Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe 9781350008465, 9781350008496, 9781350008472

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Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Cultures of Early Modern Europe Series Editors: Beat Kümin, Professor of Early Modern European History, University of Warwick, and Brian Cowan, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History, McGill University. Editorial Board Adam Fox, University of Edinburgh, UK Robert Frost, University of Aberdeen, UK Molly Greene, University of Princeton, USA Ben Schmidt, University of Washington, USA Gerd Schwerhoff, University of Dresden, Germany Francsesca Trivellato, University of Yale, USA Francisca Loetz, University of Zurich, Switzerland The ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities has generated a wealth of new research topics and approaches. Focusing on the ways in which representations, perceptions and negotiations shaped people’s lived experiences, the books in this series provide fascinating insights into the past. The series covers early modern culture in its broadest sense, inclusive of (but not restricted to) themes such as gender, identity, communities, mentalities, emotions, communication, ritual, space, food and drink, and material culture. Published Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640, Paul S. Lloyd The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1850, Sara Pennell Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750, David Hitchcock Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy, Brendan Dooley Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640, Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe Christopher Kissane

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 This paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Christopher Kissane, 2018 Christopher Kissane has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: ‘A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms’ by Pieter Aertsen (Archivart/Alamy Stock Photo). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0846-5 PB: 978-1-3501-4377-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0847-2 eBook: 978-1-3500-0848-9 Series: Cultures of Early Modern Europe Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1

Introduction: Food and History

vi viii ix xi 1

Part 1 Food and Inquisition 2

‘The Foods of a Christian’: Food, Religion, and Inquisition

13

3

Kitchens and Neighbours: Food, Gender, and Community

35

Part 2 Food and Reformation 4

‘The Eaters’: Fast-Breaking Protest in Reformation Zürich

53

5

‘Sausage-Makers’ and ‘Cheese-Hunters’: The Cultural Context of Reformation Fast-Breaking

77

Part 3 Food and Witchcraft 6

Dining with Demons: Food, Witchcraft, and Evil

107

7

‘Plain Hunger and Necessity’: Food, Crime, and Community

131

8

Conclusions: Thinking about Food, Thinking with Food

157

Notes Bibliography Index

163 205 223

Figures 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14

5.15

5.16 5.17 5.18

Joost Amman, The Butcher, from Hans Sachs, Das Ständebuch (Nuremberg, 1568) 79 The Lambs, the Shepherd, and the Butcher, from Heinrich Steinhöwel, Vita et Fabulae. Aesopus (Basel, 1487/9), p. 126 81 Detail from copy of Hans Holbein, Schweizerschlacht (early 1520s) 82 Urs Graf, Schlachtfeld (1521) 83 Detail from Die Verkehrte Welt (German, early seventeenth century) 84 Woman Preparing Sausages Banters with Man (German, sixteenth century) 84 Peasant with Wurst (late fifteenth-century German engraving), from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 8, Commentary Part 1, .022, p. 314 85 Hans Baldung ‘Grien’, The Witches’ Sabbath (1510) 86 Urs Graf, The Witches’ Sabbath (1514) 87 Pieter Aertsen, The Butcher’s Stall with the Flight into Egypt (1551) 89 Detail from Ein Newer Kunckelbrieff: Die widersinnige Weldt genandt (German, seventeenth century) 91 Albrecht Dürer, The Peasant Couple at Market (German, 1519) 92 Jacob Binck, Peasant Selling Eggs (German, sixteenth century), from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 16, .73 (286), p. 52 93 Erhard Schön, Peasant Breeding Eggs (Nuremberg, early sixteenth century), from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 13, Commentary, 184, p. 341 94 Daniel Hopfer, The Sausage Seller and Carnival Dancers (Augsburg, early sixteenth century), from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 17, .73(490), p. 150 99 Nuremberg Shrovetide Carnival (German, sixteenth century), Bodleian MS. Douce 346 100 Detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival & Lent (1559) 101 Detail from front of Huldrych Zwingli, Vonn dem Nachtmal Christi (Christoph Froschauer, Zürich, 1525) 102

Figures

5.19 Front of Huldrych Zwingli, Ejn klare Underrichtung vom Nachtmal Christi (Hans Hager, Zürich, 1526) 6.1 Detail from Johannes Vintler, Buch der Tügend (Augsburg, 1486) 6.2 Detail from Johan Geiler von Kaysersburg, Die Emeis oder Quadragesimale (Strasbourg, 1516) 6.3 Detail from Ulrich Molitor, De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus (Basel, 1489) 6.4 Detail from Jan Ziarnko, ‘Description of the Witches’ Sabbath’ in Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (2nd edn, Paris, 1613)

vii

102 111 113 122

126

Tables 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.1 7.1

Evidence in Soria Bishopric, 1486–1502 Food evidence in Soria Town, 1490–91 Food evidence from confessions in Atienza, 1504–5 Food evidence from trials in Ciudad Real, 1483–5 Examples of food evidence from cases in Almazán, 1501–2 Foods mentioned in testimonies from Soria Town, 1490–91 Gender differences in food evidence Witchcraft cases in Shetland, 1602–16

25 26 27 28 28 29 43 138

Acknowledgements This book grew out of my research at Oxford where Lyndal Roper and Deborah Oxley supported me with an incredible generosity of time, a wealth of ideas, and endless encouragement. Their advice and suggestions have been invaluable, as was their patience in putting up with me! I am enormously grateful to both of them as mentors, scholars and friends. I feel very fortunate to have received their support, and I will never forget how much I owe them. Turning research into a book is quite a challenge, and at Bloomsbury I would like to thank Beat Kümin and Rhodri Mogford for their patience and assistance throughout the process. I am also thankful that publication of the book’s images was made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation, in association with the Institute of Historical Research. Many friends helped me through what was often a very lonely endeavour, and led me to realize the importance of collaboration, moral support and honesty about struggles and weaknesses. I would especially like to thank my friends in the Oxford Early Modern Workshop for their support and advice; Peter Burke and Robin Briggs for their rigour and insight; Helga Robinson-Hammerstein for first introducing me to early modern history; Hannah Murphy for her always excellent suggestions; and John Gallagher for endless conversation, friendship and camaraderie. I  am very grateful to my family for their support and encouragement, and to my partner, Caroline, who has always been unfailingly understanding and supportive. My work benefitted greatly from suggestions and feedback offered at various seminars, workshops and conferences where I was fortunate enough to present my work, including the Economic and Social History Graduate Workshop at Nuffield College, Oxford; the Comparative Social and Cultural History Seminar at Cambridge; the Reform and Reformation Colloquium at Queen Mary, University of London; the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, Florence; the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery; the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference; and the Renaissance Society of America conference. I have also been fortunate enough to share my work with wider audiences through the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers scheme.

x

Acknowledgements

I would also like to thank Patrick Wallis, Chris Minns, the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics, and Maarten Prak, for the opportunity to engage in postdoctoral research and collaboration. Finally, I would like to thank those whose financial support made my research possible: the Economic and Social Research Council; many at Oxford including the Scatcherd Fund, the Prendergast Bequest, the Bishop Warner Fund and the Starr Foundation; Martin Foley, without whose support I  never would have been able to come to Oxford in the first place; and Balliol College (especially Rev. Douglas Dupree), who were greatly supportive throughout my time as a member of the college community. For all of this support I am extremely grateful. Cádiz, March 2018

Abbreviations AGZR

Actensammlung zur Geschichte der Zürcher Reformation in den Jahren 1519–1533, ed. Emil Egli (Zürich, 1879)

CWE

Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–)

DWB

Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jakob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, 17 vols (Leipzig, 1854–1971)

FIRC

Fontes Iudaeorum Regni Castellae, ed. Carlos Carrete Parrondo et al., 8 vols (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1981–98)

OSCB

Court Book of Orkney & Shetland, 1612–13, ed. Robert S. Barclay (Kirkwall: W. R. Mackintosh, 1962)

OSR

Orkney & Shetland Records, eds Alfred W. Johnston and Amy Johnston, vol. I (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1907)

RTSI

Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real, ed. Haim Beinart, 4 vols (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1974–81)

SCB

Court Book of Shetland, 1602–4, ed. Gordon Donaldson (Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1954); Court Book of Shetland, 1615–29, ed. Gordon Donaldson (Lerwick: Shetland Library, 1991)

SI

Schweizerisches Idiotikon, 17 vols (Zürich, Basel, 1881–)

Z

Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, ed. Emil Egli et al., 14 vols (Berlin, Leipzig, Zürich, 1905–91)

1

Introduction: Food and History

Bärbel von Arm had gone to the butcher herself. She had to lie, but Hans Hess sold her the sausages without fuss. The councillors said they just wanted to know what she and Elsi Flammer had bought and cooked, and who had eaten it. They didn’t ask what Bärbel or Elsi thought. * Margaret Patersdochter was on the boat, fleeing her home, because she had been banished. She had stolen only because she was hungry, because she had nothing at all to eat. But they told her if she stayed, or if she ever came back, she would be drowned. * Marina González was distraught. She felt abandoned, betrayed, hopeless. There was no point in eating since the inquisitors planned to kill her anyway. But they still ordered the jailers to make her eat, to violently force-feed her, as if the water torture had not been enough. And still they asked what she had eaten and what she had cooked. * What did these women have in common?1 They were of very different social standings – maids; a destitute thief; the wife of a merchant – and lived in very different places:  Bärbel and Elsi from Reformation Zürich, Margaret from remote Shetland, Marina from the plains of La Mancha. Yet their stories share something that they all would have recognized, and that would have been understandable to all sorts of early modern people: the fact that food was a matter of great significance. Perhaps things look different when viewed from that perspective. This book starts from there.

2

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Three disparate stories about early modern women and food, stories where food moved far beyond the kitchen door, belied its banality, transcended the mundane. What are we to make of them? For a long time the answer might have been ‘not much’. It took a long time for historians to take food seriously, rather too often treating it, in the words of Barbara Ketcham-Wheatam, as ‘comic and trivial, rarely rising above the level of Charles Laughton as Henry VIII with a drumstick in his hand’.2 Reay Tannahill commented that when the idea of writing her seminal Food in History ‘first occurred to me, I was mystified by the fact that no one had already written such a book’.3 Food was ‘almost too obvious to dwell on’, wrote the sociologist Sidney Mintz in his pioneering study of sugar.4 Introductions to works of food history have at times acquired an almost ritualistic quality in describing the subject’s journey from ignorance to illumination. Ours, food historians defiantly insist, is a proper subject, and we deserve to be taken seriously. And, of course, we are right. While food long received too little attention, those of us studying it today are lucky enough to be part of an exciting and varied field, full of different directions and opportunities: the days of food not receiving its scholarly due are long gone.5 Yet the restatements of our own value betray both a lingering chip on the shoulder – most historians of food have at least one story of being sniffed at by those who perceive their subjects to be more ‘serious’ – and a lack of clarity about what the subject actually is, and how it is to be done. The most fundamental requirement for histories of food is to know what people in the past actually ate, and it was with diet that the historical study of food began. Many of the earliest academic studies of dietary history – Jack Drummond and Anne Wilbraham’s survey of English diet; Redcliffe Salaman’s seminal study of the potato; Noel Deerr’s history of sugar – were undertaken by scientists, somewhat exposing what Derek Oddy and Derek Miller called ‘a conceptual gap in the framework [of history]’.6 Early treatments of diet by academic historians, such as William Ashley’s history of bread in England, were generally economic, as were early examples of wider history that gave significant attention to food, such as Eileen Power’s history of English nunneries, in which food recurs throughout a story of religion, economics, and gender.7 Indeed both economic and medical historians continue to undertake some of the most important work on the history of diet, exploring its relationship with living standards, human welfare and broader economic development.8 In the 1960s, the economic and social facts of ‘material life’ became a focus for the historians associated with the Annales journal in France, and diet formed a major part of their historical project, inspiring studies of changing diets, nutrition, food production and consumption, and explorations of

Introduction

3

the place of food in academic history.9 Some of the Annalistes also began to use food to explore cultural as well as economic and social questions. Jean Soler’s semiotic approach to biblical dietary restrictions, and Roland Barthes’s suggestion of a ‘psychosociology’ of eating, showed how food’s historical significance went beyond the material, and that historians needed to employ a wide variety of approaches to capture its importance.10 After all, Fernand Braudel commented, ‘the mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilisation’.11 Braudel’s belief that food could be connected to the ‘deep structures’ of historical societies also lay at the heart of another foundational strand in the study of food: anthropology. Food had been of interest to anthropology since the discipline’s nineteenth-century origins, particularly the way it is used to construct social and cultural groups. ‘Those who sit at meat together’, William Robertson Smith wrote in his study of ‘semitic’ peoples in 1889, ‘are united for all social effects; those who do not eat together are aliens to one another, without fellowship in religion and without reciprocal social duties’.12 Early twentiethcentury anthropologists noted how food was also used to define and enforce the boundaries between groups: excluding people from food, Alfred RadcliffeBrown wrote in 1922, excludes them from ‘social communion’.13 It was Eileen Power’s colleague at the London School of Economics, Audrey Richards, who pioneered the anthropological study of food as a cultural subject as well as a social one, producing what her doctoral supervisor Bronislow Malinowski called the ‘first [academic] collection of facts on the cultural aspects of food and eating’.14 In a study of the Bemba people in what is now Zambia, Richards noted that despite humans’ ability to adapt to almost all types of food – what we now call ‘the omnivore’s dilemma’ – we actually tend to have a fairly limited diet, controlled by inherited habits, traditions and taboos, and that these limits vary considerably between all sorts of groups. ‘Man’s selection of food,’ she wrote, ‘is determined very largely by the habits and values which his “social heritage” has imposed upon him’; ‘Culture imposes restrictions where nature would have left him free,’ and therefore ‘food acquires for him a series of values other than those which hunger provides.’15 ‘Nutrition in a human society,’ therefore, ‘cannot even be considered apart from the cultural medium in which it is carried on.’16 Not only did culture influence food, but food influenced culture, and indeed the structure of society itself. Since food was so fundamental to how families, communities and societies organized themselves, Richards argued that ‘food acquires  . . . a series of values other than those which hunger provides’; it ‘becomes symbolic  . . . of society, and acquires some of the attributes of the society itself ’.17

4

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

The idea that food symbolisms could reveal the deepest structures of society became a focus for both Annalistes and anthropologists in the 1960s and ’70s. Jean Soler argued that the symbolic meals and food taboos of Old Testament Judaism could reveal the fundamentals upon which their society and culture rested – the prohibition of pork, the insistence on ritual slaughter, fasts, ritual meals and so on, were all waves produced by structural undercurrents, alimentary expressions of a collective unconscious.18 Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the transformation of food via cooking as a universal conceptual metaphor for the creation of culture and ‘civilization’ in his seminal 1964 book, The Raw and the Cooked.19 In 1972 Mary Douglas offered another structural theory of dietary practices and taboos in her controversial Purity and Danger, provocatively arguing that even the most mundane of everyday meals contains hidden cultural ‘code’ about the context that produces and consumes it.20 Like much of structural anthropology, however, the universal nature of Lévi-Strauss’s and Douglas’s ideas meant they were somewhat divorced from both cultural diversity and historical change:  what might have been arguable for prehistorical societies or ancient Judaism often made little sense in a different place or time. As Audrey Richards had noted, because cultures vary so widely between different places and peoples, food must be analysed ‘in the structure of each different culture’.21 That sensitivity to different cultural contexts lies behind the rise of cultural history, emphasizing a desire to see things, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, ‘from the native’s point of view’ or, as Will Pooley recently adapted Geertz’s phrase for historians, ‘native to the past’.22 Indeed Robert Darnton famously characterized cultural history as anthropology applied to Western civilization.23 Culinary culture has been at the heart of much recent research on food in history, from Ken Albala’s pioneering explorations of food in early modern Europe to the wide-ranging work of Massimo Montanari.24 As with their intellectual forerunners, many cultural historians see food as a way to illuminate broader cultural issues. Albala has argued that we can see how cultural beliefs become ‘social facts’ – for example, the widespread early modern belief that melons were dangerous  – that help to ‘reveal the workings of the Renaissance mind on a level unattainable by other means’.25 Robert Appelbaum has tried to penetrate early modern ‘mentalities’ using ‘interjections’ regarding food in plays, novels and poems to examine the ‘multitude of discourses’ surrounding food in early modern European society. Appelbaum has argued that the varying nature of these discourses – be they about hunger or gluttony, joy or regret, restraint or enjoyment – reveals that early modern people ‘experienced

Introduction

5

food with great intensity and perspicuity’, often with an ‘awareness of the social, philosophical, and religious issues that eating and drinking in the human world can raise’; ‘The experience of food reached as deep into the individual as the vitalities of the genitals, the brain, and the soul’.26 Eric Rath has demonstrated that food had such emotional power in cultures far beyond Europe, showing the way that eating evoked all sorts of knowledge, experiences and ideas for the early modern Japanese.27 Cultural and temporal distance can make understanding that intensity difficult. ‘It requires a real effort of imagination,’ Richards wrote about studying the Bemba, ‘to visualize a state of society in which food matter so much and from so many points of view.’28 This is a particular challenge for early modern historians, as Piero Camporesi emphasized in his provocative work on food and fantasy. To understand the importance of food to early modern people, he argued, we must understand that they lived in societies and cultures defined by the physical, emotional, and psychological effects of hunger.29 In premodern and hungry societies, Caroline Walker Bynum has written, ‘food forces itself forward as an insistent fact, an insistent symbol’.30 Just as food pervaded early modern mentalities and culture, so too did the omnipresence of religion.31 From the ritual meal of the Lord’s Supper to the fasting of Lent, Advent and dozens of feast days, medieval and early modern Christianity was infused with food, to the extent that Bynum has argued that people often saw food as ‘the most basic and literal way of encountering God’.32 Yet the relationship between food and religion has received a ‘relative lack’ of attention from early modern historians in comparison to those studying the ancient and medieval periods.33 While recent research on early modern religion has embraced a wide variety of innovative new approaches – from the senses to emotions to material culture – food history and the study of the period’s great religious subjects have too often remained separate.34 This points to a wider issue for historians of food: the breadth and popularity of our subject (especially in light of previous ignorance) should not lead to the creation of a segregated subdiscipline. As Deborah Simonton and others have written about gender history, subjects that stay (or are kept) apart from ‘mainstream history’ are less likely to change and enrich broader historical narratives and perceptions.35 The challenge for historians of food is to integrate our rich and growing subject into questions of wider history, and to explore and reveal the role of food in them. Lévi-Strauss argued that animals and their meat had become endowed with cultural and religious significance ‘not because they were good to eat, but

6

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

because they were good to think with’.36 Food offers similar advantages to the historian, forcing us to think about the past from all angles: from economic to cultural, class to gender, medical to religious. Rather than focusing on sources that concentrate explicitly on food – such as cookbooks or dietary handbooks – this book makes use of more incidental information about and around food in other types of sources, in particular judicial records, such as Inquisition case documents, city council records, and witchcraft trial records.37 Rather than just thinking about food, it looks at early modern history through food, using the subject as a prism to offer new refractions of life in a period structured – from farm to table, faith to status – around food. This book is organized in three parts, each exploring the relationship between food and one of the processes through which early modern Europe constructed its communities of conformity and deviance:  Inquisition, Reformation and witch-hunting. While food has often been somewhat overlooked in these three subjects’ rich and diverse historiographies, approaching them through food can yield fresh insights into a Europe undergoing tumultuous religious change. All three parts make use of sources from both the different legal institutions that determined and enforced conformity, and the heterodox cultural contexts that produced and occupied those institutions, spreading from Spain to Switzerland to Shetland. What emerge are three early modern manifestations of what Audrey Richards saw in colonial Rhodesia, or what Robertson Smith described about the ancient Middle East: how food both unites and divides at the same time. In religious, cultural, and social life, food bound neighbours into communities, but also marked out the shifting boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that defined deviance and the ‘others’ who practiced it. Part  1 focuses on food and the Inquisition during its early decades in Castile, at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The newly unified Christian Spain tasked the Inquisition with policing the religious practices of ‘new Christians’, particularly the large numbers with Jewish ancestry (conversos) who were believed by many to be privately practicing a form of ‘crypto-Judaism’. As a visible difference between Christian and Jewish religious practices, food became a central focus of identity and suspicion. Chapter  2, ‘The Foods of a Christian’, explores how eating became an activity fraught with hidden meanings as certain foods and dishes became linked with particular identities. From pies to stews, garlic to aubergines, what you ate could communicate to observant neighbours and suspicious Inquisitors who you really were, and what you really believed.

Introduction

7

The records of the Inquisition’s early decades – confessions, testimonies, trial documents – are full of details about food, indicating how the Holy Office, its informers and witnesses saw eating as a central part of ‘lived’ religious practice for both Christians and Jews. Chapter 3, ‘Kitchens and Neighbours’, takes up the story of Marina González and examines the relationship between the Inquisition’s concentration on food and issues of gender and community. The Inquisitors’ interest in the women’s world of cooking and the kitchen reflected its particular concern about the behaviour of women conversas and their perceived role as guardians of the faith in allegedly ‘cryptoJewish’ households. Both defendants and accusers in early Inquisition cases were often women, and trial records reveal a great deal about how women interacted (both positively and negatively) in early modern Castilian society. They also reveal a more complicated picture of social relations than the idea of separate ‘converso’ and ‘old Christian’ communities implies. Food lay at the heart of how communities lived, defined, and negotiated their religious practices, cultures and identities. Part  2 moves 1,000 miles to the northwest, where a different group of Europeans were using food to help define religious identity. In Zürich in 1522, the followers of evangelical preacher Huldrych Zwingli broke some of the very dietary regulations that the Inquisition was trying to uphold in Spain by eating sausages during Lent. Fast-breaking protest was to play an important and underappreciated part in the birth of the Zürich Reformation. Chapter 4, ‘The Eaters’, examines the fast-breakings of Lent 1522 through the records of legal investigations launched by the Zürich city council and Zwingli’s sermons and writings. The infamous sausage meal, prepared by Elsi Flammer and Bärbel von Arm, was far from the only occasion on which the city’s evangelicals provocatively violated the church’s dietary laws, and public controversy over fasting was much more important than scholarship of the Zürich Reformation has generally portrayed. Zwingli’s defence of fastbreaking invoked not only early Reformation ideas of ‘Christian liberty’ and the primacy of scripture, but also a wide variety of populist and social ideas about the impact of unsuitable dietary laws imposed by a corrupt foreign church. The importance of food to his congregation’s religious practice and culture meant that the issue became a crucial turning point in the city’s break with the church. Chapter  5, ‘Sausage-Makers and Cheese-Hunters’, examines the cultural context of early Reformation fast-breaking, exploring what ideas and meanings

8

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

the foods prohibited during Lent would have called to mind for an early modern Swiss or southern German audience. Sausages, and the butchery behind them, were explicitly linked to the contemporary controversy over Swiss mercenary recruitment and the slaughter of young Swiss men in the service of the empire and papacy. Sausages brought to mind other aspects of manhood as well and could be an ambiguous symbol of male sexuality and independence, issues which linked to Lent’s prohibitions on sex and marriage. Such issues were also brought to mind by other prohibited foods with explicitly feminine associations, such as eggs and dairy. Lent’s restriction on carnal pursuits stood in stark contrast to the preceding Carnival, a time of raucous debauchery, excess eating, and political protest. Many elements of the Zürich fast-breaking protests show the evangelicals turning the seasons ‘upside-down’ by extending Carnival into Lent, presaging the seminal religious upheavals to come. Part  3 examines how food’s symbolism and importance related to another major issue of early modern European religion and culture  – the widespread belief in and persecution of witchcraft. Food was central to ideas of witchcraft’s operation, the thinking behind those beliefs, and the way that witchcraft was understood and dealt with in local communities. Chapter 6, ‘Dining with Demons’, analyses the place of food in demonology, the wide-ranging body of thought about how witchcraft worked. Demonologists considered food both a target of witchcraft – with witches and demons ruining harvests, spoiling food or using it to poison people – and a central part of its practice. Demonologists detailed elaborate evil banquets, where the bread was made from the bones of murdered children, and food never sated hunger. Such rituals represented an inversion of the role of food in Christian religion and culture, so salt – sanctifying and pure – would never be found on witches’ tables. The food most associated with witchcraft was milk: its symbolic association with female fertility, and women’s control of the domestic dairy economy coupled with demonology’s tortured views of gender. Chapter 7, ‘Plain Hunger and Necessity’, examines how these ideas of milk magic and wider witchcraft operated in local communities, where milk magic and disputes over food were at the root of many witchcraft accusations. The court records of early seventeenth-century Shetland – filled with cases of witchcraft and many other crimes about food – reveal how anxiety about food insecurity permeated early modern communities. With dairy central to the islanders’ economy, complaints that women were using magic to manipulate the butter yields of their own or neighbours’ cows were particularly serious, but so too were more mundane threats to food, such as endemic levels of theft. The

Introduction

9

harsh treatment of Margaret Patersdochter, who stole because she had nothing to eat, illustrates what the islanders perceived as a threat to the order of their community. Focusing on food opens up seams in the fabric of early modern Shetland society. In Chapter 8, ‘Thinking about Food, Thinking with Food’, I draw a number of comparative conclusions about the issues of identity, belief, and community, and explore the ways in which we can think with, as well as think about, food in social and cultural history. * We are long past the days when food was not given serious attention by historians. But that does not mean we have yet figured out how to approach such a vast subject. This book is not a blueprint for food history, but rather an experiment in using food as a prism through which to offer a different refraction of historical light. It is, hopefully, also an illustration of why food should not be an insular historical subgenre on its own, but instead a subject that sits at the heart of historical study and spreads right through its breadth – just as it did in the worlds and lives of early modern people.

Part One

Food and Inquisition

2

‘The Foods of a Christian’: Food, Religion, and Inquisition

One Saturday in 1490 in the Castilian village of Quintana Redonda, a man called Yohan Alonso hosted a local priest, Father Pedro Gutierrez, for dinner. The meal Yohan’s wife served included some ‘empanadas’ – little pies – made with rabbit meat. Something about how Father Gutierrez reacted to the rabbit empanadas seemed suspicious to Yohan, as the priest seemed to insist that his host eat them, as if he perhaps wanted to avoid eating them himself. Six months later when the Inquisition sat in nearby Soria (about five miles away), Yohan told this story to the inquisitors, who also heard that other people in the community had said that Father Gutierrez was a heretic and that he would ‘burn’.1 The inquisitors in Soria heard many more stories about empanadas. In December 1488, a Jewish widow called Jamila had told them that Diego García Costello (a tailor and surgeon who had worked in the towns of Aranda and Palencia) and his wife made fish empanadas on Fridays, with the intention of eating them the next day.2 South of Soria in Almazán, the García family had allegedly done the same with pigeon empanadas.3 In August 1491, a number of people told the inquisitors of suspicious behaviour by Alonso de Luçena, the prothonotary of Soria, including that a Jewish man called Capón had ‘once or twice’ brought Alonso’s mother little pies made with pigeon, which the Luçenas had eaten together.4 A woman in Almazán told the inquisitors that in the house of Luis Vélez, people had made empanadas filled with mince meat and mutton’s head fried in oil, and that those there had eaten the pies ‘with much pleasure and celebration’.5 Many of these piemakers and pie-eaters were condemned for heresy. Why would people think that the Spanish Inquisition would be interested in such details about pies and their fillings? And why did the Inquisition take such information seriously? By the late fifteenth century, the long Christian ‘reconquest’ of Spain from its medieval Islamic rulers was nearing completion. In the 1470s the Christian

14

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragón were united, providing a platform for a final defeat of the last bastion of Islamic Spain in Andalusia, and in 1492 centuries of Muslim power in Iberia came to an end at Granada. As Christian Spain united and expanded, its intolerance of the religious diversity that characterized medieval Iberia increased. Restrictions on the rights of Jews and Muslims – often in contrast to how minorities had been treated in Islamic Spain – led many to convert to Christianity in order to enjoy rights and privileges increasingly reserved for the majority (such as government service, entrance to certain religious and professional institutions).6 These ‘new Christians’ (in Spanish generally ‘cristianos nuevos’ or ‘conversos’; or ‘moriscos’ for those of Muslim origin) became the target of prejudice from some parts of fifteenth-century Spanish society. ‘New Christians’ who had come from prominent Jewish and Muslim families unsurprisingly achieved success and prominence in Christian society, and envy and intolerance led many to question the veracity of conversos’ and moriscos’ Christian belief. Since they or their parents might have converted due to social pressure or for social advancement, were they perhaps secretly still practicing their old faiths?7 Conversos could become convenient scapegoats for economic and political problems, and in the 1440s, populist anger fused with intolerance in violent unrest against them, most notably in the New Castilian city of Toledo in 1449.8 The atmosphere of suspicion led many prominent Spanish families to chart and advertise their genealogy to show their ‘pure’ Christian lineage, and – following the lead of anti-converso officials in Toledo – many institutions, from religious orders to local town councils, passed rules about ‘limpieza de sangre’, ‘purity of blood’, restricting entry and membership to those who did not have Jewish or Muslim ancestors (‘old Christians’).9 Conversion was a central concept for medieval and early modern Christianity. The original Christians, after all, were converts, and accepting the true Word of God was Christianity’s desired end for all of God’s children. The Church hierarchy opposed attempts in Spain to restrict the faith to those with Christian lineage. In 1449 Pope Nicholas V condemned the idea of blood purity in his bull Humani Generis Inimicus, and a wide variety of Spanish scholars, royal officials and other church leaders followed suit.10 Yet suspicion about conversos and moriscos remained across society, and among certain religious leaders and polemicists. The ‘reconquest’ of large Jewish and Muslim populations presented the Spanish state and church with the question of how to treat religious minorities. Religious and political

‘The Foods of a Christian’

15

thought was increasingly hostile to tolerance, with Nicholas V’s predecessor Pope Eugene IV ordering the separation of Jewish and Christian communities, and the segregation of Jews in Christian towns and cities.11 With Spanish Jews and Muslims increasingly restricted to ghettoized juderías and morerías in the late 1400s, suspicion and prejudice focused on conversos living among the Christian population. As the Christian forces advanced on Granada in the late 1470s, certain monastic and church leaders including the Dominican friar Tómas de Torquemada lobbied Queen Isabella of Castile to address claims of widespread ‘judaizing’ – secret adherence to Judaism  – among Andalusian conversos. Her husband Ferdinand’s kingdom of Aragón had maintained an Inquisition (often subject to condemnation from Rome for its treatment of conversos), and in 1478 the monarchs requested papal permission to establish an Inquisition in Seville.12 Torquemada (who many historians have argued was of converso lineage himself) was placed in charge of a system that by the end of the century had spread across central and southern Spain, and would eventually extend to the frontiers of the expanding Iberian world, from Sicily to Portugal to the Americas.13 In the 1480s and 1490s, the Inquisition’s Holy Offices received enormous amounts of evidence about alleged ‘judaizing’ in towns across Castile: indeed this was the Inquisition’s most active and most brutal phase.14 Conversos had certain social characteristics – like their Jewish ancestors, they were mostly employed in finishing crafts, local commerce and the professions – but increasingly they lived alongside ‘old Christians’.15 Indeed, who was or was not a converso was a somewhat intractable question: one fifteenth-century royal official asked ‘who knows who are [not] descended from them [conversos]’, so great was the extent of intermingled ancestry and relations.16 Unable to see into their neighbours’ souls, accusers and witnesses focused on noticeable differences that might indicate ‘crypto-Judaism’. With early modern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam visibly divided by complex dietary regulations, much of the information provided to the early Inquisition focused on food. Just as empanadas concealed a hidden filling, perhaps conversos’ eating and cooking habits were concealing their true faith, the contents of their kitchens and meals tell-tale signs of their deception. Filled with copious detail on the behaviour and professed beliefs and views of ‘ordinary’ people, Inquisition records are, as Carlo Ginzburg once put it, ‘the notebooks of anthropologists’, illuminating what Michael Alpert called the ‘most intimate aspects’ of society; they can be, Brian Pullan has written, ‘the key which unlocks the mind of the people’.17 In their search for ‘crypto-Jews’,

16

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Castilian inquisitors recorded confessions, accusations and testimony on all manner of everyday practices and habits, creating a massive corpus of evidence about the actions and beliefs of conversos and their neighbours. Few documents can reveal such copious detail about late medieval and early modern people. Such sources, however, come with inherent biases. The inquisitors and their suspicious witnesses were searching for deviance rather than conformity, so we often have a picture of the social exception rather than the rule (although the intensity of Inquisition prosecutions in the late 1400s indicate that many ‘suspect’ practices were widespread).18 A  reliance on Inquisition records and their focus on ‘judaizing’ has inevitably focused historical study on the issue of ‘crypto-Judaism’, with research sharply divided between those who believe a widespread secret religion existed, and those who see instead paranoid persecution of sincere Christians.19 More recent research, however, has offered a more heterodox religious picture, noting the complex, shifting beliefs and practices of converso individuals and families.20 We need not follow the inquisitors by focusing on ‘crypto-Judaism’:  the evidence about food from the early decades of the Inquisition allows us to ask wider questions about early modern Castilian culture, religion, gender and community. Amidst the vast treasure trove of Inquisition records, seemingly mundane stories about empanadas can understandably be overlooked. But those who told such stories thought them important enough to tell the inquisitors, thought it important enough to be specific about what the pies were filled with, about when they were made, and about when and how they were eaten. And the inquisitors thought the information important enough to take seriously. Father Gutierrez’s reluctance to eat the Alonsos’ rabbit empanadas could suggest that he was avoiding meat that was not kosher. A  Jewish woman knowing that the Costello Garcías made Saturday’s empanadas on Friday might suggest that they were unwilling to cook on the Sabbath. The fact that the Soria prothonotary’s family received chicken and pigeon empanadas as gifts (perhaps regularly) could mean that they were receiving them from someone who slaughtered the birds in a ritual Jewish way, as the poultry sold by Christian butchers was not kosher. The fillings for the Vélez family’s empanadas being fried in olive oil might mean that they habitually used that fat rather than (unkosher) lard in their kitchen. Inside these pies, behind these stories, lies a world of food meanings that reveals a great deal about how early modern Castilians saw themselves, their neighbours, and their religion.

‘The Foods of a Christian’

17

Eating As Father Gutierrez found out, revealing your dietary preferences in front of others could be a fraught business in the early years of the Inquisition. Refusing something offered could carry considerable risk if the ingredients or dish had cultural or religious significance in the mind of one’s neighbours. So too could taking especial pleasure or celebration in a particular food or dish, as shown by the story of Luis Vélez and his taste for fried mutton empanadas. Avoiding foods or dishes with symbolism or significance, however, was not easy. The sheer variety of ingredients and dishes discussed in early Inquisition cases reveals a food culture where the acts of cooking, eating, and avoiding were all endowed with complex layers of meaning. Eating could be a strong social barrier between religious communities. In medieval and early modern Europe it was difficult for Jews to eat or drink with their neighbours. In William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish moneylender Shylock describes the impossibility of him dining at a Christian table. Bassanio: If it please you to dine with us. Shylock: Yes, to smell pork; to eat of the habitation which Your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into. I Will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, Walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat With you, drink with you, nor pray with you.21

Eating together is a line that Shylock feels he cannot cross: food is central to his faith and identity, in ways that are incompatible with what and how Christians eat. Such restrictions on interreligious eating were also true for Christians and Muslims, and while medieval Spain’s much-debated convivencia (‘coexistence’) made such difficulties often permeable and negotiable, they also inevitably created social divides between – and within – communities.22 The assimilation of large numbers of converso families into Spanish Christian communities over just a few generations created a whole new set of social interactions across old identity boundaries. ‘New Christians’ and ‘old Christians’ had no religious dietary boundaries between them: not only could they pray together but eat and drank together too. But dietary habits and preferences practiced over generations were far too ingrained as cultural practices to simply disappear. No matter how sincere a converso’s Christianity (or how hidden their ‘crypto-Judaism’), local or family

18

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

kitchen traditions would not disappear with conversion. The fuzzy dividing line between which food habits were ‘religious’ and which were ‘cultural’ could create something of a dietary minefield for conversos, one which was made all the more dangerous when inquisitors arrived in a town or village, asking questions about ‘suspicious’ activity. The most prominent dietary difference between Christians, Jews, and Muslims is pork. Jordan Rosenblum has argued that since antiquity  – even before the birth of Christianity – pork has been an iconic boundary of religious identity for Jews, with ancient ‘Jewish and Gentile sources equat[ing] the ingestion of, or abstention from, pork as indicative of one’s identity’.23 For ancient Jews pork was a ‘metonym’ for ‘the other’, while for non-Jews forcing pork on Jewish people can be a form of ‘cultural domination’.24 Peter Schäffer notes that pork was a focus of ancient anti-Semitism, on the basis that ‘once the Jews eat pork, they have given up their [central laws] and will become like any other nation’, as pork refusal is the ‘embodiment’ of their laws.25 In multireligious medieval Spain, pork was a stark and visible division between Christians and their Jewish or Muslim neighbours, and so acceptance or avoidance of pork among ‘new Christians’ became a Shibboleth for those with anti-converso suspicions. Pedro de Villegas, a clothmaker in Ciudad Real, was accused of ‘judaizing’ in 1483, and tried by the Inquisition. Pedro undertook his own defence, and managed to secure an acquittal by steadfastly insisting he was a good Christian, calling character witnesses after character witness (many of whom were reputable people in the town) to testify on his behalf. When accused of eating unleavened bread, Pedro replied that it was as likely for him to have eaten such a thing as for the Muslim prophet Muhammad to have eaten pork.26 Everyone was aware of pork’s significance in Jewish and Islamic identity, and of its place as a dividing line between Christians and their neighbours. Indeed pork was also an important food for Christians’ identity, not just as a point of difference with the other faiths, but also as a cultural totem. The rearing of pigs has been a feature of Spanish agriculture for millennia, and pork has long been the most popular meat in Christian Spain. The matanza del cerdo, the annual slaughter of the pig, is a major cultural and social event for Christian communities in central Spain dating back to medieval times. Inquisition testimonies alleging that people refused to eat pork often speak in an almost incredulous tone. Pedro de Teva of Ciudad Real was certain that a woman on trial was Jewish because she had once refused a piece of wild boar meat he had offered to her, as if no one would ever have turned down such a delicacy without a suspicious reason.27 This related too, of course, to Muslims and moriscos: Jillian

‘The Foods of a Christian’

19

Williams has shown how pork refusal was also a central issue of identity in the treatment of Valencian moriscos.28 In early modern Castilian kitchens, the most common types of pork were cured and smoked products, such as ham and bacon. In the records of the Inquisition’s activities in the village of Almazán during 1501–5, abstention or avoidance from bacon appears as an accusation in over forty documents. Witnesses said that María García and her family ‘never ate bacon’.29 Sebastian Sainz, a butler to the Count of Monteagudo, recounted to the inquisitors in 1505 that he had once had dinner with a fisherman named Juan and a ‘new Christian’ of Almazán called Pedro López de Ayala. For dinner they made a stew with chicken and bacon, but Sebastian found Pedro’s behaviour suspicious: he barely ate anything, sought to avoid the bacon and then said he didn’t want any dinner.30 Andrés Gutierrez of La Vallana told the inquisitors in 1505 that he and his father had eaten with the ‘new Christian’ Miguel Pérez Nuñez, and that they had served bacon and eggs. Andrés said that Miguel ate the eggs but threw the bacon to the cat.31 Quiteria, wife of Pedro Teresa of Matamala was both suspicious and unimpressed when she once cooked for Pedro and Aldonza Lainez and their children. After killing ‘a good chicken’ and cooking it with bacon (trying to show ‘more honour’ to her diners), she was disappointed to see the Lainezes (particularly Aldonza) effectively refuse to eat, and decide to eat eggs instead.32 As a preserved meat often used in the base of stews, bacon was extremely difficult to avoid without people noticing:  bacon was the litmus test of the Inquisition kitchen, and thus ostentatious consumption of cured pork was a way of demonstrating one’s status as a good Christian. People might be able to question ancestry or spiritual devotion, but there was no questioning a piece of ham or bacon hanging in your kitchen or being tossed into your pot. Accused conversos offered various different defences against the charge that they would not eat pork, many of which, in the cold light of historical study, seem plausible. But they seemed much less believable to either a suspicious inquisitor or a pork-loving neighbour. Marina González’s husband in Ciudad Real ascribed her avoidance of pork in 1494 to ‘concern for her health’ (‘not for other ceremony’), adding that he had ‘scolded her for it’.33 Others said they did not like the taste, while some claimed that it made them ill.34 Pedro de Villareal of Cogolludo said he had asked for pork to be left out of his dinner because it exacerbated his gout.35 When the Inquisition were in town, disliking pork and bacon was not an option. Like the concealed fillings of empanadas, the hidden contents of sausages could also become a focus for suspicion, especially if they did not contain

20

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

pork. In Almazán, a local type of sausages, cabaheas, seem to have acquired an association with Jewish food culture, appearing in seventeen different Inquisition testimonies. Leonor Méndez and her husband Diego were alleged to have many times made cabaheas with ox head, chopped and minced with spices and eaten them.36 Magdalena, the wife of Pedro the carpenter, told the inquisitors in 1505 that the wife of a Master Bernal made cabaheas with cow lung and head, along with garlic and spices, that her family ate ‘on Saturdays and other days’.37 María, wife of Juan Martínez, a labourer, testified in 1505 that Pedro González and his wife Ana often made cabaheas and other types of cured sausages like longanizas out of ox heads, offal and mince, which they ate.38 Witnesses and inquisitors may have suspected that such minced meat and offal might have come from Jewish butchery, and as we will see in Part 2, the hidden filling of sausages made them a fertile ground for malleable food symbolisms across early modern Europe. Offal could also become a focus of suspicion, having perhaps originated in Jewish ritual slaughter and butchery (a subject which will be discussed in the next chapter). Many allegations were made about eating stewed tripe on Saturdays that had been prepared the previous day to avoid cooking on the Sabbath. In such an allegation relating to Pedro Méndez and a woman called Leonor in Almazán, witnesses said that the tripe was from sheep or cow.39 Much like with the cabaheas sausages, the notable absence of pork is implicit (callos de credo, pig’s tripe, is a traditional ingredient in Christian Spanish cookery). Various people were alleged to include cow’s or sheep’s hooves with their stewed tripe.40 Gabriel the innkeeper and his wife in Almazán were alleged to have cooked kid’s spleen.41 The complex restrictions around which fish are permitted on Jewish tables and which are forbidden meant that seafood too could become a subject of suspicion, particularly given early modern Christianity’s long series of fast and ‘fish days’ on which meat and dairy products were prohibited. Pedro López de Ayala was alleged in 1505 to not eat conger eel, which is not kosher.42 Many foods that became perceived as quintessentially ‘Jewish’ were not part of Jewish religious practices, but instead stereotypical parts of Jewish (and indeed Islamic) cultural tradition. Garlic, for example, was heavily associated across Europe with Jewish cooking and eating habits, and was another food that acquired identity connotations in Inquisition Castile. Testimonies in Soria and Almazán include many references to garlic in recipes, most often in spiced meat sausages or pies, generally alongside coriander.43 It is notable, however, that there are no allegations in these records where garlic is emphasized as the telltale ‘Jewish’ ingredient that is portrayed in early modern anti-Semitic polemic.

‘The Foods of a Christian’

21

Indeed many Spanish Christians certainly ate garlic, just like their Jewish and Muslim neighbours. Fray Alonso de Herrera wrote an extensive guide to the agriculture of Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and included a detailed entry on garlic.44 Roberto di Nola, a Catalan chef to the King of Naples, was the author of the first printed cookbook in Spain (1520 in Catalan, 1525 in Castilian) and includes garlic in many of his recipes.45 Rather than a binary test or a complete taboo, garlic may have become suspicious only in certain temporal or geographic contexts, for example during bursts of anti-Jewish feeling or under the eyes of the Inquisition. Maria Diemling has suggested that garlic declined from its medieval popularity in Germany during periods of early modern anti-Jewish fervour, and it is possible that the same thing may have happened in Castile, at least among the most fervently anti-Jewish/converso Christians.46 It is also possible that anti-Semitic and anticonverso polemicists exaggerated a ‘Jewishness’ around garlic that was not as notable in everyday village life where food cultures and traditions may have mixed for centuries. The Spanish royal chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, infamous for his anti-converso prejudice, wrote in the late 1400s that the conversos had ‘the smell of the Jews’ because of their use of garlic.47 The ‘smell of the Jews’, the ‘foetor judaicus’, was a well-known anti-Semitic theme in ancient, medieval and early modern Europe.48 Smell permeates and lingers. It is difficult to shake off. Its resonance and importance was much greater for those in early modern times than today.49 Before daily washing, regimented hygiene, refrigeration, ventilation and sanitation, towns and villages were considerably more odorous (and not in a pleasant way) than they are today. The narrow streets of towns and villages in hot early modern Castile would have been extremely smelly places. Early modern people took notice, and placed significance, in their olfactory environment, and it would have been very difficult to hide the smell of something as odorous as garlic from one’s home. Many Inquisition witnesses made reference to olfactory identification, and not just with regard to ‘the smell of Jews’. Ana Lainez, who was brought before the Inquisition in Almázan, was alleged to have responded to her maid bringing a small piece of pork into the house by throwing it into the fire and covering her nose and mouth with her wimple to prevent the smell of the pork reaching her nostrils and getting into her throat.50 Mayor Mélendez of Hita was accused in 1521 of removing herself to another room whenever anyone roasted pork or melted pork lard, and blocking up any holes in the wall in order to avoid the smell of pork.51 If these charges have some truth behind them, it is intriguing to

22

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

see those privately clinging to either Jewish religious practice or Jewish culture identifying even the smell of pork as offensive and dangerous to their identity. In the context of Inquisition and post-expulsion Spain, hiding from the smell of pork could certainly be seen as hiding from repression, clinging to one’s identity by defending one’s home and body from the permeation of an oppressive smell. If, alternatively, Ana Lainez and Mayor Mélendez never did such things, it is still interesting that Christians thought Jews and ‘crypto-Jews’ would see the smell of pork as so powerful a threat to their identity and to the practice of their faith. Indeed when Shylock refuses Bassanio’s dinner invitation, Shakespeare has him mention ‘the smell of pork’ as something he must avoid. Another smell that Bernáldez considered quintessential to Jewish and converso households was olive oil: ‘they cooked their meat with olive oil, which they used instead of bacon or lard so as to avoid pork; and olive oil with meat is something which smells very bad on the breath’.52 The aforementioned Luis Vélez from Almazán was alleged to have fried mince meat in oil, as was Aldonza Lainez while making meatballs.53 There are many other references to the use of oil in recipes from Almazán.54 Preferring olive oil to pork lard was certainly a marked difference between Jewish (and Muslim) households and their Christian neighbours. Again, however, as with garlic, Spanish Christians did not traditionally avoid olive oil completely; after all it had been in use in Iberia for centuries. The perceived significance of certain foods was heavily contextual. Even foods with no religious role and a limited association with particular religions could attain significance through anti-converso feeling and Inquisition suspicion. Juan Gil has noted that residents of Toledo, the reputed centre of the Castilian converso community, were often referred to as berenjeneros, ‘aubergineeaters’, due to the prevalence of the vegetable in the town’s cuisine and its association with conversos and Jews.55 ‘Berenjenero [became] a generic insult used against Toledans in an attempt to hit them where it hurt most, namely alluding to their [stereotype as Jews and conversos]’.56 In picaresque ballads and popular plays, eating aubergines was often used as a satirical mockery of Toledans and their supposed Jewishness. Thirteen witnesses in trials of conversos from Ciudad Real from 1494 to 1512 (the legal proceedings of which were actually held in Toledo) mention aubergines. Many are in relation to Sabbath dishes, such as a casserole of fish, eggs and aubergines that a servant called Pascuala accused María González, wife of Pedro Díaz de Villarrubia, of having prepared.57 Another María González, married to Pedro de Villareal, was said to have made stuffed aubergines, as was Leonor Alvárez.58 Luzia Fernández, a woman who testified against a number of her converso neighbours, alleged that Juana Nuñez

‘The Foods of a Christian’

23

fried aubergines in oil, leaving Juana accused of using two suspect ingredients.59 The complex interplay between food, culture, and identity endowed foods with significance far beyond their seeming mundanity.

Inquisition To fully understand the evidence about food in early Inquisition cases, we must ask two questions about the relationship between food and the Inquisition itself: how prevalent was food evidence, and how was it used? The question of prevalence opens up a troublesome can of historical worms: the quantification of Inquisition cases. The Holy Office’s vast repository of documents are an irresistible target for quantitative analysis, in particular to offer a general context for the widespread use of colourful individual stories and examples. In the 1980s the ethnographer Gustav Henningsen and various collaborators analysed tens of thousands of cases to build a statistical picture of the Inquisition’s work, an undertaking that inspired grandiose praise of a ‘breathtaking’ brave new world of Inquisition scholarship that could move beyond microhistory (one reviewer described Inquisition quantification as the ‘bridgehead’ of a ‘revolution’).60 The Inquisition’s very vastness, however, has made such quantification highly problematic: huge number of documents are simply no longer extant, while those that are are extremely varied and thus defy easy categorization and labelling. Henry Kamen has been particularly critical of the impact further study has had on the work of Henningsen and his partners, going as far as criticizing other scholars for even citing it.61 He has argued more broadly that as an exercise in statistics [this effort] is now seen as wholly unreliable. The margin of error has been unacceptably high . . . The classification of offences has been unreliable and arbitrary. Important categories of offence did not appear at all in the analyses. The use of figures, in short, has been helpful only within certain limits.62

Even with the advent of digitization and more advanced quantitative tools, these  major pitfalls remain. Many of the problems with Inquisition quantification, however, become less pronounced when analysing defined local and regional samples from particular years or periods, and such analyses can show what concerned local inquisitors and those who offered them evidence. As part of a research project trying to relate the religious beliefs of converso

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Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

defendants  to ‘more general European incidence of heresy and scepticism’, John Edwards analysed the cases from the bishopric of Soria in northeastern Castile (1486–1502) that have been collected and transcribed by Carlos Carrete Parrondo.63 Edwards’s analysis was inspired by a suggestion from José María Monsalvo Antón that sources such as those collected by Carrete Parrondo could be compared with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s celebrated study of the Pyrenean village of Montaillou, which was compiled from the evidence contained in a fourteenth-century Inquisition register.64 In Montaillou, Le Roy Ladurie had recreated the mental world of late medieval villagers, and Edwards sought to examine the beliefs of similar people further south in Castile. Edwards argued that far from being uniquely Spanish expressions of ‘cryptoJudaism’, many of the ‘heresies’ catalogued against Castilian conversos (or perjoratively ‘marranos’) were often observed among many other people in many other places in late medieval and early modern Europe. Relating many of the ‘blasphemous’ statements from the accused in the bishopric of Soria to long traditions of popular religious belief elsewhere in Europe, Edwards argued that ‘clearly, the concept of “marranism” as a specific and systematic mixture of Judaism and Christianity practised by Spanish conversos seems, on this as on other evidence, to be the misleading fabrication of later scholars’.65 Edwards quantitative analysis of the Soria accusations (which he described as ‘primitive’) show how many of the accusations in Soria, against both men and women, were by no means specific to Judaism, nor serious ‘heresy’. In Table 2.1, I have rearranged his results to show the most prominent subjects in the documents. Very general ‘heresies’ such as a ‘materialist’ worldview and unbelief in the afterlife, universalism of faiths, blasphemy, not going to Mass, or hostility to the Inquisition, make up a significant proportion of the accusations. Those relating specifically to Judaism are often what Edwards describes as ‘nostalgia for Judaism’ or ‘general adherence’, either at home or in public: in practice these were general accusations about perceptions of ‘acting Jewish’. Edwards focuses on how mundane many accusations were, and how they related not to any systematic Judaism, but instead to ordinary religious doubt. For example he cites the case of Isabel, wife of Pedro Alonso, who got into trouble with the Holy Office for describing the Host as the ‘figuranza’ (resemblance, representation) of God, rather than the physical body of Christ.66 Edwards argues that such views can be seen as similar to other ‘popular’ or ‘peasant’ religious views visible elsewhere in Spain, not least in other parts of Castile during the sixteenth century, as explored by Sara Nalle.67

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Table 2.1 Evidence in Soria Bishopric, 1486–1502 Accusations Blasphemy Jewish nostalgia/general Judaism Food Ignoring mass Jewish observance at home Materialism Jewish observance in public Use or reading of Hebrew Sabbath observance Breaking lent/passiontide Universalism Hostility to Inquisition Others Total defendants

Women

Men

Total

2 19 24 7 21 4 9 2 14 5 5 3 10 71

74 54 45 40 24 33 23 28 15 16 15 16 16 247

76 73 69 47 44 37 32 30 29 21 20 19 26 318

Source: Adapted from Edwards, ‘Religious Experience’, p. 43. Data is compiled from FIRC II. Note: Defendants could have more than one accusation against them so totals are not a sum.

