Alice Kyteler and the First Witchcraft Trial in Ireland with Molly Aitken

Summary

You're Wrong About: Alice Kyteler and the First Witchcraft Trial in Ireland

Host: Sarah Marshall
Guest: Molly Aitken, Author of "Bright Eye Burn"
Release Date: January 30, 2025

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Introduction

In this riveting episode of You're Wrong About, host Sarah Marshall delves deep into the enigmatic story of Alice Kyteler, the first woman accused of witchcraft in Ireland. Joined by Molly Aitken, author of the novel Bright Eye Burn, the conversation navigates the murky waters of medieval witch trials, gender dynamics, and the enduring legacy of misogyny. This episode not only unpacks the historical events surrounding Alice Kyteler but also draws poignant parallels to contemporary issues surrounding witch hunts and the persecution of women.

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The Life of Alice Kyteler

Alice Kyteler emerges from history as a wealthy and influential woman in medieval Ireland. Born into a family of merchants and moneylenders, Alice leveraged her stature by marrying four times, each time increasing her wealth and influence. Molly Aitken highlights, “Every time one of her husbands died, she became much richer. So the landscape at that time in Ireland... she kind of flipped it somehow and found her way with it” (05:00).

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The Witchcraft Trial

The trial of Alice Kyteler stands as a landmark event in Irish history, marking the first recorded case of witchcraft prosecution in the country. It unfolded in a period marked by tension between the native Gaelic population and the Anglo-Norman settlers. As tensions simmered, Alice's accumulation of wealth through successive marriages aroused suspicion and envy, particularly among her stepchildren who were marginalized by her gains.

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Charges Against Alice Kyteler

Molly Aitken outlines the seven grotesque charges leveled against Alice, all stemming from the accusations orchestrated by Bishop La Dread:

1. Denying Christ’s Power: Alice was accused of being a heretic who did not attend mass, undermining the church’s authority.
2. Animal Sacrifices: She allegedly sacrificed living animals to demons, scattering their remains at crossroads, symbolic liminal spaces.
3. Demonic Guidance: Alice was said to seek advice from demons on witchcraft practices.
4. Carnal Relations with Demons: This unprecedented charge accused her of sexual relations with a demon named Robin Artisan.
5. Nocturnal Meetings: She was implicated in holding unauthorized nightly gatherings in the church.
6. Potion Mixology: Using the skull of a robber and other macabre ingredients, Alice was accused of concocting potions to corrupt her husbands.
7. Murder for Wealth: The most tangible charge was that she poisoned her husbands to secure her and her son's financial future.

A notable quote from Molly summarizes the fantastical nature of these charges: “They were wildly fantastical... her, like, really the prime one” (25:00).

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The Accuser: Bishop La Dread

Bishop La Dread, a pivotal figure in Alice's downfall, brought a fervent zeal to his accusations. His motivations appear intertwined with personal animosities and a broader agenda to exert church authority. Molly remarks, “He was really creative, almost poetic in his descriptions... it feels like a fantasy” (51:08). La Dread’s manipulative tactics and eventual downfall, marked by the collapse of the cathedral he helped renovate, underscore the volatile interplay between ecclesiastical power and personal vendettas.

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Gender Dynamics and Misogyny

The trial of Alice Kyteler is deeply rooted in misogyny. Alice, a powerful and wealthy woman, became a target in a society that sought to suppress female autonomy and control over property. Molly observes, “The way she is remembered in Ireland still has that flavor of misogyny” (24:37). The charges, particularly those involving her sexuality, reflect societal fears and the weaponization of witchcraft accusations to subjugate women.

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Historical Context: Church and Witchcraft

During Alice's time, the Church's stance on witchcraft was transitioning. Initially viewing witchcraft as benign unless it involved maleficium—intent to cause harm—the Church under leaders like the Pope in Avignon began to conflate all witchcraft with heresy. This shift provided the theological backing necessary for trials like Alice's. Molly explains, “They decided that all witchcraft was a heresy” (11:08).

