Room to swing a cat

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This week Law & Liberty published an ambivalently positive review of The Reactionary Mind, by Michael Warren Davis, a book I enjoyed when it first came out. The reviewer, James M Patterson, takes Davis to task for romanticizing the Middle Ages, in the course of which Patterson writes this:

[Davis’s] criticisms of journalism and technology are good, though a little naïve. For example, he says, “It was the peasants, in their simplicity, piety, and common sense who saw through all the made theories” of their day. These same peasants also massacred cats because of their association with evil and witchcraft.

Okay, but what this blog presupposes is… maybe they didn’t?

This is a story I’ve been meaning to dig into for years now. It doesn’t pass the smell test for me, especially because it is always brought up to denigrate medieval people or illustrate their credulity and primitive violence. Like the term “Dark Ages,” if a story, factoid, or anecdote is always brought up to achieve the same effect, and if that effect is always to cut the subject down, double and triple check it, starting with primary sources. So consider this post a set of notes toward a deep dive sometime in the future.

Patterson, above, is making an offhand allusion. Again, the flippancy should arouse suspicion. If it’s this easy to demonstrate the stupidity and superstition of the medieval peasant why is there any difference of opinion? But the broad outline of the story in its various forms usually falls back on these points:

  • In the Middle Ages, cats were closely associated with the Devil and devil worship

  • The association was so strong that in June 1233 Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) issued a bull titled Vox in Rama condemning cats as servants of the devil

  • As a result, medieval people across Europe massacred cats

  • The lack of cats caused growth in the rat populations of Europe, leading to the Black Death

That last point is usually the Paul Harvey twist to story, really driving home the consequences of such brute stupidity and violence toward cats. That’s what you dummies get! seems to be the implied moral. Cat people twitch their whiskers and purr.

If you want the most elaborate and self-congratulatory version of this that I’ve run across, see this World History Encyclopedia article on “Cats in the Middle Ages.” The author is not an historian but a “freelance writer and former part-time Professor of Philosophy” and lards his treatment of the subject with a lot of stuff about the position of respect and honor accorded cats in the ancient world (supported by a Victorian classicist painting of Egyptian cat worship), the way medieval “religious bigots” attempted to undermine that position, and—on the other side of Middle Ages chronologically—how the Protestant Reformation “broke the power-hold of the Church over people's lives and allowed for greater freedom of thought.” Citation needed.

That article is a pile of bad research (seriously, look through the bibliography at the bottom), whiggish clichés, and Dark Ages mythology, but it is just about the Platonic ideal of the medieval cat massacre story.

Now, a fair-minded person, one not content to accept any old slander of medieval people that comes his way, should be able to see problems with this story or at least points that are open to question. A few that have occurred to me every time I’ve heard some version of this:

  • Were cats really that closely associated with the Devil? Why?

  • A papal bull condemning cats? Why would a pope bother with an official pronouncement on something like this?

  • How did the pope’s condemnation result in popular massacres of cats? Are there not several steps missing between an official letter from the pope and peasants programmatically butchering animals?

  • Vox in Rama was written in 1233. The Black Death, so-called, arrived in Europe from Central Asia in the late 1340s. Was there really a lack of cats in Europe for that long? Are these events related at all?

Accepting a story that leaves itself open to questions like these is predicated on uncritically believing that medieval people were stupid. (It also relies on a Tom & Jerry-level understanding of zoology.) But our hypothetical fair-minded person, having asked the questions above, might be tempted to ask one more:

  • Did this even happen?

The answer seems to be No, not really. At least not in the way laid out above and as popularly regurgitated over and over and over.

A few good places to start picking apart this story:

  • Here’s a Medium article that accepts rather more of the myth of medieval cat hatred than I prefer but does a good job of demolishing the proposed connection between purported cat massacres with the arrival of the plague.

  • Here’s a broad look at cats in medieval society. Though regurgitating the Gregory IX papal bull/Black Death myth as a side note, the article does a good job showing the recognizable role cats played as pets and ratters in medieval communities, from common farming families to abbeys and royal households.

  • Here’s a Medievalists.net gallery of medieval depictions of cats ranging from 8th-century manuscript illuminations and marginalia to 16th-century paintings. Note that most of them are either purely naturalistic or playful in that genuinely sweet medieval manner, showing cats doing human things.

  • Also from Medievalists.net, here’s a short review of a scholarly journal article on cats’ bad reputations in medieval Europe. Note the chronological range of sources it draws from and the distance it has to reach for examples of medieval “hatred.”

  • Here’s a Quora answer to a question about Vox in Rama provided by someone who has actually read and understood medieval literature, understands what a papal bull is and how it worked, gives attention to the bull’s context, and quotes it at length.

  • Finally, here’s a 2020 article from Museum Hack on the specific question of Vox in Rama.

The last two items above are the strongest, so if you look at any of these, look at those two. A few of the things Tim O’Neill on Quora and Alex Johnson at Museum Hack do well in rebutting the story of the cat massacres:

  • Both present the actual passages of Vox in Rama that deal with cats. If you’re expecting a rabid churchman’s spittle-flecked denunciations, prepare to be underwhelmed, as cats are only incidental and are featured alongside toads and zombie-like specters as part of a rite of initiation. The “animals” in the rite are also clearly shape-shifters—demons taking on physical form—rather than actual toads and cats. This points to the bull’s broader context.

  • Both explain well what a papal bull is, its specific function as official papal correspondence, and its reach and effects. Vox in Rama was written and delivered to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Archbishop of Mainz, inquisitor Konrad von Marburg and others for a specific purpose and was not a universally applicable diktat. Misunderstandings of this kind point to the limits of the modern imagination, shaped as it is by centralized government and totalitarianism, and to the bull’s original broader context.

  • Both note that Vox in Rama does not at any point call for the killing of cats and that, even if it did, the plague arrived far later than the bull, so a connection between the two is nonexistent, and that even with cats around the plague would still be able to spread among humans because it was fleas rather than rats that spread it. And, as Johnson notes specifically, fleas don’t mind living on cats. In fact, a flea living on cat might have a better chance of biting a human.

  • Finally but most importantly, the context. Both point out that Vox in Rama was written to warn about and combat a supposed satanic cult then operating in central Germany and that the bull is narrowly focused on this.

Knowing this and reading the actual text of the bull should be enough to scuttle the myth of the pope-ordered cat massacres. Why, then, does it persist? O’Neill sums it up well:

Despite there being no evidence to support any of these claims, they are repeated uncritically because they have found their way into a couple of badly researched books and because they appeal to people's prejudices about the Middle Ages.

Emphasis mine.

Again, consider these notes toward a deeper dive. (I’m especially intrigued by parallels between the satanic rites described in Vox in Rama and those cooked up by Philip the Fair as an excuse to liquidate the Templars a decade earlier.) I’m most grateful to O’Neill and Johnson for quoting the actual text of Vox in Rama, as its lack of availability foiled my attempts to look into the primary sources behind this story some years ago. I aim to look deeper still and write all this up in a more presentable form someday, though the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the source at the root of the story seems to settle the question pretty conclusively.

If I am to end this post with any peroration or call to action, let me simply repeat this: If you run across any story repeated context-free purely as a cudgel to denigrate a past period and its people, look into it. Deeply. Whatever you do, don’t accept it because it confirms your prior impressions or prejudices, and definitely don’t breezily repeat it to dismiss someone else’s arguments. Real history is done on purpose.