Edwards’s findings, however, also pointed to the prevalence of food-related accusations in the early years of the Inquisition. The prominence of food is even starker when one takes into account the gender division of Edwards’s sample. As he notes, the approximately 70–30 per cent male–female divide in the extant Soria records is not representative of the general picture of the early Castilian Inquisition, where women – as perceived custodians of both the Jewish bloodline and the allegedly ‘crypto-Jewish’ home – were more likely to be the target of Inquisition proceedings than men. Edwards himself suggests adjusting the female figures by a ‘conservative’ factor of 3, an adjustment which would make food the most prevalent subject in his sample. The prevalence of food is further reinforced after consideration of Edwards’s method of classification, whereby he places each defendant in the category most reflective of the accusations placed against them. As Edwards admits, this is an imperfect classification since ‘many of the so-called offences overlap or appear to be sub-sections of each other’, and furthermore ‘many of the accusations were made against the same individual’.68

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Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

It is important to note that while the Inquisition focused on alleged Jewish practices, it was a Christian institution whose jurisdiction extended only over self-identified Christians. Cases of alleged ‘judaizing’, therefore, were not just about features of Jewish religion, but also about what was considered important to Christians. Eating meat on Fridays or during Lent might have been a sign of ‘crypto-Judaism’, but it was also a sin for Christians, and not permitted in a Christian community. Dietary evidence is relevant not just to how the Christian community saw Jews (open or ‘crypto’) and their faith, but also how they saw their own religion, community, and social norms. To examine these dietary accusations in greater detail we can analyse a subset of the records of the Soria bishopric, comprising all those testimonies given in the town of Soria itself in 1490 and 1491, a total of 112 documents, involving seventy-seven conversos accused of ‘judaizing’ (Table 2.2). The documents are witness testimonies provided to the inquisitors in the Inquisition’s intense early phase, right before the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. More than one third of the documents mention food. Many reference multiple accusations relating to food, with a total of fifty-five references appearing. Thirtytwo individuals were charged following accusations directly specifying food and dietary choices or habits, out of a total of seventy-seven people charged on the basis of the 112 testimonies. Food was clearly a subject of significant importance both in the minds of the witnesses and in the eyes of the inquisitors, and was widely prevalent in the evidence provided to the Holy Office and in its charges, even in a sample of cases with an unusually high proportion of male defendants. The importance of food in early Inquisition cases is reflected elsewhere in Castile. Three other samples of Inquisition cases involving conversos from the Holy Office’s first twenty-five years in Castile confirm that evidence about food was highly prevalent, generally one of (or the) most common subjects in Table 2.2 Food evidence in Soria Town, 1490–91

Accused Related to food Testimonies Referencing food References to food Foods mentioned

Women

Men

Total

25

52 21 (40%) – – – –

77 32 (42%) 112 38 (34%) 55 19

12 (48%) – – – –

Source: FIRC II, Soria Town, 1490–91, documents 1–73, 76–107, 113–19.

‘The Foods of a Christian’

27

Table 2.3 Food evidence from confessions in Atienza, 1504–5

Confessions Referencing food Confession mostly/all regarding food

Women

Men

Total

23 21 (91%) 20 (87%)

33 30 (91%) 20 (61%)

56 51 (91%) 40 (71%)

Source: FIRC VII, Confessions from Atienza, 1504–5, documents 81–3, 85–6, 89–96, 98–101, 103, 105, 107–12, 114–18, 120–28, 130–42, 145–8.

evidence provided to inquisitors. The Soria town testimonies come from the 1490s, so I  have analysed three other samples from the 1480s and the early sixteenth century. They come from different areas of Castile, and from different types of evidence: confessions, full trial proceedings, and witness testimonies. As a result of the differing documentary profile of the three samples, a slightly different method of classifying the data has been used for each. In Atienza in 1504 and 1505, fifty-six conversos took advantage of an ‘Edict of Grace’ issued by the Inquisition and confessed to various sins of ‘judaizing’ (Table 2.3). These grace periods were commonly used by the Holy Office as an invitation to come forward and confess, and to then be ‘reconciled’ with the church (while also giving information on those who were unwilling to confess). Almost all of the confessions in Atienza make reference to food, and a large majority (71 per cent) are either entirely or mostly about food and dietary choices and habits. This again reinforces the importance of food in the minds of all concerned: even though these are confession documents, confessions to the Inquisition had to contain what it wanted to hear. After an Edict of Grace, those who had not confessed but were suspected or were the subject of accusations would be charged and put on trial. Haim Beinart collected and transcribed the trials of accused conversos from Ciudad Real in southern New Castile during 1483–5. These documents are much longer and more complex than the testimonies from Soria town or the confessions in Atienza, as they involve full trial proceedings with arraignment documents and the evidence of multiple witnesses. Food again emerges as a major subject of concern. Eating Jewish foods like unleavened bread, or breaking Lent were even more common accusations than more explicitly ‘religious’ activities such as engaging in Jewish prayer (Table 2.4). This illustrates the importance of food in perceptions of both religious practice and religious identity, with certain eating habits being seen as just as notable as

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Table 2.4 Food evidence from trials in Ciudad Real, 1483–5 Accusation Total defendants Meat and eggs during lent Unleavened bread Jewish prayers

References

Women

Men

Defendants

– 77 67 45

15 9 (60%) 12 (80%) 7 (47%)

17 11 (64%) 13 (52%) 13 (52%)

32 20 (63%) 25 (78%) 20 (63%)

Source: RTSI I, Trials in Ciudad Real of 1483–5, excluding cases where no evidence is available.

Table 2.5 Examples of food evidence from cases in Almazán, 1501–2 Accusation Avoiding pork/bacon Kosher/ing meat Meat in lent/Fridays Cabaheas sausages Jewish breads Various pies

Women

Men

Total

23 20 7 8 3 3

19 10 11 9 2 0

42 30 18 17 5 3

Source: FIRC IV, Cases from Almazán, 1501–2, excluding cases where no evidence is available.

actually praying as part of another faith. It is also notable in this sample how accusations surrounding bread were especially prevalent in accusations against women, illustrating the perceived importance of female domestic practices such as baking in maintaining a ‘Jewish home’. Finally, an analysis of witness testimonies collected against accused conversos in Almazán in in the first few years of the sixteenth century again shows similar results (Table 2.5). It is important to note that the dietary accusations do not simply focus on one or two of the most obvious charges, such as the eating of unleavened bread as Passover or the refusal of pork. For example, nineteen different ingredients or dietary choices are mentioned in the 112 testimonies from Soria town in 1490– 91 (Table 2.6). Evidence regarding dietary habits is perhaps less likely than evidence of more dramatic heresy to have been prompted by suggestions from paranoid inquisitors, a problem historians have long noted about using Inquisition records to examine social behaviour.69 That is not to say that food accusations

‘The Foods of a Christian’

29

Table 2.6 Foods mentioned in testimonies from Soria Town, 1490–91 Food

References

Sabbath stews Unleavened bread Kosher wine Kosher poultry Meat on holy days/lent, avoiding pork/bacon Lentils, chickpeas Eel, gosling, hare, tripe, pigeon pies, rabbit pies, chicken gizzards, certain stews, certain roasts

10 9 7 5 4 each 2 each 1 each

Source: FIRC II.

could not have been invented by witnesses bearing grudges (a subject which will be discussed in the next chapter). The value of these testimonies, however, is not only the insight they offer into dietary habits, but also in the fact that people thought that the information in them was important.

Identity and religion At the heart of the Inquisition’s hunt for ‘judaizing’ was the idea of conversion. Converting from one religion to another was a radical decision in early modern Europe, but in the rapid religious change and shifting religious borders of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was a notable phenomenon for those on the geographic or spiritual frontlines.70 As previously discussed, while conversion was central to Christianity and much of contemporary religious thought, it was socially, culturally and politically much more controversial. The study of converso conversion has long divided between two extremes. Cecil Roth, Yitzhak Baer, Haim Beinart and others have argued that most conversos were ‘crypto-Jews’ privately adhering to and practising Judaism, with no spiritual conversion to Christianity.71 Benzion Netanyahu and Norman Roth provocatively challenged this view, arguing instead that most conversos were practicing and believing Christians, their genuine conversion (or that of their ancestors) wrongly dismissed by a paranoid and intolerant Inquisition (and indeed disliked by Jews as well).72 Both extremes elide the wide range of personal experiences and beliefs inherent in religious conversion. The Inquisition historian Brian Pullan has argued that conversions are most fruitfully studied as individual stories, an approach that Kim Siebenhüner has

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recently applied to Jewish conversion cases from the Roman Inquisition, showing how varied and complex the process of conversion could be, both for converts and their descendants.73 Indeed, recent research has increasingly questioned the existence of collective converso religious views, instead emphasizing the diversity of heterodox (and even shifting) religious views and practices that characterized their individual, family, and local experiences.74 Diverse experiences and heterodox practices, however, existed in a context of firmly held and strongly perceived religious identities. Inquisitors repeatedly used the term ‘new Christian’, while witnesses seemed keenly aware of behaviour that indicates or deviates a certain identity. The prevalence and importance of food in early Inquisition evidence provokes questions about the relationship between food, religion and identity. How important was food to identity in early modern Castile, and what was the nature of its importance in religious identity and practice? Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous aphorism ‘tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are’ has become a well-worn cliché in the study of food, while culinary differences have long been popular and cultural shorthands for denoting identity.75 The sociologist Claude Fischler has argued that food is central to the creation of individual and group identities because of the role of choice in our food habits, creating active decisions to construct, reinforce, or reject identities through food.76 Peter Burke has noted how opposition to the ‘other’ was often central to all sorts of identity formation in early modern Europe, with emphasis on what Freud famously called ‘the narcissism of small differences’.77 The anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that food communicated identity through ‘inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries’.78 Yet Douglas’s structuralism was too universalizing to explain the diversity of ways that food affects identity. Rather than generalizing a relationship from one context, Jordan Rosenblum has argued for ‘more geographically and temporally localized studies aimed at explaining how and why specific food practices are used to create identity’.79 Just as the importance of different forms of identity – gender, status, faith – vary, it is not always the same differences in food that matter: what was unremarkable in one place or time could become totemic in another. Throughout early modern Spain, food helped to communicate one’s social status, setting apart haves and have-nots and reflecting the social order that defined society.80 Yet in early Inquisition Castile, it was religion, particularly its everyday practice, where the relationship between food and identity was most pronounced.

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Every Passover since ancient times, the Jewish seder meal is preceded by a series of questions about the food to be served.81 In order to explain the meaning of the meal, it is asked why certain foods have been chosen, cooked in certain ways, served and eaten in a particular fashion. Each element of the seder meal has been chosen to represent and evoke important elements of the Passover story: greens dipped in salt water or vinegar for the tears of enslaved ancestors; the dark, thick charoset for the adobe clay bricks of those ancestors’ slave labour; bitter herbs for the pain of oppression; unleavened bread for the rush of the Exodus. Throughout the questions and answers of the Ma Nishtana, the celebrants are asking ‘why do we eat this?’, explaining to each other a meal that is not just a religious tradition, but an important religious ritual. Christian rituals too involved food practices that offered and answered these questions, from the abstention from flesh and dairy (and all that they symbolized, as will be discussed in Part 2) that characterized the sombre reflection of holy days and Lent, to the carnal celebration of Christ’s rebirth at Easter. In fifteenth century Spain, ‘why do we eat this?’  – and ‘why do they eat that?’  – was an important religious and cultural question not just for Jews or ‘crypto-Jews’, but for their Christian (and Muslim) neighbours too. Whether certain meals and dishes were evidence of defiant ‘crypto-Judaism’, heterodox religious identities, or cultural traditions, food practices were considered integral parts of religious practice itself. Sociologists of religion have recently argued for greater emphasis on ‘embodied practices’, acts through which the sacred becomes real and present, connecting the material and the spiritual82. Spiritual meanings become embedded in such ritual expressions and activities, and they become ways of physically ‘living’ one’s faith.83 Edward Muir has emphasized how historians must remember the corporeal nature of early modern religion, arguing that we must ‘appreciate fully how Christian Europe once really thought in bodily images and habitually juxtaposed sacred and profane bodies’.84 This is especially true for our understanding of food practices, as the consumption of food inherently links mind and body, creating embodying cultural, spiritual and personal associations.85 Eating was a bodily act through which medieval and early modern people lived their religion every day, habitually renewing or altering both how they communicated their identity, and how they physically experienced their religion. The inherently social nature of eating, both on family and community levels, means that these processes existed not just for individuals making choices, but also as dynamics within groups. ‘Lived religion’ connects the individual and the social, as collective experiences, shared meanings and learned practices all inflect even the most

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private and individual belief.86 Both conversos and their neighbours ate in a world where eating choices were a way of experiencing religion, and of creating and expressing religious identity. Thinking about food as part of religion requires conceiving of religion, as Natalie Zemon Davis once put it, ‘as practised and experienced and not merely as defined and prescribed’.87 Thinking of ‘lived religion’ rather than ‘popular religion’ goes some way towards avoiding the minefield of hierarchies (between elite and common, official and deviant, religion and ‘superstition’) implied by the latter term. In his study of religious practice in early modern Spain, William Christian preferred the term ‘local religion’, arguing that the distinctiveness of religious practice in Castile and central Spain by locale was far more important than distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘official’ and ‘popular’.88 Considering the local and the lived can help us better understand both food’s place in religious practice, and its place in people’s perceptions of their neighbours’ true religious faith. For both Jews and Christians (and indeed also for Muslims), the religious calendar was punctuated by certain food patterns: Sabbath stews, fish on Fridays, Ramadan, holy days, Carnival, Lent, Passover, Easter, Yom Kippur, Christmas, marriages, funerals. The meals or dietary regulations that accompanied these religious events were both cultural traditions and integral parts of religious practice. Eating and not eating certain things at certain times was not just a statement or revelation of identity – or a private act of defiance – but also an affirmation and embodiment of faith. Medieval and early modern Christianity was characterized by a complex system of fast days and periods during which the eating of meat and other animal products was forbidden. Breaking Lent or fast days was a common enough sin that occurred in Christian communities across Europe (as will be discussed in Part 2), but in Castile fast-breaking became particularly tied to the suspicion of ‘judaizing’, as evidence that a converso was following a Jewish religious and food calendar. People’s perceptions of what religious faith involved might place greater emphasis on daily lived practices than on their theological thought or conformity with official worship. Early Inquisition records contain many ‘new Christians’ confessing to or being accused of breaking Lent, including twentynine testimonies from Almazán alone: María García was alleged to have eaten a leg of partridge during Lent; Pedro López de Hituero and María Sánchez both apparently ate meat on Holy Thursday; Álvaro de Luna allegedly ate eggs on Fridays and during Lent; Leonor Méndez, wife of Diego, confessed to having eaten meat on fast days.89

‘The Foods of a Christian’

33

Many of these accusations are, as John Edwards argued about Soria, evidence of general everyday religious transgressions, rather than anything particularly ‘Jewish’. Pedro López de Hituero, for example, was a ‘new Christian’ accused of breaking Lent by making a stew of chicken and conger eel (which is not kosher), an excellent example of the complex web of culture and religious practice that characterized these cases.90 Just as for Christians elsewhere in Europe accused of breaking Lent or other fasts, illness was a reasonable excuse, and many conversos claimed to have either eaten or not eaten things due to their health. Luis Hurtado in Almazán in 1501, admitted to the sin of eating meat during Lent, claiming he did it only as he had been very sick with syphilis.91 Another man justified eating meat during Lent and on Fridays ‘for the sake of his health’, as he too was ill with syphilis.92 Francisco Nuñez and his wife allegedly ate meat during lent because of illness.93 In another testimony, Francisco is alleged to have on many occasions eaten meat on Fridays, and on Saturdays (an odd detail), and during Lent again because of syphilis.94 Marina González said she had only ever refused to eat bacon because of heart pains and other ailments she suffered after childbirth.95 Illicitly eating meat was not the only thing that could arouse Inquisition suspicion on a Friday. For Jews, abstaining from work (including all cooking) is a central part of the observation of the Sabbath. Jewish families precook food before sundown on Friday, and then eat it the next day. Cooking on Fridays – especially if the dish being cooked could be eaten the next day, such as pies or a stew – could become a source of suspicion. The González women (Beatriz, Leonor and Isabel) from Ciudad Real, tried 1511–13, were said to often cook stews of aubergine with onions, coriander and spices on Fridays for use the next day.96 María González, wife of Rodrigo de Chillón, was said to have cooked casseroles on Friday for Saturday, which she and her family then ate cold the next day with fruit.97 Juana Nuñez was also supposed to have cooked cazuelas and other dishes on Friday for Saturday, when she and others would eat them cold.98 In Almazán, many people were accused of cooking dishes on Friday to eat on Saturday.99 The kind of meals traditionally served to mark other Jewish religious customs, such as funerals, were also noted by suspicious witnesses. Spanish Jews ate together at funerals at a meal called the cohuerzo, where fish, eggs and lentils were served at low tables with the mourners sitting on the floor.100 These symbolic foods were common in Sephardic funeral customs: the round shape of lentils and eggs symbolizes the cycle of life and the world, while their smooth ‘mouthless’ surfaces represents the voiceless mourners, silently accepting the will of God. Many conversos admitted or were accused of eating at cohuerzos.

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Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

Leonor Vélez was alleged to have eaten at a cohuerzo with her family and other ‘new Christians’ after the death of her grandfather in Almazán.101 Such meals may have been acts of crypto-Jewish religious defiance, or cultural traditions in families now firmly Christian, or somewhere between. But the fact that early modern Castilians noted them and connected them to religious practice shows how they, regardless of faith, saw food as a central part of religious practice and identity, an association that was to persist and spread in the early modern Spanish world. Olivia Remie Constable has shown how perceptions of Islamic food rules and habits characterized Spanish Christian views of the morisco minority well into the seventeenth century, with community boundaries and identity defined by what and how one ate and cooked.102 Jillian Williams has emphasized the role of food in contested morisco identities in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Valencia.103 Rebecca Earle has revealed how as Spain’s horizons stretched into the ‘New World’, food became a way to define imperial ideas of religious and racial identity, othering and dehumanizing indigenous American peoples through perceptions about their food.104 The Inquisition too spread across the ocean, prosecuting ‘crypto-Jews’ in ‘New Spain’ for centuries, while Spanish missionaries wrestled with how one could eat like a Christian in lands with strange foods, and how those strange foods could fit into Christian diets back home.105 For Christians and worlds old and new, food was at the heart of constructing and defining identities. * Eating was a serious business in Castile Inquisition, one in which dietary choices carried all sorts of significance and all sorts of risk. Witnesses and inquisitors noticed and placed importance on what – and how and when – people chose to eat. Eating communicated religious and cultural identity, and also formed part of how people experienced and practiced their everyday faith. Focusing on these early Inquisition food stories reveals a lot more than a binary between Inquisition Catholicism and ‘crypto-Judaism’, or a heterodox religious culture between them; it emphasizes the importance of food in early modern religion, its identities, experiences, and practices. In her 1494 defence, Marina González said that not only did she eat pork but also partridges, pigeons, hares, rabbits and all sorts of birds and game, and ‘all the other foods of a Christian’.106 Marina’s phrase, ‘the foods of a Christian’ emphasizes the importance of food to the people of her society: how you ate revealed, and embodied, what you believed and who you were. To understand Marina, others like her, and the thousands of neighbours whose testimony put them on trial, we must take food as seriously as they did.

3

Kitchens and Neighbours: Food, Gender, and Community

In 1484, the Inquisition took confessions from the village of Almagro near Ciudad Real, under an Edict of Grace. Those who admitted their sins would be ‘reconciled’ to the faith through religious penance, social pressure, and shame: generally they had to take part in an auto-da-fé (‘act of faith’) procession, wearing penitential garments to identify them as sinners to their watching neighbours. Like many others (indeed confessions during Edicts of Grace are often almost formulaic), a woman called Marina González admitted to having engaged in what the inquisitors saw as ‘judaizing heresy’: as a girl, she said, her relatives (especially her brothers-in-law) had encouraged her to avoid cooking on the Sabbath, to abstain from eating pork, to eat unleavened bread, to fast for atonement (a reference to Yom Kippur) and to say Jewish prayers. She ascribed these sins to her youth and to family pressure. As an adult, she admitted once having told her maid to prepare a meat stew on a Friday as she had forgotten what day it was. Her husband, Francisco de Villarreal, a spice merchant, had scolded her for her mistake, and they had had fish for dinner.1 Thousands of people confessed such behaviour to the Inquisition during Edicts of Grace, and most never appeared before the Holy Office again, promising to be good Christians and abiding by any specific penances they were given (e.g. women might be forbidden from wearing certain qualities of cloth: Marina was seemingly banned from wearing crimson).2 Ten years after her confession, however, Marina was once more accused of judaizing heresy. The Inquisition prosecutors alleged that Marina had not changed her ways after her previous confession, and was a relapsed heretic, returning (as the Inquisition often put it) ‘like a dog to its vomit’.3 They said that she had continued to abstain from eating pork and refused to sit at the same table as those who did, would not eat partridges or strangled birds, attempted to butcher her meat in a kosher way, regularly observed the Sabbath and did other things out of adherence to ‘Mosaic law’.4

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Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

While the inquisitors also alleged that Marina kept no cross or images of saints in her home – which she and witnesses for her refuted – her trial focused in large measure on her kitchen and table. Her (often unhelpful) defence witnesses argued that she did eat pork (though sometimes not, because it made her feel ill), but that they weren’t sure if she ate rabbit or octopus or eel, and they often could not speak definitively to many of the charges.5 The first prosecution witness, Pedro de Teva, a good friend of Marina’s husband, said that because of suspicions about Marina, he had carefully watched what she ate and cooked.6 He noted that she never ate pork or strangled partridges (which Pedro and Francisco often did together, once prompting an argument between Franciso and Marina), and that she would not eat at the same table or even drink from her husband’s glass if he had eaten pork.7 Women friends and neighbours made claims about foods that Marina would not allow in her pots, or how he she had refused to eat certain foods they had offered her.8 Her husband’s rather confused testimony claimed that she occasionally didn’t eat pork out of concern for her health, but that he would ‘reprimand’ her for it.9 Despite lengthy proceedings, the inquisitors felt they could not reach a conclusive verdict from the evidence they had heard, and Marina refused to confess to any of the charges. The inquisitors decided to use torture in order to force her to tell the truth.10 They tied her to a board and put a hood over her head, and then began to pour water into her nose and mouth, producing a painful and terrifying feeling of drowning, a torture technique very similar to the waterboarding used by the CIA during the Bush Administration in the first decade of this century. The inquisitors offered her chances to speak, but Marina said nothing until after multiple pints she begged them (‘for Holy Mary’s sake’) to stop, and said she would tell the truth; but the inquisitors were not convinced when she offered only an accusation that her neighbour fasted (the inquisitors asked if she meant Jewish or Christian fasts), and kept the Sabbath.11 The torture continued but despite six full pints of water and repeated demands from torturers to speak, Marina refused to say anything further.12 Marina troubled the inquisitors, and though their suspicions remained, they felt they did not have enough evidence to condemn her. They offered her the possibility of ‘compurgation’, whereby witnesses could swear on her behalf and she would be released. But on 22 May 1494, as the compurgatory witnesses she had chosen were read out, Marina interrupted the officials and said she wanted no witnesses on her behalf. The prosecutors claimed she had failed the compurgation and implied her own guilt.13

Kitchens and Neighbours

37

The Inquisition heard evidence from her jailers that Marina despaired in prison during June 1494, and had stopped eating, refusing to eat even though a doctor could find no illness in her.14 The jailers had had to violently force her to eat, ‘by pure force’.15 Marina told them that she saw no point in eating, as the Inquisition planned to kill her anyway. As she became weaker, a jailer asked her if she wished to confess but she said no.16 When he asked if she believed in Christianity and the Church, Marina despairingly said that she would not be here if she did.17 Fellow women prisoners recounted that Marina did not want to eat and was often silent and withdrawn, sometimes sane but sometimes seemingly not, and that she spoke of how the jailers had to ‘kill and tear her asunder’ to make her eat; a jailer used similarly violent terms to describe her force-feeding.18 On 30 June, Marina’s behaviour was deemed enough for the Inquisition to finally condemn her to death as a relapsed heretic, ‘relaxing her to the justice of the secular arm’ in the Holy Office’s formulaic sentencing.19 Marina’s long ordeal emphasizes not just the importance of food to the Inquisition and those who encountered it, but also the ways in which gender and community inflected evidence about food and the accusations in which it played a central role. Renée Levine Melammed has charted the early Castilian Inquisition’s focus on women conversas, noting the Inquisition’s perceptions about women’s place in the Jewish family, and its need to focus on domestic religious deviance in pursuing what it (and Melammed) believed to be a ‘cryptoJewish’ religion operating behind closed doors.20 Nowhere was this gendering more prevalent than in the kitchen, a heavily gendered space for cooking and eating, watching and being watched, performing and imagining. Whether the religious deviance practiced by conversa women was real or imagined, deliberate or accidental, religious or cultural, orthodox or heterodox, evidence about their kitchens reveals patterns of social and gender relations that help illuminate family and community life in early Inquisition Castile. Women’s responsibility for cooking made them often both defendant and accuser in Inquisition trials, bringing a domestic food world into contact with wider community dynamics, as enmity between women found outlet in the Holy Office’s system of denunciation. Marina and many other conversas did not live in a converso community separate from the Christian community: rather than between two segregated communities, the social relations between witnesses and defendants generally took place within one community, between neighbours and relatives, enemies and friends. Moving beyond a binary inquisition of these women’s ‘true’ faith and the reality of their Christianity or ‘crypto-Judaism’, this

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Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

interplay between kitchens and neighbours can help us explore wider issues of early modern gender and community.

Cooking We have seen how eating habits and choices were of great interest to the Inquisition, but the inquisitors were not just interested in what ended up on people’s kitchen tables for dinner; they wanted to know how it had got there. Stories from maids and neighbours about cooking practices fill the testimony of early Inquisition cases from Castile. There were not just suspicious ways to eat, but also suspect ways to cook and keep a kitchen as well. Probably the most onerous dietary restriction on Jews – especially for those not living in a large Jewish community  – is the need to butcher and prepare meat in certain prescribed ways in order to make it kosher for consumption. The restrictions and processes are both complicated and labour intensive. Only the meat from mammals who both ruminate and have cloven hooves can be considered kosher. The primary application of these rules is to animals which have one of these characteristics but not the other, for example, hares and, most famously, pigs.21 Trefa (forbidden) birds are listed in the book of Deuteronomy, and the Mishnah further elucidates the characteristics necessary for a bird to be kosher (namely having more than one toe on each foot, a crop in the mouth, and a gizzard which can be peeled).22 Meat and poultry may not be eaten if they are killed in any way other than a method of ritual slaughter known as schechita, which involves severing the jugular vein, carotid artery, oesophagus and trachea all in one fluid knife motion, and draining as much blood as possible from the carcass.23 This means that Jews cannot eat meat or poultry killed in a Christian slaughterhouse or by a Christian butcher, or eat meat from animals that died from natural causes or were killed through hunting. Jillian Williams has shown how meat markets emphasized and reinforced physical separation between Christians, Jews and Muslims in fifteenth-century Valencia, and how places for the butchery of meat became sites to showcase and enact religious identity.24 Like the Valencian moriscos studied by Williams, Castilian conversos faced a menu of controversial meanings in their choice of meat. While medieval Spain had many Jewish butchers, for conversos in the late 1400s trying to privately keep kosher out of either religious conviction or traditional custom, the kashrut regarding meat presented a number of logistical problems. If one’s town still had a Jewish butcher, strolling in to purchase some kosher meat

Kitchens and Neighbours

39

was certainly going to arouse suspicion about the sincerity of one’s Christianity (as will be discussed later). As anti-Semitism and segregation increased, fewer and fewer towns would have had openly Jewish butchers, and after the Expulsion in 1492, none could. According to the Inquisition and its network of informers and witnesses, many conversa women took the responsibility to kosher meat into their own homes, relying on a variety of improvised techniques to make the meat at least approximate real kosher butchery.25 María González, wife of Alonso de Merlo, described in her confession the process by which she would prepare her meat, including how she would ‘salt and desalt’ it.26 This would have been to use osmosis to remove blood from the meat in accordance with Jewish law.27 Many women also admitted or were accused of removing fat from their meat, which is also necessary to make the meat kosher.28 In Ciudad Real María González admitted to ‘removing the fat’ as well as ‘opening the leg of the meat’ to remove nerves and organs, processes which again may be necessary to make meat kosher.29 Juana de los Olivos was alleged to have ‘purged’ her meat ‘very meticulously’.30 In Almazán, dozens of people were accused of koshering meat in various ways. María the daughter of García de Valluncar described seeing Ana González and her daughter Leonor remove the fat from mutton brought from the butcher.31 Juan de Talveyla alleged to have seen Aldonza Lainez prepare her meat in a very involved process that he described to the inquisitors in detail.32 An anonymous witness claimed to have seen María García remove fat from her meat.33 In Ciudad Real, Catalina Martínez described the González women’s methods of preparing their meat step-by-step, saying they did these things ‘every time they brought meat from the butcher’.34 Others were alleged to have gone even further and slaughtered their own meat, especially birds, which could be kept domestically in an urban home, unlike say a sheep. In Ciudad Real Catalina Díaz claimed to have seen her female neighbour behead pigeons on many occasions.35 Melammed notes some women in Hita were accused of killing pigeons and chickens.36 In Almazán there were even accusations that some ‘new Christians’ had ritually slaughtered other animals. Pedro González Hurtado and his wife Ana González were said to have killed oxen at home, as allegedly did a number of other people.37 Magdalena la Jaena and her son Franciscito were alleged to have killed a sheep in their home, drained the blood out and covered it with earth, a description approximating the koshering process in Leviticus 17:13.38 Once again for these people’s neighbours, kitchen practices were a visible sign of difference, be it of religion, custom, tradition, or dietary preference.

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People – especially women, as will be discussed later – noticed kitchen habits different to their own. Noticeably different kitchen habits were not confined to butchery and meat preparation. One of the most symbolic pieces of cooking for which conversa women could be called before the Inquisition was the baking of Jewish breads. Both at Passover (when the unleavened matsah – pan çençeño, pan cuez or pan sin levadura in Spanish – is baked to commemorate the Exodus) and on the Sabbath (when challah is made to commemorate the manna from Heaven), Jews baked and ate noticeably different bread than their Christian neighbours. Melammed and Mary Elizabeth Perry have noted how due to increasing Christian intolerance and large-scale conversions, converso and morisco homes became ‘bastions of cultural resistance’ for those secretly maintaining their old faiths: with public displays of Judaism or Islam impossible, ‘the private domain became the sole site tenable for continuing the tradition’.39 In the case of baking this was especially true for those who truly did practice some form of ‘crypto-Judaism’: if one was now officially a Christian one could not go to the Jewish baker to buy one’s bread, yet bread was central to many important religious practices. Melammed notes allegations of conversas buying or bartering unleavened bread from Jews in the run-up to Passover, and allegations that some received it as gifts.40 Across Castile, there were many claims that conversa women had, as in the case of butchery, taken the responsibility of producing kosher food upon themselves in their own kitchen. At the Inquisition for Ciudad Real in 1484, Isabel, wife of Lope de Higuera, was accused of baking unleavened bread at ‘Pascua’ (Passover/Easter), as was (another) Marina González, wife of Bachiller Abudarme, while Inés de Belmonte confessed to the same.41 In Almazán in 1505, Graciana the wife of Gabriel the innkeeper, was alleged to have made bread without leavening a number of times at Easter (‘pascua de la Resurrección’).42 That summer, María de Silva, Beatriz the wife of Ruy Díaz Lainez, the wife of Francisco Suárez the toll-collector, and the wife of Maistre Bernal were all also accused of the same baking practice.43 To these women’s neighbours, baking bread in one’s home without leavening, especially at a certain time of year, was unusual enough to be suspect. So too were certain Jewish baking habits which allegedly persisted among some conversa women. Challah is noted for its braided shape, but it its preparation under Jewish law is also distinctive: the baker was traditionally supposed to set aside some of the dough for the rabbi, but after the destruction of the Second Temple the piece of dough was to be symbolically thrown into the fire.44 This practice was mentioned in a late fifteenth-century document prepared by the Valencian Inquisition on the rites and customs of Spanish Jews, following the interrogation

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of a rabbi. The document noted that ‘throwing a piece of dough into the fire is in memory of the bread that the people of Israel were obliged to give to the High Priest in sacrifice . . . in memory of the Priesthood that the people of Israel lost’.45 At the Ciudad Real Inquisition in 1503, Juana de los Olivos was accused of throwing a piece of dough into the fire while baking, out of ‘Jewish ceremony’.46 In Almazán in 1505, Beatriz the wife of Ruy Díaz Lainez was also accused of this practice, and the off-hand way it is noted by the testimony (she ‘threw away dough’) likely indicates that the practice was well known.47 The baking of desserts at the time of Pascua, given the slightly different calendars and restrictions on Jews and Christians, was a particularly notable time of difference in baking habits. In Almazán in 1505 María the daughter of Juan de Sancho alleged that the ‘new Christian’ Angelina the wife of Cristóbal de Léon made various cakes and tarts during Holy Week, either implying she was too quick to break Lent or that she was observing Passover.48 The same summer, Magdalena the wife of Pedro the carpenter made similar implications in her allegation that Maistre Bernal’s wife made Easter tarts with eggs during Holy Week.49 These stories are very far from explicit evidence about Jewish religious practice, and it is notable how women noticed such differences in the baking of their neighbours, often with such specific knowledge of method or ingredients that they must have been in the accused’s kitchen. Neighbours noticed other differences in kitchen habits too. Early Castilian Inquisition records include many allegations using the word ‘aparte’ in relation to conversa kitchens:  keeping certain ingredients (such as pork products) separate from the rest of one’s food in the kitchen was both notable and suspect. Keeping one’s kitchen ‘apart’ like this was seen almost like an embodiment of the Jewish commandment to be a people apart: I am The Lord your God, which have separated you from other people. Ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and unclean beasts and between unclean fowls and clean; and ye shall not make your souls abominable by beast or by fowl, or by any manner of living thing that creepeth on the ground, which I have separated from you as unclean. And ye shall be holy unto me; for I The Lord am holy, and have severed you from other people that ye should be mine.50

Such an idea of separation was of course also prevalent in Spanish Christian views of the Jews, first in the enforcement of segregation and then in expulsion. In the inquisitors’ and witnesses’ mind, conversas keeping things separate in their kitchens was reflective of a secretive separation from the Christian community.

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In the Almazán records for 1501–5 there are many testimonies alleging that women kept certain ingredients or cooking equipment ‘aparte’ in the kitchen. Ana Lainez allegedly insisted that spoons or pots used with bacon be kept apart.51 Catalina Vélez, mother of the doctor Antón Vélez, allegedly would not eat bacon and kept ‘separate pots’ for other types of meat.52 Catalina the wife of Pedro García alleged that Catalina Lainez would not allow any bacon in the pot she used for her and her husband Álvaro de Luna, and that they had things cooked in a separate pot.53 Other women spoke of spoons kept apart, while Aldonza Lainez apparently scalded her knives.54 Catalina, the mother of Antonio the physician allegedly kept both pots and spoons apart from any bacon.55 Francisco Nuñez and his wife confessed to keeping their pot free of bacon and other salted meat, and this was also alleged of Martín García de la Fuente.56 Beatriz, the wife of Ruy Díaz Lainez apparently kept a separate pot free from bacon, while a maid said Graciana Santa Cruz had her meals cooked in a separate pot.57 While these conversa kitchens were allegedly ‘apart’ from the rest of the Christian community in their customs and cooking practices, the very fact that witnesses knew (or claimed to know) this shows how they were not part of a separate social community. The prominence of women as witnesses as well as defendants emphasizes how gendered an activity cooking was. In evidence about kitchen work, male inquisitors were entering a women’s world.

Gender Over the past few decades we have learned a great deal about the lives of early modern women, and the gender structures that characterized their place in marriages, families, communities, and religions.58 Domestic labour, however – the major activity of early modern women’s daily lives – often remains somewhat shrouded in mystery. As Allyson Poska commented in her study of women and authority in early modern northern Spain, although ‘the majority of domestic tasks fell to women . . . this aspect of life generally eludes archival investigation’.59 Recent research has used a number of innovative techniques to get around this problem, such as the study of household inventories or the gathering of ‘incidental’ information about female labour in documents focusing on other issues.60 The Inquisition’s focus on conversa women and their kitchens means that its trial records can shed light not just on women’s work, but also on women’s relations with their families, their neighbours, and particularly with other women.

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Table 3.1 Gender differences in food evidence Food Evidence Unleavened bread: Ciudad Real, 1483–5 Accused with food: Soria bishopric, 1486–1502 Accused with food: Soria town, 1490–91 Cases with food evidence: Almazán, 1501–5 Confession all/mostly regarding food: Atienza, 1504–5

Women (%)

Men (%)

80 34 48 54 87

52 18 40 35 61

The prominence of women in the kitchen is certainly evident in Castilian converso families. The quantitative analyses in Chapter  2 revealed a greater prevalence of food-related evidence in the cases of female conversas. A selection of various categories illustrates the gender divide (Table 3.1). The evidence regarding baking, for example, illustrates how women were generally more likely to be accused of food preparation ‘heresies’ than men. While men certainly played a role in food procurement and preparation, the kitchen was firmly women’s domain. As in the context of conversas secretly fulfilling a role as mistresses of a Jewish home, male awareness – and sometimes fear – of female control of the kitchen was a common feature in late medieval and early modern Christian Europe. Caroline Walker Bynum has argued that cooking was so much a woman’s role that it appeared, to men, not merely arcane but threatening. When medieval men projected their hostility toward women into suspicion of what went on in the women’s quarters, they frequently spoke of women’s control of food.61

This dynamic was perhaps even more pronounced in Christian perceptions of Jewish (or ‘crypto-Jewish’) households, where the woman was thought to have a semireligious role as the keeper of the Jewish home.62 In fact it was not unusual for the husbands of conversa women on trial to profess ignorance of the family kitchen or what women did there, and for such ignorance to be taken by the authorities as a given. While giving evidence to defend his wife Marina González in Ciudad Real in 1494, Francisco de Toledo gave the impression that Marina had persisted in Jewish kitchen habits despite him ordering her not to. He also seemed especially irritated that when she (apparently) neglected cooking and housework on the Sabbath, he had to do what she ‘should’ have been doing.63 The perception of women’s central role in Jewish domestic life  – as cook, mother, and carrier of the Jewish bloodline – was matched by a perception of male impotence in the face of a defiant and dangerous ‘crypto-Jewish’ woman,

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and more broadly in the face of female control of the kitchen. Indeed the Inquisition’s entire view of both ‘judaizing’ and the household in general was extremely gendered. In her defence Marina said that on Saturdays she cooked and kneaded bread, ‘like a Christian woman’.64 After Marina’s execution, Francisco married a woman called Juana de Chincilla, who was also tried and condemned by the Inquisition (she received a lengthy prison sentence rather than execution).65 Francisco was also mentioned or called as a witness in a number of other trials in Ciudad Real and Toledo; on one occasion in 1520 his testimony was rejected because his mother had been condemned as a judaizer.66 García de Alcalá, the husband of Marí Nuñez who confessed during an Inquisition ‘Period of Grace’ in 1486 in Alcázar de Consuergo, admitted that he had been wrong in ‘allowing my wife to fast the fasts of the Jews’, and ‘allowing my wife to remove the fat from the meat’, thus being guilty of a sin of omission. García justified his actions by saying that he ‘sometimes forbad’ Marí from doing these things, but in general he did not stop her ‘so as not to have a bad home life’.67 Benito González, García and Marí’s brother-in-law, admitted that he had ‘sinned by eating cooked food made on Friday for the Sabbath’, but qualified that by saying he had mainly sinned by ‘consenting to let my wife [cook such meals]’. Benito also admitted having been sinful to have ‘allowed the fat to be removed from the meat’, something his wife had confessed to doing. Just in case his implications were not clear, Benito closed his confession by commenting that ‘in all of the above [sins] I was the consenter to my wife’.68 Inquisitors do not seem to have found it odd that men would profess ignorance or lack of control over their wives’ kitchens. Certainly Christian perceptions of the domestic role of women in Judaism are important in understanding this. But perhaps just as important were the gender dynamics between husband and wife. There was a clear acceptance that domestic chores, especially those relating to food, were ‘woman’s work’, and that the kitchen was a female space. Inquisition Spain was a religious society in which the social control of women, and the policing of established gender roles, were fundamental.69 Many conversa Inquisition trials centred on social interaction between women. Women witnesses were often exceptionally well informed about the cooking practices of their neighbours, right down to the use of various seasonings in certain recipes. At times testimonies almost became recipe lists, such as in some cases from summer 1505 in Almazán. Juana de Fuente Alvilla alleged that she knew that Beatriz the wife of Ruy Díaz Lainez included white wine, honey, cloves, and pepper in her unleavened bread.70 The same year, María the daughter of García Redondo said that the wife of Francisco

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Suárez the toll-collector put eggs and oil in hers.71 María the daughter of Juan de Sancho said that Angelina the wife of Cristobál de Léon made biscuits with eggs, honey, and oil.72 Juana the wife of Pedro the weaver, said that María de Silva made doughnuts with breadcrumbs (grated from unleavened bread; i.e. matsah meal), which were then glazed with sugar and honey.73 Magdalena the wife of Pedro the carpenter alleged that Maistre Bernal and his wife ate a dish involving breadcrumbs, garlic, ground spices, oil, and fresh coriander leaf.74 Dried coriander was used by Gabriel the inn-keeper and his wife Graciana, according to Magdalena the daughter of Gil Vallano, as did Catalina Lainez according to Catalina the wife of Pedro García.75 Two witnesses in the 1490s in Ciudad Real mentioned the defendants’ use of parsley.76 How did all these women know such specific details about their neighbours kitchens? Many seem to have simply seen things (or claimed to have seen things) while visiting friends or acquaintances in their homes. For women who were either related or friends, the kitchen was an important site of socializing. It was not only a private domestic space in which the wife and mother exercised authority within her own household, but was also a semipublic space in which she interacted with other women; women who were familiar with the same kitchen work, and who therefore noticed different kitchen customs.77 The Inquisition’s prized women witnesses, however, were not friends but servants. Maids had intimate knowledge of their master and mistress’s domestic routines and habits, and were thus privy to any kitchen secrets a conversa woman had. Even if a maid had not really seen anything incriminating, it would be believable to inquisitors if she claimed to have. The relationship between a woman and the women she employed to work in her home would have been a complex one, especially if the mistress ordered her maid to cook or keep the kitchen in a way the maid found unusual, or if a woman and her maid came into conflict. Early Inquisition records contain much evidence from maids about their employers’ domestic habits. Juana, a servant in the house of Beatriz, Leonor, and Isabel González (who were tried 1511–13 by the Ciudad Real Inquisition), recounted how her mistress would prevent the servants and the household’s slave, Francisca, from even touching the meat that she and her family ate. Her mistress would bring meat for the family from the butcher herself, then prepare it and cook it herself. She would also order her maid and slave not to wash the families’ dishes with the same cloths they had used on the servants’ dishes.78 Some servants hired by conversas would find their new mistress’s different cooking methods, for example, frying in olive oil, to be strange.79 In Almazán in 1505, a maid called Juana told the Inquisition that her employer and his wife ate meat

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during Lent (though apparently only because of a bad illness).80 Even people who knew maids might end up testifying: Pedro González alleged in 1505 that he knew that Aldonza Lainez had her slave, a black woman named Angelina, prepare a dish involving turnips and grated cheese during Lent.81 At least four different maids gave testimony to the Inquisition about Maistre Bernal and his wife María Álvarez during 1505 in Almazán.82 Allegations made against those who employed maids or owned slaves certainly merit discussion of the class elements of anti-converso feeling in fifteenth-century Spain. The success of many prominent ‘new Christian’ families in business, the church, and royal government led to resentment and jealousy, and fed into the narrative of insidious conspiracy which underpinned some of the Inquisition’s beliefs about ‘crypto-Judaism’. While such broad structural arguments are important in approaching the rise and development of anticonverso sentiment across Castile, and in understanding the reasons behind the establishment and direction of the Inquisition, they are less easily applied to specific local communities or particular personal stories. While some of those accused in early Inquisition trials seem to have been well-off, many seem less remarkable, and while ‘class’ envy of ‘new Christians’ might explain some suspicion, personal or familial grievances seem to characterize others. In order to understand how social resentments led to accusations of ‘judaizing’ heresy, we must think of both the woman in her own kitchen and the other women with whom she interacted there: relatives, friends, neighbours, servants. This nexus of women and food was key to the early operation of the Castilian Inquisition and its pursuit of ‘crypto-Jews’.