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Aftermath of the Trial

Alice Kyteler managed to escape the immediate consequences of the trial by fleeing to Dublin with her servant’s daughter. However, her son, William Outlaw, faced imprisonment and was coerced into penance. The execution of her servant, Petronella, marked a grim milestone as the first recorded execution for witchcraft in Ireland. Despite Alice's escape, the trial set a precedent that influenced subsequent witch hunts across Europe.

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Modern Reflections and Parallels

Sarah Marshall draws compelling connections between Alice Kyteler's trial and contemporary "witch hunts," highlighting how accusations often serve to dehumanize and control women. “It feels like a way to tarnish somebody's name in a way that can't be disproven” (14:41). The episode underscores the persistent use of witchcraft accusations as a tool for persecution, reflecting ongoing struggles against misogyny and the suppression of female agency.

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Conclusion

You're Wrong About offers an insightful exploration of Alice Kyteler's trial, shedding light on the historical underpinnings of witch hunts and their enduring implications. Through the expert analysis of Molly Aitken, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of how fear, power, and misogyny converge to shape narratives that condemn women unjustly. This episode serves as both a historical lesson and a cautionary tale about the mechanisms of persecution that persist to this day.

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Notable Quotes

• Sarah Marshall: “This is an episode for you if you are a witchy person, if you are supportive of the witches in your life...” 00:01

• Molly Aitken: “She's one of the few women who we actually do talk about, and it's a very, like, negative portrayal.” 05:15

• Molly Aitken: “...she was the prime one. They were just marginally involved.” 24:37

• Molly Aitken: “He was really creative, almost poetic in his descriptions... it feels like a fantasy.” 51:08

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Further Information

Books Mentioned:

• Bright Eye Burn by Molly Aitken
• The Island Child by Molly Aitken
• Fires of Sex in the Middle Ages by Katherine Harvey (Recommended by Molly Aitken)

Additional Resources:

Listeners are encouraged to explore Molly Aitken's works available in bookstores and check out her research recommendations for a deeper understanding of medieval witchcraft and gender dynamics.

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Credits:

• Guest: Molly Aitken
• Editing Help: Taj Easton
• Producer: Carolyn Kendrick

Thank you to Molly Aitken for sharing her expertise and to all who continue to support You're Wrong About. Join us in two weeks for another enlightening episode.

Transcript

[Sarah Marshall]

Dear Beelzebub, 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 a 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 are 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, housewifery 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, History Lesson, 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 YA 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.

[Molly Aitken]

Hello. Thank you for having me.

[Sarah Marshall]

Thank you so much for being here.

[Molly Aitken]

It is a pleasure.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yes, yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's worth knowing why people sound the way they do. I tend to suspect that you're going to tell me a story that is going to be relevant to some ongoing trends that we're thinking about today. Maybe.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

There are characters in this story which are definitely, let's say, repeated somewhat in history.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 who we're talking about today.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. So I have a book out, Bright I Burn, 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 schoolgirls. And that was because she was accused of killing her four husbands.

[Sarah Marshall]

Is it fair to say that she's a figure who, like, kids are afraid of, or is she more defanged than that?

[Molly Aitken]

Do you know what? I don't think that she's well enough known.

[Sarah Marshall]

Interesting.

[Molly Aitken]

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's a very, like, negative portrayal. I think the children who do know about her are scared, like me.

[Sarah Marshall]

Were you scared of her as a kid or did it just. Did it creep you out? I was okay.

[Molly Aitken]

And then when I was older, I was like, this is intriguing. I had just gotten 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. They were money lenders, so bankers of the day. And she just kept marrying these men who were also moneylenders. And they had so much money. So much money. And there's something in that. In that, like, 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, and I wonder, would it make 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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. Just to, like, set the scene. It was, like, Catholic Ireland, Irish school, quite traditional. 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 Kitner, who was the first woman, she said, who was, like, a known witch. A known witch in Ireland.

