#Spooktober 18: Madame de Montespan and the Witchcraft Scandal of 1677

October 18, 2022

When we talk about witch hunts, the mind usually goes to remote and muddy villages where poor old practitioners, mostly focused on healing with herbs and indulging their neighbours’ tantrums, were fiercely snatched away from their lives and persecuted on someone’s whim. This is of course true, but it’s not the whole truth: some major scandals involving witchcraft swept the European courts between the XVI and the XVII Century, shifting power and causing turmoil amongst the people implicated. One of these scandals was the so-called Affair of the Poisons, which implicated an incredible amount of members of the upper aristocracy and created turmoil at the court of King Louis XIV, involving dozens of people, including the king’s official mistress, Madame de Montespan.

You can read the story, and see a funny chart, today on my Patreon.

comics and illustration

Leo Ortolani, Tapum

A un certo punto ci sarà una battuta, in questo fumetto, e riderete. Sappiate che è l’unica. Com’è giusto che sia. Se devo paragonare quest’opera a qualcosa, il confronto più azzeccato è probabilmente lo spettacolo che Marco Paolini trasse dal Sergente nella neve di Rigoni

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Summertime

Omeros in the Caribbeans

Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African

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books and literature

Ioanna Papadopoulou’s The Castaway and the Witch

I had a genuine “oh shit” moment when I read the author’s preface saying this was darker than “Winter Harvest” because – and I absolutely ADORED “Winter Harvest” – that was pitch-black dark. I thought “we’re all going to die”. This maybe has something to

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