutely is. And it's all the things that you cannot control. You can have your laws, you can have all your money, you can have control of every part of the state and church, but you cannot control what women say to each other behind their hands. And that's what they hated about it.
- [27:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do we have any idea what kind of women relied on these networks? I mean, is it tied to social status or wealth? Would anybody be able to find.
- [27:47]
H
Yeah, the interesting. When I first started researching, I assumed it would be women from working classes who were sort of on the ground, you know, living and working in the kind of the. The cobbled sort of alleyways around old Rome. But actually it extended all the way through every single class. Because the power of the gossip and the power of these transcripts meant that if you needed help, you. You could find somebody who knew to pass you to. Somebody who knew to pass you to Julia. We have a duchess involved, you know, Aldebrandini, you know, and she actually poisoned her. I mean, well, the story is that she poisoned her much older duke husband, and it was at that point that the Pope got really. Got involved on a personal level. Because obviously, you cannot have a duke being poisoned in full view of everybody. But, I mean, that was. Obviously, they can't prove any of it, and it would be so interesting to know if that was. Was if that was actually true. But that's what was considered. That she had actually through a renegade priest who was supplying the white arsenic to Julia, that it was through the priest who was her confessor, and he put her in touch with Julia, and so she. She bought the poison and killed off her duke.
- [29:08]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident love all things Sanderson.
- [29:16]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [29:20]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [29:28]
Stephen
That's right.
- [29:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hey.
- [29:29]
Stephen
Hey. So each week, you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [29:33]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [29:41]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy Fan fellows wherever you get your podcasts.
- [29:48]
Megan McCardell
Has the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McCardell, and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post Opinion called Reasonably Optimistic. And it's an antidote to the pessimism that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday, I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.
- [30:04]
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Howie Mandel
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Megan McCardell
Join me Wednesdays on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [30:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So, Catherine, why do you think if Julia Tana was not a single person, that the story has become of a single entity? And maybe you can address this in part through your own process of deciding to make her into one woman?
- [30:51]
H
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think she's a really seductive idea and a really seductive figure, and particularly even as a contemporary woman today and with everything that's going on in the world that we live in and, you know, the continual quest for equality, really across, across, globally, across the world, I think that she as a kind of rebel and outcast, you know, creating her as a single character Just absolutely felt like it was bringing. It was bringing something to life. That's. That. That was the process of writing. It was about finding this voice that had been buried by history and was lost in the shadows of history. And like you say, she was the poster girl, you know, for this whole behavior, you know, supplying poison to women across the city. The time, as you said, you know, the legend existed in the 17th century. You know, Julia Tofana was a name that people recognized then, though they did actually call in Rome, certainly they called the poison Aqueta, or Little Water rather than Aqua Tofana. That's something that's kind of sprung up over the years since then.
- [31:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The story did become quite famous quite quickly over, not just in Rome or even, you know, in Sicily. It stretches and becomes international. Why and how?
- [32:10]
H
I mean, I think that we're always intrigued by women who take life into their own hands. We're always intrigued by women who forge their own destiny, however dark it is. We're intrigued by true crime and particularly when it comes to poisoning the fact that these women were working together, creating what they created. You know, we have to keep asking whether they were murderers or whether they were actually, you know, the saviors of women, whether they were actually providing a kind of service to women. Because we recognize what it's like to have no choices, even though we can. Cannot imagine what they dealt with. Because all of them had a route to getting there. They all had terrible experiences with husbands and with their lives and with poverty and with losing children. And, you know, these women didn't come into this, you know, whole and complete. You know, they'd been abused and they'd been punished and they'd been outcast, made outcast by the very society that they were sublime to.
- [33:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's talk about the process of. Of taking a historical story and making it into a novel. I'm always fascinated by this because a novelist's prerogative is, of course, to make things up. And yet in writing a novel about history, you take on yourself a set of conventions or ideas or realities about the past that you need to speak to. So how important is it to you to make your work historically accurate? Or is that a sort of the. Not the right yardstick to be using when it comes to novels?
- [33:44]
H
Certainly for me, there's a continual kind of push and pull between the facts that we have or that we can contend with and the point where, as a novelist, you go to work in terms of fiction. And I think that that's a really interesting push and Pull process through the book. It took me a long time to actually take on Julia as my character and the story as my story, because I wanted everything to be historically accurate. And so I just did. I mean, a huge amount of research. And in the end there's a point where you have to walk away from the facts and build your own story and build the world that the characters inhabit. And I mean, I love the research part of it and I love knowing what my characters will smell or taste or see or feel or hear in that world. You know, I need a kind of sensory experience of them to be able to kind of walk them through it. But at that point, and it's as Hilary Mantel said, that it's the gap where novelists go to work that, you know, it was actually finding that there was so little information on this woman was actually the point at which the novel could be born, in effect. But I think I really like working from a non fiction route because I have a past with nonfiction. You know, I've been ghost writing nonfiction for a long time now and you know, it feels a very comfortable place to go from, you know, know some kind of seed of the facts and, you know, and then sort of build a story from that point.
- [35:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It seems to me that perhaps the most challenging thing might be as it is for a historian trying to understand the mindset, the worldview, the montalite of the person that you're investigating or writing about in the past. Because there's so much that's alien and foreign about what was going through their minds. And I think where I found some works of historical fiction disappointing has been where I felt like I'm just dealing with 21st century women who've been plonked down in the early modern period. How do you get around that?