[Sarah Marshall]

The other ones had flown under the radar till then. Yeah, literally.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. There was definitely some before, but we didn't have any proof about it. You know what I mean?

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay. Huh.

[Molly Aitken]

And she, like. She painted her as this old hag, like, that way that you think of, which is, like, very stereotypical.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

Which is an imagery that has been created much later. But anyway.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Molly Aitken]

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 also a very terrifying teacher.

[Sarah Marshall]

Who.

[Molly Aitken]

Helped a lot. And I think I kind of conflated the two.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. Because you're getting, like, a visual demonstration that you can merge with the story.

[Molly Aitken]

Exactly. Those are the best storytellers.

[Sarah Marshall]

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?

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. So where are we and what's going on?

[Molly Aitken]

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 like very much, you know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right, yeah. If you're cutting a lot of people out of a lot of money, then.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, that's when they start to care.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Feels risky.

[Molly Aitken]

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, like, went. 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 to give to their 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 maleficium was like the intent to do harm to others. But then this changed.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Molly Aitken]

What happened was that they decided that all witchcraft was a crime, all witchcraft was heresy.

[Sarah Marshall]

Can I ask, like, how long had the Church been around and was there 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.

[Molly Aitken]

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 this ship sunk. And in the earliest cases, I think the earliest one is around 10, 1090, the church was just like, their vibe was like, this is annoying. Like, why are you bringing this to us? Like, we don't care about witchcraft.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. They're like, we have other stuff to do, whatever that is.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Molly Aitken]

To me, this just seems like a guy who was, like, weirdly nervous about.

[Sarah Marshall]

Women, but sure oh, no. If you get someone into the highest office who's weirdly nervous about women, something could occur.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. Is it feeling familiar? The new bishop who came to Kilkenny 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. 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?

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, I have guesses. Is it boy? Boy?

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. I mean, we don't know. We can only guess at it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, right. Yeah. Because we can't ask these people.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, it's a nice area.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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. A 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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Because it's all you can do to put them in the correct dehumanization bucket, I guess.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. It dehumanizes them. And also you don't need any real factual evidence.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Molly Aitken]

It's like throwing a slur at them. Because how do you prove witchcraft or Satan? Like there's no proof, really.

[Sarah Marshall]

How do you prove a negative in this case?

[Molly Aitken]

Like you.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 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.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love to think that this is a time traveler who just came back wearing, like, 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?

[Molly Aitken]

Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Are people being burned at the stake over this?

[Molly Aitken]

Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

So it's using sort of like accusations and circumstantial evidence to kind of prove that somebody needs to be burned alive.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Doesn't seem good.

[Molly Aitken]

Historians believe that the king of France 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 La dread. Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay. J.K. rowling.

[Molly Aitken]

It seems like one that you might want to change. Like.

[Sarah Marshall]

I know, yeah. You don't want people to see coming from that far away. But then also, you know, you might be like, well, this guy's name is Ladret. He must be really even handed with a name like that, you know, he'd really try and work against it.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Not in this case, no.

[Molly Aitken]

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 La Dread. 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. Huh.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, that's fine. Just find a proper outlet for it.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Make it your work, you know, just like, get some safe equipment and do it in your free time. In your free time.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, when you're a stake, everything looks like a witch.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And surprisingly, like, people didn't like him for it. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

[Sarah Marshall]

Hmm. I'm excited to get to that part. Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Huh.

[Molly Aitken]

And not officially, anyway, that we have, like, records for.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Molly Aitken]

There's, like, a couple of other cases, but nothing on the scale of this one.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, and where are the other cases? Are they in. In Europe?

[Molly Aitken]

Yes, they're all in Europe.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, has it occurred to these People that there's a lot of weather where they live.

[Molly Aitken]

So there were cases before, but it wasn't the hot, cool thing yet. Like, that would take off much later.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. It's like, you know, we have these songs that are kind of. You can hear the beginnings of rock and roll.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

But it's not Buddy Holly, you know.