Community What caused so many friends and maids to end up testifying against their neighbours? Certainly we must be aware of the effect that the arrival of the Inquisition in a community could have: as the process grew, the social pressure to inform would have been high. Many were possibly also motivated by faith: they genuinely thought the practices they had seen were evidence of ‘crypto-Judaism’. But there were also sometimes more self-interested motives at play in cases where female friends or servants informed on other women. The case of Marina González gives some particularly interesting insights into the relations between women in Ciudad Real. From the full trial proceedings we can follow the process of allegation, defence, and punishment.83 When facing

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prosecution by the Inquisition, a defendant and their counsel could present a tachas, a list of people they claimed would have cause to lie against them to the Holy Office. The idea of this was to cast doubt on prosecution evidence by claiming it had been motivated by enmity, jealousy, or other malicious intent. The process was complicated, however, by the fact that the identity of prosecution witnesses was always kept secret from the accused and the defence counsel. This means that a defendant’s tachas can be taken as a fairly honest account of those with whom they had ‘bad blood’, as a defendant would want to cast as much suspicion as possible since they did not actually know who had testified against them. It also meant, of course, that the process was extremely emotionally traumatic for a defendant, who would in all likelihood torment herself over what friend, neighbour, or relative may have betrayed her. Marina’s tachas, prepared with her defence counsel and husband, says that she and Francisco suspected Mayor, Wife of Juan de Villareal, who had been a servant in their house, of testifying out of ill will. Francisco said that Marina had ‘great jealousy’ of Mayor because she thought Franciso had committed adultery with the maid.84 Because of this, Francisco said that Marina had made Mayor’s life miserable before throwing her out of the house, dragging her by the hair, and publicly calling her a whore and a concubine.85 Francisco claimed that Mayor had reacted by threatening Marina, calling her a ‘Jewish whore’ and saying she would ‘make her burn’.86 Marina was slightly less forthcoming with the details but did say she had seen that Mayor was a ‘whore’ with some men, castigated her for it, and thrown her out of the house, and that as a result they hated each other.87 Francisco named an incredible fourteen women who he believed bore enough enmity towards Marina to possibly testify against her, mainly for her having chastised or bad-mouthed them.88 Francisco thought one of the women who might have testified against his wife was the wife of the butcher.89 He also suspected Marí Ruíz of testifying against Marina because of an occasion in the past when Marí had ‘made a hole in the wall’ of Francisco and Marina’s house (presumably to spy on them), which, unsurprisingly, had caused her and Marina to quarrel.90 Unfortunately for Marina, only two of the women had actually testified, so she was able to negate very little of the testimony that had been offered against her.91 That does not mean, however, that some were not using the Inquisition to pursue personal quarrels or grudges, and to persecute Marina. Gracia del Espina is listed by Marina and Francisco as a biased possible witness, and she had indeed come forward with ‘incriminating’ evidence about Marina’s kitchen habits and dietary preferences. Gracia claimed that once she was in Marina’s kitchen and

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that she had seen Marina cut pieces out of some meat and throw them away to a hen, after checking if Gracia was watching.92 For the Carnival festivities in 1491, Gracia made some hojuelos, a fried doughy delicacy traditionally eaten on the eve of the Lenten season in which they would be prohibited. Gracia made the pastry for her ‘flakes’ out of flour, eggs, and pork lard before frying them. Marina did not want to eat them, which Gracia seems to have found highly suspicious.93 A  combination of women’s food-related interactions and social relations combined to bolster the case against Marina. The fact that it was neighbours, perhaps even friends and relatives, who had testified against Marina haunted her during her imprisonment. Her extensive tachas shows how much she had thought about who might have reason to dislike her, and her abandonment of the compurgation process likely also had to do with the anguish of not knowing whether the people she chose could be relied upon to defend her. The particulars of the evidence against her were so mundane that – regardless of her true religious beliefs – it was impossible for her to know what people might have seen or say they had seen about her eating or her cooking or her housework. A fellow female prisoner told the inquisitors that Marina spent much time thinking about who had testified against her, and this had led her to refuse to eat.94 Fraught social relations with others played a role in many Inquisition proceedings:  the very existence of processes for denunciation and defence created a vector for the shifting friendships, alliances, and enmities that characterized women’s relations with one another (and with men), similar to the social and gender dynamics of witchcraft trials (as will be explored in Part 3).95 At the Ciudad Real Inquisition, Inés López maintained that all of the testimony against her had been given as lies by drunkards and other noncredible witnesses, many of whom were women Inés knew in town, while Leonor Álvarez succeeded in reducing her sentence by proving that a woman she knew had given false testimony against her.96 The maid Magdalena noted in her 1505 testimony against her old employer, Maestre Bernal, that he used to overcharge some patients for cures, buying things at one price from the apothecary and then selling them for much more.97 Domestic service was not the only economic transaction through which food and social relations could combine to influence Inquisition proceedings. Shopping was a process infused with social relationships and an awareness of different food cultures. Juan Rodríguez and Catalina Ramírez were both accused of procuring meat from ‘the Jewish butcher’ in Soria town in 1491.98 Intriguingly, Gonzalo the butcher gave a number of testimonies to the Inquisition in Soria

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that year, and while he did not accuse anyone of going to a Jewish butcher, he did have information on people’s eating habits, alleging that one accused ate meat during Lent.99 Another butcher in Soria, Antón, was accused of ‘judaizing’ by other witnesses, who alleged that on Saturdays he had eaten cow’s entrails as well as the wing, feet, neck, ‘and all the rest’ of a gosling.100 Even after the Expulsion and the outlawing of the Jewish faith, references still appear to people procuring meat from ‘carniçeria de los judíos’, such as María García in Atienza in 1504.101 At the same time before the Ciudad Real Inquisition, Juana de los Olivos was accused of refusing to ‘eat meat from the Christian butcher’, and thus procuring her meat ‘from some heretic’, who she thought had butchered it according to Jewish ceremony.102 While it is possible that these references relate to the period before 1492, it seems more likely that they referred to the period after the Expulsion, and that secret (or tacitly accepted) ‘Jewish’ butchers continued to operate (or at least were believed to), or that some butchers were known (or believed) to still slaughter meat in the kosher fashion, either through cultural tradition, religious conviction, or to cater to a certain clientele. Jillian Williams has shown how similar dynamics persisted for the morisco communities of Valencia.103 The details of women’s meat and food shopping were of interest to competing traders, gossips, and those with grudges, and so, like the butcher shop, the wider food market was a space where choices and preferences carried greater meaning, intentionally or not. It was not only as customers that women participated in food markets:  women also appeared in the market as traders. In the trial of Leonor Álvarez of Ciudad Real, 1512–14 in Toledo, Francisco de Mesa described for the prosecution the life of Leonor’s father and mother, saying that they ran a store in the plaza where they sold things like oil, fish, oranges and other fruits, and that they also had a store in their home where they sold the same things.104 It is not difficult to imagine how such activities could expose one to suspicion, either through quarrels (be they about overcharging or commercial disputes) or the cultural associations of certain foods. A great deal about a woman and her family was on display in her shopping and cooking, from her level of religious observance to her social standing and wealth:  women saw each other in the market, spoke and gossiped together there, and observed one another. The relationship between food and social interaction is visible in all of these stories, as is the strong influence of gender roles in the habitual lives and relations of women. They also emphasize how thinking of two separate communities – converso and ‘old Christian’ – elides the community context of these stories, where neighbours could be both friends and enemies, and the important public and

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domestic interactions generally took place within a social and religious community rather than between two. It was the presence of alleged ‘crypto-Jews’ within the Christian community  – and the threat that their hidden religious and cultural deviance posed to that community’s purity and unity – that made them a concern for the Inquisition, and it was the individual, familial, and social relations of local communities that defined most cases. Thousands of converso families survived the Inquisition, and indeed many were successful in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Castile and Andalusia.105 The boundaries of early modern communities were idealized, negotiated, and contested: focusing on food forces us to situate even the most universal in the local, and to consider the various different community contexts that might inform and influence a particular Inquisition story.106 * Gender and community are defining ideas and inescapable contexts for understanding the stories of converso Inquisition trials. In the Inquisition kitchen – a gendered space both domestic and public, both hidden and visible – these two concepts fused, as women’s behaviour and beliefs were tested against their idealized roles in family, faith and society. Accusations flowed not just from religious dogma, prejudice, or paranoia, but also from tangled webs of personal interactions, and from the wider dynamics of communities. The relations of women with their families, friends, and enemies, and especially with other women, were often mediated through their responsibility for food, making the subject a unique window onto parts of women’s domestic and social lives that often remain hidden to historians. These stories of kitchens and neighbours are intensely personal and local, but the questions they provoke about gender, community, and religion, and about food’s relationship to those ideas, have much wider resonance. In using and perceiving food habits and choices as markers or embodiments of religious practice and cultural identity, the people of Inquisition Castile were not alone in early modern Europe. Spain’s diversity, and the visible dietary between its three major faith traditions, may have endowed food with an especially high level of religious and cultural significance, but food was an important part of lived religion and culture across the continent. While conversos were having their faith questioned because of their alleged violations of established Christian regulations and traditions, Christians 1,000 miles to the northwest were deliberately violating those very regulations and traditions to protest against the current state of their faith, and to profess and practice their Christianity in entirely new ways.

Part Two

Food and Reformation

4

‘The Eaters’: Fast-Breaking Protest in Reformation Zürich

At the beginning of April 1522, Zürich city council heard of a violent altercation on the city’s streets. Michael Ferrich, a shoemaker originally from Würzburg in Franconia, and Jakob Schmidt from Meilen, on Lake Zürich, had got into a heated argument about eating meat and dairy products during Lent.1 Ferrich commented that ‘it seems that some in this country can deal better with whey and cheese than with Scripture’ and went on to mock Schmidt about being a country bumpkin – from ‘cow country and so on’ – and the two men ended up in a fist-fight that bystanders had to break up.2 The controversy over the breaking of the Lenten fast in the city during spring 1522 – the first major break the city’s reformers made with the church – has been a ubiquitous but often fleeting feature in the history of the Zürich Reformation, generally a colourful passing reference rather than a subject of focused study. At first, it is ‘as if the question of stomachs were the origin of the Swiss Reformation’, wrote Walther Köhler. ‘But it was about something different. Eating sausage . . . did not take place for the sake of the body, but the soul.’3 Bruce Gordon has written that ‘there have been many jokes about how the Swiss Reformation began with an empty stomach’.4 Historians have often moved swiftly on from the fasting controversy of spring 1522 to other theological issues: ‘before the relatively minor matter of eating meat during Lent had been [resolved]’, G.  R. Potter wrote, ‘a much more serious topic was raised  . . . the question of clerical celibacy’.5 As Ken Albala has noted, ‘the centrality of food to questions of Reform has often been overlooked by modern scholars’.6 There was, however, much more to the fasting controversy than ‘a relatively minor matter’. Fasting was an important element in the lived religion of early modern Christians, one integrally linked to how they practiced their faith,

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thought of their religion, and lived their daily lives throughout the seasons. Understanding opposition to fasting is important in understanding the appeal of the early Reformation message. In Zürich during Lent 1522, the issue provoked public violence, heated debate, symbolic protests, an episcopal visitation, a confrontation between city and church, and the mobilization of the Christian congregation for evangelical reform. As a controversy explicitly provoked and escalated by the reformers  – in both word and deed  – the events of spring 1522 reveal not only a critical turning point in the beginnings of the Zürich Reformation but also the importance of exploring food in the study of early modern religious practice and change. In Spain ‘new Christians’ and ‘crypto-Jews’ used food to prove and live out their faith, and Swiss evangelicals too used eating as a way to enact their belief. Just as questions about food had united the everyday and the theological in the early activities of the Inquisition, so too did they in the early Reformation. Like a meal in an early modern Castilian kitchen, there is more to the fastbreaking protests than first meets the eye, more to learn from thinking about the early Reformation through food.

‘Public unrest and unpleasant scenes’ Ferrich and Schmidt had come to blows over a religious controversy which had been brewing since the beginning of Lent in early March. It was well known in Zürich that many people had been eating meat, dairy, and eggs in violation of Church regulations which restricted the eating of such foods during Lent, Advent, holy days, Fridays, and many other days throughout the year. Fasting  – especially during Lent  – was an integral part of early and medieval Christianity. Indeed, Caroline Walker Bynum has argued that for early Christians ‘feast and fast defined the Church. Fasting and the Eucharist were what everyone had in common’.7 Through the Lenten fast, a Christian community not only commemorated Christ’s forty days resisting temptation, it sought God’s favour by performing that same sacrifice itself. Fasting was a price to pay for future plenty, a period of voluntary hunger before the summer harvest. For early Christians, ‘fast and feast not only joined Christian to Christian; they also joined Christian to the rhythm of nature as well’.8 Fasting was, of course, a long standing practice of Judaism, and, like the religion itself, Christian fasting developed from the Jewish tradition.9 Fasting was also an important part of religious practice for medieval Muslims in both Europe and the Middle East.10

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It would be a mistake to assume that medieval Europeans strictly observed the plethora of fast days and seasons that medieval Christianity laid out. As with much of popular medieval religion, practice was much greyer than theory. Regulations, however, remained in place, and while their seriousness, specifics, enforcement, and observance varied widely, they were often the subject of controversy. Indeed throughout the medieval period there had been theological debate about enforced fasting, about what its emphasis and objectives should be, about how sinful non-observance was, and so on.11 Such debates were to come to a head during the Reformation. The brawl between Ferrich and Schmidt was not an isolated incident in March 1522. The controversy over which the men argued had produced a tense atmosphere. The month was marked, the council recorded, by ‘many altercations, public unrest, and unpleasant scenes’.12 Public discussions on the issue were heated and some had complained to the Bishop of Konstanz  – in whose diocese the city sat  – about the sermons of the people’s pastor at the Grössmünster, Huldrych Zwingli, who had preached to a large crowd on the issue in late March. The Bishop, Hugo of Hohenlandenberg, was said to be very concerned about the events in Zürich, and was preparing to send a visitation of clerics from the diocese to investigate, and to criticize the city’s clergy for encouraging such radical behaviour. Faced with fighting in the streets and an angry bishop determined to bring what the city viewed as its clergy and its church into line, the city council launched an investigation into the controversy over fast-breaking during Lent. The process was a ‘Kundschaft’, an investigation where the council would take sworn testimony from witnesses.13 The most infamous incident that had aroused the council’s attention was a meal which took place on the night of alte Fastnacht, ‘Old Carnival’ (the Sunday after Ash Wednesday:  9 March 1522)  in the house of Christoph Froschauer, the city’s only printer, at 18 Brunngasse, on the east bank of Limmat in the Niederdorf section of the city.14 The meal became something of a cause célèbre, and the city council’s inquiry called many of those reputed to have been present to give testimony as to what had happened. The first witnesses they called were Froschauer’s maids. As discussed in Chapter 3, maids were prized witnesses for any legal inquiry into alleged food deviance, as they would have been aware of all of the food and eating in their employer’s household. Elsi Flammer, one of Froschauer’s maids, explained that she had cooked some sausages for her master on the alte Fastnacht. She said that a large group in the house on the night – including the priest Leo Jud and the bakers Barthlime Pur and Michel Hirt  – had eaten the sausages.15 Hans Berker confirmed that Elsi

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Flammer had told him these details and that he had seen eggs and sausages in Froschauer’s house.16 Another of Froschauer’s maids, Bärbel von Arm, revealed that the meat had been purchased from the butcher Hans Hess, on the pretence that it was for a woman who had recently given birth (this would have been an accepted excuse for purchasing meat during Lent).17 Martin Hantler, who worked for Froschauer at the printers (and was possibly Elsi Flammer’s brother), confirmed what the maids had said.18 Hantler revealed that his employer served his workers meat and root vegetables in Lent, but not out of any ‘contempt’ for the church. Hantler also said that Froschauer had eaten eggs for meals during Lent.19 Of the guests (which Bärbel von Arm estimated at between ten and twelve men), the only one called to give testimony to the council was Barthlime Pur, a baker. The lack of witness statements from the guests is probably because Froschauer and his employees did not deny any of the widely rumoured details. Pur admitted having attended and said that pastors from the Grossmünster (Huldrych Zwingli), Egg (Laurenz Keller), and Einsiedeln (Leo Jud) were also there. He also said that his fellow bakers Heinrich Aberli and Michel Hirt, the clothmaker Konrad Lüschinger, and Konrad Escher were in attendance. Pur described how first küchli – a traditional carnival dish of fried dough, similar to doughnuts – were served, followed by two smoked sausages which were cut into several pieces and shared around. Pur said that everyone but Zwingli ate some sausage.20 Zwingli’s decision to attend and later defend the meal, but (allegedly) not to take part, was a reflection of his attitude to fast-breaking, which will be discussed in the next section. Pur’s description sounds almost like a ritual meal: the food is presented and divided in front of everyone, and then shared around. Noting some estimates that the meal had twelve diners plus Zwingli, Ulrich Gäbler has commented that the event perhaps deliberately echoed the first Communion of Christ’s disciples at the Last Supper: ‘is it only a coincidence that the day, the number of attendants, the method of sharing, are all reminiscent of the New Testament Communion?’.21 The list of attendees, however, grew as more witnesses were interviewed. By the end of their report, the council had heard reports that in addition to the nine mentioned by Pur (himself, Froschauer, Zwingli, Jud, Keller, Aberli, Lüschiner, Escher, Hirt), Hans Uli the tailor, Hans Ockenfuss the seamster, Laurenz Hochrütiner the weaver, Wolfgang Inninger the carpenter, a young combmaker, a vineyard labourer (also mentioned by Elsi Flammer), and ‘der Fröwiller’ (whose identity is unclear) all attended, giving a total as high as sixteen.22

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Some of Froschauer’s employees (including at least the aforementioned Martin Hantler) were also probably present, as Froschauer said that he and his workers were working very long hours due to a busy period. Like many infamous events, claims of having attended seemed to multiply as time went on. Indeed claiming to have attended might have been something of an identity badge for a Zürich evangelical. Froschauer was given the opportunity to justify his actions to the council.23 His defence is detailed and well-thought-out. He referred to his evangelical beliefs, which he said were inspired by the sermons of the people’s pastor, Huldrych Zwingli, and pointed to Scriptural passages which he argued showed that he had done nothing against the Word of God.24 It seems highly likely that Zwingli assisted Froschauer in preparing his statement. Froschauer’s defence, however, was not simply a religious stand against nonscriptural regulations. Instead he began with a series of sympathetic justifications and defences for his actions which were wholly secular and practical. Firstly, he explained, he and his employees were working very hard on a printing job (an edition of Desiderius Erasmus’s version of Paul’s Epistles to the Romans) for the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair.25 ‘I must work day and night, holidays and workdays’, the printer said, and furthermore he had been suffering from gout.26 Moreover, Froschauer explained, he was simply unable to afford buying fish all the time, which made feeding his family and workforce during Lent difficult.27 This did not explain why Froschauer also served meat to about a dozen other people who were in his house that night, or why he had Bärbel von Arm buy meat from the butcher Hans Hess on a seemingly false pretext. What it did do was present Froschauer as an honest, hard-working man who hadn’t intended to deliberately offend anyone, but instead had simply tried to feed his hungry workers a good, affordable meal at the end of a long day. How plausible were Froschauer’s complaints about the price of fish? While Zürich had the river Limmat, and its lake, the Zürichsee, it certainly did not have the kind of access to fish that somewhere on a sea coast did. The existence of a season in which the sale of meat was completely banned would also have inevitably pushed up the price of fish as demand soared. Complaints about the price of fish were a commonplace in late medieval and early modern opposition to Lenten fasting. Johann Ruchrath von Wesel was a German theologian of the fifteenth century, first a professor at the University of Erfurt, and then a preacher in Mainz and Worms, where, as an old man, he was imprisoned for heresy in 1479. His preaching was charismatic, inflammatory, and popular. He was scathing in his criticism of corruption in the Church, and was very critical of

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its enforcement  of fasting regulations. ‘If St Peter did introduce this practice [of abstaining from meat during Lent]’, Wesel said, ‘it could only have been to obtain a readier sale for his fish’.28 Desiderius Erasmus, an important intellectual influence on Zwingli, notoriously detested even the smell of fish, and was highly cynical of the relationship between fish sales and Lent. In his satire Ichthyophagia (‘A Fish Diet’), he stages a dialogue between a butcher and a fishmonger. The butcher begins by asking the fishmonger if he has bought a halter yet. ‘For what?’, replies the confused fishmonger. Butcher: In order to hang yourself. Fishmonger: . . . I’m not yet weary of my life. Butcher: But you may become so quickly. Fishmonger: . . . What’s the matter? Butcher: . . . Soon you and your fellow tradesmen will all be starved to death, and quite ready to end it all . . . There is to be a dispensation . . . allowing everyone to eat what he wishes. Then what will you and your fellow merchants do, but starve to death in the midst of heaps of your stinking salt-fish?29

Erasmus was convinced that extortion was rife in early modern market places. He wrote to a friend that instead of persecuting people for breaking fasts, authorities should be policing the ‘cruel fleecing of the public’ with regard to food, ensuring that weights were not reduced from their proper size to defraud the customer, that the vendor did not put up the price of things above a reasonable figure, that no monopoly was arranged between the sellers of anything, that no tainted meat or fish was sold, that dinners were not more expensive than expedient.30

Unfortunately it is quite difficult to add economic data to the cultural perception of high Lenten fish prices in pre-Reformation Zürich. As Albert Hauser has noted, the only references to prices for fish in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Zürich are both spotty and difficult to compare, as they mostly refer to numbers of fish, not their size or weight.31 There is also not enough data to overcome the major issue involved in Lenten fish pricing: the seasonal variation when the sale of meat was prohibited. The limited data available, however, indicates that Froschauer was not relying entirely on stereotype for his argument. In the late fifteenth century, fresh fish from the Zürichsee was relatively expensive. One could buy one pike for eight schillings, or a carp for five schillings. Slightly more affordable were smaller

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freshwater fish, such as gangfisch (common European whitefish) and rötel (a variety of char), which were available for 8–9 schillings per pound. Probably most affordable was preserved herring, twelve pieces of which could be obtained for eight schillings in 1478.32 In his analysis of fish prices, Herbert Hitzbleck observed that the price of herring was quite high in inland European cities (such as Würzburg, Munich, and Vienna) during the early sixteenth century.33 In 1500, the maximum price for pork in Zürich was eight schillings per pound, as it was for beef. Fresh fish was certainly more expensive than the smoked sausages that Froschauer served. Perhaps more importantly in terms of public debate, Froschauer’s complaint about the price of fish certainly tallied with the conventional wisdom. Zwingli tacitly reinforced the view of fish as something of a luxury when he commented that for the wealthy, Lent was no hardship as they could easily substitute meat and dairy with fish, and ‘eating fish is, after all, a pleasure throughout the world’.34 At the beginning of the 1520s, Froschauer was the only printer in Zürich, but he was not alone in the dissemination of reformist literature. Andreas Castelberger, a bookseller, brought pamphlets and books from reformist printers across the German-speaking world to Zürich. He was ‘the key link between the Zürich radicals and the popular pamphlet literature of the period’.35 Castelberger, known as ‘Hinkender Andreas’ (‘limping Andreas’) or ‘Andreas auf dem Stülzen’ (‘Andreas with the crutches’) due to a disability, plied his trade between Glarus (where Zwingli spent ten years), Einsiedeln (Zwingli’s second pastorate), and Zürich. Zwingli had formed a Sodalität (a humanist group that studied Scripture together) in Zürich in the early 1520s, but due to the required language skills, it mainly involved other learned and well-to-do people (including future Anabaptist Conrad Grebel). Castelberger’s trade in pamphlets among interested artisans and labourers led to him to create another reading group, where one person would read from Scripture or a pamphlet and then the attendants would discuss it. Prominent members of Castelberger’s group included Heinrich Aberli, Wolf Inninger, Claus Höttinger, Hans Ockenfuss, Claus Hottrütinger, and Barthlime Pfister (many future Anabaptists). Conservatives in the city referred to the group as the ‘Ketzerschule’, ‘the school of heretics’. In the tense spring of 1522, the group were subject to public harassment for their activities. Some people gathered outside Höttinger’s house one night and shouted ‘Get up, Höttinger, you devil! Take your heretics with you and go to the Ketzerschule!’.36 Höttinger confronted the group from his window and told them that he was no heretic, he merely followed the teachings of the people’s pastor, Zwingli, and an argument ensued. Another day in the butcher’s shop a fellow customer mockingly addressed Höttinger as ‘Herr Doktor’ saying with all

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his studies he would no doubt soon earn a ‘red hat’ (part of academic dress). Höttinger ignored the man’s snobbery and replied that he would happily leave red hats to the rogues and knaves (i.e. the clergy).37 Höttinger said that if the council would not protect him against this kind of harassment, while he did not wish to cause unrest, he would have to ‘appeal to the common man’.38 The activities of these men came to the fore when the council’s investigation revealed that the meal in Froschauer’s house had been far from the only incidence of fast-breaking in March, and perhaps not even the most provocative. Hans Klöter, a furrier, told the council that he and his friends (including Heinrich Aberli, Hans Uli the tailor, and others) had enjoyed a ‘Winwarm’ (a soup with an egg yolk added) on alte Fastnacht (presumably for lunch, or at least before Aberli and Uli went to Froschauer’s house).39 Hans Binder reluctantly admitted that he and his son Jörg, schoolmaster at the Grossmünster, had eaten meat on the Monday after Reminiscere (the second Sunday in Lent).40 Heini Leimbacher, a labourer at the vineyards at Ötenbach, the Dominican monastery, confessed that he and his fellow labourers had eaten eggs among the vines at Rieden (Leimbacher could be the vineyard worker mentioned by Elsi Flammer to have been present at the Würstessen, though she does not use his name).41 Melchior Meier, another baker, said that on Ash Wednesday, he and some others from the bakers’ guild went to Weggengasse for something to eat, and that some of them, led by Heinrich Aberli, had some roast meat (though the council noted that Meier would not give any details on the ordering or service of the meat).42 Aberli was accused of having also inspired a provocative fast-breaking at the Augustinian church. Herr Jos, a steward for the Augustinians, alleged that Aberli, Wolf Inninger the carpenter, and a Herr Rügger, who worked for Froschauer at the printers (indeed Froschauer had taken over the printing business from the Rügger family), along with some others, came to the Augustinian church at Wellenberg one day (the monastery was near to both Aberli and Froschauer’s houses).43 Jos said that they spoke about meat-eating (during Lent), and that Aberli produced a sausage from his clothes which he began to share among the group to eat.44 Once he saw that the men were deliberately violating the Lenten fast in ‘God’s house’, Ulrich Zeller, one of the Augustinian monks, angrily confronted Aberli, and threw away the sausage (with Jos picking it up, presumably to use later as evidence).45 Ulrich Zeller gave a similar account of events to Jos. It is not made clear whether this event took place between Ash Wednesday and Old Carnival, or whether it came after the Würstessen in Froschauer’s house, but from both Jos and Zeller’s testimony it seems likely that it came after public controversy over the alte Fastnacht meal began. Zeller claimed that he and Aberli engaged in some

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heated discussion about the issue of eating meat during Lent. The monk angrily told ‘the eaters’ that ‘if he were their lord’, Aberli and his companions would be thrown in the Wellenberg (one of the city’s prisons, which was located in the tower of the monastery) with nothing but food and water to eat, and not be released unless the forthcoming visitation said that they had not done wrong.46 Aberli dismissed Zeller’s threats and said that in any case, the monks and priests were all ‘rogues and thieves’, going on to attack their control of communion at mass, offering a view of the Eucharist which Zeller described as ‘Bohemian’ (ie Hussite).47 Jos confirmed that they kept a piece of the offending sausage after throwing Aberli and the others out.48 The provocative behaviour of Aberli, Inninger, Rügger, and the others in the Augustinian church sheds a revealing light on the alte Fastnacht meal in Froschauer’s house. Firstly, the group wandering into the church to talk about fast-breaking, with Aberli carrying a sausage, cannot be reasonably construed as anything other than a deliberately symbolic act. Indeed this was at least Aberli’s third transgression of the Lenten fast that year (after Ash Wednesday on the Weggengasse, and alte Fastnacht), and he seems on this occasion to have been itching for a confrontation, angrily condemning the monks for clerical corruption and theological falsehoods. The choice of a church for this protest act, with a sausage, was deliberately provocative. Zeller’s reaction is also very revealing. He threatens Aberli that he would leave the sinners rotting in the Wellenberg on bread and water ‘if it was up to him’. Zeller’s admission of some powerlessness, and his reference to ‘Rome’ adjudicating the severity of Aberli’s actions indicates a state of flux on the issue of fasting in the city. While Zeller certainly does not act like a cleric assured that these sinners will be met with severe sanctions, he also does not react as if transgressing the fast has become wholly acceptable. Aberli and Zeller’s confrontation takes place in an atmosphere where the issue is up for debate, one in which symbolic fast-breaking seems to be a tactic of public protest for the reformers, and the city authorities have neither cracked down nor permitted such actions. The intervention of the city’s most popular cleric would prove to be an important factor in clarifying the city’s attitude.

‘Honest folk’ In the background of all this evangelical protest loomed the figure of the Grössmünster’s Leutpriester (‘people’s preacher’), Huldrych Zwingli. Zwingli had

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been brought to Zürich at Christmas 1519, the favoured candidate of canons at the Grössmünster with humanist sympathies. On his very first Sunday in his new post, Zwingli ignored the day’s traditional Gospel lesson, and began preaching (with his own commentary) from Erasmus’s copy of the Gospel of St Matthew. Zwingli’s evangelical preaching began to acquire a large following. He took his role as the ‘people’s preacher’ seriously, using understandable language and tailoring his message to a popular audience. At the end of Zwingli’s first month as Leutpriester, Bernhardin Sanson, an indulgence salesman, came to the city selling indulgences for the construction of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Zwingli denounced Sanson and the sale of indulgences to his congregation, and petitioned the city to deny him entry to the city. For the first of many times, the councillors backed Zwingli’s stance, and Sanson was turned away. During Lent and summer 1519, Zwingli became increasingly popular in the city, drawing huge crowds to his preaching. His future colleague Heinrich Bullinger recounted that ‘all kinds of people, especially the common man’, flocked to Zwingli’s evangelical sermons.49 He preached in the church, and in the churchyard, and even held special outdoor sermons and discussions on Fridays for those who came into the city from the countryside for market day.50 When a serious outbreak of plague hit Zürich in August 1519, more than one in four people died. Most who had the means to do so fled the city, but Zwingli insisted on ministering to the sick and dying, at grave risk to his own health. In September he caught the plague and was close to death.51 He recovered (a process he described in his poem ‘Pestlied’  – ‘Plague Song’), and his courage and devotion to his congregation won him many admirers among the poor.52 By December, Zwingli estimated that he had 2,000 followers (‘simple and rational’ people) in Zürich.53 In 1520, Zwingli began to refuse his papal pension, an indication of his increasing break with Rome. Many were unhappy with his evangelical preaching, but both with the general population and those in power, his popularity continued to grow. In spring 1521 he became a canon of the Grossmünster and a citizen. When discord and unrest erupted in the city during Lent 1522, the people’s preacher did not shy away from the controversy. Indeed he strode directly into it, stoking the fires of public anger with a sermon on Sunday 23 March. Zwingli defended the actions of the fast-breakers, attacked the regulations of enforced fasting, condemned much of the clerical and city elite as hypocritical and corrupt, and generally argued that the ‘common man’ was being ‘oppressed’ by restrictions on what he could and could not eat. The sermon proved both controversial and popular: it became one of Zwingli’s first explicitly evangelical

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pamphlets, ‘On the Freedom and Choice of Foods’, published by Froschauer in April.54 Even before the controversy over eating during Lent, Zwingli often used the metaphor of eating for the way the evangelical Word nourished Christians. In 1519 he wrote to his friend Myconius that his followers in Zürich were ‘miserably hungry’, and would soon move from ‘sucking spiritual milk’ to ‘solid food’.55 In his 1522 pamphlet he would continue to play with the idea of the Word and food as two types of sustenance: ‘after you have tried and tasted the sweetness of the heavenly bread by which man lives, no other food has since been able to please you’.56 When in exile in the desert, the children of Israel missed the foods they had in Egypt – garlic, onions, leeks and ‘fleshpots’ – but they still forgot such complaints when they came to the promised land and tasted its ‘luscious fruits’.57 So now in Zürich people loved the taste of ‘the salt and good fruit of the Gospel’.58 While his sermons had brought adherents to his evangelical message, changes in the everyday practice of religion would be more difficult to achieve. Fasting and food offered a concrete issue that illustrated both Zwingli’s message of evangelical, scripturally based Christianity, and his populist critique of corrupt clerics and ‘bigwigs’ who oppressed the ‘common man’.59 Because of the public controversy surrounding the fast-breaking, Zwingli said, he felt it his duty as his flock’s shepherd to help explain why the fast-breakers had done nothing wrong: ‘I have therefore made a sermon about the choice or differentiation of food’.60 Zwingli was not critical of the authorities for initiating an investigation into fast-breaking. Thanks to evangelical preaching, he said, some people had become ‘better and God-fearing’ in the past few years; but much sin remained.61 Opponents, said Zwingli, did not want the Gospel preached, because they claimed it caused offence and stirred up trouble.62 He tactfully welcomed the council’s enquiries, saying they were obliged to investigate the unrest caused by ‘false-spirited hypocrites’.63 Zwingli characterized the actions of the fast breakers as merely the behaviour of honest, hardworking people, devoted Christians who did not wish to cause anyone offence or foment any trouble. Some have issued German poems [against enforced fasting], some have had friendly discussions in public rooms and at gatherings, some now at last during this fast (and they did not think anyone could be offended by it) in their houses, and when they were together, eaten meat, eggs, cheese, and other food previously not eaten during fasts.64

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‘I do not say that these things are not forbidden by men’, Zwingli said: ‘we see and hear of them daily’.65 But that did not mean that authorities of men had the right to forbid them. To Zwingli, Scripture was very clear on the matter of restricting food. There were regulations about diet in the Old Testament, yes, but these were regulations based on ‘Jewish law’ that Christ wished to do away with in the New Testament.66 ‘Although certain foods were forbidden in the Old Testament, they were on the contrary all free in the New’.67 The fasts had been created based on ‘Jewish wiles’ and ‘Jewish fables’.68 The Jews and other unbelievers had tried to pull the ‘new Christians’ into their dietary rules by claiming certain foods were unclean, but St Paul showed how to the true believer everything is pure, whereas to the unbeliever nothing is.69 In the Acts of the Apostles 10:8–16, it is described how St Peter was once at a place called Joppa, and became hungry while up on the roof praying. A vision appeared before him of all sorts of four-footed animals, reptiles, and birds. A voice from God spoke: ‘Stand up, Peter. Kill and eat.’ Peter was shocked, as the animals were not all kosher: ‘Lord, I cannot’, he replied, ‘as I have never eaten forbidden or unclean food’. God told him that he must not deem anything that God has created forbidden or unclean. For Zwingli, this was very clear: since God has not forbidden us to eat anything, why do we wilfully burden ourselves with prohibitions?70 Christ Himself said in the Gospel of Matthew 15:17–20 that how or what or when one eats cannot defile a man.71 Furthermore, St Paul told the Colossians (2:16) that no one would judge them for their meat or drink, or for what they did on holy days.72 A man cannot be good or bad just because of when, or what, or how he eats, Zwingli argued: ‘he may eat what he likes. Let a man eat shit if he wants to’.73 The only way eating can be a sin is if it is done with excess.74 Zwingli’s argument on the lack of spiritual basis for enforced fasting is typical of early Reformation arguments on ‘Christian liberty’. Jacob Clifton has commented that Zwingli’s view on the controversy was the ‘same as that of each writer critical of the fasting laws and indeed of those who . . . publicly broke them: to use the restrictions as a focal point for a much broader subject: Christian liberty’.75 This, however, was not the only basis on which Zwingli attacked the customs of fasting. He was especially critical of the burden it placed on ordinary working people and the poor. He pointed to Mark 2:23–7, where the Pharisees are outraged that Christ’s disciples ate when walking through a cornfield on the Sabbath. Christ noted the actions of David, who when he and his followers were ‘in need’ and hungry, went into the temple (where it was forbidden for any but the priests to eat) and took food and shared it with his companions, telling them

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‘the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath’.76 For Zwingli the issue of need was central to the problems of fasting, and he did not see ‘need’ as meaning desperate hunger but ‘an ordinary daily hunger’:  Christ and his disciples had eaten at forbidden times when they were hungry, not only when they were starving.77 The hunger of the apostles did not observe the Sabbath, and neither should the hunger of men observe Lent. Since Christ allowed the hungry to break the Sabbath, need can be superior not only to human but also divine law.78 Those who broke the fast in Zürich were just ‘the poor labourer, who at this time of spring must bear the heaviest burden and heat of the day’, and ‘ate food to support his body and work’.79 The morality of food and the treatment of the poor were important issues for Zwingli and the Zürich authorities. Zwingli was actively involved in providing help for the poor (most of which involved providing food), and he and others lobbied for a reorganization of the medieval system of poor relief, which relied on the guilds (some of whom had specific food obligations, such as the bakers giving the poor bread, and the butchers meat  – though the city often had to remind them of these responsibilities), the religious orders, and the city’s hospital, which was run by the city and the Grossmünster.80 In August 1519 the city appointed two officials to oversee assistance to the poor.81 In September 1520 the council passed an alms statute regulating entitlement to poor relief in the city. The statute distinguished between those poor deserving of assistance, and those who were deemed undeserving because of their behaviour. The deserving were poor due to unfortunate events: bad luck, illness, famine, bad weather, and so on. The undeserving were poor due to bad choices which they themselves had made: gambling, laziness, wastefulness, and other immoral behaviour. The statute listed fourteen grounds on which one could be denied alms. These included those who purchased expensive food and drink without any need to, when they could easily have been accustomed to poorer food and drink, along with those who spent their money in inns and taverns.82 After the institution of the Reformation in the city, the 1520 alms statute was expanded in 1525 with a city poor law. The reforms effectively took over religious orders’ responsibility for poor relief and made it a responsibility of the city. These, too, criticized those who spent money on fancy food when they could have survived on simple fare.83 Food morality could be a political issue as well. Much of the 1523 controversy over the city’s surrounding rural communities paying their tithes centred around whether or not the city’s churches were using the tithe for its intended purpose: providing the poor with food and assistance.84 The iconoclast Lorentz

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Meyger justified his actions in destroying images on the basis that the idols were ‘the food of the poor’ as their value could and should help hungry hardworking people.85 Zwingli contrasted the oppressive influence of fasting regulations on ordinary people with the attitude of the church elite. The early sixteenthcentury church sold indulgences for fasting, as they did for other sins. In the German-speaking world these were most commonly for the use of dairy products and were known as Butterbriefe. Wild stories circulated alleging that the money collected through their sale funded many grand projects, such as the ‘Butter Tower’ of Rouen Cathedral and the ‘Butter Bridge’ in Torgau. The Swiss Confederation, with many communities reliant on dairy products, was a hotspot for the sale of Butterbriefe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with hundreds issued to monasteries, convents, towns, and communities.86 Zwingli was scathing in his denunciation of Butterbriefe in his sermon and pamphlet. He said that he must share how the ‘pretty bit of business’ functioned, so that the people might protect themselves from the ‘greed of the powerful clergy’.87 ‘Our forefathers’, he said, had eaten the foods ‘native’ to their land:  milk, whey, cheese, butter.88 But in the last century (i.e. the 1400s), the ‘Bishop of Rome’ had forced ‘our dear fellow [Swiss] confederates’ to buy the right to eat dairy products during Lent.89 It was a lie to say that the Swiss have always used oil during Lent, Zwingli said, because in the relevant church documents (which he claimed to have seen in Lucerne), there is a complaint that ‘in our country people are not accustomed to eating oil’, instead relying on their native dairy produce.90 ‘If that was a sin’, Zwingli asked, Why did the Roman bishops watch so lazily that they allowed them to eat for fourteen hundred years? If it is not a sin, as it is not, why is it necessary to pay money to do it? Therefore, I see that it is just air, that the Roman bishops announced that it was a sin only when it became money to them: proof, as soon as they announced it as a sin, they immediately sold it for money.91

By forcing the Swiss to buy Butterbriefe with lies about Lenten fasting, the Roman church had ‘abused our simplicity’, he argued.92 Martin Luther had said similar things in Germany: ‘in Rome they joke about the fasts’, he wrote in 1520. ‘First they order us out here to eat oil with which they would not grease their shoes’ – a phrase Zwingli also used – ‘and then they sell us freedoms to eat butter’.93 For Zwingli, charging people money to eat their own food was ‘a Roman swindle’.94

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Zwingli was pointing to an important cultural aspect of Lenten fasting in late medieval and early modern Europe: prohibitions meant very different levels of difficulty in different places. In southern Europe, there was no problem not being allowed to use butter or animal fats during the fasts, as one could simply use olive oil instead. On the coasts, it was relatively easy to buy fish. In regions where agriculture was not focused on cattle, the loss of dairy products was less onerous. For cattle-farming regions without olive trees or the sea – like the Swiss Confederation – Lent was much more of a challenge. It was on these grounds of substitute availability (and therefore price) that places in central Europe applied for dispensations from their bishops and Rome. For example in 1450 Zürich obtained a Butterbrief for the consumption of dairy products because of the difficulties the city had obtaining oil.95 This was an important issue – and one which could divide secular and religious authorities – across the southern German world. In Nuremberg, the city council campaigned throughout the fifteenth century to secure dispensations from Rome for the use of dairy and eggs due to the difficulty of obtaining oil and fish in Bavaria. In 1437 the city secured permission for the poor to do so, and in 1476 the whole of the population. The city’s clergy, however, resisted such liberalization, and campaigned and preached against it, creating conflict with the civic authorities, who in response distributed copies of the promissory bull from Rome and suspended the dissenting preacher of the city hospital.96 Zwingli was virulently anticlerical in his denunciation of the church’s out-oftouch attitude to fasting. Quoting the book of Isaiah 56:10, he decried how the watchmen had become blind and ignorant, mute and lazy dogs who love to lie around, dream, and sleep. The corrupt clergy were ‘all shameless dogs’, ‘shepherds who have no reason’, ‘avaricious from the highest to the lowest’.97 They say to themselves ‘let us drink good wine and become full, and as we do today, we’ll do again tomorrow, yes, indeed more’.98 Again Zwingli juxtaposed the honest men trying to eat a sausage after a hard day’s work with the fat, gluttonous clergy imposing fasts. These ‘carnal clerics’ complained about the dangerous effects for the community of men breaking the fast, yet they did nothing for the community themselves: ‘why do you not help to bear the common burden’, Zwingli asked rhetorically (tying clerical laziness to the issue of the tithe).99 If the clergy complained about the breaking of fasting custom, Zwingli said, ‘it is nothing but envy’, because they hate to see it allowed for the common man to substitute without hardship or physical difficulty, as they themselves do.100 Zwingli

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connected populist anger at greedy hypocritical clerics and oppressive fasts with his evangelical message: ‘the common man’ was his intended audience. Zwingli’s argument was quite radical, but, ever the politician, he was at pains to point out that he was not advocating public unrest, or indeed the kind of deliberate provocation practiced by Aberli and others. Zwingli devoted a large portion of his sermon to the concept of ‘offence’, arguing that as Paul said to the Corinthians (I, 10:23), just because all things are permitted does not mean all things are good.101 People should avoid doing things that will offend their neighbours, unless doing so is damaging to their beliefs.102 He made implicit reference to his presence at the Würstessen, and his decision not to eat any of the sausages. Even though it is permitted to eat all foods, if eating meat offended my brother, Zwingli said, ‘I would rather never eat meat’.103 It is bad if a man eats in a way which offends: ‘it is proper and good that a man eats no meat, and drinks no wine, indeed eats nothing, if it offends his brother’.104 Indeed, Zwingli said, just as it could not be inherently bad to eat meat during Lent, so it could not be inherently bad to eat other things, such as something ritually sacrificed, or offered by an unbeliever. If an unbeliever invited you to their house, you should eat all that is offered to you (though not the way ‘a faithless animal’ would).105 Even though eating meat during Lent and so on was entirely permitted, Zwingli argued, the appropriate Christian course of action was to explain that to those who were mistakenly offended by it. If one explained how Christ had forbidden no foods, but one’s neighbour still would not listen to the truth, and insisted on taking offence against all scriptural reason, then a true Christian should not give in.106 Yet, perhaps rebuking Heinrich Aberli and his friends, Zwingli said that even then, one should not go so far as to deliberately eat meat in front of the person who will be offended.107 Exercise liberty without causing public unrest, Zwingli advised, as Paul did on the issue of circumcision, sticking to Christian principles by opposing Titus’s circumcision (out of principle), but ensuring Timothy’s (to prevent discord).108 It was in this honest and responsible sprit that people had broken the fasts:  ‘The eaters are not trouble-makers or clowns, but honest folk, with good conscience’.109 Again, Zwingli cast the controversy as one between ‘honest folk’ seeking to do the right thing and avoid offending anyone, and a clergy who offended with their attitude, their actions, and their oppressive prohibitions. With his defence of the fast-breakers, and his scathing attacks on the church elite, Zwingli had placed himself and the issue of fast-breaking directly between the city’s evangelicals and its bishop, leaving the city council right in the middle.

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Reformation In the early 1520s, Zwingli saw Reformation as a process of real reform, not just an intellectual exercise. He thought carefully about what path would be the most effective for furthering his aims, even if that sometimes meant taking tactical decisions regarding emphasis or action. In May 1522 Zwingli wrote to Leo Jud that sometimes one has to do less than one wants in order to achieve a greater result.110 Zwingli believed that such a tactical approach was the best way to bring about reform: ‘that plan would bring most benefit to our purpose’.111 Francisca Loetz has commented that in the 1520s ‘Zwingli argues rhetorically, less concerned with theological differentiation than with persuading his listeners’.112 ‘It is difficult if not impossible’, Pamela Biel has argued, ‘to separate tactical shifts from genuine changes in [Zwingli’s] thought’.113 This view of Zwingli as a pure pragmatist is perhaps a little misleading given his theological rigour, but there is no doubt that he thought strategically about how best to pursue his cause. Zwingli liked to use the colloquial phrase ‘throwing a bratwurst to get bacon’.114 Bacon was more expensive than sausage, and the phrase is effectively the medieval and early modern German language equivalent of ‘throwing a sprat to catch a mackerel’, or the early modern French ‘donner un œuf pour avoir un bœuf’: giving or committing something small to gain something much greater. A common saying in medieval German stories, the phrase was also used by other populist early modern preachers and writers, including Johann Geiler von Kaysersburg, Sebastian Franck, and the pseudonymous satirical poet ‘Pochsfleisch’.115 The phrase is a useful way of thinking about Zwingli’s approach to controversies and disputes in the early Reformation. Zwingli’s advice to Jud was probably in reference to Jud’s reputation as an evangelical ‘agitator’ at sermons and public debates. Jud – who Heiko Oberman described as Zwingli’s ‘left-hand man’’ – often interrupted the sermons of conservative clerics in order to provoke debate with the speaker and among the audience.116 Such tactics were popular among the reformist circle in Zürich in the early 1520s, and in summer 1522 Aberli, Höttinger, and Pur, along with a number of Froschauer’s employees (including the aforementioned Martin Hantler) were reported for creating ‘noisy night-time disturbances’ with public discussions of the Gospel.117 All of these facets of the Zürich reformers’ tactics are visible in the Lenten fast controversy. The provocation of public debate through both actions and

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words were a central tactical approach to achieving reform. The differing levels of provocation practiced by Zwingli and his more radical devotees are both indicative of the split which would come between them in the coming few years, and of Zwingli’s tactical approach to promoting reform: as people’s pastor, actually eating the sausage on alte Fastnacht would have been inappropriate, as would explicitly using his sermons to encourage fast-breaking which would inevitably cause civil strife. But that does not mean that Zwingli was necessarily a cautious bystander, forced into defending his impetuous followers. His sermon and pamphlet’s radical nature, his wholehearted defence of Froschauer and others, his manoeuvring with the council and the diocese are all indicative of careful tactical thought. Bishop Hugo intended the April visitation to be a way to admonish the city for permitting radical action and for allowing its clergy to encourage defiance of the church. Allowing Zwingli to use the visitation as a platform, or debating with him was not on the agenda.118 As Zwingli recounted it, the visitors were at pains to keep all of the details of their activities hidden from Zwingli, lest he hijack the proceedings. Unsurprisingly, Zwingli found out about a meeting on 8 April at which the visitors planned to admonish the clergy, and showed up.119 Zwingli described how the meeting began with the suffragan bishop making what he saw as a violent, arrogant speech, strongly attacking Zwingli and the evangelicals (but not by name, ‘as if it would be a sacrilege’).120 Zwingli was unwilling to let such a speech go unrebutted, so he rose to speak, not least because (he claimed) he could see from the silent pallid faces of some of his clerical colleagues that they had been troubled by the bishop’s remarks.121 Seemingly flummoxed by the appearance of Zwingli and his attempts to engage them in debate, the visitors abandoned the meeting and retreated to closed meetings with the council, where (according to Zwingli), the bishop made the same complaints, again avoiding naming Zwingli and saying they had no business with him.122 The bishops’ attempts to prevent Zwingli turning their visit into a dramatic dispute showed the difficulties that the church authorities had:  Zwingli was popular, and people in the city were already living out his message as well as hearing it. At the same time, Zürich seemed to be getting out of hand: Lent was being openly flouted, and Holy Week was in only a few days. The city council faced the same problem: they were not necessarily willing to openly defy the bishops, but at the same time it was extremely difficult for them to exclude Zwingli from the process, given both his popularity and influence with some councillors. The ‘small council’ voted that the visiting bishops would meet with the ‘Commons’ or greater council (of 200 men) the next day (April 9),

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and warned Zwingli (along with his allies, Henry Engelhard of the Fraumünster and Rudolph Röschlin of St Peter’s) not to be present. Zwingli was outraged and devoted all his energy to reversing the decision. He approached first the leading men of the small council, ‘turning every stone in vain’, but failed to win them over.123 So he turned to prayer, ‘pleading with Him who hears the groans of those in bondage not to abandon the truth and His Gospel, which he had called me to preach, to defend me’.124 From the sounds of what happened next, Zwingli also did a significant amount of politicking among the city’s citizenry, because the next day citizens lined up in the council meeting and angrily denounced the exclusion of Zwingli and his colleagues. The small council refused to budge, but the greater council overruled it.125 On the ninth when the councillors, bishops, and the city’s clerics met, the suffragan bishop made a lengthy case against what had been permitted to go on in the city. This speech is central to understanding how seriously the church took Zürich’s violation of the fasts, and how they saw it as the first step on a slippery slope towards more radical change. According to Zwingli’s notes, the bishop made thirteen points, including five specifically about fast-breaking during Lent, three about similar religious ceremonies and traditions, and three about the ‘offence’ such actions could cause.126 The bishop noted how ceremonies like Lenten fasting were the way that ‘simple Christians’ understood their faith, and that it was people’s pastors’ responsibility to explain these symbolic actions.127 To the church authorities, the issue of fasting was one of great seriousness because it was a central ‘lived’ element of Christianity. While theological disputes might have been the intellectual threat of evangelical Reform, these popular actions were the practical threat to the authority of the church. After discussing how Zürich’s eating of meat during Lent had ‘scandalised the whole of the Christian commonwealth’, he urged the city to ‘remain within the church’ (since no one can be saved outside it), an indication of how gravely the church authorities regarded the situation.128 The visiting bishops were less than thrilled with Zwingli’s unwanted presence, and once again tried to sideline him by refusing to address him directly, attempting to stop him speaking by saying that since they had said nothing against him, he had no need to make any remarks.129 This was a vain hope, for after convincing the greater council to permit his attendance, Zwingli was not going to forgo the opportunity to speak again on the subject of fasting. He began with a faux pas, using slightly the wrong title for the visiting bishop. This was perhaps a deliberate mistake as he characterized the error as one made by a simple country man, ignorant of the niceties of high-level debate (something

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which was obviously untrue, as he did so by quoting Lucius Pomponius, a Roman writer noted for his skilful use of rustic and quotidian language).130 The bishops were allegedly reluctant to listen to Zwingli, saying he was ‘too violent’ a speaker, but the head of the council, Mark Röst, asked them to hear Zwingli out.131 Zwingli proceeded to speak at some length, countering the bishops’ remarks point by point, reiterating many of the arguments he had made in his sermon on the matter.132 The onerous regulations of Christian fasts, he said, were as onerous as those of the Jews, except even more varied and long-lasting.133 Zwingli attacked the visitors’ characterization of the people of Zürich as sinners or trouble-makers for breaking these oppressive fasts. People had eaten meat not to cause offence but as a ‘testament of faith’.134 This was clear, he said, because when he told people they were causing offence, they stopped. There was no need for the work of the visiting legates, as the city’s congregation was well able to police itself.135 Zwingli sarcastically applauded the diocese for beginning the first investigation of bad religious practice he had known in his sixteen years as a priest in the diocese of Konstanz. Yet after finding less wrongdoing than they wished, he concluded, they complained that the people of Zürich were the ones trying to leave the Christian communion.136 Zwingli cautioned that the great citizens of the city would not be moved by such threats.137 Zwingli made various references to the Biblical arguments he had used in his sermon to show that it was the people of Zürich who were the real Christians, and that they were more than capable of understanding the Gospel without symbolic ceremonies. After he finished his speech, he and the bishops continued to argue about whether the church fathers had forbidden meat during Lent.138 The council debated the issue and issued a mandate outlawing further transgressions of the fast, but it did not fine the fast-breakers, instead referring to religious penance for those who had caused trouble.139 Some historians have seen the council’s refusal to support the fast-breakers as a defeat for Zwingli. Despite praising Zwingli’s ‘adroit’ handling of the visitation (turning it into a ‘debacle’), Heiko Oberman has argued that the issue shows how it is ‘simply an error to imagine that Zwingli was harmoniously integrated into the political power structures of Zürich in the early twenties’.140 In his view, the visitation was ‘supported by the Zürich council – in spite of Zwingli’s public declarations and the appearance of his first evangelical treatise’ (Oberman’s italics). Further violation of the Lenten fast was prohibited: ‘the influence of the Leutpriester did not extend very far into the chambers of the city council’.141 Yet the council was not a unitary body, and its decision was not so simple. The council’s mandate noted that it had heard advice from Zwingli and the city’s other

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people’s pastors that there was no Scriptural basis for fasting.142 Its condemnation of the fast-breakers of March was not unequivocal: no one should break the fast in the city, the council mandated, ‘until further notice’ according to an agreement with the bishop in Konstanz.143 The council said its primary objective was the prevention of any further ‘public violence, discord, or unpleasantness’.144 Other than the threat of fines for causing public unrest, no one (including Froschauer and Aberli) is given any explicit civil punishment. The greater council’s overruling of the small council’s exclusion of Zwingli from the visitation process shows that while Zwingli was perhaps not supreme in his influence in early 1522, he had considerable power among both the wider populace and the city’s ruling elite. The city authorities either did not dare, or perhaps (given their support of his evangelical preaching in 1520 and 1521) did not want to rein in Zwingli or his evangelical message. Indeed apart from preventing disorder, the council’s main concern appeared to be to assert its authority over the city’s church and clergy against the diocese: the issue had ‘brought the city and bishop  . . . into jurisdictional conflict’.145 The bishop had wanted the clergy disciplined for allowing (and, on Zwingli’s part, encouraging) fast-breaking, and he had wanted the transgressors punished. The city obliged on neither count, and requested religious justification for enforcing fasts (beyond the prevention of public unrest) from the bishop. His reply the next month did not comply with their request, instead firmly reminding the city of its obligations to uphold the faith and its regulations.146 When Zwingli codified his religious principles for the crucial disputation called by the Zürich council in 1523, he included religious restrictions on food – and the ‘swindle’ of ‘cheese and butter’ indulgences – in his 67 Articles.147 Zwingli’s tactical handling of the fasting controversy had produced a widening gap between the city and the higher church authorities, one which would never again be closed. * The visiting bishop’s comment that fasting was a way for ‘simple Christians’ to experience their faith and be led to salvation is indicative of the importance of fasting to medieval and early modern Christianity. Every Friday, every Lent, every Advent, every holy day, even often in the hours before Mass, Christians expressed their faith – lived their faith – by abstaining from certain foods. In less than a decade the Reformation would bring Zürich radical social change, the physical change of iconoclasm, the horror of war, and the emotional heartbreak of religious division. This was, of course, a religious change, one in which the importance of theological and spiritual ideas must not be downplayed. But

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it was also a change in how people lived their lives, and thought about their world, part of a movement of change that would alter life all across Christian Europe. To understand the genesis of the Reformation, we must focus not just on its intellectual roots but also on the early Reformation message’s appeal to contemporary popular concerns, and its relevance not just to the theology of late medieval religion, but also to its lived practice. While strict religious and social discipline, rather than protests about Christian liberty, would become a defining feature of the Swiss Reformation, food and fasting are essential to our understanding of its birth, especially in Zürich where they served as a locus for early Reformation debates, and a breaking point for the evangelicals in their relationship with the existing Church. Much of the controversy over religious dietary laws in Inquisition Spain took place in private, semiprivate or imagined spaces. ‘Crypto-Judaism’ – real or invented – was a heresy revealed by the observation of domestic meals and habits that many wanted to keep secret. In contrast, by making no attempt to conceal (and often publicly exhibiting) their fast-breaking, the evangelicals made the breaking of fast both a public testimony of faith and a public protest against the religious status quo which they were rejecting. The variation in the militancy of those protests  – the ostentatiousness of the future Anabaptists, for example, against Zwingli’s diplomatic avoidance of actually eating sausage, and his condemnation of deliberately causing ‘offence’ – revealed both the wide spectrum of opinion within the early Reformation movement in Zürich, and the terrible schisms that would tear that movement apart by the middle of the 1520s (by which time the most controversial differences had shifted away from Lent 1522’s focus on fasting). Zwingli’s wide array of arguments in his defences of the fast-breakers to his congregation, the reading audience of his pamphlet, the council, and the visiting bishops must also be seen in their early Reformation context. While his use of the concept of ‘Christian liberty’ and free choice in religious decisions are central to understanding Zwingli’s developing theological thought, his emphasis on populist arguments in his sermon and pamphlet reveals the importance of the wider social context in spreading the early Reformation message. Zwingli’s criticism of the Church hierarchy on the issue of fasting was scathing: they were greedy, corrupt, and carnal, and cared nothing for ordinary people. Their imposition of obligatory fasts on honest hardworking people while they themselves ate with gluttony was an illustration of this message, the sale of Butterbriefe an exclamation point on the hypocrisy and sinfulness of the swindlers. The system of fasting was a microcosm of the system of the Church: it

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had no basis in Scripture, was a source of wealth for a greedy hierarchy, imposed hardship on ordinary Godly Christians while sinful clerics indulged their desires with impunity, and the whole thing was run by far-away Romans who viewed people like the honest Swiss with arrogant disdain. Zwingli’s actions in ministering to the poor and preaching to the ordinary people since he had arrived in Zürich showed to his congregation that he denounced this rotten system from a position of moral authority, as did his emphasis on topical popular concerns as well as theological principles. Just as food was not the cause of the Inquisition, the controversy over fasting was not the cause of the Reformation in Zürich:  the appeal of the Gospel message, popular anticlericalism, and political dynamics all played major roles in sparking religious change. But in both Castile and Zürich food is vital to understanding the intersection of religious, cultural, and social contexts, and it can shed unique light on major religious questions. The fasting controversy was one important piece in the early Reformation puzzle: as Zwingli might have put it, he and his followers started with sausage, but they would end up with bacon.

