Witches, leeches, and the stories we tell to feel smart

You already know the jokes. I know them too.

The Church burned nine million witches. They never bathed. They used leeches because they knew nothing about the body. The bishops decided which books made it into the Bible. Everyone expected the world to end in the year 1000. They thought the earth was flat.

We say these things the way we say the sky is blue. They sound like facts. They work like punchlines. And most of them are not medieval at all. They are modern. They were written about the Middle Ages, mostly in the nineteenth century, by people who needed the Middle Ages to be dark so their own age could look bright.

The Greek μῦθος (mythos) first meant a spoken account, and by Plato’s day it could name the story a people tells to explain who they are. That second sense is the one I mean. “Medieval ignorance” is not a finding of research. It is a mythos. It tells modern people where we came from and why we are better. Like every good origin story, it survives because it is useful.

Two lives

Every story on that list has two lives. It has a medieval life, which is what people in the Middle Ages actually believed and did. It has a modern life, which is what later centuries said about them and what we keep repeating. The trouble starts when we collapse the two. We take a modern story and hang it on medieval people.

So I want to look at two columns through this essay. In the first column sits the medieval world as it was. In the second sits the modern world and what it made. Some stories live almost entirely in the second column. They were invented later and blamed on the Middle Ages. Others really do begin in the first column and have crossed over into ours. The mistake runs in both directions. So does the danger.

The first mode: modern stories in medieval dress

Start with the story that carries the most moral weight. The medieval Church, we are told, burned nine million women as witches.

Look at the modern column first. The number is fantasy. Ronald Hutton traces it to a German writer named Gottfried Voigt, who extrapolated it from local records in 1784. The American suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage made it famous in 1893, and neopagan writers in the twentieth century built a whole “Burning Times” mythology on it. Brian Levack and other historians who have worked through the surviving trial records put the total somewhere around forty to sixty thousand executions. That is horror enough. It does not need inflating.

Now look at the medieval column. A tenth-century text known as the Canon Episcopi told bishops that women who claimed to fly by night with pagan goddesses were deluded by dreams. Believing such things was the error. That was not the Church’s last word. Over the fifteenth century more and more theologians argued that witches really did serve the devil, and the Malleus Maleficarum appeared in 1486. Even then the machinery stuttered. When Heinrich Kramer, the Malleus’s principal author, tried to run a witch trial at Innsbruck in 1485, the bishop of Brixen shut him down. He doubted Kramer’s evidence and his methods. Kramer went home and wrote his book out of frustration.

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The killing reached its catastrophic scale after the Middle Ages. The great hunts ran roughly from 1560 to 1650, in the age of the printing press and the Reformation. They were decentralized. Their scale varied sharply from region to region, and local and secular courts carried out many of the prosecutions, especially in the fractured German lands. Theologians and inquisitors fed the persecution. No Europe-wide Church machine directed it. In Spain, the Inquisition grew skeptical of witchcraft accusations in the early seventeenth century and executed very few.

Put the two columns side by side and the shape is plain. The witch hunt was a late medieval idea that became an early modern slaughter. The killing peaked in the world that likes to call itself the dawn of reason. Blaming all of it on the Middle Ages is a way of keeping modernity’s hands clean.

More costumes from the same closet

Once you learn to read both columns, you start seeing the pattern everywhere.

Take the Bible. The modern story says the Council of Nicaea in 325 voted on which books made the cut and burned the rest. The historical column, or rather the ancient one, Nicaea dealt with the Arian controversy and the date of Easter. The canon was not on its agenda. It took shape gradually, across regions and centuries. A later legend, repeated by Voltaire, imagined bishops placing disputed books on an altar so that the false ones would fall to the floor. The Da Vinci Code (2003) made the idea common knowledge. Today it circulates as “the banned books of the Bible.”

Take Easter. Every spring someone announces that Easter is really Ishtar, and that Christian worship is Babylonian paganism in disguise. That story belongs entirely to the modern column. Its modern popular form owes much to a Scottish minister named Alexander Hislop, whose book The Two Babylons appeared in 1853. The medieval column holds something much smaller. The English word Easter is usually connected to Bede’s account of an Anglo-Saxon month, Ēosturmōnaþ, named for a figure called Ēostre. Bede is our only early witness, and scholars still debate what he meant. The word has no linguistic or historical connection to Ishtar.

Take Jesus himself. The claim that the Gospels copied Horus or Mithras comes from Kersey Graves’s The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors (1875) and the writings of Gerald Massey. Their one-to-one parallels do not hold up against the ancient sources, and mainstream scholarship on ancient religion does not support them. The internet film Zeitgeist (2007) revived them for a new generation.

Take Galileo and Bruno, the two great martyrs of science. Neither one belongs in the medieval column at all. Galileo was tried in 1633 and compelled to recant under the formal threat of torture. The court found him vehemently suspect of heresy and confined him under house arrest for the rest of his life. He was never physically tortured. Bruno was burned for heresy in 1600 in a case that covered a broad cluster of theological and philosophical claims. Casting him simply as a martyr for the modern science misreads the case. Ronald Numbers and his colleagues treat both stories as myths in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009), because that is what they became.

