Magical Impotence and Divorce in the Middle Ages

Short answer? Yes.

Turns out, at one point in history you definitely could. That is until King Augustus of France in the twelfth century tried it in Pope Innocent III’s ecclesiastical court.

Dr. Kate Lister takes on some of the weirdest topics relating to recorded history, humans, and sex in her aptly titled A Curious History of Sex. Lister is a university lecturer and curates The Whores of Yore blog. This book will take you through everything from the evolution of virginity testing to the history of aphrodisiacs.

However, one of the most extraordinary historical occurrences in the book is the attempted divorce proceedings of King Augustus of France and Ingeborg of Denmark. To all appearances Augustus wanted to marry Ingeborg and then the day after the wedding, he wanted a divorce. His first strategy was to try to prove he and his new wife were related, so, he falsified a family tree. Unsurprisingly, Ingeborg protested this.

His second strategy was to claim Ingeborg cursed him. With Impotence.

Pope Innocent III still refused to grant him a divorce.

Instead, King Augustus decided to pull a Mr. Rochester. And if you ware here only for the fun facts and not for the literature, it means he locked his wife away and married someone else. This enraged the Pope. He closed all the churches in France for nine months and threw down the ultimate gauntlet. Any child born during this nine month period would be declared illegitimate. And then, just to ensure this never happened again, Pope Innocent III took magical impotence as grounds for divorce off the table, permanently, for everyone.

Zombie Unicorn Caterpillar

I have been rereading my collection of zombie literature.  Zombies terrify me.  They are mindless and they seem to need the thing I value most: brains.  I am sure, by now, everyone has seen the fungus which can mind control an ant on whatever meme site you favour.  Or the cockroach steered by a wasp, then buried alive to provide food for the larvae, which will hatch out of the egg she leaves there.  But have you heard of the zombie unicorn caterpillar? No joke, this actually exists.  And more than that, people have been shot over the fungus which is responsible because of its medicinal properties.  And you can read all about it in Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies Reveal About Our World and Ourselves by Matt Simon.  

Okay, so the basics.  This is another mind control fungus. It is, in fact, a relative of the fungus which controls ants.  Except this one preys on the ghost moth caterpillar.  It invaded it, consumed it, caused it to dig upwards as it dies, and then bursts forth from its head.  Ostensibly, it looks like a blade of grass, but as Simon says, as soon as you pull it up you know you aren’t dealing with a plant.  I have never done this, only seen pictures on the internet.  Pull up your favourite search engine, like the one which brought you to this site, and look for photos, seriously weird.  

But wait, there is more.  This fungus, like other fungi, according to Simon, secretes an antibiotic into its host to keep it alive long enough to complete its purpose.  In fact, we have synthesized medications from these fungi, according to Simon.  However, as Simon reports, this particular fungus has turned out to have some pretty legendary features as it is known as “the Himalayan Viagra”.   Simon recounts the actual shooting deaths which have occurred over this fungus near Tibetan villages.  And in one anecdote, Simon informs readers burglars tunnelled into a store to steal $1.5 million worth of this fungus in China. 

Well, this fungus gives new meaning to food for thought. 

Arsenical Clothing

I have been reading a lot of commercial romance lately.  In these lush and opulent worlds, the women wear jewel coloured gowns to balls and soirees of every sort.  In Julia Quinn’s Brighter than the Sun Eleanor gets married in an emerald green gown.  Lisa Kleypas’ Where Dreams Begin Lady Holly is gifted a spectacular gem of a gown by the man who wants to be her lover.  Part of my love for these fictional dresses in inspired by an emerald green evening gown by haute couturier Charles James which I saw in The Metropolitan Museum of Art several years ago.  However, fashion was a dangerous thing, especially anything made in green.  

In the book Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present by Allison Matthews David explores all the dangerous things we wore in the past.  From lice infested garments causing typhus to death by flaming tutu.  My first brush with deadly fashion, like most people, was the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  At the time, my dad had to explain where the name originated.  Mercury, often used by hatters and milliners, caused chronic mercury poisoning and it can cause a variety of psychological symptoms.  Even wearing or handling the hats present health hazards now, at least a century after they were made, according to David.  

However, it is the arsenical green dyes which interested me the most, considering all the romance I have been reading recently featuring green dresses.  During the 1800s many green pieces of clothing, including artificial flowers on hats, children’s clothing, shoes, gloves, coats, in fact everything were coloured with arsenic trioxide.  The girls working with the dyes to make the hats, shoes, and dresses often died horrific deaths.  Covered in open sores from handling the toxic dyes, the young women often covered their faces with handkerchiefs to avoid ruining the products.  The phenomenon was so widespread, France outlawed the use of arsenic pigments and Punch magazine in England wrote several satirical articles on the issue.  Papers across Europe reported the issue and several charitable societies formed to help the afflicted.  

According to David, the arsenic in clothing from this period still presents a danger when handling the pieces.  So there goes my current romantic fantasy.  

Underground Fly Fishing Societies

Someone stole thousands of dollars worth of taxidermy birds from the British Natural History Museum? The answer to the question is yes. His name is Edwin Rist and he was a concert flautist and a Victorian salmon fly-tying enthusiast.