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‘Sausage-Makers’ and ‘Cheese-Hunters’: The Cultural Context of Reformation Fast-Breaking

Heinrich Aberli defiantly brandishing a sausage while arguing with an angry monk would certainly have been an entertaining and attention-grabbing story in the streets, taverns, and homes of 1522 Zürich. How would people have received and understood such stories? While the fast-breaking meals sent a political and religious message, just as in Inquisition Spain the foods eaten would also have carried all sorts of perceived or intended significances, bringing to mind symbolisms, allusions, jokes, and other meanings. To understand contemporary reception of reformation fast-breaking, we must examine early modern Europe’s rich culture of food symbolism. How did the foods used for fast-breaking relate to the religious and social issues involved in the controversy? The most obvious prohibition during Lent was on meat. What cultural meaning did the season’s ban on ‘flesh’ carry? How did cultural representations of meat and butchery relate to contemporary Swiss political and religious discourse? The meat which became synonymous with the Zürich fast-breakings was sausage: what message did this association send? Meat was not, however, the only food important to the Lenten fast. Eggs and dairy products – such as milk, butter and cheese – were also prohibited for the forty days, and were also a central part of Swiss diet and agriculture. What cultural connotations were attached to these foods, and what did the choice to break their prohibition say about the culture of the early Reformation? The timing of the fast-breakings was also highly symbolic, with many taking place in the first week of Lent, just after Carnival, a season of rowdy behaviour and popular protest. How did the period of Carnival relate to the Lenten fast-breakings, and how did they fit into the culture of early modern Swiss political and religious protest? Finally, how did the often ritual meals of the fast-breakings relate to the most important ritual meal of the Reformation, the communion?

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By examining the cultural background to the foods and times of the fastbreakings, we can gain a greater understanding of how they would have been seen by the contemporary ‘audience’ that Zwingli and the evangelicals wished to persuade.

‘Menschenfleisch’: Butchers, sausages, and violence Sausages were the perfect food for Christoph Froschauer’s contention that the Würstessen was the repast of some tired, honest labourers. In medieval and early modern Europe, the sausage was widely perceived as an ordinary man’s food: preservable, portable, and above all, cheap. In his 1537 Italian poem ‘In Praise of the Sausage’, Agnolo Firenzuola satirized the association of certain foods with certain classes by farcically elevating the humble sausage:  ‘are you not the true food for poets’, rich prelates, good nobles and learned men, he asks.1 In the anonymous late fifteenth-century Zürich play script ‘Herbst und Mai’, a buffoonish noble is mocked by presenting a bratwurst  – an obviously ridiculous gift – to a messenger at his court.2 Erasmus, a notoriously picky eater, was dismayed by the ubiquity of sausage in southern German and Swiss taverns and inns. Travelling on his way to Basel in 1518 he recorded being served a dish of sausages ‘reheated more than once’, which he described as ‘simply revolting’.3 The sausage was a staple menu item for tavern- and inn-keepers, being cheap, easy to serve, and salty (thus encouraging drinking).4 The sausage’s humble status and cheap ingredients meant that it was an infamous target of adulteration and other questionable production processes. In many cities widows gained the right to make and sell sausages, but they were excluded from slaughterhouses and the main butchers’ markets, meaning they mostly sold sausages made from what offal and off-cuts they could procure.5 During a later dispute between the Zürich butchers’ guild and sausage-selling widows over quality and market access, the city council noted that widows’ right to sell sausages from stalls was a tradition in the city.6 Even in the main regulated markets, medieval and early modern butchers were often fined for putting prohibited off-cuts (or worse) into their sausages.7 In Zürich in 1521, the butcher Rudolf Zimmerman was prosecuted and fined for having slaughtered a diseased pig and used it to make bratwurst, blutwurst (blood sausage) and leberwurst (liver sausage).8 This issue was endemic:  in medieval Islamic markets, the sausage-makers were notorious for their questionable practices, and drew special attention from market inspectors.9 Stories of such practices were infamous:  in his ‘Praise of Sausages’, Firenzuola jokingly applauds the fact that sausages can be

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made from any meat, including horse, donkey, and in Egypt, even dog.10 Sausage casings could hide (or at least be perceived to hide) all manner of sins. Early modern sausage-making, and butchery in general, was a bloody, grizzly business. The cultural representation of the trade and its practices generally involved graphic slaughter. In the Zürich-born artist Joost Amman’s illustration for butchers (Figure 5.1) in Hans Sachs’s 1568 Nuremberg book of

Figure 5.1 Joost Amman, The Butcher, from Hans Sachs, Das Ständebuch (Nuremberg, 1568). By permission of the Wellcome Library.

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trades Das Standebüch, the butcher wields a large axe over an ox being held still by his assistant. In the sixteenth century’s most celebrated visual depiction of butchery, the Italian painter Annibale Carracci’s The Butcher Shop, huge carcasses hang around the knife-wielding butchers while one holds down a lamb for slaughter. The violence and gore involved in butchery made it a natural metaphor for warfare, especially in the Swiss cantons, where in the early sixteenthcentury violence was a pervasive social anxiety due to Swiss mercenary recruitment and the persistent wars of northern Italy. During the 1510s, many Swiss humanists and intellectuals turned passionately against Swiss military involvement, lamenting the draining of young men from Swiss villages and their eventual slaughter or maiming as pawns in cynical wars. In Nikolas Manuel Deutsch’s 1523 Bernese Fastnachtsspiel ‘On the Pope and His Priests’, the heroic Knight of Rhodes angrily laments the ‘butchery’ of Swiss manhood:  ‘You, pope, and emperor Charles  . . . You would have been good sausage-makers, since you like to wade in blood so much, and take pleasure in sending people to the butcher’.11 The metaphor of animal butchery as human slaughter was one often used in fables and fairy tales. Aesop’s fables gained great popularity in the first century of printing, and were widely admired by many religious reformers. Luther was particularly fond of them and remarked that they were the best stories after the Bible, with much social use. Philipp Melanchthon thought that fables were of great pedagogic value, and wanted Aesop to be central in Lutheran schools.12 While presenting universal morals, the sayings and parables from the ancient stories were often applied to contemporary contexts, either through analogy or quotation (the latter generally negatively). Catholic polemicist Johannes Eck wrote of Zwingli that the Swiss tried to do nothing more than ‘catch the popular breeze’, and did everything through uproar and violence. Zwingli was so stupid, so without learning, so witless, and wasted so much ‘innocent paper’ with his writings, that Eck said he was reminded of fox’s description of an actor’s mask – ‘Oh what a head, but no brain!’ – and of a nightingale he captured: ‘a voice but nothing more’.13 Aesop’s classical fables were a common point of reference for early modern writers, and the period’s prevailing versions had many stories involving butchers. In the fable of the rams and the butcher, the sheep see a butcher enter their field and approach one of their number, but they selfishly do nothing on the basis that the butcher is not after them. They continue in their selfishness, refusing to help each other, until it becomes obvious that they have left it too late and the butcher will

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slaughter them all. The sheep reflect that they deserve their fate as they did nothing to help each other, even though together they could have killed the butcher. The story is common in many of the most popular early modern printed editions of Aesop, including those of Heinrich Steinhöwel and Sebastian Brant, and as noted by Laura Gibbs in a modern context, the fable has implicit political connotations: William Caxton, for example, seems to have used it to comment on the Wars of the Roses.14 The illustration from Caxton’s widely distributed and reprinted edition (Figure 5.2) shows the bloody killing done by the butcher. A similar or variant fable using the threat of butchery to make a political point is that of the oxen and the butchers, where the young bulls’ desire to eradicate their nemeses, the butchers, is tempered by the wisdom of an old ox pointing out that with no butchers, slaughter would be done by less expert and crueller people. Zwingli liked to use fables to make contemporary political or religious arguments. One of his earliest political works is The Fable of the Ox, in which a strong, simple, well-meaning ox (the Swiss) becomes embroiled in a series of increasingly disastrous alliances and conflicts with sneaky cats (France), a cunning fox (Venice), a greedy lion (the emperor), and a duplicitous shepherd (the pope).15

Figure 5.2 The Lambs, the Shepherd, and the Butcher, from Heinrich Steinhöwel, Vita et Fabulae. Aesopus (Basel, 1487/9), p. 126. By permission of e-rara/Universitätsbibliothek Basel.

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Zwingli wrote the fable in 1510, showing that even early in his career he had major misgivings about the Confederation’s military entanglements, and a cynicism about the intentions of Rome. At Marignano in 1514, the Swiss ox was decisively slaughtered by the French and their allies, and Zwingli (who had been at the battle as a military chaplain) began to turn ever more bitterly against foreign mercenary recruitment. The slaughter of Marignano and similar engagements was horrific. Hans Holbein’s Schweizerschlacht – ‘Swiss battle’ or ‘Swiss slaughter’ (Figure 5.3) – shows the brutality of the fighting in which the Swiss soldiers habitually engaged, while Urs Graf ’s illustration of the Marignano battlefield (Figure 5.4) illustrates the butchery in graphic detail, with pieces of men’s flesh scattered across the scene. Zwingli’s descriptions of the mercenary recruitment that put young Swiss men on such battlefields included comparisons with butchery: [The recruiters] are like the butchers, who drive the cattle to Konstanz, they drive the cattle out, take the money for them, and come home without the cattle. Then they go out again and do the same thing repeatedly. This is what the pensioners and captains do.16

The recruiters were like ‘menschenmetzgeren’, he wrote once: ‘human-butchers’.17 In summer 1523 Zwingli explicitly linked this butchery of Swiss men’s flesh to the church’s prohibition of eating meat during Lent, pointing out that the church

Figure  5.3 Detail from copy of Hans Holbein, Schweizerschlacht (early 1520s). By permission of Albertina Museum Vienna.

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Figure  5.4 Urs Graf, Schlachtfeld (1521). By permission of Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett.

and its defenders saw eating ‘fleisch’ during Lent 1522 as a great evil sin, but had no problem with the butchery and sale of ‘menschenfleisch’.18 It was appropriate that the recruiters wore ‘red hats and cloaks’, he had written, ‘for if you shake them, ducats and crowns will fall out; and if you wring them, the blood of your son, your brother, your cousin, your good friend will run out’.19 References to the gory violence of butchery were not limited to warfare. The popular medieval story of St Nicholas illustrates the trade’s macabre connotations. During a period of widespread hunger, an evil butcher lures three young boys into his shop, kills them, and salts them in barrels. The menace of butchery was also a staple in the popular tradition of ‘the world turned upsidedown’, where instead of accepting their natural relationship with the butcher as in Aesop’s fable, the oxen turn butchers themselves, slaughtering the men of meat (see Figure 5.5). Sausages’ symbolic associations went beyond butchery and violence. The people of 1520s Zurich, like most people in early modern western Europe, would have been aware of what Patricia Simons has called a ‘social iconography’ formed of words, images, and practices, relating to sex and gender: ‘everyday deeds like coagulating cheese, ploughing a field . . . stirring or ladling a pot . . . could bring to mind an old joke or spur the formation of a new quip, a novel image’.20

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Figure 5.5 Detail from Die Verkehrte Welt (German, early seventeenth century). By permission of Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle.

Figure 5.6 Woman Preparing Sausages Banters with Man (German, sixteenth century). By permission of Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

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In this social iconography, for obvious reasons, ‘sausages were notoriously penile’.21 ‘The common visual trope of the penis as sausage’ was common across Europe, and the sausage’s obviously phallic shape had also made it a widespread cultural and humorous metaphor for masculinity.22 In the sixteenth-century German image of a woman making sausages shown in Figure 5.6, the woman and her husband banter about whether he is worthy of the long sausage she is making: pointing at the measuring stick, he invites her to come measure herself if she doesn’t believe that he is man enough.23 The sixteenth-century German peasant illustrated in Figure  5.7 is seemingly less confident:  his small rather measly sausage is limp, perhaps a reflection of the disease that has caused the pocks on his face, or his lowly status as someone reliant on the humble wurst.

Figure  5.7 Peasant with Wurst (late fifteenth-century German engraving), from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 8, Commentary Part  1, .022, p.  314. By permission of Abaris Books.

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Figure 5.8 Hans Baldung ‘Grien’, The Witches’ Sabbath (1510). By permission of the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

The removal or denial of sausages was a potent metaphor for male anxieties about emasculation, both literal and figurative. The witches of Hans Baldung Grien’s Witches’ Sabbath (Figure 5.8) menacingly ‘skewer sausages . . . and roast them’, as do those of Urs Graf ’s version (Figure 5.9).24 Both images illustrate the common early modern male fear that witches literally castrated men, stole their penises, or took their virility.25 A woman suspected of being a witch in Augsburg in the seventeenth century was feared for having begged for sausages at the engagement party of a man who had rejected her: ‘the more [she] talked about sausages, the more the assembled feared an assault on the bridegroom’s potency’.26

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Figure 5.9 Urs Graf, The Witches’ Sabbath (1514). By permission of Albertina Museum Vienna.

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The stories of the German comic writer Martin Montanus, such as those in his Gartengesellschaft (1559), often include satirical sexual symbolisms and morals. In ‘Ein mann sagt, er het noch ein kleins zipffelin’, a man and his wife quarrel over her alleged dislike of sex and her refusal of sexual advances. The wife becomes so frustrated that she tells her husband that she would like to have him castrated. The man doesn’t believe her disinterest and so conceives a prank to deceive her. While chopping wood, he pretends to have inadvertently cut off his own penis, frantically showing his wife a bloody little sausage he had secreted.27 The wife is shocked and denounces the man as no longer worthy of being a husband, saying she is going to leave him for a man with a penis. Reassured that his wife’s protestations about disliking sex were untrue, the man convinces her to stay by saying he still has ‘a little stump’, which she decides is enough, as ‘it’s better to have a little tail than nothing’.28 Other cured meats could also be used to express male anxiety about emasculation by dangerous women, be they witches or merely overbearing wives. In Hans Sachs’s 1536 Nuremberg Fastnachtsspiel ‘About an Innkeeper and Two Peasants Who Wanted to Take the Speck from the German Court’, speck (bachen) represents the ‘lost’ masculinity of German men.29 Two peasants hear tell of a great speck held at an inn called ‘the German Court’ (‘der teutschen hof’).30 The innkeeper tells them that only a real man, the true head of his own family and household, can claim the eponymous meat. Because of the (supposed) domination of German men by their wives, it has remained unclaimed for over two centuries, despite the desire of ‘many thousands’ of men. The peasants’ plan to make off with the charcuterie is foiled when it is revealed that both have been beaten and ordered around by their wives (a subject explored in other Sachs plays). The emasculation is not just of the two peasants but of all of German men: none are worthy of taking the great bachen, even though it is kept in an inn, a space reserved for men and symbolizing masculinity.31 Performed at Carnival, the play’s allegory of emasculation expressed through the denial of meat may also have been suggestive of the oppressive power of Lent to do the same. The gendered and sexual symbolism of sausages and meat is vividly illustrated in Pieter Aertsen’s 1551 painting Butcher’s Stall with the Flight into Egypt (Figure 5.10 and cover image). The foreground is dominated by a butcher’s stall overflowing with animal products, all painted in vivid, arresting detail. Fresh red meat, including a whole calf ’s head, a pig’s head, a carcass, and various legs and haunches are mixed with trotters, fats, dead poultry, and long links of sausages. Next to the tripe and intestines hanging by the tiled roof one can see

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Figure  5.10 Pieter Aertsen, The Butcher’s Stall with the Flight into Egypt (1551). By permission of Archivart / Alamy Stock Photo.

the butcher and his companions making merry at a table behind a stretched carcass. On the ground outside are many notably empty oyster shells. Through the door above the calf ’s head, however, there is a very different scene. Beginning with the simple plate of two fish, the rich colours of the butcher’s stall and the house are replaced with an austere grey. The holy family are seen fleeing into Egypt. Even on her flight into exile the Virgin Mary has paused to give something to a needy man begging by her donkey. The family’s backs are turned on the carnal world of butchery, meat, and lust behind them.

White meats: Dairy, eggs, and sex Meats are not the only sexually symbolic foods in the rich foreground of Aertsen’s Butcher’s Stall. The long string of sausage links dangle suggestively into a bowl of soft cheese, its surface pierced by a long spoon. While sausages were the most infamous of the foods associated with the 1522 fast-breakings, dairy products and eggs were also emphasized by Zwingli and his

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supporters. At the first Zürich disputation in March 1523, Zwingli complained that during Lent and other defined periods the Swiss were allowed to eat ‘no cheese, no eggs, no milk’.32 This was an irksome prohibition for the Swiss, both economically due to the importance of cattle and dairy farming, and culturally due to the place of dairy in their traditional diet. As discussed in the previous chapter, Swiss and German communities often campaigned for dispensations to use dairy and eggs during fasting periods. Restrictions on their use also carried symbolic meaning due to dairy’s popular association with female sex and fertility. In the agricultural economy, operation of the dairy was generally a female responsibility:  ‘working in the dairy  – milking cows and ewes and making cheese and butter – were regarded as “women’s work” in most of medieval and early modern Europe’.33 Both written and visual representations of rural life often emphasized this gender delineation. In Nuremberg artist Erhard Schön’s Lament of the Three Poor House Maids the artisan’s maid carries a milk jug next to a sheep, while the farmer’s maid complains that ‘in the village my life is tough with hard work and more, summer or winter, little sleep, with cows, pigs, geese, and sheep, milking, butter-making’ and many other difficult tasks.34 Late medieval and early modern descriptions of agriculture, such as the widespread Hortus Sanitatis, invariably illustrated dairy work with women. Cheese in particular had symbolic connotations, and the Christian association of cheese-making with fertility and reproduction dates back to ancient times. In Job 10:10, Job rhetorically asks God, ‘Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?’. Hildegard of Bingen wrote in the twelfth century of what were seen as scientific similarities between human conception and cheesemaking:  ‘first the semen inside the woman is milky. Then it coagulates, and afterwards it becomes flesh, just as milk first curdles and then becomes cheese’.35 The sixteenth-century Italian miller Menocchio famously equated the creation of the world to the coagulation of cheese, an analogy that Carlo Ginzburg noted was shared (seemingly completely coincidentally) by many other ordinary people in other parts of the world.36 Late medieval visual representations of cheese-making often explicitly or subtly equated the process with reproduction and pregnancy, from locating cheese in women’s laps to showing men stirring curds and whey held by their wives with long sticks. In popular German ‘world turned upside-down’ scenes, milk is squeezed from the ‘udders’ or ‘breasts’ of a cheese, illustrating the transformative relationship between cheese and female milk (Figure 5.11). A common German language insult against monks and priests in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was ‘käsejägern’ (‘cheese-hunters’), ‘käsepredigern’

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Figure  5.11 Detail from Ein Newer Kunckelbrieff:  Die widersinnige Weldt genandt (German, seventeenth century). By permission of Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

(‘cheese-preachers’), or ‘käsebettlern’ (‘cheese-beggars’).37 Such insults were aimed at both lecherous clerics – ‘lovers of women’s rooms’ as one early modern German writer put it – and greedy monks, as cheese could symbolize money as well as sex and fertility.38 Monastic begging was particularly detested by early Protestants:  the Wittenberg reformer Andreas Karlstadt wrote that ‘the cheese-beggars’ were worse for Christendom than ‘four thousand Jews’.39 Rudolf Gwalther, who married Zwingli’s daughter and succeeded his father-in-law and Bullinger in Zürich, wrote that the ‘cheese-hunters, ‘sausage-beggars’, ‘fatbeggars’, monastic beggars, and all other monks were ‘outrageous’.40 Standing for both money and female sexuality, cheese could become shorthand for the valuable and desirable. In 1523 Zwingli bemused a debating opponent unfamiliar with his Swiss colloquialisms by offering him a ‘hässene käse’ (a ‘hare’s cheese’, i.e. something extremely rare and valuable) if the cleric could disprove Zwingli’s arguments through Scripture.41 Another of Lent’s prohibited foods was notably ‘female’ in its symbolism. Eggs were a mainstay of the poor, a cheap and accessible source of protein in all sorts of situations. The proverbial Reformation peasant was often shown with a basket of eggs, as in Albrecht Dürer’s famous depiction (Figure  5.12). Eggs

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Figure  5.12 Albrecht Dürer, The Peasant Couple at Market (German, 1519). By permission of the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute.

required just the small space to keep a chicken and the scraps with which to feed it. Like sausages, they were a convenient portable food: as noted in the previous chapter, some of those who broke fast in spring 1522 were eating eggs while at work in the fields and vines. Eggs were also symbolic of reproduction and female fertility, intimately associated with birth, rebirth, and Easter. In visual culture, women with eggs and dairy were often engaged by men in sexually suggestive poses. In the Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer’s Market Scenes, men stare at the

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Figure 5.13 Jacob Binck, Peasant Selling Eggs (German, sixteenth century), from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 16, .73 (286), p. 52. By permission of Abaris Books.

butter and eggs in the laps of market women, while Jacob Binck shows a man reaching between the thighs of a peasant woman with a basket of eggs and a jug of milk (Figure  5.13). In Flemish depictions of sixteenth-century peasant weddings, women dance with masked male companions dressed with a necklace of sausages and broken eggs, a potent example of suggestive sexual imagery.42 Erhard Schön combined the reproductive symbolism of eggs and male anxiety about emasculation in The Peasant Breeding Eggs (Figure 5.14) where an overbearing wife tells her husband (who she is abusing while making him sit on a nest of eggs):

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Figure  5.14 Erhard Schön, Peasant Breeding Eggs (Nuremberg, early sixteenth century), from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 13, Commentary, 184, p. 341. By permission of Abaris Books. ‘God must pity you that your eggs will not get warmer; If you attended to your eggs as you do the tavern, they would hatch’ ‘Your heart is not in it. Your nest is no good’.

Here the German husband is like the peasant unable to take the meat from the inn: he is not man of his own house, his ‘nest is no good’, and he cannot ‘warm’ his eggs. In Martin Montanus’s story ‘Ein junge dochtr theylt drey ayer auss, das neun darauss wurden’, a man has three daughters of marriageable age, but he cannot afford more than one dowry. He decides to test which is the most suitable for

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marriage, giving each of them three eggs and telling them that the one who knows how to ‘invest her eggs best so that she has the highest profit from it’ will marry now, while ‘the others will have to wait longer’.43 The eldest daughter boils her three eggs and hands one to her father, saying that this one now means he has three (the other two being his testicles). The eldest gives her second egg to her mother, saying that she too will soon have three, as when she sleeps with her husband, he will give her ‘two eggs’. The third egg she keeps as after her wedding, she will sleep with her new husband and he will give her ‘two eggs’. Therefore the family have turned three eggs into nine, a handsome return. By displaying her strong desire to marry, and her mature awareness of the sexual symbolism of the eggs, the eldest daughter ‘won the field, and her father had to give her a husband’.44 The role of these feminine food symbols in the popular Reformation is generally passive. As Lyndal Roper has noted The imagery of the common man, the Reformation hero, and the rhetoric of community which underlay it, were relentlessly male  . . . In Dürer’s monument to the Peasant War, it is the male peasant . . . who caps the whole. He alone can embody the peasants’ struggle and tragedy. The female presence is only implicit, in the baskets of eggs and cheese, the butter churn and milk can of women’s work.45

In the Zürich fast-breakings, the female presence is also only implicit. Elsi Flammer and Bärbel von Arm prepare the food for the Würstessen but that is their only role in the meal. Their opinion is only sought because of their gendered responsibilities in the kitchen. Women are not noted among any of the other fastbreakings noted by the city authorities:  they do not participate in evangelical protest of practice. In understanding the cultural background to fast-breaking, Lenten requirements for abstinence must be kept in mind: this was a season in which ‘flesh’ in both food and sexual terms was off limits. The Christian ‘liberty’ at the heart of Zwingli’s justification of fast-breaking would have had cultural connotations for some of his audience that went beyond the purely theological.

The season turned upside-down: Carnival protest and Lenten fast-breaking A sometimes overlooked detail about the Würstessen meal in Christoph Froschauer’s house is the baker Barthlime Pur’s testimony that before the infamous sausages were served, the men ate küchli (a type of deep-fried doughnut), a traditional Swiss Carnival treat made of eggs, sugar, milk, and flour.46 While the

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fast-breakings took place during Lent, many of their features connected them to the festival which took place before that season began. Many histories erroneously place the meal on Ash Wednesday (5 March 1522), the modern beginning of Lent.47 As noted in many of the testimonies before the city council’s investigation, however, the meal actually took place on the Sunday following Ash Wednesday (9 March 1522). This Sunday falls exactly forty days before Good Friday, hence its title Quadragesima (‘fortieth’) Sunday, or often Invocavit Sunday (from Psalm 91, ‘He shall call on me’). In medieval and early modern Swiss and southern German culture, the Sunday was often called alte Fastnacht (‘old Carnival’), which is the term used in the Zürich city council investigation. Alte Fastnacht was so called because Lent was originally calculated as beginning on Quadragesima Sunday, but in the late medieval period church regulations changed to exclude Sundays from the forty days, pushing the beginning of the season back to Ash Wednesday, and Carnival back to Shrove Tuesday. Lee Palmer Wandel has argued that Basel’s celebration of alte Fastnacht as opposed to Shrove Tuesday, or the previous Sunday (which was in some places called ‘Herrenfastnacht’, ‘Lords’ Carnival’), and the location of the city’s major iconoclasms just before Lent 1529 (and their explicit association with Carnival in the city chronicle) was perhaps reflective of a desire ‘to recover lay authority to set the time of Carnival, to take from the bishop the right to determine the date for one of the most popular lay religious festivals’.48 The choice of alte Fastnacht for the Würstessen must also be seen in the context of the contested  – and traditionally politically controversial – Carnival period. The date of the Würstessen strongly associates the event with the medieval and early modern tradition of Carnival protest. Such protests were central to the beginnings of the Reformation in many communities across Germanspeaking Europe. Bob Scribner noted how satirical processions, mock religious ceremonies, and other anti-Roman protests characterized Carnival 1522 in many places across Europe, including Stralsund, Danzig, Strasbourg, and Prussia, as well as having occurred during Carnival 1520 and 1521 in Wittenberg.49 In many cases these Carnival incidents were communities’ first recorded popular expressions of support for the Reformation.50 Scribner argued that in the early ‘popular’ phase of the Reformation, Carnival protest could function as ‘an alternative mass medium’, a method of ‘propaganda for the Reformation’ which ‘abolishe[d] the social distance between those whom it [brought] into contact’ due to its ‘freer forms of speech and gesture and . . . familiarity of language outside the limits of social convention’. In Scribner’s view, Carnival protest sometimes ‘communicated the popular will to the magistrates

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as effectively as a popular vote’, and lenient punishments often indicated that ‘that they had got the message’.51 Seen as a Carnival protest similar to the others noted by Scribner in 1521–2, the Zürich fast-breakings become an important propaganda event for the Reformation  – both in the actual propaganda Zwingli provided, and in the transformation of Reformation from words to social deeds – and an important communication of the popularity of evangelical feeling to the city’s authorities. While genuine religious feeling and political relationships surely contributed to the decision of the greater council to permit Zwingli to debate the episcopal visitation, the public unrest and controversy which the issue had generated must also have preyed on the authorities’ minds. The function of Carnival in the medieval and early modern world has been much debated by historians. Max Gluckman’s theory of semi-sanctioned times for dissent (‘rituals of rebellion’) as a ‘safety-valve’ which reinforced social structures and stability has been applied by some historians to early modern Carnival. Keith Thomas saw early modern Carnival as such a ‘safety-valve’, reinforcing the social order by limiting social protest into an officially defined period.52 On the other extreme, Mikhail Bakhtin saw Carnival as an alternative reality in which social dissent thrived, destroying and remaking social orders in all societies.53 Natalie Zemon Davis has offered a more complex compromise between these two positions, one in which Carnival could reinforce or undermine the social order depending on context, highlighting ambivalence and conflict in Carnival.54 Peter Burke has offered a similar view which emphasizes the local and temporal differences in the way Carnival can function.55 Edward Muir has summarized the more nuanced idea that carnival did not function in any single way, either reinforcing or subverting authority. Carnival revolved around an ongoing improvised social drama, played out in a highly creative and elastic fashion that evoked multiple meanings, which depended on changing contexts and conditions.56

In the medieval and early modern period there was a strong ‘Swiss tradition of politically charged Carnival’.57 Towns and cities welcomed business and diplomatic delegations, and there was large-scale public entertainment, often including martial parades and events.58 Basel and, especially, Bern were well known for their raucous Carnival events, but controversial Carnival practices were found across the cantons. At Carnival in 1523 in Lucerne, Catholics burned Zwingli in effigy.59 There are no printed Fastnachtsspiele for early modern Zürich, but the satirical Herbst und Mai play transcribed in the city in the late fifteenth

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century has been categorized as a Carnival play.60 Carnival in the city and its surroundings were certainly a politically intense period: on Lake Zürich in 1489, Carnival disturbances boiled over into a full-blown revolt which led to the overthrow and execution of the city of Zürich’s mayor.61 Bullinger notes that Zwingli and the Zürich reformers completely banned Carnival in the city during the later 1520s as it was seen as too raucous, a ‘depraved and impure’ Catholic tradition.62 But even in 1523, Zürich’s city council was so concerned about the possibility of religious and social conflict at Carnival that it passed a mandate curtailing most celebrations in the interest of public order.63 After the altercations and ‘unpleasant scenes’ of Lent 1522, the city authorities were keen to avoid further flashpoints for public unrest, especially in light of the continuing radical actions of some of the city’s evangelicals. The details of the city’s first ‘iconoclasm’ in 1523 are intriguing in light of the previous year’s fast-breaking protests. As we have seen, Zwingli had juxtaposed the inconvenience of the Lenten ban on butter for the dairy-reliant Swiss with the sale of Butterbriefe and expensive low-quality oil – oil the Romans wouldn’t even use for grease, as both he and Luther had put it.64 Manuel had represented this difference in his anti-Roman 1523 Fastnachtsspiel, naming a proverbial Swiss mercenary exploited by Rome ‘Heine Anckennapff ’ (‘Butter-pot’).65 As the target of their planned protest against ‘idols’, a group of radicals chose church oil lamps.66 Oil lamps were expensive, and were mainly funded through tithes and rents (issues that Zwingli had also raised during the fasting controversy, in relation to ‘sharing the common burden’). The participants in these iconoclasms included many of the radicals who had broken fast the previous Lent including Lorenz Hochrütiner, Klaus Höttinger, Barthlime Pur, and Klaus Ockenfuss. Wandel has argued that the oil lamp protests were evocative of the ‘irreverence and inversion of Carnival’.67 The 1522 fast-breakings are even more evocative of Carnival tradition and culture. The choice of sausages at the alte Fastnacht meal in Froschauer’s house, and in Aberli’s provocative fast-breaking at the Augustinian church, draws a direct link with the events of Carnival: sausages were the quintessential Carnival food, their status as carnival fare well known throughout Europe. Butchers in Nuremberg and elsewhere carried giant sausages through the streets during Carnival processions; in Königsberg in 1583 the butchers’ guild carried a sausage allegedly weighing 440 lbs.68 A familiar icon of Carnival events was the sausage-seller, as illustrated in Daniel Hopfer’s depiction from early sixteenthcentury Augsburg (Figure 5.15), which echoes similar images from other parts of Europe. The image displays many of the characteristic features of carnival: the sale and eating of food on the street, the raucous festivities, and the bawdy, sexually charged atmosphere. Sausage unites the three major themes of early

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Figure 5.15 Daniel Hopfer, The Sausage Seller and Carnival Dancers (Augsburg, early sixteenth century), from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 17, .73(490), p. 150. By permission of Abaris Books.

modern Carnival – ‘real and symbolic’ – identified by Peter Burke: food, sex, and violence.69 In satirical processions and performances, sausage often represented the Carnival season in opposition to a Lenten fish. At Carnival in Zittau in 1505, the town staged a mock battle between a bratwurst and a herring.70 In an illustration of Shrovetide from sixteenth-century Nuremberg in Figure 5.16, the figure’s torso is divided evenly between sausages and herrings, embodying the iconic foods of the seasons and the battle between them. In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 Battle between Carnival and Lent (detail, Figure  5.17), food pervades the scene, with some indulging in carnival gluttony while others stock up on fish from the busy fishmonger. Centre stage is the mock ‘battle’ itself, a fat man with pork sausages on his lance (backed by cheese, dairy products, and waffles) ‘jousting’ with a pallid and thin woman wielding fish. By blurring the line between Carnival and Lent, the Zürich evangelicals had begun to turn the established seasons and their traditions upside-down. Zwingli’s argument was for a desacralization of eating, one where only spiritual intention, not mundane tradition could be the basis for sin. As previously discussed, many have noted the similarities of the Würstessen to the communion meal, from the general number of participants to the ritual

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Figure  5.16 Nuremberg Shrovetide Carnival (German, sixteenth century), Bodleian MS. Douce 346. By permission of Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

sharing of food. Catholic Lent was a season of ‘spiritual warfare’ in which Christians were supposed to do battle with the spirits of the devil as Christ had done in the desert. No Eucharist was offered during the Lenten season:  not only was ‘flesh’ (in both food and sexual senses) prohibited, but the physical flesh and blood of Christ was also denied as Christians made themselves spiritually ready for Christ’s Resurrection on Easter Sunday.71 The fleisch shared and eaten by the fast-breakers was stripped of the physical significance that church doctrine had endowed it: its spiritual significance lay only in the spiritual intentions of the eaters, in their faith alone. The ordinariness of the Eucharist became a central idea in Zwingli’s thought and the development of his Reformation. In article 18 of the 67

Figure 5.17 Detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival & Lent (1559). By permission of Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.

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Figure  5.18 Detail from front of Huldrych Zwingli, Vonn dem Nachtmal Christi (Christoph Froschauer, Zürich, 1525). By permission of e-rara/Zentralbibliothek Zürich.

Figures  5.19 Front of Huldrych Zwingli, Ejn klare Underrichtung vom Nachtmal Christi (Hans Hager, Zürich, 1526). By permission of e-rara/Zentralbibliothek Zürich.

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Articles, Zwingli described the celebration of the Mass as a ‘remembrance’ of Christ’s sacrifice, not a sacrifice itself.72 In the next two years Zwingli further developed his ideas, generally justifying a rejection of transubstantiation with John 6:63: ‘The spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing’. Zwingli’s morality of eating, so present in his defence of the fast-breakers, also influenced his rejection of Catholic and Lutheran concepts of the Eucharistic meal, which he described as ‘carnal and gross eating’.73 To Zwingli, the mundane nature of the meal was important in highlighting Christ’s humanity and the primacy of faith, and he and his followers emphasized that idea in their propaganda. In Christoph Froschauer’s and Hans Hager’s Zürich editions of Zwingli’s 1525 and 1526 pamphlets on the Eucharist (Figures 5.18 and 5.19), Christ and the apostles are shown eating and sharing food, the Lord’s supper visualized as an ordinary meal, just like the meals that had helped launch the Reformation in the city in 1522. * Understanding the fast-breaking protests requires us to try and understand the cultural context in which the events and the debates that surrounded them took place. Three contexts in particular are important to emphasize. Firstly, the wide variety of symbolism associated with the meat prohibited during Lent. The bloody business of butchery and sausage-making was a vivid symbol of pervasive Swiss anxiety about the slaughter of its young men at war, as well as an often ambiguous political metaphor. Carnal ‘flesh’ also signified lust and aggression, while sausages, the humble and marginal food, were a potent symbol of masculinity and independence. Secondly, the feminine and sexual symbolism of eggs and dairy were also widely known, and tied into Lent’s season of sexual abstinence, the complex gender dynamics of early modern households and communities, and the gender divide of Reformation theology and participation. Finally, the seasonal situation of the Lenten fast-breakings as an extension of Carnival protest, and an early example of what would become the central role of symbolic eating in Zürich’s reformed religion, is an important temporal context for understanding the meaning and intention of the controversy. Carnival and much of the radicalism of Lent 1522 did not survive the Zürich Reformation. Indeed by the mid-1520s Zwingli and many of those whom he had defended as ‘honest folk, of good conscience’ over their fast-breaking had become enemies, with the split between Zürich’s official Reformation and the Swiss Anabaptist movement. Indeed much of debate of that season seems

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somewhat at odds with the austere, controlling reformed religion that took hold in the city. Yet it is important to analyse the events of spring 1522 in their own early Reformation context, one where both radicalism and a complex cultural background surrounding food were crucially important. That context – much like in Inquisition Spain – shows how the relationship between food and belief in early modern Europe went beyond the theological and into wider issues of culture, social order, and community relations. Such dynamics were not limited to the religious turmoil of post-Reconquista Inquisition or dramatic Reformation. The malleable and ambiguous symbolism of sausages, for example, points to how the interplay of meanings and beliefs around food was central to another of the period’s major phenomena: the panEuropean question of witchcraft.

Part Three

Food and Witchcraft

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Dining with Demons: Food, Witchcraft, and Evil

‘What did you have to eat?’, asked Heinrich von Schultheiss’s exhaustive 1634 list of questions for interrogating accused witches about their ‘sabbaths’.1 ‘What did you drink?’, the suggested interrogation continues. Where was the food? Was it on a table, or somewhere else? How did the food taste? Who served the table? Where did you get the food? Where did you get the beer? In all, Schultheiss suggests thirty-seven questions to ask about food and drink at witches’ rituals, three times more questions than he asks about the nature of demonic worship.2 While the Inquisition enforced one orthodoxy and the Reformation constructed new ones, a destructive phenomenon was also at play in defining early modern Europe’s communities of conformity and deviance:  the witchhunt. Tens of thousands of early modern people were executed in the persecution of witchcraft. ‘Witches’ were put on trial across the continent, with by far the greatest concentration in the Holy Roman Empire, and a particular ‘craze’ during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.3 Accusations fell not just on obvious outsiders but on ordinary women and men, young and old, neighbours and relatives. In the midst of all this, why were the demonologists who studied and analysed witchcraft so interested in food? And what can their interest tell us about food in early modern thought and culture? Recent historical literature has emphasized demonology’s integration with the intellectual and cultural thought of early modern Europe.4 Stuart Clark has shown that, far from an isolated literary genre, ‘demonology was a composite subject consisting of discussions about the workings of nature, the processes of history, the maintenance of religious purity, and the nature of political authority’.5 Charles Zika has demonstrated how demonology and representations of witchcraft permeated multiple layers of early modern culture.6 Lyndal Roper has revealed demonology’s cultural reach, characterizing it as an ‘imaginative’ ‘Pandora’s box’, touching all manner of cultural expression, including art, entertainment, and humour.7

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It should, therefore, come as no surprise that food – both subject and object of many scientific, religious, political, and cultural debates – was an important topic of interest for demonologists. In a period when food was so often endowed with such rich cultural symbolism, it is natural that these associations would appear in the ‘expansive forest of symbols’ that formed demonology’s picture of witchcraft.8 Food has not yet, however, been the subject of specific study as an issue within demonological literature.9 Though it constitutes ‘a working system of belief ’, early modern demonology was often frustrating in its illogic, contradictions and inconsistencies. Many of the most popular texts were also ‘parasitic on each other’, repeating (or twisting) material gleaned from other writers (including those with whom they disagreed), ‘larding demonology with anecdote’.10 Among this tangle of ideas, however, are three major areas of demonological interest surrounding food that will be examined in this chapter. Demonologists saw milk magic as the predominant form of witchcraft involving food, an association so widely held that Euan Cameron has described it as a ‘theological orthodoxy’.11 Demonology literature is full of stories of women (and it was mostly women) who could magically ‘steal’ milk, spoil it, make it impossible to churn or cause the milking animal to ‘dry up’. How were these processes believed to work, and what were their symbolic meanings? A second area of focus was witchcraft against food as a tool in social conflict: witches cursing livestock because of grudges, or destroying crops and harvests due to personal resentments. Third, the demonology of food focused on food’s place in witchcraft rituals themselves, especially in fantastic ‘witches’ sabbath’ meals. What did demonologists believe about the foods allegedly prepared and served at these meals; what symbolic role did food fulfil; and what can these details reveal about demonological thought about ritual and the nature of witchcraft? By exploring these questions, we can also gain a more integrated understanding of food’s place in early modern European culture, an understanding that situates food within other cultural issues, rather than as a separate cultural subject of its own.