[Molly Aitken]

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 Kittler'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 a, 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 step kids, 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Do you think they felt they need to bring witchcraft into the mix in order to get someone to take it seriously?

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, I think so. Because there was no way to really prove murder. There was no toxicology reports. 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 I find that field very interesting. No, wait. But to my understanding, and I think this is based on two books which I've read in the past. One is Women who Kill, by a writer, I think, named Ann Jones, and one is Lady Killers by Tori Telfer. I think both of them get into this concept of there was this long period where you couldn't really test if someone had died because they had been poisoned. And especially a period 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?

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I am also fascinated by husband poisoning.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, it's just so interesting.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes.

[Molly Aitken]

Which is really, really messed up.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. It seems like one of the worst ways to die, in fact, because it's.

[Sarah Marshall]

Long drawn out, it's painful, it's psychologically manipulative. Which you always like to avoid, ideally.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. Yeah. And it takes a certain type of person to have the stamina.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

To poison someone like this like it does.

[Sarah Marshall]

Because it's a. Yeah. And it is like. And then if you change your mind, then it's too late. I would assume.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

There had to have been some women throughout history who like started poisoning their husbands and then were like, oh, never mind. And. And then it was kissed. He just never knew why he. Yeah. And it was just that, you know, just that weird ailment that one time.

[Molly Aitken]

Absolutely. Yeah. With Alice Kittler specifically, we don't know 100% if she killed all her husbands. Now it does seem quite likely that she was poisoning her last husband.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Molly Aitken]

But there's no way to know for sure. But my, my interpretation is that she probably did.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 yeah. You know, we still deserve to know what happened.

[Molly Aitken]

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. Yeah. But, yes, I can tell you what the charges were that were laid against her, if you like.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Molly Aitken]

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 Ladred 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. She was 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, you know. Terrible.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's just insecure behavior on the part of the church to be so bothered by that.

[Molly Aitken]

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 crossroads is like that liminal space.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And I'm sure people were.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

So it's about thought crime, I guess, is what that shows.

[Molly Aitken]

Three is asking demons for advice on witchcraft. I'm guessing maybe Alice didn't know enough, so she needs some help.

[Sarah Marshall]

Dear Beelzebub, I just can't get my cauldron to stop rusting. Every time I wash it is cast iron for me. Signed Alice.

[Molly Aitken]

Exactly. I meant number four, having carnal relations with a demon.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Molly Aitken]

Called Robin Artisan or Robin Son of Art. So we're getting very specific here.

[Sarah Marshall]

Robin son of Art.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Specifically, cats have barbed penises. That can't be fun. I don't know why that's my response.

[Molly Aitken]

That's horrendous. Yeah. Or he would take the form of an Ethiopian.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my gosh.

[Molly Aitken]

You know, there's racism within that, of course.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. Yeah, they're like, it's terrible. He turns into an animal or. Yeah, someone from Ethiopia. No.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

La dread La dread the worst will a dread you.

[Molly Aitken]

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, demons were like, whatever. But people within medieval society would have heard about demons and these types of things happening in other places.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

You know, the way gossip spread back then, and so. And so it would feel like a real threat, this kind of, like, demon element.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

So, again, I think Ladred 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

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. I never thought about it. And now I'm. I don't know. It's just really nice to know when the first one happened.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. I mean, there was plenty more after. Plenty more after. Yeah, that was the first.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, it is, it is. And 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

As it is today to so many men.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, true, true.

[Sarah Marshall]

And yet I can't imagine anyone who could be better at it, you know, because you certainly have had time to learn exactly what to do.

[Molly Aitken]

Exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 wick 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. 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 postmenopausal senior citizens, you don't see that in a lot of fictional depictions. And we usually now are. You know, 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?

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. 100%. And it's been going on for 700 years, at least.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Boy. Well, how much do we know about this trial? Like, what's the sort of state of the records?

[Molly Aitken]

Well, we have this one very detailed account that we think is written by Ladret 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 and 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 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.

