A Desirable Disaster
A man’s wife has run away, but everyone knows where she is: living with the priest who enchanted her. In this episode our host digs deep into her own archival research to bring you four cases of seduction by magic in one fourteenth-century Italian city. Why were priests and women so likely to be accused of using magic in late medieval Europe, and who could resist their charms?
Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.
For more on these cases, see “The Charms of Women and Priests: Sex, Magic, Gender and Public Order in Late Medieval Italy.”
Music
Purple Planet - Red Mist
Purple Planet - Civilisation
Purple Planet - Tormented
Purple Planet - Introspection
Purple Planet - Harbinger of Doom
Purple Planet - Sense of Loss
Purple Planet - Shadowlands
Sources
Primary
Archivio di Stato di Lucca. Capitoli. Vol. 1.
Archivio di Stato di Lucca. Sentenze e bandi. Vol. 26 (1361).
Archivio Storico Diocesano di Lucca. Tribunale ecclesiastico. Cause criminali. Vols. 5 (1352-1353), 8 (1356), & 13 (1359).
Kramer, Heinrich and Jacob Sprenger. “Why Most Witches Are Women: Kramer and Sprenger, The Hammer of Witches, 1.6.” In The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment. Edited and translated by Brian Copenhaver, 345–346. New York: Penguin Books, 2015.
Secondary
Bailey, Michael D. “The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature.” The American Historical Review 111 (2006): 383–404.
Bratchel, M. E. Medieval Lucca and the Evolution of the Renaissance State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Brodel, Hans Peter. The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
Brucker, Gene. “Sorcery in Early Renaissance Florence.” Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963): 7–24.
Collins, David J. “Albertus, Magnus or Magus? Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Reform in the Late Middle Ages.” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 1–44.
Cullum, Pat. “Give Me Chastity: Masculinity and Attitudes to Chastity and Celibacy in the Middle Ages,” Gender & History 25 (2013): 621–636.
Gentilcore, David. From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.
Green, Louis. Lucca Under Many Masters: A Fourteenth-Century Italian Commune in Crisis (1328–1342). Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 1995.
Hadley, Dawn M. “Introduction: Medieval Masculinities.” In Masculinity in Medieval Europe. Edited by D. M. Hadley, 1–18. New York: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd., 1999.
Hansen, Joseph. Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter. Bonn: Carl Georgi, Universìtäts-Buchdmckerei und Verlag, 1901.
Hansen, Joseph. Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, Verlag, 1900.
Herzig, Tamar. “The Demons and the Friars: Illicit Magic and Mendicant Rivalry in Renaissance Bologna.” Renaissance Quarterly 64 (2011): 1025–1058.
Karras, Ruth Mazo. From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Kieckhefer, Richard. “Erotic Magic in Medieval Europe.” In Sex in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays. Edited by Joyce E. Salisbury, 30–55. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991.
Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Klaassen, Frank. “Learning and Masculinity in Manuscripts of Ritual Magic of the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 38 (2007): 49–76
Lansing, Carol. “Gender and Civic Authority: Sexual Control in a Medieval Italian Town.” Journal of Social History 31 (1997): 33–59.
Lansing, Carol. &lduqo;Idolatry and Fraud: The Case of Riperando and the Holy Managlia.” In Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R. I. Moore. Edited by Michael Frassetto, 253–269. Boston: Brill, 2006.
Lea, Henry Charles. Materials toward a History of Witchcraft. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939.
Maxwell-Stuart, P. G. Witchcraft in Europe and the New World, 1400-1800. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Meek, Christine. The Commune of Lucca Under Pisan Rule, 1342–1369. Cambridge: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1980.
Monter, E. William (ed). European Witchcraft. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1969.
Osheim, Duane J. An Italian Lordship: The Bishopric of Lucca in the Late Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Ruggiero, Guido. Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Swanson, Robert N. “Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation.” In Masculinity in Medieval Europe. Edited by D. M. Hadley, 160–177. New York: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd., 1999.
Watt, Jeffrey R. “Love Magic and the Inquisition: A Case from Seventeenth-Century Italy.” The Sixteenth-Century Journal 41 (2010): 675–689.
Wieben, Corinne. “‘As Men Do with Their Wives’: Domestic Violence in Fourteenth-Century Lucca.” California Italian Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 1–13.
Wieben, Corinne. “The Charms of Women and Priests: Sex, Magic, Gender and Public Order in Late Medieval Italy.” Gender & History 29: 141–157.