Milk magic The most prominent issue surrounding food in witchcraft was milk magic, a subject that characterized witchcraft belief across early modern Europe, especially in the northern half of the continent, where dairying was more

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prominent. In Sweden and Finland witches were commonly thought of as ‘milk thieves’.12 In Denmark, magical milk theft was a central issue in discussions about magic and witchcraft.13 In Poland, ‘witches were, above all, thieves of milk’.14 In Franconia too, witches were called ‘milk-thieves, while ‘in Low German and in the Netherlands ‘the words [witch and milk-thief] were interchangeable’.15 Demonologists were well aware of this common belief:  not even the smallest village could be found, wrote Heinrich Kramer in the infamous witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum (‘The Hammer of Witches’), ‘in which women do not taint each other’s cows, deprive them of milk, and very often kill them’.16 While there were men accused of milk magic, the act was one primarily associated with women. Both women’s general responsibility for the dairy in the domestic economy, and the cultural associations between dairy produce and female fertility are important to understanding the beliefs behind milk magic. Demonologists drew direct links between the physiology of animal milk, and that of women. Referencing the medieval scientific work of Albertus Magnus, De Animalibus, the Malleus directly equated the production of human and animal milk, stating that in animals milk worked on a menstrual cycle, ‘like any other flow in a woman’.17 The association of animal milk with that of women was at the centre of milk’s contested place in early modern nutritional thinking. Ken Albala has argued that ‘there is probably no food about which more contradiction and confusion’ was generated among ancient, medieval and early modern dieticians than milk. Due to its maternal source and origins in blood, milk (both human and dairy) was considered excellent nourishment for children. In its raw liquid state, however, there was much disagreement over its suitability as a food for adults, centring on its place in the ancient system of humourism, which was a popular scheme of food categorization for medieval and early modern physicians and dietaries. In the view of Galen – whose ancient views on the humors and physiology were especially influential in medieval Europe – milk was cold and moist, making it generally unsuitable for ‘hot and dry’ adult bodies (unless adults were affected with something which made them ‘cold and wet’ like children, such as old age, or melancholy). Early modern dietary theorists generally thought of milk as having three parts: the buttery cream, the cheesy solids, and the watery whey.18 The basis of arguments against Galen’s classification was that milk was produced directly from the elemental ‘hot’ liquid, blood, a source which dietaries considered supremely nourishing. A large amount of medical advice about eating milk therefore focused on how to consume it as close to its ‘hot’ source as possible, as the less fresh it was, the less nutritious it would be (which was especially true

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in premodern Europe as it spoiled easily). This focus on freshness was at the root of the unusual early modern practice of adult breastfeeding, something recommended by a number of medical writers, including Bartolomeo Platina, Marsilio Ficino, and Thomas Cogan.19 In the breast (or the udder) was where milk was closest to blood, the site of a transformative relationship between the two liquids.20 The relationship between milk and blood is one of direct relevance to demonologists’ views on milk magic, as it informed views about the nature of milk magic processes. Martin Tulouff from Guernsey allegedly claimed at his trial for witchcraft in 1563 to be able to bewitch cows so that they produced blood from their udders instead of milk.21 Anthropologists have long focused on the blood–milk relationship, most famously in Roland Barthes’s essay ‘Wine and Milk’, that juxtaposes the two liquids (with wine representing blood) as opposites representing essential differences in the human condition and in human culture.22 It was not only the udders of milk cows that could be ‘dried up’ or drained by envious witches. Italian demonologist Francesco Maria Guazzo told of a woman called Nicole Morrell who decided to take revenge on a woman with whom she had quarrelled by colluding with a devil to cause the other woman’s breasts to dry up through the use of a magical powder.23 Jesuit scholar Martin Delrio discussed cases where witches took away the milk of women, as well as from cows.24 One of the discussants in Lambert Daneau’s 1574 Dialogue of Witches says that witches can ‘dry up’ the milk of those breastfeeding.25 In the 1575 English translation he describes the act: ‘I have seene them, who with onely laying their hands upon a nurses breasts, haue drawn forth all the milke, and dryed them up’.26 Roper has noted the importance of (perceived) attacks on women’s milk production by envious women, and the terror it held for young mothers.27 Female fertility was deeply intertwined with milk magic in early modern demonological thought. Johannes Beetz discussed milk magic in his 1486 Commentary on the Ten Commandments, and recorded the spells allegedly used by Dutch women to affect or protect dairy cows, a passage reproduced by Martin Delrio in his 1600 demonological manual Investigations into Magic. Interestingly, Beetz and Delrio both include the vernacular Dutch of the ‘spell’ in their Latin texts: ‘An old woman, full of wicked days, wishing out of envy to stop the milk of her neighbour’s cow, took a knife, went to the opening of the byre where the cow was, and facing away from the moonlight, said, “Here I cut a nick in her plumpness, and add another one to it. Thus I take the cow’s milk”.’28

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The envious hag draining the ‘plumpness’ of her neighbour’s cow is a vivid image of what Roper has called an ‘economy of bodily fluids’, in which it was feared that witches inverted the traditional female role of nourishing mother: ‘a postmenopausal woman, the old witch was in a sense a dry woman who, instead of feeding others well, diverted nourishment to her own selfish ends’.29 This disruption and inversion of the normal role of nourishing mother and child also worked in reverse. Demonologists often spoke of the popular belief in demonic babies, ‘changelings’. The Malleus said these were the result of demons mating with women, witches stealing men’s seed, or demons taking the form of babies in order to be suckled by wet nurses. All of them had a voracious appetite for women’s milk: ‘the supply of four women would not suffice to suckle one’.30 The most common form of witchcraft against milk was magical theft from domestic animals. The milk would simply disappear, either into thin air, or – more commonly – into the witch’s own milk pails. This was a common belief in late medieval and early modern Europe, and a prominent theme in early demonology. Johannes Vintler’s Buch der Tugend, produced in Augsburg in 1486 contains one of the period’s first major discussions of magical practices. Milk magic is discussed at length and shown in an illustration (Figure 6.1). Many of the book’s stories and images have origins earlier in the fifteenth century, and are notable for their nondemonic character, offering a view of

Figure  6.1 Detail from Johannes Vintler, Buch der Tügend (Augsburg, 1486). By permission of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

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witchcraft quite different to the demonic fantasies of a century or so later.31 The ‘witch’ in the image does not look any different from the woman she is targeting: it seems almost more an illustration of a social fact than of a magical menace. Charles Zika has argued that the pentagram or hexagram (widely believed to be protective symbols against witchcraft) under the ‘witch’ is hindering her attempts at magic, noting that an illustrated manuscript whose images appear based on the same source as Vintler’s shows milk in the dairywoman’s pail, but not that of the witch.32 In the Vintler woodcut it does seem as if the witch is having more success, as the witches’ pail seems to contain milk, and the dairy-woman seems perturbed, pointing at her attempts to milk the cow’s udders. This descriptive view of milk magic became gradually embellished in demonology, as authors began to ascribe the popular practice to collusion with the devil. The Malleus described how some women take a position in any corner of their house, holding a pitcher between their thighs, and after sticking a knife or some tool into the wall or a pillar and positioning their hands for milking, they invoke the devil. This devil always works for them for all purposes, and she explains that this is affecting to milk such-and-such a cow from such-and-such a house, this cow being one that is healthier and more plentiful in milk. Then the Devil immediately takes the milk from the teats of the cow and puts it in the place where the sorceress is sitting, as if it were flowing from the tool.33

The popular Strasbourg preacher Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg described the practice of milk magic in his 1508 Lenten sermon series, which in 1516 was collated and published as Die Emeis (‘The Ants’).34 Geiler’s title was an allusion to Johannes Nider, who had dawn inspiration from Proverbs 6:6  – ‘Go thou sluggard, to the ant; consider her ways, and be wise’ – for his 1475 work on the issues of human society, Formicarius (‘The Ant Colony’).35 Nider discussed both men and women witches, but also often emphasized witchcraft as a female trait, a gendering of witchcraft that was to become increasingly influential in both demonological thought and the directions that witchcraft cases could take.36 In his discussions of witchcraft (a subject which appears in many of the sermons), Geiler often refers to popular beliefs about magic, and offers his opinion on their veracity. He refers to witches ‘drying up’ cows, ‘taking’ their milk, making them unable to give milk any more.37 The milk they took could then be produced from an object of their choosing, such as an axe-handle.38

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All of this, Geiler explained, was accomplished ‘through the help of the devil’.39 Just as evil spirits could cause things to fly or move wherever they wished, so it was with cows, since ‘milk is a physical thing’.40 If a witch wants to milk an axehandle, the devil can take milk from another cow and bring it there ‘in a short time’.41 The 1516 printed version of Geiler’s sermons includes an illustration of such activities (Figure 6.2), an image Charles Zika has argued is an important early visual representation of the ‘demonization’ of witchcraft in the sixteenth century, noting the skinny cow in the background, drained of its milk by the hag-like witch performing the axe-magic, who is standing alongside infamous symbols of witchcraft: a cauldron bubbling on a fire, and a storm raging overhead.42 This use of an object to vicariously milk another’s cow was a form of ‘sympathetic magic’, where the theft or spoiling of a symbolic food such as cow’s milk could represent harm that went beyond the material. Objects other than axes could also be used. Guazzo wrote of a famous witch at Trier who inserted a spigot into the wall of her house, which she used to magically siphon off all the milk of her neighbour’s cows.43 Demonologists were not entirely certain how this process worked. Henri Boguet, in his 1590 Execrable Discourse on Witchcraft, suggested that the witch and the devil were able to cut back the milk

Figure 6.2 Detail from Johan Geiler von Kaysersburg, Die Emeis oder Quadragesimale (Strasbourg, 1516). By permission of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

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of one cow and cause another’s yield to increase by giving one harmful and the other beneficial herbs.44 The search for an explanation of the process by which milk could magically be transferred from one woman’s cow to another struck the sceptical English demonologist Reginald Scot as vaguely absurd. If witches can seemingly conjure milk from thin air, Scot wrote, ‘it might have beene compared to the raising up of Lazarus’, as ‘is not the converting of water into milke, as hard a matter as the turning of water into wine?’.45 Yet, while it was widely alleged that witches could access powerful demonic magic, ‘the poore old witches . . . furthest fetches . . . are but to fetch a pot of milke, &c: from their neighbors house halfe a mile distant from them’.46 Hermann Witekind (also Wilken; pseudonymously ‘Augustin Lercheimer’) was equally sceptical: a witch could not take the milk from your cow, he argued, unless she was there with a pail to milk it herself.47 Scot was equally sceptical about the prevailing fear that witches could spoil the milk churned for butter. ‘[Witches] can also bring to passe’, Scot wrote, ‘that chearne as long as you list, your butter will not come’. This could happen, Scot added sarcastically, ‘especiallie, if either the maids have eaten up the creame; or the goodwife have sold the butter before in the market.’ There were ‘true and naturall causes to hinder [butter making]’, Scot argued: ‘for example. Put a little sope or sugar into your chearne of creame, and there will never come anie butter, chearne as long as you list’. Yet according to common superstitions of countermagic, ‘there be twentie severall waies to make your butter come, which for brevitie I omit; as to bind your cherne with a rope, to thrust therinto a red hot spit, &c:’. ‘But your best remedie and surest waie is,’ Scot concluded, ‘to looke well to your dairie maid or wife, that she neither eat up the creame, nor sell awaie your butter’.48 The idea that milk from one place ended up in another place was actually at the heart of demonological thought on milk magic. Boguet explained that the Devil could move milk from the udders of one cow to those of another, right at the moment of milking.49 He could take the milk from one of the cows, and then surreptitiously pour into the pail over which the other is being milked, so ‘subtly’ that it seemed as if the milk was actually coming from the second cow.50 Guazzo’s explanation was similar: when a witch wished to invoke milk magic, the demon milked the cows and instantly transported the milk.51 The Malleus recorded a story of some men who were on a journey together during May, and stopped for a break in a pasture by a stream. They wished to have some ‘May butter’ with their food. One of the men mysteriously told them he could procure some, took off all of his clothes, and waded into the stream.

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Not sitting but standing, he turned back against the current, and in the sight of the others, he first uttered certain words and moved the water with his hands behind his back, and then after a little while he brought them a large amount of butter in the way that village women sell it in May time. When the others tasted it, they agreed that it was excellent butter.52

Kramer discussed how this magic might have been done. He was sure that the man had either directly colluded with the Devil, or been ‘dedicated to the Devil with a curse by his mother or midwife’. Kramer was also certain that the man (and the Devil) had not turned the water of the stream into butter, as this was beyond the Devil’s powers. The Devil cannot produce new varieties of things, so when the natural butter suddenly burst out from the water did not happen through the demon changing the water into milk . . . Rather, the demon took butter hidden elsewhere and put it in the man’s hands, or he took natural milk from a natural cow and suddenly churned it into butter, for while the art of women takes some time to make butter, the devil can do it in in a very short time.53

If the devil and his witch could take the milk from another cow, that meant that the owner of that cow had had their milk supply reduced. Witches were not conjuring things out of thin air: someone was gaining, and someone was losing.

A moral economy: Food, magic, and community relations Witches being able to move food around in this way was a potentially serious disruption to the ‘natural’ distribution of food in the premodern economy, especially as it was not just milk or butter which could be magically redistributed. Guazzo, referencing the ancient Roman thinkers Servius and Apuleius, asserted that witches could both destroy people’s crops and food, and magically move them from one place to another.54 The Malleus alleged that witches could magically fill empty vessels with wine or other things which the Devil could take from elsewhere.55 Geiler’s explanation for axe magic also relied on the idea that demonic magic could move physical things from one person’s possession to another. This sort of redistributive magic was characteristic of how demonologists saw the role of magic in community quarrels over food. The French magistrate and demonologist Nicolas Rémy recounted a story (retold by Guazzo) of some women in Lorraine who became involved in a witchcraft case that illustrates how disputes

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over food could escalate. Jeanne Armacuriana had stolen from her neighbour’s vegetable garden and hidden the profits of her theft at the bottom of the garden of Alexiae Cabuse.56 Unbeknownst to Jeanne, Alexiae saw this and  – as is the ‘character’ or ‘ingenuity’ of women, as Rémy puts it – told all the neighbours.57 Jeanne was the subject of community hostility and gossip, and was at risk of the law, given Lorraine’s severe penalties for theft, even of vegetables.58 Unsurprisingly, Jeanne was livid with Alexiae and her ‘impudent tongue’, and, in collusion with a demon who capitalized on her anger, took revenge on her neighbour by attacking Alexiae with a vicious whirlwind one day while she tended her cattle. Alexiae was left badly injured and had to be carried home ‘half-dead’.59 Another of Rémy’s stories showed how food quarrels were believed to tempt women into witchcraft. Margareta Lüdman in the Moselle was urged by a demon to poison her neighbour’s cow, after it ate all her vegetables and destroyed her garden.60 Margareta, however, changed her mind, believing that since her neighbour was known as ‘a very perspicacious woman’, she would be discovered.61 Fearful of the demon’s anger, Margareta tried to appease him by poisoning her own calf.62 Rémy’s writing (and therefore also Guazzo’s derivative work) is full of other stories of peasant women whose disputes and grudges eventually escalated into allegations of witchcraft:  when retelling one such story, about a woman who was always fighting with her neighbour, he commented that women who lived in the same vicinity frequently quarrelled, as if they had a general ‘proclivity’ for it.63 As in Inquisition Castile, women’s social relations, and their roles within communities, often revolved around food, and their legal conflict and persecution  – for witchcraft or ‘judaizing’ heresy  – therefore often had a background in food. Begging and charity were particularly fertile ground for food arguments between women. Robin Briggs has shown how awkward community relations between those who had and those who begged from them could escalate into witchcraft allegations.64 Rémy wrote of how a woman in the Moselle, Bertrande the barber’s wife, took retribution on her neighbour Elisa who had refused to give her a pitcher of milk by ‘inserting a bone’ into Elisa’s neck.65 In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, one of the three witches says she will take revenge on a sailor’s wife who refused to give her one of the chestnuts she was ‘munching’.66 The beggar woman who had been refused charity could easily become the focus of suspicion and blame if things went wrong for those who had shunned her. The asymmetry of power and the very obvious differences in food security could lead to jealousy, envy, guilt, and suspicion.

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Allegations about magical theft at the expense of others could arise from suspicion over agricultural yields or distributions considered unusual or unnatural. One of the standard questions listed by the Malleus for use in interrogations of accused witches asks ‘What caused the fact that while she had one cow or two, she had a larger supply of milk than the neighbouring women with four or six?’.67 Not only was this a common genesis for allegations of witchcraft, it was also well known to women that it was a way to insult or threaten neighbours with whom they had quarrels. Boguet notes a woman called Antoine Tornier threatening her neighbour Jacquema Paget by saying she had noticed that Jacquema’s cows were giving twice as much milk as her own, implicitly referencing that this was a well-known activity of witches.68 Demonologists focused on stories of agricultural envy involving women, but some involved men too. Rémy told the story of a peasant in the Moselle in 1584 who was on his way to ‘negotiate a profitable deal in milk’ when he was attacked by a violent whirlwind whipped up by a man seeking to ‘vent his spite’ due to a long-running ‘rancorous desire for vengeance’ over a grudge.69 In examining the prevalence of concerns about milk magic in early modern Poland, Michael Ostling applies an adaptation of George Foster’s theory of ‘limited good’.70 Foster argued that in many peasant societies it is believed that all good things (including health, wealth, good luck and so on) are in ‘finite quantity and are always in short supply’, meaning that any significant gain of such good things can come ‘only at the expense of others’.71 Ostling uses this concept to explain Polish peasants’ belief that witches stole ‘the profit’ of dairy production. In Klimkówka in 1668, Ostling recounts, a period of dearth led to the entire community . . . accusing one another of ‘great harm in the village, partly from witchcraft, partly from thievery, so that there is no profit from the cattle’. To restore order and goodwill, all male heads of household were to gather publicly, and publicly swear for themselves, their families, and their servants, that the engaged in no witchcraft and had no evidence that anyone else did.72

This community anxiety over a nefarious disruption to the distribution of the ‘limited good’ could also function as a sort of ‘moral economy’, in which the individual ‘unfair’ advantage (both absolute and relative) of agricultural witchcraft was seen as a threat to the order and foundations of the community itself.73

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From the beginning of the early modern ‘witch-hunt’, witchcraft targeting agriculture was seen as a major social problem. In the 1484 Papal Bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, which Heinrich Kramer sought from Innocent VIII (and which he then included at the beginning of the Malleus Maleficarum), the threat of witchcraft against food production was clearly emphasized: Committing abuses with  . . . demons, [witches] have no fear of using their incantations, chants and conjurations and other unspeakable superstitions and acts of sorcery, as well as excesses, crimes, and misdeeds, in order to bring it about that the offspring of women, the progeny of animals, the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vines and the fruits of the trees, as well as men, women, work animals, cows, sheep and other animals of various kinds, and also the vines, orchards, fields, pastures, wheat, grain, and other crops of the earth are killed, suffocated, and wiped out.74

The various ways in which witches attacked crops and livestock were of great interest to demonologists. Kramer included sections in the Malleus on the harm witches did to both ‘the fruits of the earth’ and domestic animals, and to popular remedies against these harms.75 Boguet included chapters on witches afflicting livestock, and on crops.76 William Perkins in his 1608 Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, saw attacks on food supply as central to the six ‘inchantments’ of which witches made use, which included raising storms, poisoning the air, the destruction of grain, and the killing of cattle.77 One of the most dramatic ways that witches could inflict this harm on communities’ agriculture was through violent storms. Kramer devoted a chapter to ‘the method by which [witches] stir up hailstorms and rainstorms’.78 He related a case that he investigated in a community located in the Swiss part of the diocese of Konstanz, where a terrible hailstorm destroyed all the produce, crops, and vineyards, leaving the harvests damaged for years. ‘Virtually all’ of the angry and distraught locals believed this calamity to be the work of witches. Though the list of suspects was ‘not small’, Kramer narrowed the culprits down to two women, Agnes the bathkeeper and Anna of Mindelheim, who were tortured and burned. Kramer admitted that none of the locals had any evidence of the women’s witchcraft, except for suspicion about harm done to livestock and crops, but after torture the women confessed to a whole variety of fantastical happenings, including having had sex with a demon over a period of eighteen years, and the method by which they had conjured the hailstorm.79 Weather magic targeting harvests was discussed by many other demonologists, including Ulrich Molitor who discussed the idea in his widely distributed and influential 1489 work

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De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus. He even included an illustration of witches literally cooking up a storm on the front cover.80 Weather magic against crops continued to be a common subject in demonological thought debate throughout the sixteenth century.81 The idea of witches in league with the devil raising such terrifying storms to destroy crops and communities was irresistible to demonologists who sought the sensational. Wolfgang Behringer has commented that ‘the primary motivation behind the engagement of continental theologians with weathermagic derived more from its dramatically virulent manifestations’.82 Instead of individual allegations arising from individual conflicts, the mass destruction of crops by a witch or group of witches was so heinous that it could rouse communities to fevered witch-hunts or even unrest, reactions which fitted the seriousness with which demonologists endowed their subject. Weather magic fitted with demonologists’ desire to write in a way, which, as Roper has put it, ‘linked the humdrum, poor witch of the time to the much more ambiguous figure of classical literature, snake-haired goddesses, or glamorous creatures like Circe’.83 French witch-hunter and demonologist Pierre de Lancre united both the mundane local and the dramatically diabolical in his explanation of the Devil’s use of witches to attack crops and livestock: When people see themselves reduced to starvation, after the Devil has removed the fruits of the earth, they commit a thousand wickednesses to live, and Satan seeing them in this desperate need, forces them to beg for his help, and from beggars turn them finally into witches.84

Although it was primarily thought of as a threat to whole communities, weather magic could also be used for individual relative benefit as well as to generally destroy. Kramer included a story in the Malleus of a Swabian man who condemned his own wife as a witch after a conversation with his young daughter as they stood in his field. Lamenting a drought, the man helplessly wondered if rain would ever come. Saddened by her father’s plight, the little girl, ‘out of the simplicity of her spirit’, told him that she could make it rain if he wanted. Shocked, the father questioned his daughter as to how she could do this, and she revealed that her mother had taught her. When her father asked how the mother had such powers, the girl told him that she and her mother had a ‘master’, who she had seen visit her mother. Terrified, the father asked whether she could summon rain at that moment, and the girl said, ‘Certainly. If I get a little water, I will’. The father then took the girl by the hand to a flowing stream and said, ‘Do so, but only on our field’.

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The girl put her hand in the water and in the name of her master moved it according to the teaching of her mother. All of a sudden, rain poured over that field alone.

In a display of admirable faith, the man resisted the temptation to make use of his daughter’s powers, and instead accused his wife as a witch, and she was arrested, tried, convicted, and burned.85 The biblical parallels of crop-destroying storms were accompanied by ideas of witches afflicting crops and livestock with plagues of insects and disease. The Malleus explained that damage to crops was inflicted sometimes through worms and sometimes through insects that fly over long stretches of the earth in swarms, so that they seem to cover its surface, consuming all the plant matter consisting both of vines and of the crops in the fields and grass down to the roots.86

Kramer recounted mass deaths of oxen and cows in the diocese of Augsburg (which expert farmers knew were not the result of disease), and said that in the Alps witchcraft against livestock was known to be widespread.87 He told the story of how women burned for witchcraft in Ravensburg had bewitched domestic animals so that some were ‘of superior quality’ and some ‘fatter’, while one witch had killed dozens of one man’s animals (as he bought more to replace those which died), until he reached ‘the depths of poverty’.88 In Macbeth, one witch tells her companions that she has been off ‘killing swine’.89 Some clerics were unhappy with what they saw as folk ‘superstitions’ about milk magic and weather magic being given official credence or publicity. Kramer had heard of a case in Innsbruck from 1484 where a serving girl was accused of using magic to steal milk from cows, and received criticism for including it in his sermons, on the basis that popularizing such notions might encourage people to believe in them, or worse, to try them. Many think that these facts and others that have been set down should not be preached to the congregation because of the danger of giving instruction, though it is impossible for someone to be instructed in the manner described. Rather, these statements serve as a public indication of the loathing felt for so great a crime [demonic witchcraft], and they should be preached . . . in order that judges will be further inflamed to avenge [such crimes] . . . The laity do attach greater importance to temporal losses of this kind, since they are more involved in earthly than in spiritual emotions, and therefore when it is affirmed to them that such things can be done, they are more savage in their desire to punish these people.90

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The fact that those clerics, such as the authors of the Malleus, encouraging harsher witch persecutions were explicitly aware of the laity’s concerns about milk and food magic, and the opportunity to exploit those concerns, is of great importance in understanding the interface between popular ‘superstition’ and demonological ‘magic’. A major concern over the dissemination of stories about food magic was that frightened people would resort to countermagic to protect themselves. Delrio (again referencing Beetz, and quoting the vernacular Dutch) recounted how if a farmer knew a witch was trying to steal his or her milk: The owner of the cow . . . snatched up a stick and ran after the woman, and while he beat her, he said, ‘Here I give you a blow, and I give another one like it, and I add a third to them. Thus I preserve my cow’s milk’. This was the best remedy.91

Jean Bodin also discussed the use of preventative magic to protect dairy yields.92 Ostling has written that in Poland the use of countermagic meant that it could be difficult to distinguish milk-theft from counter-magical cure . . . [Was this] witchcraft or its opposite? In practice the distinction could become very blurry indeed. It was also relational: what I experience as counter-magic might look, to my neighbour, very much like witchcraft, especially if I am stealing back what is ‘rightfully mine’ from him.93

As will be discussed in the next chapter, in everyday community life the dividing line between magical and mundane threats to food could be difficult to define. Only through emphasis on the devil and the demonic could demonologists and witch-hunters illustrate the differences between everyday sin, common superstition, and evil magic.

‘Every type of food’: Food and fantasies With regard to food, nowhere was the demonization of witchcraft more pronounced than in debates about the foods served and eaten at witchcraft rituals. In Molitor’s 1498 treatise, the illustration of the witches’ meal (Figure 6.3) looks like a normal meal scene, not a fantastical witches’ sabbath feast. The three witches at the table represent a Swiss story of witchcraft (probably based on a folk tale), where three witches sit under a peach tree discussing what they desire to eat, and how to steal this food: one wants all the year’s cherries, one all the year’s birds, and one all the year’s wine.94 The witches are not surrounded by a bubbling cauldron or an evil demon, nor are they eating nightmarish food: their fantasy

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Figure 6.3 Detail from Ulrich Molitor, De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus (Basel, 1489). By permission of Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg.

is of an abundance of desirable rich foods. The lack of macabre detail, however, does not make these witches less threatening:  all of that food would come at other’s expense. Much like rebellious hordes of peasants upending the social order by raiding the wealthy’s wine cellars, witches were thought to commit rapacious, gluttonous theft of food and drink, either out of envy or selfish spite.95 Food was a subject of much fantastical thought in the early modern period. Food fantasies were a rich and ubiquitous part of popular culture across Europe, and indeed the whole early modern world.96 Structural anthropologists have pointed to food as a central site of both personal and social fantasy. Roland Barthes argued that appetite was inherently related to dreams, always connected to both memory (of things previously eaten) and hallucination (imagined future eating). Barthes saw the sensory aspect attached

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to these fantasies by memory and ‘predictive imagination’ as central to their understanding, making reference to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s comment that ‘dreams are the memory of the senses’.97 The desires, fears, and memories upon which food fantasies were constructed were also deeply emotional. The pleasure of certain tastes and of gluttony, and the terror and pain of hunger were physically and emotionally experienced, and those memories inevitably played into imagined food fantasies. The sensational entertainment value of fantastical accounts of witches’ feasts must not be discounted. Clark has noted that descriptions of the witches’ sabbath often seem like an ‘extravagant and excessive’ expression of ‘histrionic exaggeration’.98 Roper has written that de Lancre’s description piles on metaphor in ‘sentences that barely pause for breath’, and noted that ‘intellectual ambition often seems little more than a fig leaf to conceal [the] desire to titillate, [and] to explore the exotic’.99 These sensory and emotional aspects of food fantasy in early modern Europe have been emphasized by Piero Camporesi, who has drawn attention to the fantastical popular culture of hunger, an omnipresent physical and psychological threat which Camporesi argued often led the poor to vivid fantasies and ‘an unbalanced, incoherent, spasmodic interpretation of reality’.100 Robert Appelbaum has analysed the duality of food fantasies in early modern European culture, the positive ‘food of wishes’, and the negative ‘food of regret’.101 These conceptions of food fantasies as emotional and sensory, remembered and imagined, are important in understanding perceptions of the food served at witches’ ritual ‘Sabbaths’ in early modern Europe. As demonology increasingly focused on the fantastical and demonic, the meal was emphasized in occult rituals, an ungodly feast almost always present in descriptions of the rituals in which witches engaged when they congregated. As the central event for socializing in early modern communities (and indeed in human society in general), it is not surprising that eating together was considered central to the bonding of groups of witches. There was great variation in descriptions offered of witches’ sabbath meals, some which could be seen as positive dreams, and some negative nightmares ‘Some called it a “splendid meal” ’, Roper notes, while others called it a ‘Gfress’, ‘a word which in German alludes to the way animals eat food’.102 Many demonologists provided both types of description, such was the variation in the interrogations and confessions on which they relied. Unsurprisingly they preferred nightmarish visions of these meals to utopian visions of wonderful meals. Rémy’s survey of accounts of the fare on offer at witches’ feasts was far

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from appetizing. The food was ‘unpleasant and mean’, and it would not satisfy hunger.103 At times it included human flesh, or the carcasses of animals who had died (rather than those slaughtered for food).104 In Mainz, the food consumed included ‘knacker’s meat, stinking flesh, or baked frogs and toads’.105 Rémy wrote that those who had dined at the Devil’s table said that the food at the ‘foul feasts’ was so repugnant to the eyes and nose that it would cause nausea in the stomachs of even the hungry and greedy.106 Some found it so disgusting that they had to spit it out immediately.107 Instead of consuming the body and blood of Christ at the ritual meal, the Devil wanted people to consume foulness, to consume evil. Boguet wrote that even though the fare varied, witches all agreed that the food had no taste, and that the meat served was mere horsemeat. One woman said that the food was cold, while most said it left them feeling hungry, and others that ‘it seemed that they had eaten nothing’, or that the food was ‘nothing but air’.108 This showed, Boguet argued, that the Devil was a deceiver: instead of ‘solid’, nourishing food, he swaps it for air.109 This is a stark contrast to God, who provides His people with the nourishment  – both alimentary and spiritual  – they need to survive and thrive. The idea of the foul feast, tables laden with food which one cannot eat and which cannot nourish is a powerful representation of the way the sabbath meal was viewed in early modern demonology. Robin Briggs has commented that ‘stories about the sabbath function on the principle of inversion’, with every ritual symbol turned on its head to emphasize the evil of the witches.110 Roper has written that demonologists and interrogators [tried] to corral the glorious profusion of detail [about rituals] into schemes that fitted their religious concerns, presenting the Sabbath as a systematic inversion of central religious mysteries [and]  . . . relentlessly drawing out their theological significance.111

Schultheiss’s encyclopaedic questions on the food and service at witches’ sabbath meal is an example of this ‘relentless’ attempt to draw meaning out of both fantastical and mundane details.112 Even the food itself could be inverted: rather than the Godly fruits of the earth, the food on offer might be the fruits of evil. In de Lancre’s vivid description of witches’ sabbath, any tempting food on the tables serves just to abuse the diners, as it really just air.113 If one is able to eat, the food involves all manner of disgusting things ‘hostile to eyes, taste, touch, and heart’, including carrion, the flesh of hanged men, and that of unbaptised children.114 Jan Ziarnko’s illustration of de Lancre’s incredible tableau includes

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the witches’ diabolical cooking  – other popular images would show demons fanning the cooking fire with bellows, or roasting flesh – and the foul feast itself in its bottom right corner (Figure 6.4). This concept of inversion is central to understanding the place of food in descriptions of such rituals. The devil and his witches invert everything about food in their inversion of religion: the food itself does not taste good and does not nourish or sate hunger; women are not the source of fertile nourishment but of envious selfishness; at the ritual meal one does not consume the body of Christ but instead the foulness of evil. The foul taste of food at the Devil’s table was not just because of the evil fare on offer. As if to further underline the theological inversion of Christian ritual meals, two foods notable at such religious rituals – salt and bread – were often noted by demonologists for their conspicuous absence at witches’ sabbath meals. Demonologists often remarked upon witches’ and demons’ loathing for salt, and their unwillingness to allow its presence at their meals. Rémy wrote that almost all of the witnesses he knew of said that witches banquets had every kind of food except for salt and bread.115 This absence was not without reason, he argued, and the cause was the conflict between the natures of those foods and demons.116 Referring to Christ’s judgement that ‘salt is good’ in Mark 9:50, Rémy noted that salt’s goodness was exemplified in the modern sacraments of baptism and exorcism, both of which were inimical to demons.117 Rémy also argued that salt had symbolic resonance that made it hateful to witches and their demonic master. Referencing Horace’s embodiment of the pure and simple life in a salt-cellar on a modest table, Rémy argued that salt has always had religious significance.118 Salt preserves and protects, and comes from the ‘purest of all substances, sea-water’, making it a natural symbol of purity.119 Salt’s ability to preserve food from decay is the antithesis of the foul food and ruined crops of witchcraft. The idea of salt’s symbolic antipathy with evil went even further. There is nothing, Rémy argued, which demons hate more than justice, as justice and equity are characteristics of Godly behaviour. ‘Nothing is more symbolic of equality and justice to man than salt’, and therefore it is hated by the Devil and his witches.120 Boguet wrote that there was never salt at witches’ banquet, for the ‘good reason’ that salt symbolized immortality, so the Devil viewed it with ‘extreme hate’.121 As part of baptism and other rituals, salt forms part of ‘a sovereign antidote to the Devil’, and as ‘a symbol of wisdom’, God does not permit its use at witches’ sabbaths, a way of communicating to the witches that what they are doing is ‘pure folly’.122 Many demonologists make reference

Figure 6.4 Detail from Jan Ziarnko, ‘Description of the Witches’ Sabbath’ in Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (2nd edn, Paris, 1613). By permission of the British Library.

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to Leviticus 2:13, where God orders the Israelites to season all their offerings and oblations with salt, and point to the importance of consecrated salt in early modern Christianity, as noted by Euan Cameron.123 Salt was used in many Christian rituals designed to purify people, objects, or places. It was a key element in the purification of consecrated spaces.124 Susan Karant-Nunn has described the centrality of salt to late medieval and early modern baptism rituals, where salt was explicitly and symbolically linked to purification, wisdom, and eternity.125 The marital bed was often purified with a sprinkling of salt on a couple’s wedding night.126 Indeed blessed salt was believed to possess actual sacred power. The blessing and exorcizing of the salt before Mass each Sunday were believed to endow it with the power to banish the Devil.127 Salt was also a key element in many popular beliefs which some clerics or demonologists might have thought ‘superstitious’. According to Boguet, many people believed that if one had been cursed by a witch one could be cured by taking bread and salt from the house of the witch (a belief he held in contempt).128 Many of those afflicted by the witches of Lorraine examined by Robin Briggs were only cured when they ate bread and salt from the witch’s house.129 The Spanish theologian Alfonso de Castro retold a story (popular across Europe) of a peasant who was suspicious about his wife’s activities and beat her until she confessed she had been to witches’ sabbath.130 He refused to believe her unless shown proof, so she brought him along to the demonic banquet. At the dining table he ignored his wife’s requests that he not be awkward and demanded salt, because he found the food tasteless.131 After some difficulty salt was procured, and when it arrived the man exclaimed ‘Thank God!’, apparently causing the demons and witches to vanish.132 Unfortunately for demonologists intent on focusing on the theological inversion of witchcraft ritual meals, the popular evidence did not always fit the theory. Jonathan Durrant has noted that at Eichstätt in 1626, the women being interrogated had to be prompted about the presence or absence of salt by direct questions: ‘even with the help of these questions, the Eichstätt interrogators were unable to diabolize the suspects’ testimonies’, as many of those being questioned ‘could not remember’ if there had been salt present, much to the disappointment of the interrogators.133 One imagines the women might have been even more perplexed if presented with Schultheiss’s list of questions. Bread’s alleged absence from witches’ tables (unless it was black, or baked with gruesome ingredients) was equally based on Christian symbolism. Boguet noted the belief that bread was never present at demonic events, but he said such beliefs must be wrong, as he had heard witnesses say that had eaten bread, meat,

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and cheese with witches.134 Others were more convinced of bread’s unsuitability for witches’ meal. For Rémy, bread’s presence in the Eucharist, where it became the body and blood of Christ, was a clear reason for its absence at witches’ meals. Bread was also symbolic of the world the Devil and the witches wanted to destroy. Bread was so essential to supporting life that the Scriptures used the word to signify what was necessary to live.135 Witches and demons obviously wanted to disrupt the daily bread that sustained life, which is why they incessantly sent injuries, plagues, calamities, evils, and misfortune.136 Bread, like salt, symbolized everything which was good, everything that witchcraft was determined to corrupt and destroy. The details of the foods on offer at witches’ meals illustrate the rich variety of symbolisms with which foods could be endowed in early modern European culture. In a society that, as we have seen in other chapters, often assigned food with enhanced cultural meaning, food symbolisms formed a central part of thought on witchcraft in the same way that they formed a central part of other aspects of culture. Just as particular foods or eating customs could symbolize the religious rituals and honest labour of Christian communities, so too could their inversion or avoidance represent the evils which sought those communities’ destruction. Food could be a source or symbol of joy or terror, comfort or fear, the subject of dreams of plenty or nightmares of dearth; it was inseparable from attempts to understand and theorize the world of witches and magic. As an understandable commonplace drawn from everyday life, food – and in particular everyday food rituals such as the meal, the sharing of bread, or the Eucharist – was a way of relating the fantastical world of the demonic to everyday experience. To understand witches and their world, it was essential to know what they ate. * Food was a subject of great interest for early modern demonologists, and must also be so for modern studies of their writings and of wider early modern perceptions of witchcraft and evil. Witchcraft was often seen to be at work in all three aspects of food: its production, preparation, and consumption. Damage and destruction of crops and harvests by disease or weather might be blamed on witches targeting individuals or whole communities. So too could illness or death of livestock, while divergent agricultural fortunes might be the result of witches manipulating yields for their own benefit or to harm others. The production of food could also become a perceived target for witchcraft.

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Transformative food processes such as butter-churning and cheese-making (which could be naturally unreliable with early modern techniques) were a particular focus for magical suspicion. Witchcraft fantasies might also involve the cooking of magical dishes, or witches preparing and offering poisoned food to those they wished to harm. Belief in milk magic (regarding both milking and churning) was particularly widespread and influential, and tied into many of the important themes of early modern witchcraft. A witch provided a tangible scapegoat for the unpredictable nature of premodern dairy farming, while such beliefs also provided a space through which traditional ‘superstitions’ and early modern perceptions of demonic witchcraft met and mingled. Witches’ targeting of other women’s dairy production mirrored beliefs about their threat to female fertility and nourishment:  the milk of both women and their cows could be dried up by envious or spiteful witches. Because magic against dairy, crops, or harvests often involved a witch gaining while her ‘victim(s)’ lost, it could become the source of personal quarrels or community conflict. Magical redistributions of a community’s ‘limited good’ were disruptions to its ‘moral economy’ of food. In an era in which harvest failure, famine, harsh weather, or food spoilage were frightening fears and real dangers, such magic was much more than mischievous ‘maleficium’. As demonologists noted, it was also the way in which many ordinary people perceived witchcraft to be at work in the world, and the way in which they perceived witchcraft as a real threat to them, their families, and their communities. Eating, too, could be a focus of the witch, particularly in the context of witches’ banquets or ‘sabbath’ meals. The menus of these rituals expressed their underlying themes and concepts, and illuminated the food (and wider) culture from which they sprang. Even though there were fantastical amounts of food, and much of the ritual seemed familiar – such as the traditional meal setting, and the maintenance of normal social divisions by seating, menus, and tableware – the food’s inability to sate hunger at the Devil’s table was a stark contrast with the nourishment offered at the Lord’s. The black, foul, often gruesome and unappetizing food exemplified the kind of witchcraft that demonologists and witch-hunters wished to brand as unattractive and demonic, and revealed many of the fantastical fears of the early modern mind. The witches’ avoidance of salt, preserver and purifier of foods, reinforced the symbolic association of evil with rot, decay, and spoilage. So too did their distaste for bread, ‘the staff of life’, an omnipresent feature of communal meals where diners would ‘break bread’.

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The witches’ rejection of bread was a rejection of the Eucharist, of honesty and humility, and of the civilized norms of Christian society. The way in which the complex symbolisms in demonologists’ accounts of witches’ meals differed from the recollections or imaginings offered by ordinary people indicates the complex and socially varied (as well, of course, as culturally varied) nature of the relationship between food symbolism and witchcraft. It is important that food not become lost in the plethora of ideas and issues that witchcraft lets loose. In exploring cultural subjects historians must be wary of the danger of intellectual analysis obscuring the ways in which subjects or concepts were perceived in the past. For example, Robert Appelbaum has noted that despite its manifold cultural connotations for historians, the myth of ‘Cockaigne’ ‘addresses itself first of all neither to politics, communism, the fountain of youth, nor sexuality, but to the relation of the individual and society to food’.137 Without understanding the complex role that food played in demonology and witchcraft belief – and in early modern culture and mentalities more widely – we will not be able to understand the way witchcraft was perceived and experienced in the early modern period.

7

‘Plain Hunger and Necessity’: Food, Crime, and Community

In July 1604 Mareoun Cromartie was called before the court (or lawthing) in Aithsting on the west coast of Shetland, to answer accusations of witchcraft. The court ordered her to have oaths sworn by her neighbours on her behalf or to pay a fine of two marks. During the same summer, Mareoun also had to appear before the court on another charge, that of breaking into the skeo (a shed used for curing and smoking) of Andrew Nicholson and stealing a ling (a large codlike fish common in the Norwegian and North Seas). As this was her first offence of theft, she was ordered fulfil an oath or pay a fine of two marks for ‘stowth’ (theft).1 In the same court records is the case of Margaret Patersdochter from Unst in northern Shetland, who stole a sheep from her neighbours ‘in plane hunger and necessitie . . . having na scheip of her awin’. Having stolen before, and – given her situation – being likely to steal again, the court banished Margaret and ordered that if she returned to the islands, she was to be taken down to the beach and drowned as an example to the rest of the community.2 Away from demonological thought, the practical prosecution of ‘witches’ was embedded in local social and legal contexts. Witchcraft was only one of many crimes that early modern communities dealt with harshly, and witchcraft cases involved many harms  – spoiled milk, stolen food, ruined crops  – that could be explained through the mundane, the magical or a combination of both. The social and legal framework in which those trials took place helped to define both their importance and severity. The rigid due process of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, for example, often made the successful prosecution of ‘witches’ difficult, while the absence of witch panics – and their absence was more a rule than an exception – shows the various ways in which early modern communities could resolve tensions and maintain cohesion, even in an unforgiving natural world.3

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Food, central to so many aspects of early modern life, was unsurprisingly at the heart of many criminal cases, the fulcrum around which a community’s cohesion and norms intersected with its tensions. Witches, thieves, murderers, and dishonest merchants were all tried in the same courts in early modern Shetland, and the way that law and community treated magical and mundane deviance offers a vivid example of how food both united and divided. Shetland also offers a unique case study for the ways in witchcraft belief and accusations related to food. While geographically isolated, Shetland was at a maritime crossroads of different cultural and economic worlds: Scotland to its southwest, Scandinavia to its east, and the cities of the Hanseatic League to its southeast. But while its trade placed it in contact with these wider worlds, its isolated location was a buffer against trends of change from abroad:  while it became part of Scotland in the fifteenth century, its relatively independent Norse legal system persisted well into the next; while the Scots church had influence on the island from medieval times, the Reformation in Shetland was far from the tumultuous religious event it was in Scotland; and while witches were being tried in Shetland at the same time as the Scottish witch hunts of King James’s reign, the demonological colour of witch prosecution was late to arrive on the islands.4 Furthermore, early modern Shetland’s economy was overwhelmingly based on the production and trade of food. Sheep-farming, dairying and fishing were the basis of the islanders’ trade in all directions, and foodstuffs often literally paid the rent, paid taxes, and even acted as currency. Food was everything: economically paramount, a central concern of the legal system, and an organizing force in social life and structure. The subject is a window into how Shetland ordered itself, how it drew and constructed norms of community and deviance.

Witchcraft at the edge of the world Shetland was considered one of the possible locations of what the Romans called ‘ultima thule’, the edge of the known world. It was, indeed, a very remote part of Britain when it was mortgaged to the Scottish crown in 1469. Its capital Lerwick was closer – geographically as well as culturally, economically, and legally – to Bergen in Norway than to Edinburgh. Shetland was, not, however purely at the edge of the European world. In maritime terms, Shetland was well integrated, ‘at the centre of the European fishing world, not on the fringe’.5 Understanding

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Shetland’s location – economically and culturally – in relation to both Scotland and northern Europe is important to understanding its handling of witchcraft. While Shetland did not adopt Scottish law until 1611, there had been longstanding Scottish influence in Shetland’s church. Even before 1469, Scottish clergy were dominant in Shetland and Orkney, and after the pledging of the islands, the influence of the Scottish church in the Northern Isles grew. Although the proportion of its population with Scots origin remained less than a third throughout the sixteenth century, only one of Shetland’s recorded clergy in that period appears to have been a native, and one of them Norwegian: all the others were Scottish.6 The clerics sent to the Northern Isles found the church’s land holdings and tithes there to be profitable, but were often unhappy with the devotion displayed by the islanders: in 1615 the kirk influenced the passing of an act in Shetland ‘for punischement of sin and vice’, and the suppressing of ‘all idolatrie, speciallie of walkis and pilgrimadges, and all utheris vyces’, including missing church. Punishments included fines, ‘douking in the sey’, and ‘stocking’.7 For the Presbyterian kirk in mainland Scotland, witchcraft was a major issue of concern. Soon after the Scottish Parliament instituted the Reformation in 1560, the 1563 Scottish Witchcraft Act made the practice of witchcraft punishable by death. Witch-hunting in Scotland lasted well into the eighteenth century, and the Survey on Scottish Witchcraft identified 3,387 people tried for witchcraft between 1563 and 1736.8 While trials for witchcraft occurred throughout this 173-year period, historians of Scottish witchcraft have generally identified five ‘peak’ periods (or ‘panics’): 1590–91, 1597, 1628–30, 1649, and 1661–2. While these years saw high levels of cases, the vast majority of ‘accusation episodes’ (75 per cent) involved one or two cases in a parish, with only about 10 per cent involving more than six cases. There are marked regional variations in the concentration of extant trials, with the surviving documents indicating a concentration of cases in the southern lowlands, especially the Lothians, and a proportionally low level of cases in Highland Scotland, the far north, and the western and northern islands (though in all of those areas extant records are far rarer).9 The ‘panic’ periods were often connected to local and regional political events. Those of 1590–91 and 1597 were both influenced by the personal interest in witchcraft and demonology taken by King James VI. James believed that a conspiracy of witches had tried to kill him and his new wife, Princess Anne of Denmark, by wrecking their ship at sea on the way back from their wedding in Copenhagen. In 1597, James (and his administration) were instrumental in expanding an investigation of witchcraft trials in and around Aberdeen to a

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much wider witch-hunt, with the king’s handbook, Daemonologie, also being published that year.10 The treatment of witchcraft in early seventeenth-century Shetland, therefore, was influenced by shifting developments both home and abroad. While the past two decades have seen extensive research on witch-hunting in both lowland and highland Scotland, witchcraft in the country’s most remote region has received much less historical attention. Liv Helene Willumsen has recently examined some of the cases involving witchcraft in Shetland and Orkney in her comparison of witchcraft in Scotland and Finnmark in northern Norway.11 Willumsen has characterized witchcraft trials in Shetland in the early seventeenth century as cases where ‘traditional sorcery [was] now for the first time criminalized and brought before the courts as witchcraft’.12 While legal change certainly affected the way the islands dealt with accusations of witchcraft, it is perhaps unlikely that the extant court books (only available from 1602 onwards) capture the first time authorities tried such crimes. A  wider exploration of the court books permits a more contextual examination, one cognizant of the centrality of food to island society, and the web of relationships between food, witchcraft, and community. Social tensions and anxiety about threats to food underpinned most of Shetland’s witchcraft cases. The most serious were those of three (seemingly unconnected) witches, tried and executed together in summer 1616 (after the introduction of Scottish law). All three women were embroiled in tangled webs of social and food-focused quarrels. Katherine Jonesdochter was alleged to have consorted with the devil, who gave her ‘ane cleik [a fish hook] quhairby she could be hable to do ony thing she desyrit’, specifically in relation to cows if she ‘want the proffeit of thair milk to milk thame throw the ring of the cleik’. She also allegedly transferred sickness from her husband to a Dutch merchant ‘becaus he wes ane stranger, rather nor ony countreyman’ after he refused her alms, and the Dutchman died within a fortnight.13 Jonka (or Janet) Dennis was suspected of witchcraft mainly because of her apparently legendary skills at butter churning. Alexander Frieman, grieve (steward) to the laird of Cultmalyndies in Westerhouse, ‘haveing fyftein kyne [cows], gat no so meilke’ as she did from one cow, and he appeared unable to get any butter while she was churning four marks a day. Frieman ‘challengit’ her about this, and ‘urged her to kirne with him’. After ‘many boisting wordis’, thereafter he ‘gat his butter’.14 Jonka was also accused of using weather magic in favour or against fishermen. Ten years before her trial, while her husband was ‘in ane boit at the fischeing

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in Wallis sex myllis from Aith quhair she dwelt, in perrell of perishing’, Jonka apparently went into some sort of trance and saved her husband’s boat.15 Jonka was involved in a quarrel with the family of a man called Ola Jone in Stowis, which began after Ola’s son (also Ola) hit Jonka’s son in a fight. ‘Jonka fell out in most vyle cursingis and blasphemous exclamatiounes’, threatening that Ola would be dead within a few days while out fishing, ‘his bones  . . . raiking about the bankis’. The man soon ‘perished be sey be hir witchcraft and devilrie’. Two or three years after this, Jonka, ‘haveing discordit with Geillis’, the mother of the deceased, told someone that Geillis had received a blow ‘to hir hairt quhen hir sone Ola dyit’ and that soon ‘she sall get ane uther’. Soon after Geillis’s other son, Mans, ‘perished be sey be hir witchcraft and devilrie’.16 Intriguingly, Geillis’s grudge against Jonka was also related to her alleged butter magic. Four or five years before the trial, Jone of Stowis, like Alexander Frieman grieve to the laird of Cultimalyndeis in Westerhouse, wanted ‘the profeeit of his milk’ (i.e. he wanted it churned into butter). The women of Hildisweyk ‘were desyrit as the former wes to kirne’ (i.e. they were as renowned for churning as Jonka was), and were brought to churn the milk, but there ‘wes no butter’. So Jonka was wanted to churn the milk, but she ‘haveing absentit hirself sindrie tymes and fleing half a myll fra hir hous’. So Geillis followed her, and they appear to have had a fight – one of them ‘wes bluiding at the mouth and nose’ – but Geillis succeeded in bringing Jonka ‘back agane and compellit hir to kirne, at quhilk tyme wes gottin sextein merkis buttir quhair before wes gotten bot seven, be hir witchcraft and devilrie’.17 Jonka’s quarrel with Geillis is somewhat reminiscent of an incident referred to by one of the witches in Macbeth. Asked by her ‘sister’ about her activities, one of the witches recounts a story of an encounter with a local woman: A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap, And munch’d, and munch’d, and munch’d: – ‘Give me!’ quoth I: ‘Aroint thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries.18

The genesis of the accusation is a quarrel between women over food. The sailor’s wife – ‘rump-fed’ – has a good diet, and eats food of which the greedy (or desperate) witch is envious. When the witch demands that she share, the sailor’s wife angrily accuses her of witchcraft. The witch’s wicked vengeance on her accuser’s husband is similar to what Geillis claimed Jonka had done to Ola, manipulating the weather to put him in danger at sea.19 In a community where death at sea was a common hazard and a terrifying fear, those with whom one had quarrelled, those of whom one was envious, or those widely

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perceived to be ‘weird’ could easily become the focus of suspicion when misfortune struck. The third witch tried in Shetland that summer was Barbara Scord Thomasdochter who allegedly made a man sick, and then was able to periodically cure him when he would come to her.20 Barbara had had a strange encounter with a woman called Marjorie Sinclair ten or twelve years before. She had gone to visit with Alexander Arnott in Lunasting and stayed overnight. The next morning she went to Marjorie (Alexander’s wife) who was churning butter, and ‘said she wantit the proffeit of hir milk’. Barbara told Marjorie that if the lid of the churn was wet Marjorie could keep the ‘profit’, while if it was dry, Barbara wanted it. For some reason, however, Barbara offered to help Marjorie. She oppinit hir purse and tuik ane bone furth thairof quhilk wes the bone of ane manes finger, great at the ane end and small at the uther, of tua inches lang or thairby, and baid her steir hir milk with it and she wald get her proffit, quhilk bone wes sumquhat bread and sum hoillis into it bot not throw, and being thairefter cast in the fyir it crackit and effrayit the hous be hir witchcraft.

When passing sentence the judge noted that this was a seal bone, not a man’s finger.21 Barbara also allegedly consorted with the devil, and engaged in various enchantments to compel people to do what she wished. Sixteen years before, when Barbara was already a widow, a man called Bothwell Manssone came to live with her, and ‘remanit in houshald and lay with hir be the space of ane halff yeir or thairby, being hable to discharge ane dewtie to a woman’. But when Barbara found out that the man had no intention of marrying her but was instead planning to leave the country, ‘she tuik the power of his member sswa that he wes never hable for a woman sensyne’.22 Bothwell was not the only man who Barbara supposedly targeted like this. After Erasmus Laurencestone had been ‘in companie’ with Barbara’s daughter for some months, Barbara somehow took his ‘power and strength’ after ‘she haid grippit his member in hir hand’. When Erasmus complained and denounced her to the kirk, ‘he was restorit to his health and strenth of bodie agane be hir devilrie’.23 A man called John Laurencestone from Delting came to Lunasting and agreed to marry Isabel, the daughter of a man called Mans. Barbara was apparently ‘angrie that [John] should have cum out of his own parochin to marie’, and was ‘desyrous that the said Jone sould marie her dochter’ instead. So one day when John was gathering peat in Lunasting, Barbara went to her sister’s house there,

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where Isabel was preparing meat for the men in the bog. Barbara allegedly took some meat from Isabel, and as ‘shoone as she departit the said Issobell changeit hir mynd’ and would not even speak to John, and now John was married to Barbara’s daughter.24 Even though demonic elements play a role in these three cases  – with Katherine and Barbara both accused of consorting with the devil while Jonka’s behaviour is referred to as ‘devilry’ – a background of envy and anxiety about dairy production, and of a complicated patchwork of social quarrels (often focused on food) colour the evidence provided against the accused women. Even if a witchcraft prosecution might be characterized in one way, its many roots and branches in community relations defy simple labelling. Mareoun Ormesdochter was charged with ‘certaine poyntis of witchcraft’ at Sumburgh on 9 July 1603, the day after she had been fined for having ‘troublit and dounraxterit’ (i.e. attacked and knocked over) Ingabar Sinclair on the Sabbath. Mareoun was fined forty shillings and one mark of silver for the assault. With regard to the charge of witchcraft, she and her husband William Bernesoun humbly asked if she could be released from the accusations, and a few days later a man called William Bruce withdrew them.25 Janet Archibald was in court for witchcraft on the same day (6 August 1602) that she was also convicted of hitting Marian Tulloch. For that she was fined one mark, and for witchcraft the saxter oath (requiring six people) or a fine of six marks was imposed.26 On 7 August 1602 at Sumburgh on the southern tip of Shetland, Nicol Culsetter was in court for two charges. Firstly he was involved in a dispute with a number of men over erecting enclosure fences for pasture on land that apparently belonged to Malcolm Sinclair. The court ordered him not to trespass again, or else he would be fined £40 (Scots) ‘on pain of poynding’ (the impounding or confiscation of property). Secondly Nicol was accused of witchcraft, the specific accusation being ‘turning the sieve and shears’, a method of divination believed to reveal the identity of thieves or dishonest people in disputes. Nicol was ordered to fulfil the saxter oath or a pay a fine of six marks.27 Fitting the witchcraft accusations against Mareoun, Janet, and Nicol into neat categories elides their complex social background. While the shift from Norse to Scottish law, and indeed demonological and religious influence from Scotland, may have increased the severity with which the islands’ courts viewed ‘witchcraft’, social context also deeply affected the way Shetland dealt with quarrels and defined deviance. Food lay at the heart of these cases, most prominently in the issue of milk magic.