[Molly Aitken]

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 Ledred loved to write. 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. And I think this was like his Magnus, like his, his great show.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

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 he had a lot of imagination to create it. But this was really all that I had about the trial. It was nothing from women.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow.

[Molly Aitken]

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, you know, 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 always human. And 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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, 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.

[Molly Aitken]

No.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like, I don't think that we need to be eating like them or doing very many things like them. But yes, 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 just in raising livestock. There's a lot of uncontrollable stuff and things go wrong. 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. 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.

[Molly Aitken]

They absolutely didn't feel that way about it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

Because if they did, I don't think they could go on as well.

[Sarah Marshall]

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. 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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 going to Be good for all of us.

[Molly Aitken]

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, I didn't. Yeah, it's something that is always present for us, even now. And that's, 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

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 dry up the bad humours in them. Humors being blood, phlegm and bile.

[Sarah Marshall]

So men are just full of dried blood. Where do they keep that? Yeah, use your head.

[Molly Aitken]

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?

[Sarah Marshall]

All right, Yeah, I love that. They're just kind of like, it's. This is the thing I thought of today and it's. And it's how the uterus works now. I thought of it and I'm pretty sure that's it. Yeah, we haven't come up with dissection yet, so.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, yeah. And that again, I'm just thinking now, like, goes back to things that women did for themselves. But also witches in the 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Molly Aitken]

And, you know, they were probably a lot smarter 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 we're like giving people quite simple cures for things. But they could also give an abortion or give you poison to poison your husband.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, so it's the trial of the century.

[Molly Aitken]

Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

The 14th century.

[Molly Aitken]

Yes. 1324.

[Sarah Marshall]

Reading this guy's record of his own prosecution slash persecution, like, does he feel that he did a really good job or.

[Molly Aitken]

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 like the rulers of Ireland at this time. And both of them didn't like each other because both were powerful and they weren't particularly connected. And this becomes like much more relevant later in the case because after Alice is accused, then big Irish men, 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 the Poer 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 Ladred to kind of drop the case. And Ladred was like, no, this is my special case and I really like it. I put a lot of work into it. And then Arnold Le Poer imprisoned Ladred in Kilkenny Castle and was like, you can't leave until Alice's trial is dropped. And Ladred was actually quite clever about this. He asked for the host to be brought into him. And then he could say that Arnold Lapoer was holding Christ as well as the bishop. And that was illegal.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Molly Aitken]

And so Arnold Le Poer was then forced to release him. But actually La 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. You've cut the phone line to God until you can have your way. Wow.

[Molly Aitken]

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'm sure her stepchildren, when they brought the case to the bishop, would have had no idea where it would lead.

[Sarah Marshall]

They had no idea it was exactly what he was looking for.

[Molly Aitken]

Exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

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?

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Basically, that's what I've always wanted.

[Molly Aitken]

So I think it was, like, actually better quality what you were getting in your childhood. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 as a shithouse rat.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow.

[Molly Aitken]

I actually didn't tell you all of the accusations.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Molly Aitken]

They get more mad. They get 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Fascinating.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

First of all, that can't have been an existing stack. Shoot. 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 know, you're going to get the easiest thing available. And the fingernails of dead people is not that easy.

[Molly Aitken]

No.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like, Ina Garten would say, like, live fingernails are fine, probably.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, yeah. It does feel like a lot of effort.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Ledred, 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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, yeah. It all has the feel of someone who's just like plucking things from the air and being like, oh, genius. Okay.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, 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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, 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 husband to make money for herself and her son.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. The one recognizable motive, really.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. And it was said in the kind of 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 husband, like, Right. They were dying anyway.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

An element of the case that I loved was that Alice was said to have had a pipe and ointment beside her bed. And this has been interpreted as a dildo and lube.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, no.

[Molly Aitken]

How dare a 6, 60 year old woman be enjoying herself.

