>Has anyone seen real proof that there were widespread "cat massacres" in the
>Middle Ages owing to the belief that cats were creatures of the devil?
Dear Susan,
Your hunch is a good one. This one should go into the "misconceptions" list.
There are indications of uncleanliness - at least, Rob Meens from Utrecht
has pointed out that milk which a cat had licked was unclean in early
medieval penitentials - but so it was if any other animal touched
it.(Personal communication) "Cat massacres" were nothing like it, in the
sense that a massacre connotes a sort of mass frenzy killing, and Darnton
mixed two totally unrelated phenomena in his article. One was 18th-century
apprentices angry because the master's cats got better fed than they did;
the other one was "cat feasts". Of these, I know exactly two. In late
medieval Ypres they had a cat feast on the second Wednesday of Lent, in
which they ended up throwing three cats from a tower (H. Viaene, "Kattedat
te Ieper," _Biekorf_ 45 (1939), 47-52. Sixteenth-century Paris was much
crueller, but also ritual - on the eve of St. John's day cats were collected
in bags and burned in the Place de Greve (Alfred Franklin, _Paris et les
parisiens au 16e siecle, Paris, 1928), 508-9). I have found no earlier
indication in descriptions or chronicles of the fifteenth century, or
earlier. So it's an early modern phenomenon in Paris.
As for the "devilishness" of cats - that's also early modern, and tied to
the witch-hunts. Any domestic animal could be a witch's familiar (though
they turn up far more often in England than in the Continent), but the cat
is the domestic animal par excellence. Practically every house in Europe had
a cat - how else to you keep the mice away? So they came in for accusations
of being familiars far more often than other animals. The rest is part and
parcel of the "dark middle ages" nonsense.
Cheers,
Esther
Esther Cohen
Professor of Medieval History
Department of History
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
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