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‘The profits of milk’ In Shetland, we know of eighteen people charged with witchcraft in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, twelve women and six men (Table 7.1).28 Details of the charges are known in thirteen of the cases, and in all but two of those cases, witchcraft against dairy production is a major (or in three of the cases, the only) accusation. Women were much more likely to be accused of milk magic than men:  of the two men accused of the practice, one was the husband of a woman also accused, while the other was the head of a gypsy family generally believed to able to bewitch cows and milk. Under the Norse legal system in use in Shetland, crimes were generally dealt with through oaths and fines. More serious offences, or repeat offences, drew oaths of more people or larger fines. Paul Watson and his wife were both accused of witchcraft at Walls in late July 1602 due to suspicions at the size of their butter production: they only had two or three cows and yet were producing more butter than their neighbours’ seven cows. This mysterious disparity was ascribed to witchcraft. The Watsons were unable to muster enough neighbours for their oaths and were fined seven marks.29 Also in Walls in late July, Mareoun Geilsdochter was accused of witchcraft having allegedly stolen some of her neighbour William Philips’s milk through magic.30 A  year later, on 20 June 1603 at Fulay, Catherine Thomasdochter was also alleged to have stolen some of a neighbouring woman’s milk

Table 7.1 Witchcraft cases in Shetland, 1602–16 Accusation Dairy Divination Causing illness Involving devil Weather magic Murder Enchantment Causing impotence No details Total

Women

Men

Total

9 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 0 12

2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 6

11 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 5 18

Source: Shetland Court Books; Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.

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through witchcraft.31 A woman called Mareoun from Houle was convicted in July 1603 of sending ‘witchit milk’ to another woman called Mareoun from Uverasund.32 All three of these women were ordered to quit themselves with the larycht oath (requiring two people), or to pay a fine of two marks for witchcraft. Those accused of milk magic in the next decade were not so leniently treated. After complaints that Patrick Stewart, Earl of Orkney and Lord of Shetland, had been exploiting the local courts for financial gain, and the decision of King Christian IV of Denmark to introduce a new lawbook in 1604 (whose introduction in the Northern Isles would have been a setback for Scottish rule), the Scottish Privy Council decided in 1611 to replace the Norse legal system with Scottish law.33 The Shetlanders continued to operate a judicial system that was far from the norms of lowland Scotland, but a combination of Scottish law and more Scottish clergy seems to have made the islanders’ courts harsher in their treatment of witchcraft, at least for a short period. In 1612 milk magic and witchcraft were raised as issues in a murder trial. John Faw, his son (‘little’ John) and his two daughters, Katherine and Agnes, were indicted for the ‘cruell and unmercifull slauchter’ of Murdo Brown, ‘egipitian’ (gypsy), the husband of Katherine Faw. ‘Little’ John was also indicted for ‘geving his bodie to the abhominable vice of incest with Barbara Faw, his wyffis sister, and with Helene Faw, his wyffis sister dochter, and for geving the use of his bodie to the abhominable vice of adulterie with Katheren Faw, spous to the said . . . Murdo’. In addition, the whole family (‘everie ane of thame’) were accused of ‘comoun thift and comoun pyckrie’ (petty theft), and for a variety of types of witchcraft including ‘geving of thame selffis furth for sorcereris, givearis of weirdis, declareris of fortounis and that they can help or hinder in the proffeit of the milk of bestiall’.34 The legal process of their trial was complex as the defence lawyer, Walter Ritchie, argued that under the ‘practique of this realme, egiptianis have never bene adjudget to the death for slauchter amangis thame selffis’, and so the trial should not be taken further. The judge was of the opinion that murder committed within his jurisdiction was murder, whether the accused was a gypsy or not, so Ritchie further argued that Murdo ‘drew the first sword’, and that the rest of the family ‘aucht to be assoilyeit becaus . . . Katheren slew hir said . . . husband with her awin hand with a lang braig knyff ’ and has ‘confest the fact’ (presumably in an attempt to save her family).35 Katherine alone was put before the assize, who after some serious deliberation, found her guilty and ordered her drowned to death. The rest of the Faws were not punished.36

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It seems to have been common knowledge that, like witches and others with supernatural skill, gypsies knew the secret of how to aid or harm the production of dairy and other foods. Magnus Linday and his wife Geillis Sclaitter were convicted of witchcraft during June 1616 in Orkney for stealing the profit of their neighbours’ corn. Geillis allegedly learned how to do this from the gypsies.37 Gypsies could be sought out for other nefarious ends too: the infamous Lady Munro of Foulis (Katherine Ross), who was tried multiple times (and eventually acquitted) for witchcraft in the highland Scotland in 1590, was said to have obtained the poisons she allegedly added to food in order to murder a number of enemies and rival heirs from the gypsies.38 Milk magic continued to be a major issue in Shetland witchcraft trials as the island’s first decade of Scottish law progressed. As we have seen, accusations regarding milk and butter were central parts of the extensive trials of the seemingly unconnected ‘witches’ Katherine Jonesdochter, Jonka Dennis, and Barbara Scord in 1616.39 Harm to food production, and in particularly to dairy, was also a leading feature of witchcraft accusations in Orkney, where twenty-two witches were convicted between 1613–29. During summer 1624, Maribel Cooper was executed after becoming involved in various disputes with her neighbours over cursing their cattle, quarrels over corn, and allegedly stealing the milk from their cows.40 The beggar Janet Randall was suspected of harming farm animals and stealing the profit of people’s milk after they refused her alms in winter 1629 on Shetland.41 The next week Annie Tailzeour was executed for magically diverting profits of milk and corn from some families to others, causing some cows to stop giving milk, and breaking a plough of a neighbouring farming family with whom she had quarrelled.42 These were the everyday effects of the widespread cultural and economic focus on defending dairy from the demonic. Milk magic was a major element of accusations about witchcraft in mainland Scotland too. In the Gaelic Highlands, Lizanne Henderson has written, witchcraft cases often did not concern themselves with demonic interference, but rather with the mundane problems of everyday life, particularly disputes between neighbours, or interference with dairy and other agricultural produce.43

Ronald Hutton has also noted that in the Gaelic regions of Scotland, witches were primarily feared for their ability to wreck ships and ‘steal the profits of dairy farming’.44 Hutton notes the cultural similarities between early modern

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Gaelic Scotland, Gaelic Ireland, and the Isle of Man: all shared ‘a profound belief in witchcraft’ and a belief that ‘the main activity of witches consists of stealing dairy produce, either directly or by a transfer of its goodness and abundance’. As Hutton notes, for subsistence farmers in economies often dominated by dairy farming, such losses could be serious, though often such beliefs were ‘mostly used as a way of explaining why some farmers prospered while neighbours did not, for no obvious reason of virtue or industry’.45 In examining the reasons behind such beliefs in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Ireland (where they were still ‘the most important area of witch beliefs’), Richard Jenkins has noted the uncertainty of preindustrialized dairy farming, where for technical reasons, ‘the butter frequently would not come’, a fact which, given the centrality of butter and dairy to the Irish domestic economy, must have caused ‘a considerable amount of anxiety’.46 Such anxieties were even more potent in areas where dairy farming was central to both subsistence and trade. Concerns about magic against dairy and food production were not limited to Scotland’s Gaelic and Norse fringes. The records of the 1597 panic in Aberdeenshire are considered ‘one of the fullest and most important collections of source material on the subject [of witchcraft] in Scotland’.47 After a group of witches was uncovered in Aberdeen in February and March, suspects were interrogated and tortured, which led to long lists of supposed witches. This ‘conspiracy’ led to the authorities in Aberdeen seeking royal assent for a general investigation of witchcraft. Investigators were sent out across the county to collect evidence, while investigations also began in other lowland counties.48 P. G.  Maxwell-Stuart and Edward J.  Cowan have both focussed on the demonic aspects of the 1597 ‘panic’, emphasizing a fantastical demonic dance allegedly performed at a market cross on Halloween 1596 in Aberdeen as its starting point.49 Christine Larner and Julian Goodare have argued, however, that it took months for the authorities to even mention such a dance, and both the increasingly fantastical details offered by tortured ‘witches’ and the lack of any external witnesses indicates that the dance never happened.50 Indeed contrary to some of the more sensationalist demonological elements in some of the dittays (indictments) and trials, much of the initial information provided to investigators in Aberdeenshire consisted of ‘vague accusations’ and much which was simply based on the ‘power of general reputation’ in communities.51 As such, the information provided to the Aberdeenshire clerics tasked with investigating the ‘conspiracy’ often centred on social fears and anxieties, especially at times of dearth.

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Goodare has commented regarding the ‘possible correlation of witch-hunts with subsistence crises’ that we should not dismiss the possibility that witch-hunting was a way of scapegoating women at a time when women were part of an economic problem. Since the problem of famine could not be tackled directly, witch-hunting was perhaps a displacement activity.52

He has argued that in 1597, for example, the poor harvests of 1594–9, which produced periodic mass starvation, may have ‘increased social tensions in local communities’, engendered ‘resentment at begging’, and raised the spectre of ‘diabolical intervention’ among hungry peasants and rent-short elites. Lauren Martin has written that even though in some areas demonologically focused suspicion from authorities played an important role, local episodes often involved ‘the emergence of witchcraft belief out of [Scottish] everyday life’.53 Goodare cautions, however, that witches were ‘not blamed directly’ for famine or hardship, and that there is certainly no clear national pattern of a causal link.54 The details of cases, however, show how fears and quarrels about food were central to all sorts of Scottish witchcraft cases. Lumphanan is a small village about twenty-five miles from Aberdeen. It is most famed as the site of the battle in 1057 where the future King Malcolm defeated Macbeth, a story which in the early 1600s would receive new popularity (and a strong witchcraft angle) in Shakespeare’s play. As site of a number of cases in 1590, and home to Margaret Bane, sister of Janet Spaldarg who had been prosecuted in Aberdeen, Lumphanan drew the eyes of investigators.55 The local minister John Ross investigated a number of accusations of witchcraft against local people.56 Agnes Fren (or Frem) from Lumphanan was accused of multiple suspicious actions towards the parish’s dairy cattle. Various ‘spells’ were alleged, such as taking hairs from a cow’s tail and putting them in its trough, charming calves in her arms, and recommending to neighbouring women that they bury clippings from cow’s hooves to ward off danger. Some of these were alleged to have caused a neighbour’s cow to stop giving milk, while Agnes’s cow continued to do so.57 James Og (or perhaps ‘Óg’, young in Gaelic), also from Lumphanan, was accused the same month of making a cow he had sold to a neighbouring married couple unable to milk (and the cow eventually died). He was also alleged to have cursed a neighbouring man’s crops so that none of them would grow.58 Isobel Robie was suspected of malicious action towards neighbour’s cows after a beggar she offered milk refused it on the grounds that it was known that she had milk from other

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people’s cows and cows not in calf. She was alleged to have told her husband to walk three times around any cattle he was purchasing in order to protect them.59 Margaret Reauch was accused of threatening and killing a neighbour’s sheep.60 Agnes, James, Isobel, and Margaret were questioned and had their cases forwarded to the local magistrate. However, like many of Aberdeenshire’s local ministers ordered into witch-hunting in 1597, John Ross cautioned the higher authorities about a lack of evidence of actual witchcraft, and none appears to have been executed.61 Another Lumphanan woman, Margaret Og (not seemingly related to the aforementioned James), was treated more seriously, being fully tried and executed in the hills near Aberdeen. Margaret was alleged to have met the devil and liaised with other witches, but her concrete crimes were aimed at her neighbours’ livestock and food: she was alleged to have poisoned someone with mutton, performed various rituals over cattle, and killed neighbours’ sheep and cows.62 Margaret Bane was also executed, along with her daughter Helen Rogie, who had allegedly killed the oxen of a neighbouring man.63 Elsewhere in the county, too, there were fears of witches stealing dairy products and cursing other foodstuffs and livestock. Helen Fraser of Aikenhill, was alleged to have a number of magical powers over the production of food, both negative (such as the ruining of dairy products), and positive (such as the increasing of yields). Some local salmon fishermen asked her to help them increase their catch, and paid her in kind with fish. She was also alleged to have the power to protect hens from a recent spate of deaths, for which she was again paid in kind, and prescribed various things to eat as remedies for sick people (wood sorrel and kale, for example). Helen allegedly cursed a neighbouring woman’s cow so that it gave blood instead of milk, and also was alleged to have killed another man’s cow. Helen told investigators that she told people she was a wise woman with these powers in order to support herself and her children.64 Isobel Cockie, a married woman in her sixties from Kintore became embroiled in a number of disputes with her neighbours, over which she is alleged to have taken magical retribution by spoiling their milk and causing it to fail to churn. After her husband John Duff had a dispute with a man about the ownership of a house, Isobel allegedly cursed the man by ruining his crops.65 Isobel was implicated in (and executed for) the conspiracy in Aberdeen, where, given some of the accused’s alleged actions towards food, their meeting places of the fish market, the meal market, and the market cross are very suggestive. One of the main witches in the conspiracy, Janet Wischart (tried and executed in February) was accused of poisoning some of her neighbours with spells after

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various quarrels, including one over wetnursing. Among other things, she was alleged to have poisoned a whole brew of her neighbour’s ale.66 Ellen Gray of Aberdeen was alleged to have cursed neighbours and others with whom she had quarrels. She was accused of ruining the dairy milk of one of another woman, which she only allowed to return after the woman begged three times. Ellen uttered other curses which were heavily gendered: after a quarrel with a man she allegedly made his ‘wand’ unable to ‘sit down’.67 Executed alongside Ellen in April was Agnes Webster, who again was accused of numerous crimes against food. She had tried to poison a woman with ‘devilische potage’ which she claimed was brawn and jelly (the woman apparently refused, and believed she would have died had she eaten). Agnes had asked another woman for milk, and after the woman refused, she cursed the woman’s cow and its milk later dried up.68 Even in some of the more sensational demonic cases there were fears and accusations of witchcraft’s threat to food. Seventy-year-old Andrew Mann, an itinerant who was arrested after confronting a local woman and claiming she was a witch, was tried in a case that eventually involved a number of witnesses, lots of accusations, and many claims by Mann himself to possess all sorts of sorcerous powers. Mann claimed to have known (and fathered children with) ‘the Queen of the Elves’, and described the ‘Queen’ and the elves in detail. In more concrete terms, the dittay alleged that Mann claimed to have the power to take the milk from another person’s cow ‘when he pleases’, and that he had promised certain people that he would do this for them.69 Such beliefs were very common. In analysing the role of gender in witchcraft accusations – over 80 per cent of cases in the Survey on Scottish Witchcraft are of women – Lauren Martin has written that since ‘women were largely responsible for the production of milk, butter and ale [it] is not surprising . . . that these were thought to be particularly vulnerable to witchcraft [and thus] . . . dairy cows were often targets of witchcraft malice’.70 Louise Jackson has made a similar argument with regard to witchcraft cases in seventeenth-century England: When things went wrong in the domestic world or the farmhouse – the cream curdled, the butter would not set or the child fell ill, witchcraft might be suspected. Women were in a potentially extremely powerful position through their control over child-rearing and feeding [and] . . . the dairying economy.71

Martin has argued that many Scottish witchcraft cases involving female witches and female accusers should be understood as a way of women fighting quarrels over the domestic and social areas in which they held power. Not only did the

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aforementioned Ellen Gray take away her female neighbour’s cow’s milk in 1597, she also took away her breast milk.72 There are numerous other cases from the 1600s of female witches taking away both the dairy and breast milk from other women.73 Milk magic was a very common feature of witchcraft beliefs and accusations in medieval and early modern Scandinavia too.74 Jan-Inge Wall has surveyed the cultural motif of dairy magic in medieval and early modern Scandinavia, calculating that images of such witchcraft appear in 143 Norse church murals. These images include demons stealing or spoiling milk, women doing the same, or witches in animal form (most often hares), stealing milk from cows.75 Historians must be careful in making use of folklore given the difficulty in dating or historically contextualizing certain beliefs or practices, but some details can help illustrate the nature of traditions and ‘superstitions’. In Norwegian folklore, the ‘milk hare’ was referred to as the ‘smörkatt’ (‘butter cat’), and witches were renowned for their ability to churn and steal butter: one could test if the butter was the work of witchcraft by scraping it with a special knife, and if it was made with ‘witches’ milk’, blood would come from it.76 Norse views of dairy witchcraft are important in examining the cultural background of witchcraft belief and prosecution in Shetland. Understanding the culture of early modern Shetland is a difficult task for historians as there are so few cultural sources. The court books of the early seventeenth century provide ‘peculiarly copious material’ for an island often invisible in sources.77 The books give an indication of Shetland’s continued links with Scandinavia, even under Scottish rule. The 1602–4 Shetland Court Book is the second oldest court book remaining from a district using Norwegian law, the oldest being from Oslo 1572–80, and Knut Robberstad has noted that the two books are similar in many ways, including that many of the fines are imposed in the same amounts as stated in Norwegian law. While the Shetland lawthing made many ordinances which applied just to Shetland, its ‘terminology, the legal conceptions applied, the rules enforced . . . the way of thinking and . . . the fines’ show that the island was using a legal system which was Norwegian in more than name.78 Indeed, Shetland continued to refer some legal decisions to Bergen for advice, the Norwegian city being the highest court for the form of Norse law in use on the island.79 Shetland’s economic gaze, too, was often to the east rather than the south. Along with its trade with Scandinavia, Shetland maintained an important and growing trade with the Dutch, and with the Hanseatic League. This trade centred on fish, wool, and butter.80 Food was intimately tied to the islands’ economic, social and cultural structures, and so  – as in many other places  – it is not

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unsurprising that suspicion and accusations swirled around the dairy, a place endowed with both economic importance and gendered cultural symbolism. Yet for those whose milk went mysteriously missing, witches were not the only possible culprits; in fact, they might not even have been the most likely suspects.

‘The abominable crime of theft’ At Tingwall in August 1602, William Linkletter and Lawrence Halcro were convicted of stealing corn, milk, butter, oats and more from a local man, and of surreptitious ‘milkings of his ky [cow]’.81 Mareoun Manisdochter was convincted in August 1602 at Skalloway of having ‘milkit James in Hamnagarthis ky’.82 In June 1604, the tenants of Wilsness and Grutness were accused of milking the cow of William Bruce.83 In June 1603 in Fetlar, Marian Matchesdochter was convicted of stealing butter from one man’s skeo and another man’s barrels, on ‘liklines’ because ‘the smell of auld butter wes feld in hir hous’.84 The ‘abominhable crime’ of food theft was endemic in early seventeenthcentury Shetland, exercising the islands’ courts much more than the threat of witchcraft.85 In reviewing the Scottish Record Society’s 1954 printing of the 1602–4 Shetland Court Book, The Scottish Historical Review commented that one’s first impression on reading the book is that [early modern] Shetland must have been one of the most litigious communities that ever existed. The state of public morals seems to have been low . . . [with] astonishingly [high levels] of crimes great and small.86

The book’s transcriber, Gordon Donaldson, agreed that the court records indicated a ‘community where quarrelsome dispositions and disregard for the rights of property were little checked by morality’. Donaldson noted that the (mis)rule of Patrick Stewart had perhaps inflated the level of crime through ‘an inquisitorial administration, vexatious regulations and a readiness to exploit any transgressions, whether old or new, with a view to gathering fines’, but the problem of food theft persisted in Shetland’s courts after Earl Patrick was removed, and the community remained extremely concerned by it well into the seventeenth century.87 Much of this theft was of livestock, but there was also a very high level of food theft from kitchens and pantries, and especially from skeos. At Northemaving in June 1603 Nicole of Garthishous was convicted of robbing Andrew Hargrasetter of fish, butter and other food.88 At Delting in June 1603, Ingagar

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Earikisdochter was found to have stolen meat, fish and butter from the cellar of Magnus Urovingis.89 Thomas in Roulstay stole a curing mutton from Christiane Nicolsdochter in Sorth Yell.90 A  man called Magnus stole curing mutton and some ling from a skeo in Howasetter.91 Mareoun Manisdochter broke into three houses in South Yell and stole fish.92 A woman called Ingagar stole butter from Mareoun Magnusdochter in Lunnasting.93 In July 1602, Nicole Antensoun, Cristopher Nicoulson, Matches Andersoun, Magnus Davidsoun and Thomas Sandersoun were ordered to each fulfil the saxter oath or pay six marks as they had previously failed the larycht oath and had been involved in ‘ane grate stowth of fische, flesche, and uther sort of gere stollin continewallie out of the selleris and skeois of Papa’.94 Prepared foods such as ‘puddings’ (made with blood and grains, similar to black and white puddings, or to Scottish haggis) were also a target of theft from skeos and cellars. Katharine Olasdochter was fined for stealing some white puddings in Fetlar in July 1602.95 The next July a man called Magnus was convicted of stealing some white puddings from Erasmus Smyth.96 Marion Olason stole puddings, beef, and other things in Yell.97 In Papa Stour, Margret Matchesdochter ‘confest that scho sta out of James Erasmussonis skeo certane quhyt dry scheipe pudding with twa birskettis of ane scheipe with certaine uther thingis’.98 Other prepared and easily portable foods were also targets of theft. In July 1602 in Fetlar, Magnus Thomasson was convicted of stealing some cheese from the skeo of Matthew Magnusson.99 Along with dairy and wool, the major economic activity in early modern Shetland was fishing, and unsurprisingly fish were a major target for theft, on both land and sea. Piter Lourensoun was convicted of stealing ling from Nicol in Paphill, as well as other fish from James Nisbett, from whom Nicole Jhonsoun had also stolen fish. Both thieves were fined four marks.100 Mareoun Houstoun stole half a ling from the skeo of William Gardies.101 In June 1603 Margaret Olawsdochter stole fish from Olaw Murinis, as did a tenant family in Brehouland.102 John Peage stole five dried skate-fish from Gilbert Mackraythis in Walls.103 At Unst in July 1602, Donald Smyth was convicted of stealing fish from Wiliam Scrawall’s skeo, and then of stealing a turbot from David Spence’s skeo.104 At Yell in July 1602, Walter Turvous and his crewmates were alleged to drawn the lines of two other fishermen, Arthur and Gutherom from Ness, ‘upoun the sie’ and thereby stolen their fish.105 Such high levels of food theft would have had a major influence on community relations in Shetland, and in the way that social threats were perceived. Shetland was not unusual in seeing thefts of foodstuffs from farms and houses: these were

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not uncommon across Europe, especially in rural areas, and it was not unusual for thieves of food to be women.106 It has also been noted that theft often rose in times of dearth or rising prices.107 The terror of roving bands of vagabonds may have been the dramatic face of the fear of theft, but as Robert Jütte has noted, people ‘actually had more to fear from their next-door neighbours, whether they were poor or not’.108 Ulinka Rublack has commented that ‘theft was certainly a serious threat to most people; even petty theft did serious harm to a society close to subsistence’.109 The anxieties that led to witchcraft accusations must be seen alongside the everyday anxieties caused by more mundane threats to food security and the social cohesion that it underpinned. In the medieval and early modern Norse world, foodstuffs  – especially butter – were used as both rates and methods of exchange. Butter currency was especially important in Shetland, where its use persisted into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A court verdict from 1509 ruling that the people of Toop in Orkney did not have the right to graze on certain land or to take seaweed from its seashore, noted a rate of skat (tax) as 1 1/2 leispunds (a common Shetland measurement equal to 1/12 of a barrel) of butter.110 In 1560 the Archdeacon of Orkney John Tyry signed a contract with his relative Walter Tyry for a variety of lands. Walter agreed to pay a barrel of ‘marketable quality’ butter a part of annual rent for the Isle of Damsey, a stone of butter as part of the annual rent for Archdean’s Quay, and a significant amount of butter to supplement his skat.111 A 1563 land contract between the Precentor of Orkney and Katherine Kennedy and her husband Patrick Bellenden in the parish of Stenness lists various places’ rents in barrels or part-barrels of butter.112 A  conveyance of land from 1567 between Olaf Persson of Fejde in Norway and David Sanderson of Qualso in Shetland lists various rents in butter.113 A land contract from 1572 explains the general system of Shetland payment, whereby two-thirds was paid in wool cloth, and one-third in butter.114 Tithes were often paid in food, in butter or fish oil in Shetland, grain or butter in Orkney.115 Even in the seventeenth century when butter payment was generally used as a rate of exchange and payments were generally made in cash, some rents still involved payments of barrels of butter. In 1615 Robert Halcro and Jean Scollay agreed a yearly rent in butter, and to pay the Bishop of Orkney barrels of butter, large amounts of grain, meat, poultry, and cash for their farm duties.116 As butter began to move from a method to a rate of exchange, the threat of someone stealing your butter or spoiling your milk still had serious consequences:  on 26 August 1615, Marjorie Fermour and her husband Andro Mourton brought twenty-two tenant families to court for

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nonpayment of rents and duties, with the overdue amounts listed in wool and butter.117 Due to trade with Norway, the Netherlands, and the Hanseatic League, butter was also big business, and an important way of earning cash: in August 1602 the courts had to deal with a complex dispute over many barrels of butter involving a number of Shetlanders, the ‘Lords of Norway’, and some Dutch merchants.118 One of the most serious legal disputes in early modern Shetland came during 1576, when a Royal Commission was sent north from Edinburgh after the islanders complained to the king that Lawrence Bruce, who through family connections had become Lord of Shetland, was ‘oppressing’ them. The islanders complained about Bruce’s soldiers’ practice of evicting locals from their farms and billeting themselves in their stead, sometimes for weeks on end. Magnus Leslie of Ayth ‘hevelie lamentit and compleint’ that this had happened to him, and said that Bruce’s men had ‘speindit and waistit his meit, fische and flesche, buttir and cheis’. Leslie detailed what Bruce’s cronies had taken from his house and land, a list which is exhaustive because, as Leslie put it, they ‘tuk with thame . . . [all] that thai could appreheind’. The list includes two barrels of new ale, a half barrel of old ale, a barrel of malt, a barrel of oatmeal, some barley meal, four leispunds of butter rinded with honey, four leispunds of salted butter, eight leispunds of tallow, seven cured muttons, one cured pig (which Leslie valued in butter), seven fowl, an ox worth four dollars (which ‘thai slew’), a barrel of salt-beef, a lot of smoked and cured fish, and a large quantity of honey. When Bruce’s men finally left and the Leslies could return, ‘there was na manner of meit, dreink, clothing nor uther geir left to sustain thame’, so Magnus had to borrow some barley meal from his neighbour’s wife in order to feed his wife and children.119 Leslie’s inventory shows the importance of butter and other foods as both economic commodities and stores of value. Perhaps mindful of the abuses that had taken place under Bruce and Earl Patrick, Shetland’s courts did not relinquish the legislative role they had enjoyed under Norse law even after the introduction of Scottish law in 1611. In 1612 and 1615 the courts issued a number of ‘acts’ addressing social problems in the county, and these orders reveal the seriousness with which the community viewed threats to food security and an orderly food economy. Shetland’s authorities, like those elsewhere in Europe, were keen to ensure that the market in food was not distorted by nefarious practices which pushed up prices or concealed low quality. A  major problem was what the islanders called ‘forestallers’, merchants who bought up goods from Dutch and Hanseatic

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merchants and then sold them on at inflated prices, either straight away, or after holding them back to push up market prices. In 1615 Shetland’s courts passed an ‘act contra chapmen and foirstalleris’, who it was alleged were gouging the population of the island with these dishonest commercial tactics. There were sindrie chapmen quha be way of foirstalling at all occasiounis attendis the cumming of schippis and prevenis the inhabitants of the cuntrey un buying all soirt of merchandice and in selling the same agane to the cuntreypepill at ane far heicher rait to thair great prejudice and hurt.120

This expanded on an act from 1602, which attacked the commercial practices of Dutch merchants and ‘utheris strangeris’, especially the forestallers whose tactics were found as contrary to ‘the common weile’.121 Black market commerce in food was seen as a widespread problem by the authorities. In 1615 surreptitious food trading with the Dutch and other ‘foirrenaris’ at Bressay Sound was banned, especially as it was alleged to often be accompanied at that location by ‘fornication or adulterie’ with the foreign sailors and merchants.122 The authorities’ concerns were not limited to those from abroad. Local farmers and butchers were targeted in a regulation in 1615, which outlawed slaughtering meat for sale to anyone without coming to the authorities with ‘twa honest nychtbouris’ and showing them the animal, ‘the mark and the manes name fra quhom they coft the samen’. Any transgressors would lose their merchandise and be banned from trading, as well as being punished accordingly.123 In 1603 and 1604, action had been taken against people selling ale at allegedly inflated prices, and tests were ordered on sellers to whether their ‘ail be sufficient or nocht’.124 Peddlers of hides and wool were forced to swear where before the bailiffs where their merchandise had come from to make sure it was not stolen.125 The courts  – perhaps unconvincingly  – stated that except for nefarious market practices, ‘victuallis ar guid scheape in the contrie praisit be God’.126 In Orkney a 1612 order setting Saturday as market day for ‘fleschouris, fischeris, brousteris, baikeris, cordineris, and utheris’ said that officials would be present at the market ‘for helping of a civil societie and gwid ordour and repressing of all enormities and extortiounis’.127 The threats to civil society went beyond just dishonest merchants. The courts repeatedly addressed the problem of ‘outland and inland beggeris of woll, fisch, and cornis’ and ‘vagabondis’.128 In August 1615, this was reiterated:  ‘na outland nor inland beggeris of woll, fishce, and cornes of honest rank sall repair throw the contrey’.129 By far the biggest problem, however, remained food and livestock theft.

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In 1612 Shetland passed an act restricting all sorts of behaviour because ‘the abhominable cryme of thift is so comoun in this cuntrey . . . to the great prejudice of the inhabitantis of the land  . . . and hurt of monie within this cuntrey’.130 If anyone was found, day or night, ‘in ane uther manis holme upon quhatsumever pretence without licence of the awner . . . he sall be reput haldin and punischt as a comoun theif ’.131 It was not to be legal ‘at ony tyme of day, bot speciallie before the sun rysing and efter the sun setting’, to go across a neighbour’s land or grazing areas with a sheep dog without permission (or unless accessing your own land required it). The punishment for transgressing a first time was a fine of £40 (Scots), ‘his dog hangit’, and not to be allowed to have a dog thereafter.132 This was reiterated in 1615, when it became necessary to get approval from the authorities of the parish in order to even own a sheepdog (unless one was disabled in some way).133 The problem of surreptitiously shearing other people’s sheep was also addressed.134 Due to the prevalence of theft and the relative infrequency of court proceedings, Shetland had a traditional system of community vigilantism (‘ranselling’) if someone was robbed. A  victim could go to the parish official and together they could choose ‘twa or thrie honest men’ who would together ‘ransell, seik and searche all houssis and suspect places’ in the parish, ‘and in cais of nocht finding or suspitioun to pas to the nixt parochin’, the officials of which were instructed to assist.135 Ranselling shows how theft – like witchcraft – was seen as a crime against the whole community, not just a crime of one against another. As such, the courts were concerned with people concealing information about crimes such as theft and witchcraft, or refusing to come forward with what they knew. In 1615 Shetland passed an act saying that na persone nor persones of no rank, qualitie nor degrie sall hyde nor conceill ony kynd of thift, sorcerie nor witchcraft, bluid, wrang, injurie, roberrie nor oppressioun, weak or ony kynd of waith, bot sall impart, schaw and delaitthe same to thar bailies or to the scheriff deput as they weschew to be reput and haldin as partakeris thairof and punischt thairfoir conforme to the lawis and practique of this realme.136

Orkney passed a similar law the same summer.137 The converse problem of people holding back information about their neighbours, friends, and relatives was people lying about them. This was a problem of which the community and authorities were well aware. In 1602 Shetland had passed an act demanding that ‘nane lie nor traduce ane uther’,

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stating that such offences could lead to banishment, and demanding that ‘nane pretend ignorance thairof ’.138 In 1612 the island passed an act on slander because it is haviele complenit that thair is diveris and sindrie persones quha out of thair evell humouris and bad dispositiounis detractis, sclanderis and defames thair nichtbouris, calling thame huir, theif, and sicklyke sclanderous wordis quhair they ar hurt in thair name and fame far contrair to all Cristiane dewtie,equitie, and ressoun.139

The danger of slander to the community was indicated by the punishment. There was both a fine and adjudged compensation to the injured party, and the judge could order that the offender appear before ‘the minister and parochineris within quhais boundis they sall happin offend, and publictlie in presens of the congregatioun convenit for the tyme confes his fault and crave the pairtie grevit and offendit forgivenes’.140 One of the other ‘slanderous words’ used to defame other members of the community was ‘witch’. Bessie Boy was found to have been ‘wrangouslie sclanderit’ by Garthero Johnsdochter in June 1604, after she had alleged that Bessie had cursed her ‘kirne milk’ (milk churned for butter) by witchcraft so that the milk would not churn. Since Bessie was also suspected of witchcraft, the court ended up sanctioning both of them.141 Mareoun Erasmusdochter from Walls had a ‘dittay giffin in aganis’ her, consisting of accusations by a neighbouring woman that Mareoun had been stealing ‘the profit of hir milk’. The assize, however, ‘found nothing with [Mareoun] in that caus but guid and honestie, thairfor the essyse all in ane voice obsolvis hir of all cryme or penaltie’, and more importantly ‘ordainis that nane repruife hir, hir bairnis, huisband or famelie’.142 Catherine Thomasdochter, convicted of milk magic in June 1603, was back in court the next month as it seemed that the accuser, the wife of ‘Culyevo’, had changed her mind and admitted that she did not suspect Catherine any more. Catherine was not entirely absolved, but was provided with the opportunity to ‘quit herself ’ with the larycht oath or to pay two marks as a ‘witch’. This was significantly less onerous than the £40 (Scottish) fine she had been initially charged ‘on pain of poynding’.143 Mareoun Cromartie, who had been accused of ‘certaine poynts of witchcraft’ in summer 1604 and fined for not appearing at her court dates had her sanctions reduced after it was decided that one of her accusers, ‘a lad’ called Magnus Olawsoun, ‘was jugit to be infamous and could nocht be sworne to depone in the said mater’. It was ordered that Mareoun could ‘quit herself ’ of the charge

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of witchcraft with the larycht oath, or failing that, pay a fine of two marks as a ‘witch’.144 Slander about theft was also common. Nicol Swanneson, husband of the alleged witch Catherine Thomasdochter, accused Olaf Nicolson of breaking into his skeo and stealing fish and meat from it. Olaf counter-accused Nicol and his family of ‘breking his awin skeo’.145 Magnus Nicolson was convicted of slandering Janet Thomasdochter in Fetlar in June 1603 after he had accused her of stealing butter.146 Barbara Matchesdochter was found to have slandered a man called Magnus Blance.147 Slander was treated so seriously because it was a form of deviance that damaged not just another individual but  – like witchcraft and food theft  – threatened the stability of the wider community. For the same reason, cases of repeated theft were treated extremely harshly. While first offences were generally punished with small oaths and fines, second or subsequent thefts were a different matter. Nicole Antonusson in Setter was found to have stolen fish from many skeos in St Magnus parish, and fish from his neighbours was found in his house. His goods and ‘geir’ were seized, and if he was found he was to be ‘hangit be the craie quhill he die in exempill of utheris’. Nicole’s employer, Andrew Ollawsoun, had to swear the larycht oath to prove ‘that he knew nothing thairof ’.148 Corporal punishment – tellingly carried out in front of the community – was used in some cases of repeated theft. A woman called Ellen in Kirktown stole butter from a local man and was fined as it was her first offence. Her children, however, seemed to have gained a reputation for repeated stealing, as the court also ordered that ‘becaus hir bairnis are common pykairis [thieves] decernis the fold [the ‘foud’, the local legal official] to bett them about the kirk in exempoll of utheris’.149 Margaret Matchesdochter was ordered ‘to be scurgit about the kirk’ as she had stolen again after previously having been fined and had oaths fulfilled.150 Escheatment, banishment, and execution were also used as punishments for repeat thieves. Marian Davidsdochter was banished in July 1602 and had her property seized after she was convicted of stealing butter from Edward Sinclair in Nesting because it was the latest in ‘syndrie uther poyntis of thift’. If she came back and was apprehended, she was to be ‘drownit to the daithe, in exempill of utheris’.151 In Unst in 1604, James Frissal was executed after he had stolen barley, oats, and a sheep.152 He had previously stolen puddings in 1602, and a peat spade in 1603.153 When the three witches, Katherine Jonesdochter, Jonka Dennis and Barbara Scord, were executed and burned in summer 1616, the livestock thief Robert Brounsdone was hanged alongside them.154 Repeated theft of food was treated harshly even when the accused presented a sympathetic justification for

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their crimes, as we saw with the case of Margaret Patersdochter and her theft from ‘plane hunger and necessite’.155 Most of the witches who harmed Shetland’s dairy cows, those who committed assault, and most thieves did not suffer the fate that this hungry, desperate woman did. But in Margaret’s repeated thefts of food, and perhaps in the fact that her situation made more such thefts likely, the islanders saw the one of the threats they feared most, and tolerated least. The threat of slipping below subsistence, of harvest failure and famine, of not having enough money to pay the rent were omnipresent social anxieties in early modern communities. Magical or mundane, from a hungry woman or an oppressive lord, repeated threats to food security could not be tolerated in a society whose economy and subsistence depended on its domestic farming and food production. * Food was central to the way early modern communities perceived and dealt with witchcraft. People saw it as a target of witches, and a vector for their magic. It was often a kernel of conflict, and a source of envy. As a common good and a cultural symbol it was a focus for issues of unity and division, deviance and cohesion. The relative dearth of cultural sources from early modern Shetland is a handicap on our ability to provide context and texture to our understanding of witchcraft beliefs and accusations on the island. But by forcing us to work outwards from the records of courts where witches and thieves were tried alongside each other, mostly for crimes involving food, it reminds us that for all its seductive fascination, early modern witchcraft must be approached from within its own legal and community contexts, alongside the other fears and threats which worried people and authorities. Food can provide an instructive link between the magical and the mundane. If someone stole your fishing lines, or their dog took one of your sheep, or their pig ruined your vegetables, your livelihood was in danger. If someone took the mutton or the fish from your skeo, you could quite easily end up resorting to theft yourself. If you and a neighbour got into a quarrel, one of you might say something that would put the other in court accused of a serious offence. The frightening or the unexplained could become the malevolent or the demonic. Suspicion, envy, anxiety, resentment, and fear surrounding food often coloured community relations, and threats to a secure and ordered food economy were treated harshly. The evidence from Shetland and Scotland shows how accusations about magical manipulation of milk yields, of spoiling milk, of magical theft, of harming livestock, or of ruining crops were often where cultural traditions and beliefs interacted with everyday life.

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By providing the fertile soil in which beliefs about witches and magic could grow, such crimes helped to reveal the fears and anxieties of early modern families and communities. We may not know the rich details of early modern Shetlanders’ fantasies of demonic banquets or their nightmares of hunger and rot, but in their punishment of food thieves and malevolent food magic we can glimpse the collective fears of their community, the norms and boundaries they constructed and emphasized. As a locus for conflict, envy, and suspicion, food often became the way through which quarrels and grudges became accusations and slander. Paul Watson’s wife the skilled dairywoman could become Mrs Watson the witch in the eyes of her envious neighbours. Jonka Dennis the renowned butter churner could become Jonka Dennis the spiteful witch to the angry Geillis Sclaitter. Similarly, as a heavily gendered area of responsibility  – through maternal nourishment, the kitchen, the dairy, or folk medicine – food was often one of the subjects over which beliefs about the female witch fixated, or from which such beliefs could expand. Barbara Scord the milk-stealing witch could become also Barbara Scord the devil’s mistress, the jealous and embittered witch with no husband who made the men who spurned her sick and impotent. In these stories of witches and thieves we can see not only the importance of food to the fears and anxieties that fed beliefs and accusations of witchcraft, but also food’s importance to the social life of the whole community, and how the issue of witchcraft was situated in – and sometimes sprang from – that social life. At the edge of the world, food can provide a bridgehead from which to explore.

8

Conclusions: Thinking about Food, Thinking with Food

Eagle-eyed inquisitors, tortured women, populist preachers, sausagebrandishing protesters, suspicious dairymaids, desperate thieves: these stories have been varied and far-flung, drawn from different places with different contexts. Yet their similarities, and indeed the nature of their differences, offer many insights on the ideas of identity, belief, and community that pervaded them all. They also offer examples of how we can think about food in the past, and think with food to offer a different perspective on all sorts of religious, cultural and social questions.

Identity ‘What we like, what we eat, how we eat it, and how we feel about it,’ wrote Sidney Mintz, relate intimately to ‘how we perceive ourselves in relation to others.’1 Early modern Europeans used food both to affirm and communicate their own identity, part of the wider processes of identity formation – social, religious, confessional, eventually national and racial – that characterized the period. To many in Inquisition Castile, cooking and eating choices were so integral to identity that they could reveal the hidden truth of someone’s religion. Eating ‘the foods of a Christian’ was seen as an almost intrinsic part of Christian identity. Even though it served no religious function for Christians, pork was so ingrained in Christian food culture, and its avoidance so deeply associated with perceptions of Judaism, that it was simply implausible that someone would refuse to eat it for innocuous reasons. Certain foods – pork; garlic; aubergines; even certain stews, pies or sausages – became litmus tests of identities to the Inquisition and the witnesses and informers who provided its information.

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‘Crypto-Jews’  – real or imagined  – also used food to reaffirm their hidden identity and to conceal it. In Zürich too, food was a way both to express an identity and to define it in relation to others. From the beginning of Lent 1522, violating the traditional fasts became a way to identify – both positively and negatively – adherents of the reformed faith. Eating became for some, like Heinrich Aberli, a testament of belief, an act that embodied a new identity. Huldrych Zwingli’s defence of fast-breaking also connected food and identity, linking the honest Swiss with a humble diet of cheese and sausages in contrast to the gluttony of church leaders in far-off Rome who would laugh at the bad oil they forced the Swiss to use in place of local butter. What is most striking is not that food was connected to identity formation, but how local and historic contexts defined the ways in which it was, a diversity of dynamics also notable in the construction of confessional and national identities that characterized the latter part of the early modern period.2 Through all of these issues ran the thread of food’s relationship with gender. The world of food was heavily gendered, the gender norms of the kitchen reflecting a broader patriarchal structure that made even these very different places similar in many food-related ways. Foods themselves could even have gender identities, from the carnal masculinity of sausages and meat to the sexualized femininity of eggs, cheese and milk. Those gender associations drew outwards to gendered social issues, from the butchery of young men on the continent’s battlefields to the complex gender dynamics of the household, the dairy, and the domestic economy. Food could be about identifying who ‘we’ were, but also about who ‘the other’ was, and understanding the early modern dynamics of food and identity is particularly important at a time when Europe was on the verge of encountering a whole new world of ‘others’ in ways that would define a new global age. That encounter often involved food identities in its discourses of dehumanization, from concerns about the lack of vines and wheat in the ‘New World’  – ‘cassava is not bread, and Indians are not people’, went a common saying in Spanish colonial Venezuela  – to the stories of cannibalism that coloured narratives of new colonial ‘others’.3 Across the early modern world, eating different foods could become a signal and an embodiment of deeper differences. Understanding early modern European relationships between food and identity is essential for understanding how they functioned when Europeans sorted themselves into newer forms of national and racial identities, both at home and across the oceans.

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Belief Just as food lay at the heart of how early modern people identified themselves and others, so too did it inform the ways in which they made sense of their world, and what they believed in. Food ran right through the practice of both Judaism and Christianity, from the ritual meals of the seder and Eucharist to the reaffirmative testaments of faith embodied in rhythms of fasting. Alongside ritual functions in explicit religious practice, food also formed an important part of what we can think of as people’s ‘lived religion’, how they experienced and acted their faith on a daily basis. Acknowledging and emphasizing these dual roles of food in early modern religion shines a different light on a number of questions of belief. The difficulty of changing diet and switching food cultures illustrates both the challenge and the complexity of the process of religious conversion, both for conversos moving from Judaism to Christianity, and for those Christians moving to a new reformed faith. When food played a key role in how and what you believed, eating differently required not just a change of habit or a change of identity, but a spiritual change. The importance of food to ordinary people’s experience and perception of their religion throws a different light on the popularity of the early Zürich Reformation, and requires us to place greater importance on the fasting controversy that occupied the city’s evangelicals, church, and civic leaders for two months in 1522. This was not a ‘relatively minor matter’ but instead a crucial turning point for Zürich’s Reformation movement. Emphasizing the importance of food in belief also offers a different perspective on the popularity of witchcraft beliefs. Food’s role in the demonic word reflected its roles in real life, and the terrifying food inversions that characterized the meals of witches and demons help reveal the fears of a society that believed deeply in supernatural threats to its food security. It also offers insight on how witchcraft beliefs operated in local communities, with food helping us untangle the complex web of fear, envy, and enmity that produced witchcraft accusations and disputes. As religious conflict swept across the continent, food would often be emphasized as a dividing line between denominations – such as in the Catholic Reformation’s reemphasis on fasting  – or sidestepped as societies developed new models of tolerance or different priorities, such as Protestant England’s institution of ‘political Lent’, an avowedly unreligious fast for the benefit of the maritime industries. Food can offer a distinctive perspective on the tumultuous

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religious changes that defined European life in the two centuries after the Reformation.

Community Those upheavals in belief were mediated through legal institutions and systems that charted varying courses between toleration and persecution, constructing, defining, and regulating faith communities new and old. In Castile, the Holy Office of the Inquisition enforced a Spanish Catholic orthodoxy that excluded not only Jewish and Muslim practice, but even its cultural remnants. Zürich’s autonomy facilitated the institution of a local Reformation that became built into the very structure of the city and its territory. Across Europe, the pattern and nature of witchcraft persecution was determined by legal variation, from the panics of lowland Scotland to the legal hybridity of Shetland, from the German ‘heartland’ of witch-hunting to the rigid legal processes that limited it in Inquisition Spain. These legal and institutional frameworks affected the way that both religion and food shaped the boundaries, structure, and life of communities. Food, Audrey Richards wrote, ‘determines, more largely than any other physiological function, the nature of social groupings, and the form their activities take’.4 To Richards it was not (as many of her contemporaries held it) sex that created the shape and dynamics of human communities, but food. As we have seen, food and sex were deeply connected, but early modern communities give much evidence for Richard’s contention. The early modern economy and its associated settlement patterns, family structures, and social structures were all still greatly defined by food, while in premodern societies food was also the source of the ‘social communion’ that bound communities together.5 The way that people lived together was in many ways determined and structured by food. Yet as we have seen food was also a locus for conflict within and between communities. Food became the issue upon which Castilian villages, towns, and cities split in the hunt for ‘crypto-Judaism’, with neighbours and relatives testifying against those they suspected or disliked. The inability to eat together created chasms in communities that were not easy to overcome. In Zwingli’s nuanced call to avoid causing offence with food, he pointed to the complex relationship between food and community that faced early Christians, an argument that eating together was what was important, not what was on the table. Yet in Zürich not only did conflict over religious change concentrate on food, but fast-breaking also helped to define the norms and boundaries of a new

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community. Food could bring together and push apart, both create community and destroy it. Many early modern communities were united by collective fears about threats to their harvests and food supplies, be those threats magical or mundane. But the focus of such united fears on individuals – from outcast witches to hungry thieves  – could also unsettle communities. Ideas of ‘limited good’ and ‘moral economy’ could pull communities apart as women used the idea of milk magic to give form to their envy, enmity, or disputes. Understanding the early modern relationship between food and community, and the role of food in community dynamics, is particularly important to understand the social background to the food revolution that trade and empire would bring to Europe in the seventeenth century. Atlantic cod, sugar, coffee, potatoes, and tomatoes, and much else would radically redefine European diet over the next two centuries, and greatly affect the way that European communities and societies worked, from their sociability to their social structure.6 Food would remain at the heart of social change for centuries to come. * These stories about food emphasize what histories of food have been showing for the past few decades:  that we must continue to think more about food in the past. Something which lay at the heart of so much of early modern life – from religion to economics, gender to identity  – should never be a historical afterthought, but instead be cemented as a central subject of inquiry. But this book has also shown that we can do more than think about food: we can think with it too, not looking at food but using it to look outwards. Food can offer us a unique prism with which to split historical light, a way to create a different perspective from which to view historical subjects. At heart these were not stories about food, but stories about people, people whose stories I have tried to tell with the consideration they deserve, stories in which I have tried to understand what was important to those living them. By thinking with food about personal stories and wider historical issues, we can begin to reap some of the great fertility of the ‘intellectual no-man’s land’ in which food has sometimes found itself. When considering who might have offered biased testimony against her to the Inquisition, Marina González and her husband Francisco had named a neighbour called Marí Ruíz. Marina and Marí had quarrelled after Marina discovered that her neighbour had made a ‘hole in the wall’ of Francisco and Marina’s house.7 Seemingly caught up in the atmosphere of suspicion that pervaded the Inqusition’s hunt for ‘crypto-Judaism’, her curiosity presumably piqued by

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Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe

personal animosity or Marina’s colourful history, Marí had taken fairly drastic action to get a glimpse of the hidden world of Marina’s kitchen. Holes in the wall are as intriguing for historians as they were for curious Marí, offering insights into lives and worlds whose realities often remain elusive. Food gives us ways of peeking through many such portals, ways of seeing the past differently.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Imagining the thoughts of historical subjects can be a fraught but illuminating business, as shown by Natalie Zemon Davis in her iconic introduction to Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 2 Barbara Ketcham-Wheaton, ‘Review: Carole Lambert (ed.), Du Manuscrit à la Table: Essais sur la Cuisine au Moyen âge et Répertoire des Manuscrits Médiévaux Contenant des Recettes Culinaires; Martin Aurell, Olivier Dumoulin, & Françoise Thélamon (eds.), La Sociabilité à Table: Commensalité et Convivialité à Travers les Âges’, Speculum 71.2 (April 1996), pp. 449–50. 3 Reay Tannahill, Food in History (2nd edn, New York: Crown, 1988), ‘Introduction’, p. ix. 4 Sidney Mintz, Sweeteness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Viking, 1985), p. 3. 5 Among many see: Jeffrey Pilcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers (eds), A Cultural History of Food, 6 vols (Bloomsbury : London, 2012); Kyri Claflin and Scholliers (eds), Writing Food History: A Global Perspective (London: Berg, 2012); Ken Albala (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Pilcher, ‘ The Embodied Imagination in Recent Writings on Food History’, American Historical Review 121 (2016), pp. 861–87. 6 Jack Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939); Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949); Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1949–50); Derek Oddy and Derek Miller, The Making of the Modern British Diet (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p. 8. 7 William Ashley, The Bread of Our Forefathers: An Inquiry in Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928); Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries, c.1275–1535 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922).