The birds he stole would create the most accurate flies seen in the modern era. Rist packed the birds into a suitcase after he snuck in through a window if the museum annex in Tring. He would later sell the flies to other aficionados who regarded tying them and collecting them as an art form. The flies can contain up to a dozen feathers from different birds around the world, some of them extinct since the late Victorian era.

The book The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson delves into this history of this strange world and the very modern crime which sparked Johnson’s interest. A fly fisher himself, he found the crime fascinating and takes his readers on a bizarre journey through the art form of fly tying and the collectors who want the rarest of the rare original flies. This is a must read for anyone who loves bizarre and true crimes.

Methamphetamine Chocolates

Because you and I both read that correctly.

Once, while travelling, I stumbled across Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs In Nazi Germany in a tiny airport bookstore with a ridiculously small English section. In need of something to read, I picked one of the few books which did not involve a plane being overtaken by terrorists.

Ohler’s book examines the use and abuse of drugs within the Nazi party and military. It starts in the Weimar period, with Anita Berber, an actress, who breakfasted on rose petals coated with chloroform and ether to the rise of methamphetamine usage. The use of stimulants, especially amphetamines, was so prevalent at the time a confectionary manufacturer even used them in chocolates.

Hildebrand Pralinen dosed each bonbon sold with 14 mg of methamphetamine and recommended women consume anywhere between three and nine a day to make housekeeping more enjoyable and curb hunger, according to Ohler. At the high end of the dosage recommendation this is 126 mg of methamphetamine a day!

The Rat King

My uncle recommended a fantastic work of teen fiction called Rotters by Daniel Kraus. This is a book about a teenage boy whose mother has died and he is reunited with the father he has never met. His father inducts the young boy into an ancient and secret society of grave robbers.

It was through this book I learned a rat king is not just an invention for children’s ballet but an actual thing. A horrifyingly disgusting thing.

At one point in the novel, father and son are digging up a grave when they come upon a nest of rats, which turns out to be a rat king. According to Wikipedia, a rat king is a collection of rats whose tails are bound together, through injury, excrement, or foreign substance, or all three. There is a famous rat king preserved in a museum in Hamelin, where they appear to have had more than one rat problem if one gives any credence to the legends of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Baby Farmers

I was in a fantastic bookstore in Bath called Topping and Company Booksellers of Bath and a gentleman there recommended the Jospehine Tey mysteries by Nicola Upson.  This is one of those fantastic and beautiful independent booksellers with ladders spanning ceiling high shelves packed full of books and tables stacked with all sorts of lovely finds.  Perfect for every bibliophile.  Their sales staff give spot on recommendations over tea.  When last I visited I walked away with several kilos of books.  

Anyway, this post is not about amazing bookstores but about baby farmers.  In the third installment of the Josephine Tey series Upson tackles the historic crime phenomenon of baby farming.  Specifically, the Finchley Baby Farmers.  

Amelia Sach and Annie Walters are said to have killed in excess of a dozen infants.  Sach advertised her services for unwed mothers, she would charge for their care and for the birthing process, and then would charge a fee for adopting the infants out to deserving families.  The infants were not adopted out.  Instead, Sach employed Walters to kill the infants and dispose of the remains.  

There were other infamous cases of this practice.  Margaret Waters, who was hanged in 1870, is said to have drugged and starved nineteen infants.  Amelia Dyer, who was hanged in 1896, operated over a thirty-year period.  Rhoda Willis was the final baby farmer to be hanged in 1907. 

Cannibalism in Children’s Literature

Turns out, a lot.

Do you remember in the long version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Those white hot iron shoes for being a usurper to the throne? Applied during a giant feast? Reading the unexpurgated version of the fairy tale, this incident takes place in the last few lines. “The she railed and cursed, and was beside herself with disappointment and anger. First she thought she would not go to the wedding; but then she felt she should have no peace until she went and saw the bride. And then when she saw her she knew her for Snow White, and she could not stir from the place for anger and terror. For they had ready red-hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down dead.”*

For some European history scholars this will sound eerily familiar.

According to Richard Sugg in Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorian, a similar fate awaited a Hungarian rebel in 1514. György Dósza lead a popular uprising against the Hungarian nobility. The nobility made an example of him in the worst way, they had an iron throne and crown made for him and starved his foot soldiers. They built a fire under the iron throne, “until it was white-hot” and roasted him alive in it and forced his soldiers to eat his remains. Sugg suggests the iron crown, at the very least, was a well known form of capital punishment in the renaissance era.

Now, Snow White, the prince, and their friends did not dine on the wicked stepmother, despite her previous actions but this does not mean cannibalism doesn’t appear elsewhere in the work of the Grimm brothers. Maria Tatar, in The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, highlights several instances where people were baked into pies and one cannot forget the witch in the gingerbread house, fattening children. Tatar says the brothers rarely toned down the violence in the tales, often only when someone specifically asked. Rather, they did the exact opposite. They made them more violent and gruesome. Which apparently made them closer to the historical reality Sugg recounts in his book.

Well, that is where my curiosity led me this week. Get curious.

*Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1993.