- [35:50]
H
To an extent, I don't know if you can.
- [35:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Of course, yes, you're saying the same thing as historians say, it's subjective history.
- [35:56]
H
It's really subjective. And I think that really it's a case of feeling your way into it as much as possible and learning as much as possible about the world that they live in. And we can never take ourselves away out of that equation. You know, writing it felt like a kind of channeling. And you know, that might sound a bit woo woo, but it felt like a channeling. I could hear her voice in my head and at the same time I'm aware it's coming through me. And I'm a 21st century woman and all of my parking, all of my kind of my mindset and my worldview and my values is going to be really difficult. And so I think that all we can do is learn as much as we can about the times that we're dealing with. And I think that dialogue can be really, really interesting in terms of how we position our mindsets, because particularly when you've got the trial records, hearing the voices and seeing the words that they've written and seeing the way that they're speaking is a really, really valuable insight into, you know, how people thought and how they beh and how they were back then. But I totally acknowledge that there's nothing that I can do about being a woman writing today.
- [37:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's very interesting and very honest. I think also it's true that the time on task as a headmaster, I used to say, is kind of crucial because the time you spend with those documents helps you into that voice. It means that you can hear when something sounds awry. For me, as a historian, I'm like, no, wait a second. They don't write like that, they don't speak like that, kind of channel that. And that just takes absorption. You just need to spend time soaking it all up, don't you? If you're going to be able to, then squeeze it out.
- [37:36]
H
I think so. And I think you almost have to feel that you're the character. Walking in that environment and obviously going to all the places that you're writing about is really, really important. I, you know, I know that some people research on the Internet and write that way, but for me, it's really important to. To follow in their footsteps and to actually be there. And again, I'm still there in a 21st century sense. But I think certainly with places like Italy, you can kind of transport yourself a little bit back to the past. You know, there is a really, a kind of a visceral sense of history, you know, walking through Rome.
- [38:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Richard Holmes calls it footprint research when he comes to his biographies. And I agree. I think it's absolutely vital. And would it be fair to say that there is a sense of calling in your writing, that there's something you're trying to do that you're motivated by? I guess I'm asking why you do what you do.
- [38:34]
H
I think so. And I think it's been nudging. I think it's a nudging, actually, maybe more than a calling. Writing historical fiction has been something I've wanted to do since the age of 11. I've always been fascinated by. By women in history, actually, and it started with Catherine de Medici and Went all the way through and we talked about various obsessions with Amberlynn, et cetera. And there's something about women's lives and women's history that. That nudges at me constantly. And so when Julia and I'd been writing non fiction for a long time before that I was a journalist, there was a whole kind of writing world, but that was the part that was missing and. And I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated by the past and I feel that part of me is still sort of back there, possibly in the 17th century, maybe. But yes, it's very much a calling and it has to be because we become obsessional about these characters and about the lives they led. You know, it's not something that you do. I mean, certainly for me Anyway, on a 9 to 5 basis, it's a kind of all or nothing thing. You walk into their world, world, and you have to stay there until the story's done. So, yeah, very much a channeling, actually,
- [39:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I would say Your next book is about the Icelandic witch trials. Tell me about that and how you've made the leap from 17th century Italy to Iceland.
- [39:59]
H
Oh, it was such a. It was a tough leap to make, I think. I get so absorbed in the worlds that I'm creating that it's quite difficult to come out and even think about. I felt hollowed out at the end of a poisonous tale and to think about coming up with another book and another story. And then Theodore Jonsir walked onto my computer and I started looking into a notorious witch trial in Iceland in the West Fjords, the Kirkley Bull Affair. And you know, as you'll know, you know, in Iceland it was men who were accused of being witches because they had the learning. You know, it was seen as a very kind of learned thing to be. And, you know, witchcraft was very much a part of. Part of everyday life. And then things change. The Protestant Reformation kind of swept through Europe. We know about all the kind of early modern witch trials that were happening across Europe at the time, and they nudged into Iceland as well. And there was. There were only, I think in the whole. In the whole of the Icelandic witch trials, there was only one woman burnt for witchcraft. It was mostly men. But anyway, okay, I found. I found the story and, you know, creating that world was extraordinary. You know, witchcraft in 17th century Iceland. I mean, I actually can't think of anything better.
- [41:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you so much for taking us into your process into thinking about writing historical fiction and into the world of Julia Tofana, if she indeed existed. Catherine Kemp author of A Poisonous Tale. Thank you so much.
- [41:28]
H
Thank you, Susannah.
- [41:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History Hit.
- [42:08]
Hayden
Howdy, howdy ho. And welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
- [42:15]
Stephen
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [42:19]
Hayden
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy and epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [42:28]
Stephen
That's right.
- [42:29]
H
Hey.
- [42:29]
Stephen
Hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [42:33]
Hayden
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
- [42:40]
Stephen
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find fantasy fan fellows wherever you get your podcasts.
- [42:47]
Howie Mandel
Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie do It Gaming team take on Gilly the King and Wallow. Two six seven million dollars gaming in an epic global gaming league video game showdown. Four rounds, multiple games, one winner, plus a halftime performance by multi platinum artist Travy McCoy. Watch all the action and see who wins and advances to the championship match against Neo right now@globalgamingleague.com that's globalgamingleague.com everybody. Games.