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8 For a recent medical history of early modern diet, see David Gentilcore, Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450–1800 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Among much excellent recent economic history on diet, see: Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, and Fashions, 1500–1760 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007); Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Roderick Floud, Robert Fogel, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Numerare est errare: Agricultural Output and Food Supply in England before and during the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 73 (2013), pp. 1132–63; Deborah Oxley and David Meredith, ‘Food and Fodder: Feeding England, 1700–1900’, Past and Present 222 (2014), pp. 163–214. 9 See among many: Fernand Braudel, ‘Vie matérielle ét comportements biologiques’, pp. 545–9, and ‘Alimentation ét categories de l’histoire’, pp. 961–5. Both from Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisation 16 (1961). Many Annales essays on food were collected in Jean-Jacques Hémardinquer (ed.), Pour une histoire d’alimentation (Paris: Libraire Armand Colin, 1970); and in English in Roy Forster and Orest Ranum (eds), Food and Drink in History: Selections from the Annales (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). See also Eva Barlösius, ‘The History of Diet as Part of the “Vie Matérielle” in France’, in Hans Teuteberg (ed.), European Food History: A Research Review (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 90–108, esp. pp. 92–4 and bibliography. 10 Jean Soler, ‘Sémiotique de la nourriture dans la Bible’, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisation 28 (1973), pp. 943–55; Roland Barthes, ‘Pour une psycho-sociologie de l’alimentation contemporaine’, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisation 16 (1961), pp. 977–86. In English: Soler, ‘The Semiotics of Food in the Bible’, pp. 55–66, and Barthes, ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Food’, pp. 20–27. Both in Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik (eds), Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997). 11 Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, tr. Miriam Kochan (London: Collins, 1981), p. 64. 12 William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. Fundamental Institutions (London, 1889), p. 269. 13 Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders. A Study in Social Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 279. 14 Bronislow Malinowski, ‘Preface’ to Audrey Richards, Hunger & Work in a Savage Tribe. A Functional Study of Nutrition among the Southern Bantu (London: Routledge, 1932), p. ix. 15 Richards, Hunger & Work, p. 8.

Notes 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24

25 26

27 28 29

30 31

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Ibid, p. 10. Ibid., pp. 9, 181. Soler, ‘Semiotics’. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, tr. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1966); ‘Deciphering a Meal’, Daedalus 101 (1972), pp. 61–81. Richards, Hunger & Work, p. 15. Clifford Geertz, ‘ “From the Native’s Point of View”: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 28 (1974), pp. 26–45; Will Pooley, ‘Native to the Past: History, Anthropology, and Folklore’, Past and Present (2015), pp. 1–15. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 3. Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002); Food in Early Modern Europe (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003); The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007). Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food, tr. Carl Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); with Jean-Louis Flandrin, Food: A Culinary History, tr. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Food Is Culture, tr. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Albala, Eating Right, p. 13. Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. xiv. Eric C. Rath, Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2010). Richards, Land, Labour, & Diet in Northern Rhodesia. An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 46. Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, tr. David Gentilcore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); The Magic Harvest: Food, Folklore, and Society, tr. Joan Krakover Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1987), p. 3. For an assessment of the importance of religion to early modern European culture and society, see Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, tr. Thomas Dunlap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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32 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 4. 33 Ken Albala, ‘Historical Background to Food and Christianity’, in Ken Albala and Trudy Eden (eds), Food and Faith in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 7. 34 Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Maya Corry, Deborah Howard and Mary Laven (eds), Madonnas & Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy (London: Philip Wilson Press, 2017). 35 See Deborah Simonton, ‘Writing Women in(to) Modern Europe’, in Deborah Simonton (ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 11. 36 Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, tr. Rodney Needham (London: Merlin, 1963), p. 89. 37 This approach of focusing on ‘incidental’ information to reveal hidden elements of social life has been used recently in a variety of innovative research. See, for example, Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski, ‘Sport and Recreation in Sixteenth-Century England: The Evidence of Accidental Deaths’, in Angela Schattner and Rebecca van Mallinckrodt (eds), Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture. New Perspectives on the History of Sports and Motion (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Mark Hailwood and Jane Whittle, ‘Research in Progress Essay: Women’s Work in Rural England 1500–1700: A New Methodological Approach’, Local Population Studies 96 (2016), pp. 66–71.

Chapter 2 1 Fontes Iudaeorum Regni Castellae (hereafter FIRC), ed. Carlos Carrete Parrondo, 8 vols (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1981–98); vol. II, doc. 64, p. 44: ‘enpanadas de conejos’; ‘Pero Gutierres, cura, que era hereje e que ellas harían quemar’. 2 FIRC II, doc. 421, p. 173: ‘hasía enpanadas de pescado el vyernes para el sábado’. 3 FIRC IV, doc. 70, p. 49: ‘E que vn sábado le vido comer de vnos palominos puestos en pan’. 4 FIRC II, doc. 99, pp. 53–4: ‘pastellejos de palominos e de pollos’. 5 FIRC IV, doc. 248, p. 122: ‘con carne picada frita en aseyte e cabeças de carnero descosidas fazían vnas enpanadas, y las comían con mucho plaser y fiesta’. 6 The issue of the relative tolerance of Islamic and wider medieval Spain is much debated. For some recent perspectives, see Alex Novikoff, ‘Between Tolerance and Intolerance in Medieval Spain: An Historiographic Enigma’, Medieval Studies 11 (2005), pp. 7–36; Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the

Notes

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8

9

10

11 12

13

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Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Kenneth Baxter Wolf, ‘Convivencia in Medieval Spain: A Brief History of an Idea’, Religion Compass 3 (2009), pp. 72–85. For a wider view on medieval treatment of minorities, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Conversos and moriscos, and their relations with the Inquisition, have been the subject of much recent research. See James Amelang, Parallel Histories: Muslims & Jews in Inquisitorial Spain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Kevin Ingram (ed.), The Conversos & Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain & Beyond, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2009–15). See Angus MacKay, ‘Popular Movements and Pogroms in Fifteenth-Century Castile’, Past and Present 55 (1972), pp. 33–67; ‘Ritual and Propaganda in FifteenthCentury Castile’, Past and Present 107 (1985), pp. 3–43; ‘The Hispanic-Converso Predicament’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (5th series) 35 (1985), pp. 159–79; Money, Prices, and Politics in 15th Century Castile (London: Royal Historical Society, 1981). The concept of limpieza de sangre has been much debated in converso historiography. Recent scholarship has explored the concept both within Iberia and in relation to Spain’s early modern colonial project in the Americas: see María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, & Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), esp. chs 1–3 for Castile and Andalucia. Pope Nicholas V, Humani generis inimicus (1449); legal scholar Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo, De unitate fidelium (1449); Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, Tratado contra madianitas e ismaelitas (1449); Archbishop Alonso de Cartagena, Defensorium unitatis christianae (1450); Royal Secretary Fernán Díaz de Toledo, Instrucción del relator para el Obispo de Cuenca (1449). Pope Eugene IV, Dundum ad nostram audientiam (1442), Article 8. On the Aragonese Inquisition, see Paula Tartakoff, Between Christian & Jew: Conversion & Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). For the Spanish Inquisition beyond Central Spain, see William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Stephen Haliczer, Inquisition & Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1990); António José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory: The Portuguese Inquisition and Its New Christians 1536–1765, tr. H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon (Leiden: Brill, 2001). For contrast with the Roman Inquisition in Italy, see Christopher Black, The Italian Inquisition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

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14 For an overview of the Inquisition’s intensity over time, see Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, 4th edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 15 See Linda Martz, A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo: Assimilating a Minority (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 16 Quoted in MacKay, ‘Popular Movements’, p. 49. 17 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘The Inquisitor as Anthropologist’, in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, tr. John Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 141, 159; Michael Alpert, Crypto-Judaism and the Spanish Inquisition (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 7; Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550–1670 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 117. 18 On the problems of Inquisition records, see Kim Siebenhüner (tr. Heidi Beck), ‘Inquisitions’, in Charles H. Parker and Gretchen Starr-LeBeau (eds), Judging Faith, Punishing Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 140–52; specifically regarding the behaviour and beliefs of conversos, see Avina Navitsky, ‘Some Theoretical Considerations about the New Christian Problem’, in Issachar Ben-Ami (ed.), The Sephardi & Oriental Jewish Heritage (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1982), pp. 4–12. 19 See, for example, Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos of Spain (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1932); Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial: The Inquisition in Ciudad Real (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1981); Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995); Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); David Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003). 20 See, for example, David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identies and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 21 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (London, c. 1596), Act 1, Scene 3, lines 28–33. 22 For an example of divisions in multireligious medieval Spanish communities, see David Nirenberg, ‘Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain’, American Historical Review 4 (2002), pp. 1065–93. 23 Jordan Rosenblum, Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 50. 24 Ibid., pp. 50–52. 25 Peter Schäffer, Judeophobia: Attitudes towards the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 67. Quoted in Rosenblum, ‘ “Why Do You Refuse to Eat Pork?”: Jews, Food, and Identity in Roman Palestine’, Jewish Quarterly Review 100 (2010), p. 102, n. 32.

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26 Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real (hereafter RTSI), ed. Haim Beinart, 4 vols (Jersualem: Israeli National Academy of Science and Humanities, 1974–85), vol. I, p. 220. 27 RTSI II, p. 21: ‘Y vn día, comiendo con su marido de vn pedaço de puerco javali, y este testigo dixo: Señora, ¿pues no venis a comer? Y ella dixo: No puedo comer agora.’ 28 Jillian Williams, ‘Flesh and Faith: Meat-Eating and Religious Identities in Valencia, 1400–1600’, PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 2013; Food and Religious Identities in Early Modern Spain, 1400–1600 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 29 FIRC IV, doc. 70, p. 49: ‘Que nunca le vido comer toçino ni hecharlo en la olla’. 30 Ibid., doc. 166, p. 86: ‘Pero Lopes no quiso comer dellos, syno mordió vn bocado de vn pollo e dixo que no le echasen toçino’; ‘no quiso çenar’. 31 Ibid., doc. 213, p. 103: ‘Migeul Peres Nuñes metía en la boca los huevos e alguna ves toçino e lo echaua luego, e lo comía el gato’. 32 Ibid., doc. 4, p. 22: ‘mató vna buena gallina y la echó a coser con vn pedaço de toçino, pensando que les fasía más honra’; ‘[Aldonza] no quiso comer de la gallina ni henos del toçino’; ‘[Pedro] mandó asar vnas huevos para comer’. 33 RTSI II, Trial of Marina González, 1494, p. 22: ‘por el daño de su salud e non por otra çeremonia . . . [Françisco] reprehendia’. 34 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, p. 534. 35 Renée Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 132. 36 FIRC IV, doc. 188, p. 96: ‘fazer muchas vezes cabaheas de cabeças de buey, cochas e picadas con espeçias’. 37 Ibid., doc. 39, pp. 37–8: ‘cabaheas de lyvyanos de vaca e de cabeça de vaca y de las entrañas, y con sus ajos y espeçias, y las hazían y las comían los sábados y los otros días’. 38 Ibid., doc. 83, p. 56: ‘cabaheas de cabeças de bueyes quando los matauan en su casa para çeçina, cochas e picadas, e las fasía como longanisas’. 39 Ibid., doc. 191, p. 98n; doc. 143, p. 78. 40 Ibid., doc. 52, p. 43; doc. 191, p. 98n; doc. 52, p. 43. 41 Ibid., doc. 67, p. 47: ‘baço de cabrito’. 42 Ibid., doc. 166, p. 86. 43 FIRC II, doc. 67, p. 47; FIRC IV, doc. 39, p. 38; doc. 67, p. 47; doc. 51, p. 42; doc. 247, p. 121. 44 Alonso Herrera, Agricultura General del campo (Madrid, 1513), Bk 4, ch. 8, ‘De los Ajos’, pp. 109r–v. 45 Roberto di Nola, Libro de guisados, manjares y potajes (Barcelona, 1568; first published 1520): for example, f.70v: ‘tres o quatros cabecas de ajos’. 46 Maria Diemling, ‘ “As the Jews Like to Eat Garlick”: Garlic in Christian-Jewish Polemical Discourse in Early Modern Germany’, in Leonard J. Greenspoon, Ronald A.

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48

49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

61 62

Notes Simkins and Gerald Shapiro (eds), Food and Judaism (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2004), pp. 215–34. Memorias del reinado de los Reyes católicos que escribía el bachiller Andrés Bernáldez, Cura de Los Palacios, ed. Manuel Gómez Moreno and Juan de M. Carriazo (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1962), p. 97: ‘manjajeros de cebollas e ajos refritors con aceite’; ‘ellos . . . tenian el olor de los judíos, por causa los manjares’. See the discussion of the foetor judaicus in Jay Geller, ‘(G)nos(e)ology: The Cultural Construction of the Other’, in Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (ed.), People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective (Albany : SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 243–82. See Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott (eds), Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London, 1994), esp. ‘Part I: In Search of Lost Scents’. FIRC IV, doc. 119, p. 66: ‘puso la toca delante de las narises por el olor del toçino, por que . . . “Ese güesmo dese toçino se me entra en la gargante adalante” ’. Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel?, p. 42. Memorias del reinado de los Reyes católicos, p. 599: ‘la carne guisaban con aceite, ca lo ecfiaban en lugar de tocino é de grosura por escuchar el tocino; y el aceite con a carne es cosa que hiace muy mal oler el resuello’. FIRC IV, doc. 248, p. 122: ‘carne picada frita en aseyte’; doc. 134, p. 73: ‘fasia vnas pelotillas de carne picada con espeçias e las fr[e]ia en aseyte’. Ibid., doc. 39, p. 38; doc. 52, p. 43; doc. 238, p. 112; doc. 232, p. 109; doc. 12, p. 27. Juan Gil, ‘Berenjeneros: The Aubergine-Eaters of Toledo’, in Kevin Ingram (ed.), The Conversos & Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain & Beyond, vol. I (Leiden: Brill, 2009– 15), pp. 121–42. Ibid., p. 131. RTSI II, Trial of María González, Wife of Pedro Díaz de Villarrubia, 1511–12, p. 213: ‘caçuelas de pescados e huevos e verengenas para el sabado’. Ibid., pp. 259, 339: ‘verenjenas rellenas’. RTSI II, Trial of Juana Nuñez, 1512–14, p. 491: ‘verenjenas e freyrlas en azeyte’. See, for example, Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras, ‘Forty-Four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition, 1540–1700: Analysis of a Historical Data-Bank’, in Henningsen Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (eds), The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Sources and Methods (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), pp. 100–129; Geoffrey Parker, ‘Review’, European History Quarterly 19 (1989), pp. 538–9; William Monter, ‘The New Social History and the Spanish Inquisition’, Journal of Social History 17 (1984), p. 713. Kamen, ‘Review’, English Historical Review 121 (2006), p. 927. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, p. 198. See also comments on p. 341, n. 11–12.

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63 Ibid., p. 41; FIRC II, El Tribunal de la Inquisición en el obispado de Soria, 1486–1502, ed. Carlos Carrete Parrondo (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1985). 64 José María Monsalvo Antón, ‘Herejía conversa y constetación religiosa a fines de la Edad Media. Las denuncias a la Inquisición de el obispado de Osma’, Studia Historica 2 (1984), p. 115. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324, tr. Barbara Bray (London: Scolar Press, 1978). 65 John Edwards, ‘Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450–1500’, Past and Present 120 (1988), p. 24. This article provoked a debate on Edwards’s concept of ‘atheism’ and its possibility in the early modern world. See C. John Sommerville, ‘Religious Faith, Doubt and Atheism’, Past and Present 128 (1990), pp. 152–5, and Edwards, ‘Reply’ in the same issue, pp. 155–61. 66 Edwards, ‘Religious Faith and Doubt’, p. 10; FIRC II, doc. 358, pp. 146–7. 67 Edwards, ‘Religious Faith and Doubt’, pp. 22–3. See also Sarah Nalle, ‘Popular Religion in Cuenca on the Eve of the Catholic Reformation’, in Stephen Haliczer (ed.), Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 67–87; and Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 68 Edwards, ‘Religious Experience’, p. 42. 69 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), pp. 74–5. 70 For recent research on conversion at a variety of those ‘frontlines’, see David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Daniel C. Ryan and David Warren Sabean (eds), Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012); Peter A. Mazur, Conversion to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Claire Norton (ed.), Conversion and Islam in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Lure of the Other (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith (eds), Conversions: Gender and Religious Change in Early Modern Europe (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2017). 71 Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos; Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961); Beinart, Conversos on Trial. 72 Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition; Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion. 73 Kim Siebenhüner, ‘Conversion, Mobility and the Roman Inquisition in Italy around 1600’, Past and Present 200 (2008), pp. 5–35. See also Graizbord, Souls in Dispute; Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer (eds), Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

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74 See, for example, Graizbord, Souls in Dispute, and the diverse essays in Kevin Ingram (ed.), The Conversos & Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain & Beyond, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2009–15). 75 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, ‘Aphorismes pour servir de prolégomènes’, Physiologie du gout (Paris, 1825), aphorism no. 4. 76 Claude Fischler, ‘Food, Self, and Identity’, Social Science Information 27 (1988), p. 275. 77 Burke, ‘Language and Identity in Early Modern Italy’, in The Art of Conversation (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), pp. 67–8. 78 Douglas, Purity and Danger; ‘Deciphering a Meal’, Daedelus 101 (1972), pp. 61–81. 79 Rosenblum, Food & Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism, p. 190. 80 For a discussion of fifteenth-century Castilian cuisine and its variation by socioeconomic status, see Adeline Rucquoi, ‘Alimentation des riches, alimentation des pauvre dans une ville Castillane au XVe siècle’, in Denis Menjot (ed.), Manger et boire au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1984), pp. 297–312. The wider relationship between food and social status in early modern Spain is discussed in Jodi Campbell, At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017). 81 ‘Ma Nishtana’, Mishna, Pesachim 10:4. 82 Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 13. See also Robert Orsi, ‘Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion’, in David Hall (ed.), Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 3–21. 83 Meredith McGuire, ‘Embodied Practices: Negotiation and Resistance’, in Nancy Ammerman (ed.), Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 188. 84 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 157. 85 See Pilcher, ‘The Embodied Imagination in Recent Writings on Food History’. 86 McGuire, Lived Religion, pp. 12–13. 87 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘From “Popular Religion” to Religious Cultures’, in Steven Ozment (ed.), Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research (St Louis: Centre for Reformation Research, 1982), p. 322. 88 William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 8. 89 FIRC IV, doc. 70, p. 49: ‘comido en quaresma vna pierna de perdis’; doc. 167, pp. 86–7: ‘Jueues de la Çena tenia en la olla para comer vna gallina e vn pedaço de pescado’; doc. 225, p. 106: ‘comio carne vn Jueues de la Çena’; doc. 173, p. 91: ‘y que comían huevos en viernes e en quaresma’; doc. 188, p. 96: ‘Confesó que ha comido carne en dias vedados’.

Notes

173

90 Ibid., doc. 167, p. 87: ‘vna gallina a cozer en vna olla vn pedaço de congrio, y que hera vn día de cuaresma, cree que miércoles’. 91 Ibid., doc. 99, p. 61. ‘Confesó que he comido [carne] en quaresma e días vedadas porque estaua enfermo del mal de las bubas u la modorra’. For ‘las bubas’, see Covarrubias’s dictionary, vol. I, fol. 107r. 92 Ibid., doc. 52, p. 43: ‘comío en quaresma dos dias carne por neçesidad que tovo de salud . . . Confesó que por enfermedad de las bubas comío vn viernes de vna gallina’. 93 Ibid., doc. 200, p. 100: ‘comer carne en quaresma, pero que estauan malos de dolençia’. 94 Ibid., doc. 200, p. 100: ‘Muchas veses comer carne en viernes y en sábados y en quaresma . . . el qual tenia bubas’. 95 RTSI II, p. 15: ‘muchas dolençias que tenia del coraçon e otros males de far fijos que pario’. 96 RTSI II, Trial of Beatriz, Leonor, and Isabel González, 1511–13, p. 163: ‘guisar los dichos viernes con verengenas e con çebollas y culantron y espeçias, e las comian en los dichos sabados syguientes’. 97 RTSI II, Trial of María González, Wife of Rodrigo Chillón, 1512–13, p. 380: ‘Y alli comia[n] frutas . . . y comian caçuelas guisada del viernes para el sabado, e lo comian fryo’. 98 RTSI II, Trial of Juana Nuñez, Wife of Juan de Teva, 1512–14, p. 472: ‘guisava de comer el viernes para el sabado asi caçuelas como otra viandas, y aquellas comia el sabado, ella y otras personas, frias’. 99 For example, FIRC IV, doc. 12, p. 26; doc. 191, p. 98; doc. 162, p. 84; doc. 174, p. 92. 100 See Renée Levine Melammed, ‘Life-Cycle Rituals of Spanish Crypto-Jewish Women’, in Lawrence Fine (ed.), Judaism in Practice from the Medieval through the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 143–54. 101 FIRC IV, doc. 137, p. 77: ‘comer en vn coguerço con . . . su padre e con otras personas, christianos nuevos, quando falleçió su ahuelo’. 102 Olivia Remie Constable, ‘Food and Meaning: Christian Understandings of Muslim Food and Food Ways in Spain, 1250–1550’, Viator 44 (2013), pp. 199– 235. Research ongoing at the time of Constable’s recent death has been collected in Constable, To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. Robin Vose (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 103 Williams, ‘Flesh and Faith’; Food and Religious Identities in Early Modern Spain. 104 Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

174

Notes

105 See Francisco Bethencourt, The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); John F. Chuchiak IV, The Inquisition in New Spain, 1536–1820: A Documentary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) 106 RTSI II, p. 15: ‘e todas las otras viandas de christiana syn distinçion alguna’; p. 16: ‘todas viandas de christiana’.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

RTSI II, Trial of Marina González, Confession, p. 10. Ibid., p. 15: ‘grana’. Ibid., p. 12: ‘torno como el can al gomito’. Ibid., pp. 15–16: ‘de guarder la Ley de Muysen’. RTSI II, Defence Witnesses Alfonso de Zarza, Marina Ruiz, Maria Sanchez, Leonor Fernandez, Catalina Lopez, Bartolomé de Badajoz, pp. 17–20. Ibid., p. 21: ‘lo myro de aviso’. Ibid., pp. 21–2: ‘si comia[n] toçino no comia a la mesa’; ‘si comya toçino su marido, no queria bever con la taça que su marido beuia’. RTSI II, Testimonies of Juana de la Cadena, Gracia [del Espina], pp. 23–4. RTSI II, Testimony of Francisco de Toledo, p. 22: ‘reprehendia’. Ibid., pp. 32–4. Ibid., p. 33: ‘para Santa Maria’; p. 34: ‘de judios o christianos’. Ibid., p. 33: ‘e nunca dixo cosa alguna’. Ibid., pp. 34–5. RTSI II, Testimony of Pedro Gonzalez ‘el romo’, p. 35. Ibid., p. 36: ‘pura fuerça’. Ibid., p. 36. RTSI II, Testimony of Rodrigo de Valdelecha, p. 36: ‘Sy yo lo creyera non estoviera aqui’. RTSI II, Testimony of Mayor del Castillo, p. 37: ‘matar e hacer pedaços’; p. 36 (Rodrigo de Valdelecha): ‘despedaçar’. RTSI II, Sentence of Marina González, p. 39: ‘relaxamos a la justiçia e braço seglar’. Renée Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Leviticus 11:3–8. Deuteronomy 14:12–18. Talmud Mas. Chullin 59a. Deuteronomy 12:21; Leviticus 12:15. See Williams, ‘Flesh and Faith’, and Food and Religious Identities in Spain, esp. pp. 59–87. Melammed discusses the koshering of meat, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? pp. 84–8.

Notes 26 27 28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

175

RTSI II, Trial of María González, Wife of Alonso de Merlo, 1512–13, p. 427. Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 3:17, 17:11; Deuteronomy 12:16. Leviticus 7:23–5. RTSI II, Trial of María González, Wife of Alonso de Merlo, 1512–13, p. 427: ‘quitarle la gordura, e abrir la pierna del carnero e sacar la landrezilla’. A number of records mention removing glands or sweetbreads from animals’ legs (e.g. FIRC IV, doc. 4, p. 21: ‘fendir la pierna y sacarle de dentro vna cosa como molleja, que disen landresilla’), but many sweetbreads are kosher, so witnesses were likely referring to removing the sciatic nerve and its surrounding tendons from the hips, which is required by Genesis 32:32. RTSI II, Trial of Juana de los Olivos, Wife of Antón Ramírez, 1503–4, p. 151: ‘purgaua la carne muy por menudo’. Juana is mentioned by Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? p. 84. FIRC IV, doc. 77, p. 52: ‘Leonor le quita el sebo’. Ibid., doc. 4, p. 21. Ibid., doc. 70, p. 49. RTSI II, Trial of Beatriz, Leonor, and Isabel González, 1511–13, p. 163: ‘e que todas las vezes que tenyan carne de la carneçeria’. RTSI II, Trial of María González, Wife of Pedro Díaz de Villarrubia, 1511–12, p. 215: ‘y que degollava palominos’. Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? pp. 84–5. FIRC IV, doc. 83, p. 56: ‘bueyes quando los matauan en su casa’. Ibid., doc. 179, p. 93: ‘e cubrío con la . . . tierra la sangre de vn carnero que avían matado en su casa’. Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? p. 167; see also p. 166. Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘Behind the Veil: Moriscas and the Politics of Resistance and Survival’, in Alain Saint-Saëns and Magdalena Sánchez (eds), Spanish Woman in the Golden Age: Images and Realities (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 44. For more on morisca women, see Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? p. 20; see also pp. 76, 83. RTSI I, trials of the named women, pp. 360, 340, 310. FIRC IV, doc. 67, p. 47. Ibid., doc. 174, p. 92; doc. 35, p. 35; doc. 232, p. 109; doc. 39, p. 38. Melammed briefly discusses this requirement, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? p. 76. The custom is prescribed by numbers 15:7–21. Ramón Santa María (ed.), ‘Declaraciones de las ceremonias de los ritos judaycos declarados por cierto judio Rabbí’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 22 (1893), p. 181.

176

Notes

46 RTSI II, Trial of Juana de los Olivos, Wife of Antón Ramírez, 1503–4, p. 151: ‘por ser çeremonia judayca’; Melammed also notes this case, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? p. 76. 47 FIRC IV, doc. 35, p. 35: ‘echar de masa . . .’. 48 Ibid., doc. 25, p. 32. 49 FIRC IV, doc. 39, p. 38: ‘rollillos y tortas con hueuos para la pascua de flores’. 50 Leviticus 20:24–5. 51 FIRC IV, doc. 119, p. 66: ‘la cuchara que tienen para la olla de sus amos, que se guisaua syn toçino’; ‘olla aparte’. 52 Ibid., doc. 245, p. 120: ‘y faze olla aparte para ella de carnero e de otra vianda, e que no la echo toçino’. 53 Ibid., doc. 173, p. 91: ‘cozían en vn puchero aparte’. 54 Ibid., doc. 124, p. 67: ‘cuchara aparte’; doc. 4, p. 22: ‘escaldase sus cuchillos’. 55 Ibid., doc. 45, p. 40: ‘olla aparte’, ‘cuchara aparte’. 56 Ibid., doc. 200, p. 100n: ‘guardar su olla aparte, syn toçino e sin ninguna cosa salada’; doc. 73, p. 51. 57 Ibid., doc. 52, p. 43: ‘vna olla aparte syn toçino’; doc. 230, p.108: ‘la olla que se guisa para ella aparte’. 58 Among many, see the overviews in: Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, vol. I (London: Harper Collins, 1995); Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Stephanie Tarbin and Susan Broomhall (eds), Women, Identities, and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 59 Allyson Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 229. 60 See, for example, Sheilagh Ogilvie, Markus Küpker and Janine Maegraith, ‘Women and the Material Culture of Food in Early Modern Germany’, Early Modern Women 4 (2009), pp. 149–59; Ogilvie, A Bitter Living; Hailwood and Whittle, ‘Women’s Work in Rural England’. 61 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast & Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1987), p. 190. 62 This is a point emphasized by Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? Conversion itself was often seen as a gendered process in early modern Europe; see the essays in Ditchfield and Smith (eds), Conversions: Gender and Religious Change. 63 RTSI II, Trial of Marina González, Wife of Francisco de Toledo, p. 22: ‘en aquel dia avya de haser todo lo que devyese’. 64 Ibid., p. 15: ‘como christiana’. 65 RTSI II, Trial of Juana de Chincilla 1503–4, p. 127: ‘muger de Françisco de Toledo espiçiero’. 66 RTSI III, Trial of Juan Ramirez, p. 162.

Notes

177

67 Confession of García de Alcalá, 10 April 1486, translated in Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel?, Appendix 3, pp. 193–4. 68 Confession of Benito González, 10 April 1486, translated in Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel?, Appendix 3, pp. 192–3. 69 On the relationship between gender and social ‘order’ in early modern Spain, see Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 70 FIRC IV, doc. 35, p. 35: ‘masa syn leuadura e amasada con vino blanco e miel e clauos e pimienta’. 71 Ibid., doc. 232, p. 110: ‘con vn hueuo e la echó aseyte a la . . . masa’. 72 Ibid., doc. 25, p. 32: ‘fasía con masa [y] huevos vnas tortillas redondas, con pimienta e miel e aseyte’. 73 Ibid., doc. 174, p. 92: ‘e de aquel pan rallado fisieron rosquillas e charon en ellas açúcar e miel’. 74 Ibid., doc. 39, pp. 37–8: ‘que comen cilantro en una sartén y ajos y espeçias molidas y agua y azeyte y echavan pan desmenuzado y el culantro verde’. 75 Ibid., doc. 67, p. 47 and doc. 173, p. 91: ‘culantro seco’. 76 RTSI II, pp. 252, 479. 77 The kitchen has been surprisingly understudied; a notable recent exception is Sara Pennell, The Birth of the British Kitchen, 1600–1850 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 78 RTSI II, Trial of Beatriz, Leonor, and Isabel González, p. 166. 79 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, p. 536. 80 FIRC IV, doc. 200, p. 100: ‘pero que estauan malos de dolençia’. 81 Ibid., doc. 4, p. 19: ‘vn día de la quaresma . . . Aldonça . . . mandó a Angelina, negra, su esclaua, que nos diese de la olla vnos nabos y que los echase vna ralladura de queso.’ 82 Ibid., doc. 39, p. 38–9; doc. 39, pp. 37–8; doc. 12, pp. 27, 28. 83 RTSI II, Trial of Marina González, Wife of Francisco de Toledo, 1494, pp. 8–41. 84 Ibid, p. 26: ‘mi muger tomo tan grandes çelos della que pensaua que yo adulteraua con ella’. 85 Ibid, p. 26: ‘arrastrando de los cabellos y disyendole que era vna puta publica y mançeba de su marido e despues de toda la villa’. 86 Ibid., p. 26: ‘disyendo della que era vna puta judia y que ella la haria quemar’. 87 Ibid., p. 31: ‘Yo la veya como andaua perdida con algunos e la castigaua, fasta que la ove de echar de mi casa; e asy, quedo con0 mucho odio’. 88 Ibid., pp. 25–8: Juana la Cadena; Juana, wife of Martin the Butcher; Catalina, wife of Bartolome, a neighbour; Mençia Sanchez; the wife of Juan de Estribera; Mari Ruíz; the wife of Luís Vaca; the wife of Hernando de Segovia; Catalina la Toledana; the wife of Alonso de Estaban; Graçia del Espina; the wife of Pedro Mexia; the maid of Bartolomé de Badajoz; Juana de la Cuchilla.

178 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100

101 102

103 104 105

106

Notes Ibid., p. 25: ‘Juana . . . muger de Martin, carniçero’. Ibid., p. 27: ‘Mari . . . hiso un portyllo’. Juana de la Cadena and Gracía del Espina, see ibid., pp. 23–4. Ibid., p. 24: ‘e myrandola a verle sy la miraua’. Ibid., p. 24: ‘vn día de Carnestolendas tenia hechas fojuelas con manteado puerco et non quiso comer’. Ibid., p. 37, Testimony of Mayor de Castilla: ‘que tenya grande pensamiento de como la avian atestiguado’. On female friendship, see Amanda Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); see also Naomi Pullin’s ongoing research on female enmity, focused on the early modern trans-Atlantic Quaker community. RTSI II, Trial of Inés López, p. 77: ‘borrachos’, ‘falsos testigos’; Trial of Leonor Alvarez, pp. 320–71. FIRC IV, doc. 39, p. 38. FIRC II, doc. 55, p. 39: ‘Traxiese de la carniçeria de los judíos’; doc. 61, p. 42: ‘carne trayda de la carniçeria de los judíos’. Ibid., doc. 14, p. 25. Gonzalo also gives evidence in doc. 22, p. 28. Ibid., doc. 52, p. 38: ‘Antón, carniçero, que comía en los sábados las entrañas de las vacas e que comío en vn sábado los alones e patillas e pescueço e todo el otro vn ansarón’. FIRC VII, doc. 100, p. 49: ‘Comío de la carneçeria de los judíos carne caser’. RTSI II, Trial of Juana de los Olivos, Wife of Antón Ramírez, 1503–4, p. 151: ‘la carneçeria de los christanos’; ‘comia la carne que degollaua algund hereje, creyendo que aquello hera muerta con çeremonia judayca’. See Williams, ‘Flesh and Faith’, and Food and Religious Identities in Spain, esp. pp. 59–87. RTSI II, Trial of Leonor Alvarez, Wife of Fernando Alvarez, pp. 334–5: ‘e que asymismo tenia otra tienda en su casa de que vendian las mismas cosas’. See Enrique Soria Mesa, ‘De la represión inquisitorial al éxito social. La capacidad de recuperación de los judeoconversos andaluces entre los siglos xv-xvii: el ejemplo del linaje Herrera’, Medievalismo 24 (2014), pp. 399–417. On ‘community’ in early modern Europe, see Peter Burke, Languages & Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 5–6; Michael J. Halverson and Karen E. Spierling (eds), Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

Chapter 4 1 Actensammlung zur Geschichte der Zürcher Reformation in den Jahren 1519–1533 (hereafter AGZR), ed. Emil Egli (Zürich, 1879), doc. 232.

Notes

179

2 Ibid.: ‘auch äusserte der fremde Geselle, es wärind etlich in disem land, die bas mit ziger und käs köndint umbgan, dann mit der geschrift’; ‘Kuhlandes u.s.w.’. 3 Walther Köhler, Huldrych Zwingli (Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang, 1954), p. 78. 4 Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 54. 5 G. R. Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 78. 6 Ken Albala, ‘The Ideology of Fasting in the Reformation Era’, in Ken Albala and Trudy Eden (eds), Food and Faith in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 42. 7 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast & Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1987), p. 33. 8 Ibid., p. 34. For Bynum’s overview of the early and medieval Christian theology of fasting, see pp. 33–47. 9 See Veronika E. Grimm, From Feasting to Fasting, the Evolution of a Sin: Attitudes to Food in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1996). 10 See Megan H. Reid, Law and Piety in Medieval Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 56–96. 11 See Bynum, Holy Feast & Holy Fast, pp. 41–7. 12 AGZR, doc. 237: ‘vil zanks, unrouw, und widerwärtigheit’. 13 Ibid., doc. 235: ‘Kundschaft wer jetz in der fasten fleisch und eier essen’. 14 Much of the literature on the Zürich Reformation has placed this event on Ash Wednesday (5 March) instead of the following Sunday (9 March). While some of those who gave testimony to the council’s investigation mention Ash Wednesday, they do so in reference to other incidents of fast-breaking, not that in Froschauer’s house, which Elsi Flammer explicitly states was on the night of alte Fastnacht, which in all likelihood means Sunday, 9 March. The term alte Fastnacht, ‘Old Carnival’, refers to the medieval practice of counting the Sundays in the forty days of Lent (discounting them pushed back the start of Lent to Ash Wednesday). This will be discussed in Chapter 5. 15 Ibid., doc. 233.1.a. Some scholars (e.g. Albala, above) have placed the meal in the morning or afternoon, but a reference in ibid., doc. 269 later in 1522, refers to the event as a ‘nachtessen’. 16 Ibid., doc. 233.1.b. 17 Ibid., doc. 233.W: ‘unter der Vorgabe, es einer Kindbetterin zu geben’. 18 Ibid., doc. 233.1.d. Regarding Hantler and Flammer, see ibid., doc. 269. 19 Ibid., doc. 233.1.d: ‘zuo dheiner [keiner] Verachtung der kilchen gebrucht’. 20 Ibid., doc. 233.1.c: ‘do brächte der trucker harfur zwo [ge]digen wiirst; die zerschnittind si, und wurde ir jetlichem ein kleins stucki. Das essint si all, usgenommen M. Uolrich Zwingli.’ 21 Ulrich Gäbler, Zwingli: Leben und Werk (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2004), p. 51. 22 AGZR, doc. 233.W.

180

Notes

23 Ibid., doc. 234: ‘Rechtfertigung über das Fleischessen in der Fasten. Christoph Froschauer, Buchdrucker’. 24 Ibid., doc. 234, pp. 2–7. References Matt XV, Mark VII, Luke XI, Rom X, Cor VIII, Tim III–IV. 25 Ibid., doc. 234.1. For details on the print job, see Gottfried Kuhn, ‘Die Buchdruckerei Froschauers in der Fastenzeit 1522’, Zwingliana 4.10 (1925), pp. 300–302. 26 Ibid.: ‘ich muoss tag und nacht, firtag und werktag . . . arbeiten’; ‘ich bin guchtig’. 27 Ibid: ‘fisch vermag ich nit aber allwegen ze koufen’. 28 Quoted in Carl Ullman, Reformers before the Reformation, Principally in Germany and the Netherlands (tr. Edinburgh, 1855), p. 299. 29 Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), vol. 39– 40, ‘Colloquies’, p. 327. Hereafter CWE and volume number. 30 CWE 9, Letter 1353 (23 March 1523), pp. 444, 445. 31 Albert Hauser, Vom Essen und Trinken im alten Zürich: Tafelsitten, Kochkunst und Lebenshaltung vom Mittelalter bis in die Neuzeit (Zürich: Verlag Berichthaus, 1961), p. 149. 32 Quellen zur Zürcher Wirtschaftsgeschichte von den Anfängen bis 1500, ed. Werner Schnyder (Zürich: Zürcher Handelskammer, 1937), vol. IV, pp. 1051–3. 33 Herbert Hitzbleck, Die Bedeutung des Fisches für die Ernährungswirtschaft Mitteleuropas in vorindustrieller Zeit unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Niedersachsens (Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität, 1971), pp. 324–5. 34 Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, ed. Emil Egli and Georg Finsler, vol. I (Berlin, 1905), p. 106: ‘denn visch essen ist gar nach in aller welt ein wollust’. Zwingli’s works are hereafter Z with the volume number. 35 Wolfgang Packull, ‘The Origins of Swiss Anabaptism’, Journal of Mennonite Studies 3 (1985), p. 38. 36 AGZR, doc. 252: ‘du tüfel Höttinger, stand uf! Nimm dine ketzer mit dir, und gond in die ketzerschuol!’. 37 Ibid: ‘als er in die metzg kommen, hab M. Holzhalb zuo im gesprochen: herr doctor! und wenn er herr wäre, so wellte er im ein rote kappen ufsetzen’; ‘er sollte ihm dhein roten kappen, sonder die einem schelmen ufsetzen’. 38 Ibid: ‘so müesste er zuoletzt den gemeinen mann anrüefen’. 39 Ibid., doc. 233.3: ‘ein Winwarm gegessen zu haben’. 40 Ibid., doc. 233.5: ‘Fleisch gegessen zu haben’. 41 Ibid., doc. 233.6: ‘in den Reben bei Rieden Eier gegessen zu haben’. 42 Ibid., doc. 233.2.a: ‘er wüsse aber nit zuo sagen, wennen das bratis käme oder wer es dargeton’. 43 Aberli lived at Rennweg, which is near the Augustinian monastery. See ibid., doc. 269.

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181

44 Ibid., doc. 233.4.a: ‘man vom Fleischessen [in der Fasten] redete’; ‘habe Aberli eine Wurst aus dem Busen gezogen, sie zerschnitten und seinen Genossen davon gegeben, auch selbst gegessen’. 45 Ibid.: ‘in das Gotteshaus’; ‘Sein Mitbruder H. Ulrich Zeller nahm, sowie er solches sah, die Wurst und warf sie weg; er selber, der Zeuge, habe sie dann aufgehoben’. 46 Ibid.: ‘wenn er ir herr wäre, so wellte er inen ein buoss schöpfen, nämlich si in den Wellenberg leggen und si mit wasser und brot spisen lassen, und nit wider darus, bis man gen Rom schickte und die botschaft harus käme, ob si recht getan hettind oder nit’. 47 AGZR, doc. 233.4.b: ‘die münchen und pfaffen wärint all schelmen und dieben’; ‘wie solicher glouben wol in Böhem fuogte’. 48 AGZR, doc. 233.4.a: ‘bis jetzt ein Stück davon behalten’. 49 Heinrich Bullingers Reformationsgeschichte, ed. Johann Jakob Hottinger and Hans Heinrich Vögeli, vol. I (Frauenfeld, 1837), p. 12: ‘Da ward bald ein traffenlich glöüff von allerlei menschen, insonders von dem gemeinen man, zu disen Zwinglis Evangelischen predigen’. 50 Ibid., p. 39. 51 See Z I, p. 62. 52 Pestlied: Z I, doc. 5, pp. 67–9. Potter discusses the extensive debate over the psychological impact of this episode and the poem: Zwingli, pp. 69–70, n. 7. 53 Z VII, p. 245 (Zwingli to Oswald Myconius, 31 December 1519): ‘Non enim soli sumus: Tiguri plus duobus millibus parvulorum et rationalium’. 54 Zwingli, Von Erkiesen und Fryheit der Spysen: Von Ergernus und Verböserung: Ob man Gwalt hab die Spysen zuo etlichen Zyten verbieten (Zürich, 1522). References in the text are to the transcribed version in Zwingli’s Sämtliche Werke; for ease of reference, Z I, pp. 88–136 (Editors’ Introduction, pp. 74–87). 55 Z VII, p. 245 (Zwingli to Oswald Myconius, 31 December 1519): ‘qui lac iam spiritale sugentes mox solidum cibum perficient, illis misere esurientibus’. 56 Z I, p. 89 (‘On the Freedom and Choice of Foods’, March 1522): ‘das üch, nachdem ir die suesse des himelischen brots, darinn der mensch lebt, versuocht und empfunden haben, dhein andre spyß menschlicher leer fürhin hat wellen schmecken’. 57 Ibid.: ‘häfen mit fleisch’; ‘lyeplichen früchten’. Zwingli means ‘flesh-pots’ (‘häfen mit fleisch’) in the sense of Exodus 16:3, a meat stew. 58 Ibid.: ‘des euangelischen saltzes und guoter früchten’. 59 Z I, p. 495 (First Zürich Disputation, 3 March 1523): ‘die grossen hansen, bischoff unnd prelaten, das heyter unnd luter euangelium, die götlich gschryfft, dem gemeinen man underston vorzehalten’. 60 Z I, p. 91 (‘On the Freedom and Choice of Foods’, March 1522): ‘Hab also ein predig gethon von erkiesen oder underscheid der spysen’. Zwingli’s use of these two words – ‘erkiesen’ and ‘unterschied’ – seems to emphasize a considered process of ‘choice’ rather than simple freedom to choose.

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61 Ibid., p. 111: ‘besser unnd gotsförchtiger’. 62 Ibid., p. 111. 63 Ibid., p. 90: ‘der glychßneren eins falschen geists’ (Zwingli frequently described his opponents with the word ‘glychßneren’: ‘hypocrites’). 64 Ibid., pp. 89–90. 65 Ibid., p. 99: ‘Ich stryt nüt, daß von menschen nit verbotten sye – wir sehen und hörend das täglich geschehen’. 66 Ibid., p. 91: ‘jüdischer ordnung’. 67 Ibid., p. 96: ‘Und obschon im alten testament etlich spysen verbotten xin, sind sy doch im nüwen fry widerumb alle erloubet’. 68 Ibid., p. 96: ‘jüdischen somen’, ‘jüdischen fablen’. 69 Ibid., pp. 96–7: ‘die nüwen Christen’; ‘das denen, die eins reinen gloubens sind, alle ding rein sind, aber den unglöbigen sye nüt rein’. 70 Ibid., p. 92: ‘warumb beschwären wir uns muotwillig mit verbott der spyß?’. 71 Ibid., p. 91. 72 Ibid., p. 95. 73 Ibid., p. 94: ‘er esse, was er welle. Wil einer gern, so esse kat’. 74 Ibid., p. 94: ‘mit unmaß des überfüllens’. 75 Jacob Clifton, ‘ “Let No Man Therefore Judge You in Meat or in Drink”: A Note on the Iconography of Daniel Hopfer’s B. 32, the So-Called “Christ’s Mission to the Apostles”’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 61 (1998), p. 403. 76 Z I, pp. 99–100. 77 Ibid., p. 102: ‘ein täglich gebruchter hunger’. 78 Ibid.: ‘die noturfft nit nun menschlich, sunder götlich gsatzt übertrifft und pricht’. 79 Ibid.: ‘der noturfftig arbeiter, der in diser zyt des glentzes am schwäresten die burde und hitz des tages tragen muoß, zuo uffenthalt des lybs und der arbeit sölich spysen ässe’. 80 Lee Palmer Wandel, Always among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zürich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 133. Wandel discusses poor relief in the legislation and actions of the Reformation decade, pp. 124–69. 81 AGZR doc. 92. 82 StAZ A61.1, AGZR doc. 619; Wandel, Always among Us, Appendix B, pp. 188–95. 83 Wandel, Always among Us, pp. 145–62. 84 Ibid., pp. 136–7. 85 Wandel, Always among Us, p. 138, n. 51: ‘spys der armen’; ‘sondre grossen hunger vnnd arbentzaligkeit’. 86 See the documents collected in Butterbriefe: Beiträge und Quellen zur Geschichte der Fastendispensen in der Schweizerischen Quart des Bistums Konstanz im Spätmittelalter, ed. Erwin Ettlin (Bern: Peter Lang, 1977). 87 Z I, p. 109 (‘On the Freedom and Choice of Foods’, March 1422): ‘muoß ich dir ein hüpsch stückly zeigen, damit du dich vor dem gyt der geistlich gwaltigen beschirmen magst’.

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88 Ibid., p. 110: ‘die landbrüchigen spyß, milch, zyger, käß, ancken’. 89 Ibid., p. 109: ‘Unser lieben Eydgnossen hand erst inner hundert jaren das mulchen erkoufft von dem bischoff zuo Rom’. 90 Ibid., p. 110: ‘denn in der bull würt klagt, man hab in unsren landen nit gewonet öl ze essen’. 91 Ibid.: ‘ich sich, daß es lufft ist’. 92 Ibid.: ‘sy . . . habend also unser einfaltigheit mißbrucht’. 93 Regarding Luther – An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation (Wittenberg, 1520): ‘Denn sie selbst zu Rom der Fasten spotten, lassen uns hier draußen Ol fressen, womit sie nicht ihre Schuhe ließen schmieren; verkaufen uns darnach Freiheit, Butter und allerlei zu essen’. Regarding Zwingli – Z I, p. 537 (‘First Zürich Disputation’, 3 March 1523): ‘Wie können wir dazuo, das sy uns wolten gebieten kein keß, kein eyer, kein milch, sunder stinckends öll zuo essen, damit sy kum zuo Rom ire schuoch thuond salben, sunst huener und copunen ässen’. 94 Z II, p. 245 (‘Auslegen und Gründe der Schlußreden’, 14 July 1523): ‘ein römsche gschwindigheit’. 95 StAZ C I 49/50. 96 Jacob Baum, ‘Sensory Perception, Religious Ritual, and Reformation in Germany, 1428–1564’, PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, 2013, pp. 73–4. 97 Z I, p. 121 (‘On the Freedom and Choice of Foods’, March 1522): ‘aller unverschamptist hund’; ‘hirten, die dhein vernunfft habend’; ‘all gytig vom höchsten bis zuo den nidresten’. 98 Ibid.: ‘Lassen uns guoten win trincken und voll werden, und wie wir hüt thuond, wellen wir ouch morn thuon, ja noch vil me’. 99 Ibid., p. 119: ‘fleischlich geistlichen’; ‘warumb helffend ir denn nit ouch die gemeinen burdinen tragen’. 100 Ibid., p. 106: ‘Unnd wenn sich die klagend deß bruchs abgang, ist es nüt dann ein verbunst; sy sehend ungern dem gemeinen menschen zimmen, das sy an inen selbs wol ersetzen mögen on beschwärd oder abgang des lybs’. 101 Ibid., p. 117. 102 Ibid., p. 111. 103 Ibid., p. 117: ‘wann spyß minen bruoder verergret, wil ich ee dhein fleisch essen in die ewigheit’. 104 Ibid., p. 115: ‘Es ist kommlich und guot, daß einer nit fleisch esse, noch win trincke, ja nüt esse, darinne din bruoder verletzt würt, verergret.’ 105 Ibid., p. 117: ‘ein untrüwer fraß’. 106 Ibid., p. 112. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., p. 125. 109 Ibid., p. 91: ‘die essenden nit muotwiller oder geyl possen, sunder eersame lüt und guoter conscientz sind’.

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110 Z VII, p. 520 (Zwingli to Leo Jud, 22 May 1522): ‘faciendum enim interdum, quod minime velis, ut, quod maxime velis aliquando sequatur’. 111 Ibid.: ‘Proderit id consilii plurimum ad nostrum propositum’. 112 Francesca Loetz, Dealings with God: From Blasphemers in Early Modern Zürich to a Cultural History of Religiousness, tr. Rosemary Selle (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 65. 113 Pamela Biel, ‘Personal Conviction and the Cult of the Saints, 1522–1530’, Zwingliana 16 (1985), p. 469. 114 For example, Zwingli uses the phrase in ‘Auslegen und Gründe der Schlußreden’ in July 1523: Z II, doc. 20, p. 177: ‘die wurst an ‘n bachen geworffen’; and in one of his 1525 writings on iconoclasm, ‘Eine Antwort, Valentin Compar gegeben’: Z IV, doc. 53, p. 65: ‘werffend all weg die wurst an ‘n bachen’. 115 Various uses of the phrase are listed in Thesaurus Proverbiorum Medi Aevii: Lexikon der Sprichwörter des romanisch-germanischen Mittelalters, ed. Sebastian Singer, vol. 13 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002), p. 328. It may refer to winning prizes from the game of ‘sausage toss’, or may simply be a humorous juxtaposition of cheap sausage and desirable bacon. 116 Heiko Oberman, Masters of the Reformation: The Emergence of a New Intellectual Climate in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 212. Jud’s provocations and agitations are examined in Heinold Fast, ‘Reformation durch Provokation. Predigtstörung in den ersten Jahren der Reformation in der Schweiz’, in Hans-Jürgen Goertz (ed.), Umstrittenes Täufertum 1525–1975. Neue Forschungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), pp. 79–110. 117 AGZR, doc. 269: ‘nächtlichen lärm’. 118 Zwingli summarized to a friend his submissions to the visitation: Z I, pp. 142– 54 (Zwingli to Erasmus Fabricius, 9 April 1522); the council’s concluding meeting: AGZR doc. 236. 119 Z I, pp. 142–3 (Zwingli to Erasmus Fabricius, 9 April 1522). 120 Ibid., p. 143: ‘ac si sacrosanctum esset’. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid.: ‘Frustra diu movi omnem lapidem’. 124 Ibid.: ‘Ibi ego quiescere ac suspiriis rem agere coepi apud eum, qui audit gemitum compeditorum, ne veritatem desereret ac euangelium suum, quod per nos praedicari voluisset, defenderet’. 125 Ibid., pp. 143–4. Note that Zwingli uses the term ‘nos Tigurinorum episcopi’ (‘we bishops of Zürich’) to refer to himself and his allies, Engelhard and Röschlin. 126 Zwingli summarizes the bishop’s speech, without much negative commentary, ibid., pp. 145–6. 127 Ibid., p. 146: ‘per quas simplices Christiani ad agnitionem salutis inducerentur’.