[Sarah Marshall]

Also a pipe. It's like my first thought is like smoking some weed. I don't know.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, well, I think they, like, they didn't really have the words for it at that time.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. Yeah. Gosh, it is just. Yeah, it's like, the most we can say is that she perhaps killed a quarter of her husbands. It's really not bad.

[Molly Aitken]

But, yeah, there does seem to be this, like, general horror about an older woman's sexuality. Like, it's very sexually focused.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

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, you know, sexual wiles and, like, seducing men. And it's just. It's interesting that that is his focus in this case.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. What do you make of that? I know everything we can do is speculate, but what is your speculation?

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

But for 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Classic case.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. So he had, like, reached the heights that he could possibly reach, and yet he couldn't actually, you know, experience sex or pleasure with another person.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

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. Well, he should just let it go.

[Sarah Marshall]

So what does a trial involve at this point? How do you convict someone of the demon sex and everything else?

[Molly Aitken]

It's probably going to 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 La Dread tortured her servant, who was a woman called Petronella of Meath. 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. You know the way torture works.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, Right, Yeah. One of the most efficient things about torture is that you can get someone to say basically whatever you told them to.

[Molly Aitken]

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. She didn't have the wealth.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

To leave in the way that Alice did. But I. I do find it interesting that Alice took Petronella's daughter with her.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

It suggests that there was some kind of connection there, and we can only speculate what that was. But.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like the actual. 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.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah. Who is too rich and has too many powerful male friends for you ever to really take her down.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right, right.

[Molly Aitken]

So you take your anger out on this poor woman. So Petronella was burned in November 3rd.

[Sarah Marshall]

Jesus.

[Molly Aitken]

So just over 700 years ago.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we're talking on November 6th. Did you do anything A couple days ago?

[Molly Aitken]

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 a 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 Petronoa. I have to say, even when it happens, people were horrified. The commentary at the time was horrendous. They just couldn't have imagined that something like this would have happened.

[Sarah Marshall]

Was this a public execution that people left records of?

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, yeah. A contemporary of La Dread, Friar John Clyn, 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 the poer 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, well. And you guess you don't want to be a country that burns women. Yeah, I would think.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

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 Petronella. But also it was because people didn't, like, Ledrech.

[Sarah Marshall]

Seems like he might have been a bit of, like, a difficult customer and so on.

[Molly Aitken]

You know, later on, he would go on to, like, accuse the bishop in Dublin of trying to murder him. And then he was caught. 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

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 La Dread, and to get out, he had to admit his guilt.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow.

[Molly Aitken]

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 mass three times a day for a year, go on a pilgrimage, feed the poor, and time goes by. But La Dread then calls William back and is like, yeah, 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 reroof 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 terms as well. So you get the sense that, like, Ladred is, like, being paid off. Yeah. But then, ironically, after redoing the roof of the cathedral, it fell down. It collapsed in 1332, presumably from, like, the weight of this new lead roof, and destroyed the cathedral.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, God.

[Molly Aitken]

And I just feel like there's some kind of poetic justice.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Molly Aitken]

Because that was. The cathedral was where, like, legerd did his, like, his Sunday mass. It was like his place of work.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's literally structurally unsound.

[Molly Aitken]

Yeah, exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 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.

[Molly Aitken]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Molly, just. Yeah. Thank you so much for this conversation and for spending this day with me talking about everything. Just. Yeah. Tell us again, what is your book? Where can people find it? What else can people find of yours or any of that? Any. Any recommendations you have too? You know, just. 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.

[Molly Aitken]

Oh, yeah. Okay. So my book Bright I Burn is in all good bookshops, which is every bookshop.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's true.

[Molly Aitken]

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 Sex in the Middle Ages by Katherine Harvey. I recommend everyone reads it. It's brilliant.

[Sarah Marshall]

Amazing.

[Molly Aitken]

Favorite dessert? I like a plain cake. Is that something that you do, like an apple cake or just like. Like a. A basic cake?

[Sarah Marshall]

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. And 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 I 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.