#63 "Women as Witches, Medieval Healthcare, Jousting School"

Medieval Menagerie: Animals Real and Imagined
Any depictions of everyday life from the Middle Ages and Renaissance include wild and domestic animals. The bestiaries, or "books of beasts" that were created in the mIddle Ages describe not only the different kinds of animals known in the day, but also tell us much about the world as it was during that time. Animals both real and imagined were used as symbols, were given religious meanings, and were depicted in allegories and illustrations of manuscripts.

Women as Witches
From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, witchcraft persecutions raged across Europe. The Roman Catholic Church, suffering declining fortunes and influences, sought to blame attacks against its practices on Satan and his minions. Once thought to be sporadic or illusory, witchcraft became standardized into a real and present systemic evil among people needing a scapegoat for society's ills. Papal bulls that linked witchcraft to heresy against the Church sanctioned Inquisition tribunals to try accused witches.

Jousting in the Clouds
For people who love to ride horses, or those who yearn for a taste of history there's a new school in the Southwest that teaches the medieval sport of jousting. In fact, it is the only institution of its kind in the state of New Mexico: The Ravenwood School of Jousting.

Medieval Healthcare: Leeches, Boiling Oil and Maggots
When one thinks of a culture from the past, we may think of it as "unsophisticated" when compared to our own. It's very easy for those of us in the twenty-first century to look at the stomach -churning medical treatments that were available to medical practitioners of the Middle Ages, including leeches plumped-up with a patients blood, draining the blood of an ill person, cathartics, emetics, and doctors reciting prayers over the injured and ill in an effort to have God (or the gods) intervene and heal the loved one.

SCA's Pennsic War Encampment
Photos by Ron Lutz II