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128 Ibid.: ‘carnes enim eos in quadragesima edisse non sine totius reipublice Christiane scandalo’; ‘Hortatus est inde senatum, ut cum et in ecclesia maneant, nam extra illam neminem salvari’. 129 Ibid., pp. 146–7: ‘Nihil, inquit ille, contra te locuti sumus, unde non est opus, ut satisfacias’. 130 Ibid., p. 146: ‘rusticatim tango’. 131 Ibid., p. 147: ‘vehementiorem esse’. 132 Ibid., pp. 147–54. 133 Ibid., p. 149. 134 Ibid., p. 150: ‘in testimonium fidei’. 135 Ibid.: ‘unde nec ista legatione opus fuisse, remittente sua sponte malo’. 136 Ibid., p. 150: ‘quiritari unos esse Tigurinos, qui secessionem a Christianorum communione meditari audeant’. 137 Ibid., p. 152: ‘Nihil vos moveat, o optimi cives’. 138 Ibid., p. 154. 139 AGZR, doc. 237.3: ‘Es ist ouch hiemit denen, so das flesich gessen haben, irn conscienzen ufgelegt, das iren bichtvättern zuo bichten, welche si aw geistliche handlung mit ufgelegter buoss strafen mögen’. 140 Oberman, Masters, p. 212; The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications, tr. Andrew Colin Gow (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), p. 185. 141 Ibid., p. 186. 142 AGZR, doc. 237.2. 143 Ibid., doc. 237: ‘erlouptness gar niemas mer fleisch essen sole bis uf witern bescheid, inhalt einer abredung mit unsers gnädigen herren von Konstanz botschaft beschehen’. 144 Ibid.: ‘Darbi ist ouch unser(er) herren will und meinung, dass sich niemas einichs zanks und haders, oder widerwärtiger’. 145 Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, p. 54. 146 AGZR, doc. 251. 147 Z I (‘Aktenstücke zur ersten Zürcher Disputation’, January 1523): ‘Das ein yeder Christ zuo den wercken, die gott nit gebotten hatt, unverbunden ist, gedar alle zyt alle spyß essen; darus erlernet wirt käß- und anckenbrieff ein römische geschwindikeit sin’.

Chapter 5 1 Opere di M. Agnolo Firenzuola, ed. Niccolo Cappuro, vol. VI (Pisa, 1816), p. 273: ‘Non sono el proprio un cibo da poeta?/ Tutti I prelate ricchi, e signor buoni,/ Gli uomoni dotti’.

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2 ‘Ein Streit zwischen Herbst und Mai’, in Friedereke Christ-Kutter (ed.), Frühe Schweizerspiele (Bern, 1963), p. 12. 3 CWE 8, Letter 867, p. 114. 4 Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe, p. 113. 5 For example, Memmingen and Augsburg. See Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Vol. I 1500–1800 (London: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 246–7. 6 Quellen zur Zürcher Zunftgeschichte, ed. Werner Schnyder (Zürich: Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs, 1936), doc. 1241, p. 787. 7 For example, some cases from Norwich and London are discussed in Martha Carlin, ‘Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England’, in Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (eds), Food and Eating in Medieval England (London, 1998), pp. 39–40. 8 AZR, doc. 207. P. 57: ‘ein finniges schwein’. 9 Paulina Lewicka, Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis in the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 111. 10 Firenzuola, p. 274: ‘Fassi buona salsiccia d’ogni carne’; p. 275: ‘Molti oggidi la fas coll’ asinello’; ‘Semiramis di caval volse usarla’; ‘Ch’uno in Egitto la facea co’ cani’. 11 ‘Vom papst und seiner priesterschaft’ in Paul Zinsi, Thomas Hengartner and Barbara Freiburghaus (eds), Niklaus Manuel: Werke und Briefe (Bern: Stämpfli Verlag, 1999), p. 155: ‘Du pabst vnd keisr Carolus . . . / Jr hetten guot würstmacher gen/ So ir so gern im bluot vmbgand/ Ein lust die lüt zuo metzgen hand’. See also Glenn Ehrstine, Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523–1555 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 97, and more generally pp. 79–134. 12 See Carl P. E. Springer, ‘Martin Luther and the Vita Aesopi’, in Maríllia P. Futre Pinheiro and Stephen J. Harrison (eds), Fictional Traces: Receptions of the Ancient Novel, vol. I (Gröningen: Barkhuis, 2011), pp. 95–106; Luther’s Aesop (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2011), pp. 95–6. 13 Johannes Eck, Repulsio Articulorum Zuuingli (Weissenhaus, 1530), p. 63. Zwingli and Eck had a visceral dislike for each other. In one letter – which he decided not to send – Zwingli compared Eck to (among other things) a cow, a mule, an ape and an escaped slave, while also attacking his looks, his forehead and his sanity. See Z VII, pp. 216–18. 14 Gibbs draws a parallel with Pastor Martin Niemöller’s remarks about Nazi Germany. See Laura Gibbs (ed.), Aesop’s Fables (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 58n. For Caxton and fourteenth-century England, see Richard Garrett, ‘Modern Translator or Medieval Moralist? William Caxton and Aesop’, FifteenthCentury Studies 37 (2002), pp. 62–4. 15 Z I, pp. 10–22: ‘Das Fabelgedicht vom Ochsen’. 16 Z III, p. 587 (‘Predigt wider die Pensionen’, 12 March 1525): ‘Sy sind den metzgeren glych’.

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17 Z 5, p. 130 (‘Die andere Schrift an Dr. Johannes Faber’, 15 May 1526): ‘Ja, du bist der menschenmetzgeren’. 18 Z I, pp. 575–6 (‘Entschuldigung etlicher Zwingli unwahrlich zugelegter Artikel’, 3 July 1523): ‘aber menschenfleisch verkouffen unnd ze tod schlahen halt er nit für ein grosse sünd’. 19 Z I, p. 73 (‘Predigtworte zu den Soldverträgen mit dem Ausland’, 1521): ‘Sy tragind billich rote huet und mäntel; dann schütte man sy, so fallind duggaten und kronen herus; winde man sy, so ründt dines suns, bruoders, vatters und guoten fründts bluot herus’. 20 Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 293. 21 Ibid, p. 275. 22 Jennifer Spinks, ‘Codpieces and Potbellies in the Songs Drolatiques: Satirizing Masculine Self-Control in Early Modern France and Germany’, in Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline van Gent (eds.), Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 88. 23 ‘Dasselb sich, Theißgen, gar nich zaimpt, Daß ihrdie aller beste nempt’; ‘Ja, frau, und daß ihr glaubet haß, so kompt und nempt selb die maß’. 24 Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 141. 25 See Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 300–321. 26 Roper, Witch Craze, p. 171. 27 Martin Montanus, Schwankbücher, ed. Johannes Bolte (Stuttgart, 1899), p. 289: ‘ein klaines würstlin’. 28 Ibid, p. 290: ‘Ey kum her, mein fraw! Ich hab noch ein kleins stimplin’; ‘weger ein zipffelin weder gar nichts’. 29 ‘Ein schön kürtzweilig faßnacht-spiel mit dreyen personen, nemlich ein kelner und zwen bawren, die holen den bachen im teutschen hof’, in Edmund Goetze and Adelbert von Keller (eds), Hans Sachs, vol. 5 (Tübingen, 1870), pp. 31–46. Kenneth Moxey translates ‘bachen’ as ‘sausage’ in his Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 117–18. However, bachen is more accurately a type of speck or bacon, though these cured products could be rolled into large salami-like sausage shapes for curing. 30 On the role of inns in early modern German Europe, see B. Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Beat Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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31 On the relationship between gender and drinking, see Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 32 Z I, p. 567 (First Zürich Disputation, 3 March 1523). 33 Mavis E. Mate, Women in Medieval English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 14. See Deborah Valenze, ‘The Art of Women and the Business of Men: Women’s Work and the Dairy Industry, c. 1740–1840’, Past and Present 131 (1991), pp. 142–69, particularly pp. 142–7 for discussion of dairying as ‘women’s work’ before the eighteenth century. 34 The Illustrated Bartsch 13, commentary, ‘German Masters of the Sixteenth Century: Erhard Schoen, Niklas Stoer’: ‘Lament of the Three Poor Housmaids’/ ‘Klage der Drei Hausmädchen’. From the accompanying text: ‘Auf dem dorff hab ich hartes leben/ Mit schwerer arbeye vnd darneben/ Sumer vnd winter wenig zu schlaffen/ Mit kuen, sewen, genss vnd schaaffen/ Mit melcken, putern’. 35 Margaret Berger (ed.), Hildegard of Bingen. On Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Selections from Cause et Cure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 84. See Cristina Mazzoni, The Women in God’s Kitchen: Cooking, Eating, and Spiritual Writing (New York: Continuum, 2005), ch. 2, ‘How to Make Cheese and Eat Love’, pp. 34–47. 36 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, tr. John Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 57–8. 37 SI, vol. III, p. 20; DWB vol. XI pp. 250, 252–3, 256. 38 DWB, vol. XI, p. 253. 39 Andreas Karlstadt von Boden, Antwort, geweicht wasser belangend: wider einen Bruder Johan. Fritzhans genant: holtzuger ordens (Wittenberg, 1521), f.25v : ‘Ach ihr keeszpetler habet der Christenheit mehr schades dan iiij. tausend Juden’. 40 Rudolf Gwalther, Der Endtchrist (Zürich, 1546): ‘Die unverschamten kässjeger, wurst und schmalzbettler, die bettelmunch und sunst andre munch’. 41 Z I, pp. 565–6 (First Zürich Disputation, 3 March 1523). Johannes Fabri seemed unfamiliar with Zwingli’s characteristically colloquial turn of phrase: ‘Ein häßene käß? Was ist das? Ich bedarff keins käß’. See also Gottfried Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 1981), p. 103, n. 102. 42 Peasant Wedding scene by Maarten van Cleve, referenced by Paul Vandenbroeck, ‘Verbeeck’s Peasant Weddings: A Study of Iconography and Social Function’, Similous: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 14 (1984), p. 100. This image’s whereabouts are not known, but the sausage and egg necklace also appears in van Cleve’s The King Drinks. 43 Montanus, Schwankbücher, pp. 275–6. 44 Ibid., p. 276.

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45 Roper, ‘ “The Common Man”, “The Common Good”, “Common Women”: Gender and Meaning in the German Reformation Commune’, Social History 12 (1987), pp. 3–4. 46 AGZR, doc. 233.1.c: ‘An der alten fasnacht habint er . . . in des buochtruckers hus das küechli gereicht’. 47 For example, E. G. Rupp, ‘The Reformation in Zürich, Strassburg, and Geneva’, in G. R. Elton (ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History: Volume II, The Reformation, 1520–1559 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 98; C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 25. 48 Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 175. 49 See Bob Scribner, ‘Reformation, Carnival, and the World Turned Upside-Down’, Social History 3.3 (October 1978), pp. 303–29, esp. 304–5. 50 Ibid., p. 323. 51 Ibid., pp. 322–4. 52 Keith Thomas, ‘Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society’, Past and Present 29 (1964), pp. 53–4. 53 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Cambidge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). 54 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France’, Past and Present 50 (1971), pp. 41–75; ‘Women on Top’, in Natalie Zemon Davis (ed.), Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 124–51. 55 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), pp. 201–4. 56 Edward Muir, ‘Carnival’, in Paul F. Grendler (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (New York: Scribner’s, 1999), vol. 1, p. 348. 57 Rebecca Ehrstine, ‘Of Peasants, Women, and Bears: Political Agency and the Demise of Carnival Transgression in Bernese Reformation Drama’, Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2000), p. 677. 58 See Peter Pfrunder, Pfaffen, Ketzer, Totenfresser: Fastnachskultur der Reformationszeit. Die Berner Spiele von Niklaus Manuel (Zürich: Chronos, 1989), pp. 72–8, 82–4; Heidy Greco-Kaufmann, ‘Von rechten litten ist guot schimpfen’: Der Luzerner Marcolfis und das schweizer Fastnachtspiel des 16. Jahrhundert (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), pp. 22–4, 27–30, 36–41; Ehrstine, Theatre, Culture, and Community, pp. 84–6. 59 Gottfried Locher, Die Zwinglische Reformation im Rahmen der europäischen Kirchengeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), p. 426.

190

Notes

60 Eckehard Simon, ‘The Allemanic “Herbst und Mai” Play and Its Literary Background’, Monatshefte 62.3 (Fall 1970), pp. 217–30. 61 Beschreibung des Waldmannischen Auflaufs zu Zürich von einem Zeitgenossen, ed. Moritz von Stürler, Archiv für schweizerische Geschichte 9 (1853), pp. 279–329. 62 Bullinger, Reformationsgeschichte, vol. II, p. 45. 63 AGZR, doc. 467, pp. 191–2. 64 Regarding Luther – Martin Luther Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 2, p. 50, ‘An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation’. Regarding Zwingli – Z I, p. 537. 65 Niclaus Manuel. Leben und Werke, ed. Karl Grüneisen (Stuttgart, 1837), p. 361. 66 See Peter Jezler, Elke Jezlar and Christine Göttler, ‘Warum ein Bilderstreit? Der Kampf gegen die Götzen in Zürich als Beispiel’, in Hans-Dietrich Altendorf and Peter Jezler (eds), Bilderstreit. Kulturwandel in Zwinglis Reformation (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1984), pp. 83–102; Wandel, Voracious Idols, pp. 67–72. 67 Wandel, Voracious Idols, p. 71. 68 Burke, Popular Culture, p. 265. 69 Ibid., p. 186. 70 Chronik der Stadt Löbau, 1221–1701, ed. Simone Flammiger and Jürgen Hönicke (Löbau: Stadtverwaltung Löbau, 2011), p. 74: ‘Am 5 Februar, dem Aschermittwoch, findet in Zittau “das lächerliche Spiel” zwischen einer bratwurst und einem hering statt’. 71 Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 44. 72 Z I, p. 468 (‘Aktenstücke zur ersten Zürcher Disputation’, January 1523): ‘ein widergedechtnuß’. 73 Z 6.5, p. 91 (‘Christianae fidei brevis et clara expositio ad regem Christianum’, Summer 1531): ‘carnali et crassa manducatio’.

Chapter 6 1 Heinrich von Schultheiss, Eine Außführliche Instruction Wie in Inquisition Sachen des grewlichen Lasters der Zauberey gegen Die Zaubere der Göttlichen Majestät und der Christenheit Feinde ohn gefahr der Unschuldigen zu procediren . . . (Köln, 1634), p. 217: ‘3. Was habt ihr für essen gehabt?’. 2 Ibid. By comparison, Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 141, calculates nine questions about the form of demon worship in rituals, and twelve about worship of the devil as a god (Schultheiss, Eine Außführliche, pp. 220–22).

Notes

191

3 The literature on the witch-hunt is vast. See particularly: Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 4th edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); Julian Goodare, The European Witch-Hunt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Robin Briggs, Witches & Neighbours: The Social & Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London: Viking, 1996). 4 See the discussion of recent research on demonology in Gerhold Scholz Williams, ‘Demonologies’, in Brian Levack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 69–83. 5 Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. viii. 6 Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print & Visual Culture in SixteenthCentury Europe (London: Routledge, 2007). 7 Lyndal Roper, ‘Witchcraft and the Western Imagination’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (6th series) 16 (2006), pp. 117–41, especially 119. See also Lyndal Roper, The Witch in the Western Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), esp. Introduction, pp. 1–24. 8 Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 82. 9 For example, in his extraordinarily wide-ranging study, Clark only briefly discusses: the representation of witches’ ‘sabbath’ meal in Jan Ziarnko’s illustration of Pierre de Lancre’s description (p. 90); Schultheiss’s detailed interest in both the menu and serving manner at witches’ ‘sabbath’ meals (p. 141); Hermann Witekind’s skepticism of milk magic (p. 204); and Luther’s awareness of it as a believed social problem (p. 490). 10 Roper, ‘Witchcraft and Imagination’, p. 122. 11 Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 161. 12 Rosa Maria Toivo, Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland and the Wider European Experience (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 41. 13 Stephen A. Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 136–45. 14 Michael Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 127. 15 Roper, The Witch in the Western Imagination, p. 97. See also Roper, Witch Craze, pp. 32, 159. 16 Part II, Q1, ch. 14, 142A. Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum (Speyer, 1486/7). For ease of reference, I have used the modern printed version Christopher Mackey (ed.), Malleus Maleficarum, Vol. I: The Latin Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Vol. II: The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Mackey’s English translation is, at

192

17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

Notes times, misleading; so I have included the useful cross-referenced numbering which is used in both volumes, and used my own translation of the Latin where necessary. Malleus, Part II, Q1, ch. 14, 142B. Ken Albala, ‘Milk: Nutritious and Dangerous’, in Harlan Walker (ed.), Milk: Beyond the Dairy. Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery 1999 (London: Prospect, 2000), pp. 19–30, especially 19, is an excellent overview of medieval and early modern dietary debates on both human and animal milk. See also Deborah Valenze, Milk: A Local & Global History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 34–57 (medieval), pp. 58–80 (early modern). Albala, ‘Milk’, pp. 23–4. See Barbara Orland, ‘White Blood and Red Milk: Analogical Reasoning in Medical Practice and Experimental Physiology (1560–1730)’, in Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King and Claus Zittel (eds), Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 443–78. Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), p. 241. Roland Barthes, ‘Wine and Milk’, in Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (London, 1972), pp. 58–61. Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum (Milan, 1626; first published 1608), Bk 2, ch. 15, p. 249: ‘expursque lactis’. Martin Delrio, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Lyon, 1608; first published Louvain, 1599–1600), Bk 3, Part 1, Q4, sec. 3, pp. 208–9. On Delrio, see Johannes M. Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the CounterReformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Lambert Daneau, Les Sorciers. Dialogue tres-utile et necessaire pour ce temps (Geneva, 1574), ch. 3, p. 54: ‘asseichent le laict des nourrisses’. Lambert Daneau, A Dialogue of Witches, tr. Thomas Twyne (London, 1575), f.28v. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 208. Johannes Beetz, Commentum super decem praeceptis decalogi (Louvain, 1486), f.40r: ‘Hier snydick een spaen in mollekens ghevvaen,/ Ende een ander daer toe, so neem ick het milck van deserkoe’. Also Delrio, Bk 3, Part 1, Q4, sec. 3, p. 209. See also P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), Martin del Rio: Investigations into Magic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 126, n. 16. Maxwell-Stuart’s edition frustratingly comprises only translated selections. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 209. Malleus, Part II, Q2, ch. 8, 182D–183A. See discussion in Zika, Appearance, pp. 46–7. Zika, Appearance, p. 40; image on p. 49.

Notes

193

33 Malleus, p. 375/142B–C. 34 Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg, Die Emeis oder Quadragesimale (Strasbourg, 1516). 35 Johannes Nider, Formicarius (Basel, 1475). 36 On the gendering of witchcraft, see Laura Kounine, ‘The Gendering of Witchcraft: Defence Strategies of Men and Women in German Witchcraft Trials’, German History 31 (2013), pp. 295–317; Stuart Clark, ‘The “Gendering” of Witchcraft in French Demonology: Misogyny or Polarity?’, French History 5 (1991), pp. 426–37; Susanna Burghartz, ‘The Equation of Women and Witches: A Case Study of Witchcraft Trials in Lucerne and Lausanne in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in Richard J. Evans (ed.), The German Underwold: Deviants and Outcasts in German History (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 57–74. 37 Geiler, Die Emeis, f. 54r: ‘die hexen dye kü versigen und inen die milch nimmen, das sie nicht mer milch geben’. 38 Ibid.: ‘sie die milch au seiner alen oder auss seiner axthelmen melcken’. 39 Ibid.: ‘durch hilff des tüffels’. 40 Ibid., f. 54v: ‘Die milch ist ein leiplich ding’. 41 Ibid.: ‘so kan der tüffel in kurtzer zeit milch dar bringen’. 42 Zika, Appearance, pp. 46–7. 43 Guazzo, Bk I, ch. 8, p. 54: ‘in domus suæ pariete inserto Episto/mio, lac omne uaccarum alienarum eliciebat’. 44 Henri Boguet, Discours exécrable des sorciers (Paris, 1603; first published Lyon, 1590), ch. 33, p. 81: ‘herbs mauuaises’, ‘bonnes herbes’. 45 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584; modern print edition London: J. Rodker, 1930), Bk 7, ch. 16, p. 87. 46 Ibid., Bk 15, ch. 31, p. 262. 47 Hermann Witekind (aka ‘Augustin Lercheimer’), Christlich bedencken vnd erinnerung von Zauberey (Speyer, 1597; first published Heidelberg, 1585), ch. 11, p. 95: ‘sie muss daben senn mit irem kübel und sie melcken’. 48 Scot, Bk 12, ch. 21, p. 160. 49 Boguet, ch. 33, p. 81: ‘à l’instant’. 50 Ibid.: ‘si subtilement’. 51 Guazzo, Bk I, ch. 8, p. 54: ‘dæmon eas mulcebat, et celerrimè lac eò transportabat’. 52 Malleus, Part II, Q1, ch. 14, 142C–143A. 53 Ibid., Part II, Q1, ch. 14, 143C. 54 Guazzo, Bk 1, ch. 8, p. 52. 55 Malleus, Part II, Q1, ch. 14, 143C–D. 56 Nicolas Rémy, Daemonolatreiae libri tres (Lyon, 1595), Bk 2, ch. 9, p. 256. 57 Ibid.: ‘mulierum ingenium’. 58 Ibid.: ‘nam furto etiam subducti ex alieno horto oleris pœna est fustium in Lotharingia’.

194 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83

Notes Ibid., p. 256: ‘eam lingue petulantiam’; ‘semiuiuam’. Ibid., Bk I, ch. 13, p. 105. Ibid.: ‘muliere, quam alioqui perspicacissimam nouerat’. Ibid. Ibid., Bk 2, ch. 13, p. 278: ‘rixæ frequentes’, ‘procliuitatem’. Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, pp. 140–41, 154–6, 276. Rémy, Bk 2, ch. 4, p. 220: ‘os infixisse’. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, lines 4–11. Malleus, Part III, Q6, 201D. Boguet, ch. 33, p. 81: ‘queses vashes rapporteriét deux fois plus de laict que les siénes’. Rémy, Bk II, ch. 14. See also Guazzo, Bk II, ch. 7. Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host, pp. 124–5. George M. Foster, ‘Peasant Society and the Image of the Limited Good’, American Anthropologist 67 (1965), pp. 296–7. Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host, p. 68. Ralph A. Austen has tentatively tested the application of E. P. Thompson’s concept of a ‘moral economy’ to witchcraft (especially in modern Africa) in ‘The Moral Economy of Witchcraft: An Essay in Comparative History’, in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds), Modernity and Its Malcontents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 89–110. For the concept of the ‘moral economy’ in relation to ‘peasant’ economies, see E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century’, Past and Present 50 (1971), pp. 76–136; James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Malleus, 1A. Ibid., Part II, Q1, ch. 14 (domestic animals), ch. 15 (storms); Q2, ch. 7 (combating magic against weather and domestic animals), ch. 8 (protecting crops). Boguet, chs 33 and 34. William Perkins, A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft (London, 1608), p. 629. Malleus, Part II, Q1, ch. 15. Ibid., Part II, Q1, ch. 15, 145D–147A. For a discussion of Molitor’s work and the original woodcuts, see Natalie Kwan, ‘Woodcuts and Witches: Ulrich Molitor’s De lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus, 1489– 1669’, German History 30 (2012), pp. 493–527. Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Weather, Hunger and Fear: Origins of the European WitchHunts in Climate, Society and Mentality’, German History 13 (1995), pp. 4–5. Ibid., pp. 5–6. Roper, ‘Witchcraft & Western Imagination’, p. 126.

Notes

195

84 Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris, 1612), p. 545. See Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, p. 145. 85 Malleus, Part II, Q1, ch. 13, 141B–D. 86 Ibid., Part II, Q2, ch. 8, 182C. 87 Ibid., Part II, Q1, ch. 14, 144B–C. 88 Ibid., Part II, Q1, ch. 14, 143D–144A. 89 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, line 2. 90 Malleus, Part II, Q1, ch. 14, 142B–C. 91 Delrio, Bk 3, Part 1, Q4, sec. 3, p. 209: ‘Hier slain ick eenen slach, ende eenen anderen als ick mach,/ Ende den derden daer toe, soo behoudick d’melck metter koe’. From Beetz, f.40r. See also Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), Martin del Rio, p. 126, n. 17. 92 Jean Bodin, De la démonamanie des sorciers (Paris, 1580), Bk 3, ch. 5, f.147v. 93 Ostling, Between the Devil and the Host, p. 130. 94 See Kwan, ‘Woodcuts and Witches’, p. 499; Roper, Witch Craze, p. 125. 95 Roper, Witchcraft in the Western Imagination, pp. 96–7. 96 See, for example, Eric Rath, Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2010). 97 Roland Barthes, ‘Reading Brillat-Savarin’, inThe Rustle of Language, tr. Richard Howard (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1989), p. 264. 98 Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 82. Although flawed, Carlo Ginzburg’s Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, tr. Raymond Rosenthal, ed. Gregory Elliot (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), is a provocative exploration of sabbath fantasies. 99 Roper, ‘Witchcraft and Imagination’, pp. 117, 120–21. 100 Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, p. 17. 101 Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, esp. ‘The Food of Wishes: From Cockaigne to Utopia’, pp. 118–54, and ‘Food of Regret’, pp. 155–200. 102 Roper, Witch Craze, p. 74. 103 Rémy, Bk 1, ch. 16, p. 127: ‘Insuaues, atque illiberales’; ‘& qui praeterea famem nihil depellant’. 104 Ibid.: ‘humanis, morticinis’. 105 Roper, Witch Craze, p. 277, n. 13. 106 Rémy, Bk 1, ch. 16, p. 127: ‘epulas sordere’. 107 Ibid.: ‘exspuere’. 108 Boguet, p. 52: ‘qu’il luy sembloit, qu’elle ne mangeoit rien’; ‘n’estoit que vent’. 109 Ibid.: ‘le Diable est tousiours trompeur, puis qu’il repaist les siens de vent au lieu des viádes solides’. 110 Robin Briggs, ‘ “Many Reasons Why”: Witchcraft and the Problem of Multiple Explanation’, in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts

196

111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

125

126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

Notes (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 60. Roper, Witch Craze, p. 115. Schultheiss, Eine Außführliche, pp. 216–20. de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance, pp. 367–8. Ibid., p. 368: ‘ennemies des yeux, du goût, de l’attouchement, & de coeur’. Rémy, Bk 1, ch. 16, p. 127: ‘sine sale ac pane’. Ibid., pp. 127–8. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., p. 129: ‘nimirium quia salis in ea precipua semper fuit religio’. Ibid.: ‘ex re purissima, aqua videlicit marina’. Ibid.: ‘Nihil autem est quod homines aequitatis, ac iustitiae magis admoneat, atque sal’. Boguet, ch. 21, p. 52: ‘la raison est bonne’; ‘que le diable a extrememet en haine’. Ibid.: ‘vn Antidote soouuerain contre la puissance du diable’; ‘vn signal de sagette’; ‘pure folie’. Euan Cameron has discussed early modern consecrated salt in his Enchanted Europe, esp. pp. 196–202. Anne-Francoise Morel, ‘Church Consecration in England 1549–1715: An Unestablished Ceremony’, in Maarten Delbeke and Minou Schraven (eds.), Foundation, Dedication and Consecration in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 303. Susan Karant-Nunn, ‘To Beat the Devil: Baptism and the Conquest of Sin’, in The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 45–6. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 43. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400– c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 281. Boguet, ch. 25, p. 89. Robin Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 263, 311, 313, 317, 318. Alfonso Castro, De Iusta Hereticorum Punitione Libri Tres (Antwerp, 1568; first published Salamanca, 1547), pp. 87–8. Ibid.: ‘cibos insipidos’. Ibid.: ‘dixit: Nunc laudeteur Deus, quonian iam venit sal’. Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 73. Boguet, p. 52: ‘a rapporté le contraire, & dict qu’elle anoit mage au sabbat du pain, de la chair, & du frommage’.

Notes

197

135 Rémy, p. 130: ‘Panis vsum ad tolerandam vitam’. 136 Ibid.: ‘multae iniuriae, pestes, calamitatésque quas humanis rebus quotidie important’. 137 Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, p. 125.

Chapter 7 1 Court Book of Shetland 1602–4 (hereafter SCB), ed. Gordon Donaldson (Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1954), pp. 120, 122. 2 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 3 On the relationship between Inquisition and witchcraft, see María Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain: Abracadabra Omnipotens, tr. Susannah Howe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Rainer Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Draing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition, tr. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Guido Ruggiero, Blinding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–14 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980). For a flawed but provocative exploration of Inquisition and witchcraft, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries, tr. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (London: Routledge, 1983). On the widespread absence of witch crazes, see Alison Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561– 1652 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 4 For some of the background to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Shetland, see some of the essays in Donald Withrington (ed.), Shetland and the Outside World, 1469–1969 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. Donaldson, ‘The Scots Settlement in Shetland’, pp. 8–19; Barbara E. Crawford, ‘The Pledging of the Islands in 1469: The Historical Background’, pp. 32–48. 5 H. A. H. Boelsman Kranenburg, ‘The Netherlands Fisheries and the Shetland Islands’, in Withrington (ed.), Shetland and the Outside World, p. 100. 6 Donaldson, ‘Scots’, pp. 9–10, 13. 7 SCB 1615–29, p. 159; Miscellany of the Maitland Club, vol. I (Edinburgh, 1833), p. 170 (hereafter Maitland and volume). 8 Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, ‘The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft’, www.shca.ed.ac.uk/witches/, archived 2003. Hereafter SSW. SSW references are to the entry numbers in the SSW database. 9 See Lauren Martin, ‘Scottish Witchcraft Panics Re-examined’, in Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, and Joyce Miller (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan), pp. 119–43.

198

Notes

10 James I and VI, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597). For the 1590 panic, see Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000); for the 1597 panic, see Goodare, ‘The Scottish Witchcraft Panic of 1597’, in Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, pp. 51–72; for sixteenth-century Scottish witchcraft in general, see P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Satan’s Conspiracy: Magic and Witchcraft in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001), though MaxwellStuart’s view of Scottish witchcraft as a cult or conspiracy is distracting. 11 Liv Helene Willumsen, Witches of the North: Scotland & Finnmark (Leiden: Brill, 2013). See pp. 149–220 for Shetland and Orkney; pp. 168–77 for a brief quantitative analysis of Shetland witchcraft trials from the SSW; pp. 178–216 focuses on specific cases from the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Willumsen has some more statistics on the Northern Isles in ‘Seventeenth Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, PhD Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2008, Appendix C, pp. 312–14. 12 Willumsen, Witches of the North, pp. 169, 219. 13 SCB 1615–29, p. 38. 14 Ibid., p. 39. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3, L.4–6. 19 Ibid., Act 1, Scene 2, L.7–29. 20 SCB 1615–29, p. 39. 21 Ibid., p. 40. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 SCB 1602–4, pp. 86, 88, 92. 26 Ibid., p. 29. 27 Ibid., p. 30; SSW C/LA/3044. 28 Calculated from: SCB 1602–4; Court Book of Orkney & Shetland 1612–13 (hereafter OSCB), ed. Robert S. Barclay (Kirkwall: W. R. Mackintosh, 1962); Court Book of Shetland, 1615–29 (hereafter SCB), ed. Gordon Donaldson (Lerwick: Shetland Library, 1991). Larner counts four extra Shetland witches from nineteenth-century secondary sources which she dates to c. 1600–1620, which are included in the SSW (Andrew Duncan, Patrick Peterson, Marjorie Ritchie, Nicol [Unknown]); none have any details of accusations. The SSW does not include Janet Archibald (1602) or two accused witches who were acquitted of wrongdoing. 29 SSW C/LA/3042, C/LA/3043; SCB 1602–4, pp. 22, 57.

Notes 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54

199

SSW C/LA/3041; SCB 1602–4, pp. 22, 57. SSW C/LA/3046; SCB 1602–4, p. 34. SSW C/LA/3045; SCB 1602–4, pp. 90–91. Robberstad, ‘Udal Law’, in Withrington (ed.), Shetland and the Outside World, pp. 58–9. OSCB 1612–13, p. 25. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 26. For Geillis, see SSW C/EGD/2216. Note that the islanders called the gypsies ‘egiptianis’ (see OSCB 1612–13, ‘Glossary’, p. 95; for Magnus, see SSW C/EGD/ 2214). SSW C/EGD/39. SCB 1615–29, pp. 38–40. SSW C/EGD/963. SSW C/EGD/2244. SSW C/EGD/964. Lizanne Henderson, ‘Witch Hunting and Witch Belief in the Gaidhealtachd’, in Goodare, Martin and Miller (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, p. 100. Ronald Hutton, ‘Witch-Hunting in Celtic Societies’, Past and Present 212 (2011), p. 56. Ibid., p. 65. Richard P. Jenkins, ‘Witches and Fairies: Supernatural Aggression and Deviance among the Irish Peasantry’, in Peter Narváez (ed.), The Good People: New Folklore Essays (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), pp. 310, 306. Julian Goodare, ‘The Aberdeenshire Witchcraft Panic of 1597’, Northern Scotland 18 (1998), p. 17. For a discussion of the legal mechanics of witchcraft cases in the 1590s, see Julian Goodare, ‘The Framework for Scottish Witch-Hunting in the 1590s’, Scottish Historical Review 81 (2002), pp. 240–50. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, ‘Witchcraft and the Kirk in Aberdeenshire, 1596–7’, Northern Scotland 18 (1998), pp. 1–14; Edward J. Cowan, ‘Witch Persecution and Folk Belief in Lowland Scotland: The Devil’s Decade’, in Goodare, Martin and Miller (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, pp. 71–94. Goodare discusses his differences with Maxwell-Stuart in ‘Aberdeenshire’, pp. 34–6. Ibid., p. 18. Julian Goodare, ‘Women and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland’, Social History 23 (1998), pp. 292–3. Goodare, ‘Re-examined’, p. 139. Goodare, ‘Scottish Withcraft Panic of 1597’, pp. 52–3.

200

Notes

55 For Bane see SSW C/JO/3033; Spaldarg SSW C/JO/3034. 56 ‘Notes by Mister John Ros, Minister at Lumphanan, Regarding Certaine Persons Accusit of Witchcraft’, pp. 189–92, in John Stuart (ed.), The Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vol. I (hereafter Spalding and volume) (Aberdeen, 1841). 57 SSW C/JO/3095; Spalding I, p. 191. 58 SSW C/JO/3107; Spalding I, pp. 190–91. 59 SSW C/EGD/2140; Spalding I, p. 191. 60 SSW C/JO/3093; Spalding I, p. 192. 61 Goodare discusses how Ross’s actions reinforce the view that local ministers were far from the driving force behind the 1597 panic: ‘Aberdeenshire’, p. 25. 62 SSW C/EGD/2154; ‘Trials for Witchcraft’, Spalding I, pp. 142–5. 63 Regarding Bane – C/JO/3033; Spalding I, pp. 156–62. Regarding Rogie – SSW C/ JO/3035; Spalding I, pp. 145–7, 153–6. 64 SSW C/EGD/2150; Spalding I, pp. 105–10. 65 SSW C/EGD/2119; Spalding I, pp. 111–16. 66 SSW C/EGD/2220; Spalding I, pp. 83–97. 67 SSW C/EGD/2159; Spalding I, pp. 125–8. 68 SSW C/EGD/2160; Spalding I, pp. 128–30. 69 SSW C/EGD/2172; Spalding I, pp. 117–25. 70 Lauren Martin, ‘The Devil and the Domestic: Witchcraft, Quarrels and Women’s Work in Scotland’, in Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, p. 87. 71 Louise Jackson, ‘Witches, Wives and Mothers: Witchcraft Persecution and Women’s Confessions in Seventeenth-Century England’, Women’s History Review 4 (1995), p. 71. 72 SSW C/EGD/2159; Spalding I, pp. 125–8. 73 For example, Marion Leyland in 1633, SSW C/EGD/1268, and Jean Craig in 1649, SSW C/EGD/1605. 74 Jacqueline Van Gent, Magic, Body, and the Self in Eighteenth Century Sweden (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 112–17; Stephen Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 136–43. 75 Jan-Inge Wall, Tjuvmjölkande Väsen, i. Äldre nordisk tradition (University of Uppsala, 1977; English summary, pp. 245–60), ii. Yngre nordisk tradition (University of Uppsala, 1977; English summary, pp. 193–202). See also Jan-Inge Wall and Bodil Nildin-Wall, ‘The Witch as Hare or the Witch’s Hare: Popular Legends and Beliefs in Nordic Tradition’, Folklore 104 (1993), pp. 67–76; Mitchell, pp. 140–41. 76 Eldar Heide, ‘Spinning Seiðr’, in Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere (eds), Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), p. 165. Bente G. Alver,

Notes

77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

201

‘Concepts of the Soul in Norwegian Tradition’, in Reimund Kvideland, Henning K. Sehmsdorf and Elizabeth Simpson (eds), Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 118–20. Donaldson, Shetland Life, p. 1. Robberstad, p. 57. Ibid., pp. 54–5. Klaus Friedland, ‘Hanseatic Merchants and Their Trade with Shetland’, in Withrington (ed.), Shetland and the Outside World, pp. 86–95. This article is interesting but unfortunately lacks footnotes. SCB 1602–4, p. 34. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 67. OSCB 1612–13, p. 20. H. L. Rogers, ‘Review: Shetland Court Book’, Scottish Historical Review 35 (1956), p. 161. Donaldson, Shetland Life under Earl Patrick (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1958), p. 124. SCB 1602–4, p. 75. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 12. Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 153; Garthine Walker, ‘Women, Theft, and the World of Stolen Goods’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts (London: UCL Press, 1994), pp. 81–105;

202

107 108 109 110

111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

Notes Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 159–209; Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 94–133. See John Walter and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the Social Order’, Past and Present 71 (1976), pp. 22–42. Jütte, Poverty & Deviance, p. 151. Rublack, Crimes of Women, p. 132. Orkney & Shetland Records (hereafter OSR), ed. Alfred W. Johnston and Amy Johnston, vol. I (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1907), doc. 88, p. 253: ‘ane lysspone and ane half lysspone buttyr in skaytt’. Ibid., doc. 64, p. 130: ‘barellam butiri sufficientis marcimonii’; ‘petram butiri’; ‘vnacum lie skat, viz., . . . vna petra siue leschepund butiri’. Ibid., doc. 65, p. 131: ‘barrelis butteri subscriptas’. Ibid., doc. 45, p. 84 (translated by editors from Norse). Ibid., doc. 69, p. 182: ‘solidos solutionis Zeitlandis, viz., binam partem earundem in panno lanio, Norice vocato wadmell, et tertiam partem in butiro’. Ibid., Index II, p. 349. Ibid., doc. 81, p. 235; doc. 82, p. 237. SCB 1615–29, pp. 10–11. SCB 1602–4, p. 46. ‘The Complayntis of the Commownis and Inhabitants of Shetland . . . February 1576’, in David Balfour (ed.), Oppressions of the Sixteenth-Century in the Islands of Orkney and Shetland (Edinburgh, 1859), pp. 71–2. OSCB 1612–13, p. 20; Maitland I, pp. 159–60. Maitland I, pp. 145–6. SCB 1615–29, p. 160. Ibid., p. 162. Maitland I, pp. 149–50, 151. SCB 1615–29, p. 162. Maitland I, p. 151. Ibid., p. 158. OSCB 1612–13, pp. 19–20; Maitland I, p. 159. SCB 1615–29, p. 160. OSCB 1612–13, pp. 20, 23; Maitland I, pp. 160–61, 163. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 20; Maitland I, p. 161. SCB 1615–29, pp. 161–2; Maitland I, p. 174. Ibid., p. 162; Maitland I, p. 175. Ibid., p. 162; Maitland I, pp. 174–5. SCB 1615–29, p. 164; Maitland I, p. 178.

Notes 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155

203

Maitland I, p. 186. Ibid., p. 146. OSCB 1612–13, p. 22; Maitland I, pp. 161–2. Ibid. SCB 1602–4, pp. 122–3. Ibid., pp. 134–5. Ibid., 23 July 1603, p. 92. Ibid., pp. 136, p. 145. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., pp. 10, 71. SCB 1615–29, p. 41. SCB 1602–4, pp. 7–8.

Chapter 8 1 Sidney Mintz, Sweeteness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (London: Viking, 1985), p. 4. 2 On early national identity formation, see Lotte Jensen (ed.), The Roots of Nationalism: National Identity Formation in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). 3 Rebecca Earle, ‘ “If You Eat Their Food. . .”: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America’, American Historical Review 115 (2010), pp. 688–713. 4 Audrey Richards, Hunger & Work in a Savage Tribe. A Functional Study of Nutrition among the Southern Bantu (London: Routledge, 1932), p. 1. 5 Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders. A Study in Social Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 279. 6 See Regina Grafe, Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 52–79; Mintz, Sweetness and Power. 7 RTSI II, Trial of Marina González, Wife of Francisco de Toledo, 1494, p. 27: ‘Mari. . . hiso un portyllo’.

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Index Aberli, Heinrich 56, 59, 60–1, 69, 73, 77 Albala, Ken 4, 53, 109 Almazán 13, 19–20, 22, 28, 32–4, 39–46 Americas 15, 34, 158 Anabaptists 59, 74, 103 Annales 2–3, 4 anthropology 3–4, 15, 30, 110, 122 Appelbaum Robert 4–5, 123, 130 Atienza 27, 43, 49 aubergines 22–3, 33 bacon 19, 22, 33, 42, 69, 88 bakers 25, 40–1, 56, 60, 65, 97 Barthes, Roland 3, 110, 122–3 Beinart, Haim 27, 29 Boguet, Henri 113–14, 117, 118, 124, 127 bread  Eucharist 100–3, 128, 130, 158 Jewish 18, 27–9, 31, 40–1, 43, 44, 45 as metaphor 63, 158 witchcraft 125, 127–9, 129–30 Briggs, Robin 116, 124, 127 Brillat-Savarin Jean Anthelme 30, 123 Bullinger, Heinrich 62, 91, 98 Burke, Peter 30, 97, 99 butchery 56, 58, 65, 98–9, 150 Jewish 16, 20, 35, 45, 38–9 violence 78–89 butter 90, 93, 95, 129, 141 as currency 148–9 Lenten fast 66–7, 73, 98 theft 146–7, 153 witchcraft 114–15, 134–6, 138, 141, 144–5, 152 Bynum, Caroline Walker 4, 43, 54 Camporesi, Piero 5, 123 Carnival 48, 55–6, 88, 95–103 Castile 13–50 cheese Lenten fast 46, 53, 63, 66, 73, 99

sex and fertility 83, 89–91, 95 theft 147 witchcraft 128, 129 chicken 16, 19, 33, 39, 91–2 Ciudad Real 18–19, 22, 27–8, 35–7, 39–41, 43–9 Clark, Stuart 107, 123 community 3, 160–1 crime 131–2, 146–8, 149–54 Inquisition 26, 37, 46–50 Reformation 54, 67, 95 witchcraft 115–21, 137, 154–5 conversos  beliefs 24, 29, 32, 49–50 community 46–50 food 17–18, 32, 38–42 gender 37, 42–6 identity 29–34 intolerance 14–15 convivencia 14, 17 crime see theft ‘crypto–Jews’ see conversos and Judaism dairy 89–95, 138–46; see also butter, cheese, milk Davis, Natalie Zemon 32, 97, 163 de Lancre, Pierre 119, 123, 124–6 demonology 107–8, 128–30 agriculture 118–19 food rituals 121–8 milk magic 108–15 social conflict 115–17, 120–1 weather magic 118–20 Douglas, Mary 4, 30 Easter 40, 41, 70, 92, 100 Edwards, John 24–5 eel 20, 33 eggs Lenten fast 28, 32, 41, 48, 56, 60, 63 symbolism 33, 91–5

224 embodied practices 31, 158–9 empanadas see pies Erasmus, Desiderius 57, 58, 62, 78 fables 80–2 fantasy 5, 121–8 fasting 20, 32–3, 54–5, 64–5; see also Lent Jewish 35, 36, 44, 64, 72 fish fishing, 132, 134–5, 145 Jewish diet 20, 33 price 57–9 symbolism 99 theft 131, 146–7, 153 witchcraft 143 Flammer, Elsi 2, 55–6, 95 Froschauer, Christoph 55–60, 63, 69, 73, 95–6, 103 garlic 20–1, 45, 63 Geiler von Kaysersberg, Johann 112–13, 115 gender food symbolism 83–95 history 5 inquisition 25, 37, 42–6 Judaism 37, 43–4 masculinity 85–9 reformation 95 witchcraft 109–13, 116, 119–20, 138, 142–6 González, Marina 1, 19, 34, 35–7, 43–4, 46–8 husband 43–4 Guazzo, Francesco Maria 110, 113, 114, 115, 116 ham 19 herring 59, 99 identity 30–1, 157–8 Inquisition 17–23, 29–34, 38 reformation 57 indulgences 62, 66–7, 73 Inquisition 13–50 auto–da–fé 35 confessions 27 establishment in Spain 15 global 15 quantification 23–4

Index records 15–16 Roman 29–30, 131 torture 36 witch–hunting and 131 James VI and I 133–4 Judaism ‘crypto–Judaism’ 15–16, 17–18, 24–5, 29, 34, 37, 41–2 food stereotypes 20–3 funerals 34–5 gender 37, 43–4 kosher 16, 28, 38–9, 49, 64 Passover 31, 40, 41 pork 17–18 Sabbath 33, 43, 44, 64–5 Spain 14–15 Yom Kippur 35 kitchens 37–46, 50, 95, 146 Lent 54–5, 100, 103 Carnival and 48, 55–6, 88, 95–103 fast–breaking in Spain 26–9, 32–3, 41, 46, 49 fast–breaking in Zürich 53–61, 63–8, 71–3 preaching 62, 112 sex 95 Lévi–Strauss, Claude 4, 5–6 Luther, Martin 66, 80, 98 Macbeth 116, 120, 135, 142 maids 45–6, 48, 55–6, 90, 114 Malleus Maleficarum 109–21 markets 49, 58, 78, 92, 141, 143 meat kosher 16, 20, 35, 45, 38–9 Lent 56–61, 68, 71–2 offal 20, 78–9, 88 symbolism 78–89 theft 137, 147, 153 witchcraft 124, 127 Melammed, Renée Levine 37, 39, 40 mercenaries 80–3 milk 90 breastfeeding 110–11, 145 magic 108–15, 117, 120–1, 134–6, 138–46 Molitor, Ulrich 118–19, 121–2

Index moriscos 14, 17–19, 34, 38, 49 Muslims 14–15, 17–19, 38, 54, 74 ‘New World’ see Americas Norse law 132, 137–9, 145, 149 oil 22–3, 45, 66–7, 98 papacy 14–15, 80, 81, 118 Patersdochter, Margaret 2, 131, 154 pies 13, 15, 16, 33 pork 4, 17–22, 28, 34–6, 59, 99 Reformation 95, 159 Carnival 96–7, 103 Christian liberty 64 Zürich 53–4, 69–75, 103–4 religion 159–60 identity 29–34 ‘lived religion’ 31–2, 53–4 Rémy, Nicholas 115–16, 117, 123–4, 125, 128 Richards, Audrey 3, 4, 5, 160 ritual Carnival, 97–9 meals 56, 99, 100–3 religious 31–2 slaughter 38–9, 68 witchcraft 121–8 Roper, Lyndal 95, 107, 110–11, 119, 123–4 salt 39, 63, 125–7, 129 sausages Carnival 98–9 fast–breaking 53, 54–6, 60–1, 67 Inquisition 20, 28 production 78–9 social status 59, 69, 78 symbolism 78–80, 83–9, 99, 103–4 Scandinavia 109, 139, 145, 148 Scot, Reginald 114 Scotland highlands 140–1 rule of Shetland 132, 137, 139 witchcraft 133–4, 140–5, 154 sex food symbolism 83–95, 98–9, 102, 103 Lent 95, 100

225

social relations 47 witchcraft 118, 136 Shakespeare 17, 22, 116, 120 Shetland 132–3 crime 131, 146–54 economy 132–3, 145, 147, 148, 149–50 law and governance 133, 138, 145, 149–52 witchcraft 131, 134–40, 154–5 slander 48, 151–3, 155 slaves 46 smell 21–2, 58, 146 Soria 13, 20, 24–6, 28–9, 33, 43, 48–9 Spain 21, 24, 30 Christian ‘reconquest’ 13–15 food 18, 21, 30, 50 gender 42 imperialism 34, 158 medieval ‘convivencia’ 17–18 religion 24, 32 Spanish Inquisition see Inquisition Swiss Confederation 66–7, 80, 81–3, 90, 97–8, 103–4 theft 115–16, 131, 146–54 von Ärm, Bärbel 2, 56, 95 wine  drinking 67, 68 Jewish 29, 44 symbolism 110 witchcraft 114, 115, 121–2 witchcraft agriculture 118–19 emotions 120, 123 envy 116–17, 122, 137 Gaelic 140–1 gender 109–13, 116, 119–20, 138, 142–6 Holy Roman Empire 107 ‘limited good’ 117 milk magic 108–15, 117, 120–1, 134–6, 138–46 Poland 109, 117, 121 rituals 121–8 Scotland 133–4, 140–5, 154 Shetland 131, 134–40, 154–5 social conflict 116–21, 144–5

226 weather 118–20, 134–5 witch-hunting 107, 109, 118, 120–1, 133–4 Zürich council 55–7, 60–1, 62, 65, 70–3 poor 65–6 Reformation 70–5, 103–4

Index Zwingli, Huldrych Eucharist 100–3 fast-breaking 55–7, 62–5, 66–8, 70–5 literary writings 62, 81 mercenary recruitment 81–3 preaching 55, 62 Reformation 60, 62, 64, 69–70, 73–5, 103–4