Take the lord’s supposed right to a bride’s wedding night, the so-called droit du seigneur. It made great material for Voltaire and Beaumarchais in the eighteenth century and for Braveheart in 1995. Evidence that it was ever practiced as a legal right is almost nonexistent.

Take the smaller ones too. The “terrors of the year 1000,” with crowds waiting for the sky to fall, owe far more to French Romantic historians like Jules Michelet than to the chronicles of the tenth century. Many medieval towns kept and regulated public bathhouses. Bathing customs varied by region and century, and late medieval concerns about disease and sexual disorder reshaped attitudes toward public bathhouses. Filth works as visual shorthand for backwardness. It is a costume department decision.

And yes, the flat earth belongs here. In the medieval column, educated Europeans knew the earth was round. We know less about what a plowman in Kent believed, but the preachers and the university men were not in doubt. Bede called the earth round like a ball, and John of Sacrobosco’s De sphaera taught a spherical cosmos in European universities for four hundred years. In the modern column stands Washington Irving. In 1828 he took the real commission that reviewed Columbus’s plan and dramatized it into a scene of clerics at Salamanca quoting Scripture to prove the earth was flat. The real argument was about distance. Columbus badly underestimated the westward distance to Asia, and his critics were right. Jeffrey Burton Russell told the whole story in Inventing the Flat Earth (1991).

Where the costumes were sewn

Now look at the dates in the modern column.

Washington Irving invents the Salamanca scene in 1828. Samuel Rowbotham launches modern flat-earth theory in 1849. Alexander Hislop publishes The Two Babylons in 1853. John William Draper declares war between religion and science in 1874. Kersey Graves finds sixteen crucified saviors in 1875. Matilda Joslyn Gage popularizes nine million witches in 1893.

Many of the most durable myths about medieval ignorance were amplified and set in order about a hundred and fifty years ago. Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) gathered them into one grand narrative, and schoolbooks did the rest. The internet did not invent these stories. It is only the new distributor. The factory was Victorian.

How the costumes come back

These stories are not fading. They are being recycled from two opposite directions, and both directions need the same fake Middle Ages.

One side uses it to celebrate progress. Religion made people ignorant. Science set them free. The witch fires become a parable, and every believer in the room is cast as an inquisitor.

The other side uses it to reject expertise. Today’s flat-earth movement presents itself as suppressed ancient wisdom, though it descends from Rowbotham’s Zetetic Astronomy and gained new visibility on video platforms in the mid-2010s. Other theories claim the past itself has been faked. In 1991 a German writer named Heribert Illig proposed the Phantom Time Hypothesis. He argued that the years 614 to 911 never happened, that Charlemagne was invented, and that the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II padded the calendar so they could reign in the year 1000. The idea has found a second life in online conspiracy communities. The recent “Tartaria” pseudohistory claims a great global empire was erased and buried under a “mud flood,” with history rewritten in the nineteenth century. The ancient-aliens industry, launched by Erich von Däniken in 1968, runs the same move one step further back. Ancient people were too primitive to build the pyramids, so someone else must have.

One side wants a dark age to escape. The other wants a hidden age to recover. Neither one wants the medieval column, with its universities and hospitals, its scriptoria, its astronomers and surgeons, its famines and plagues. The real thing is too complicated to fit on a thumbnail. A lone hero against a foolish authority fits perfectly.

The second mode: medieval things in modern dress

So far every story has lived mostly in the modern column. I owe you the other mode, because this essay should not flatter the Middle Ages any more than the memes flatter us. Some things really do begin in the medieval column and have crossed into ours. They cross over changed, and that is where the care is needed.

Leeches are the gentler case. In the medieval column, physicians did use leeches. They also bled patients with lancets. They did both inside humoral medicine, a system inherited from Hippocrates and Galen and refined by Islamic physicians such as Avicenna. The body held four humors. Illness came from imbalance. Remove the excess and restore the balance. That system was coherent. It explained the body with the observations available, and it held the field for close to two thousand years across Greek, Roman, Arabic and Latin medicine. It was also wrong, and it killed people. Notice too that leeching was never a medieval peculiarity. It was ancient, and it outlived the Middle Ages by centuries. In the 1830s France used and imported leeches on a vast industrial scale, long after the Enlightenment had supposedly turned the lights on.

In the modern column, leeches are back in hospitals. In 2004 the FDA cleared the medicinal leech as a medical device. Surgeons use leeches after reattaching fingers and ears, when blood flows into the tissue but cannot drain out. The leech’s saliva carries hirudin, an anticoagulant, and the continuing bleeding relieves the congestion while the tissue establishes new drainage.

Now watch the two columns get collapsed from the other side. Some online wellness content takes that fact and runs with it. See? The ancients knew. Modern medicine is only catching up. That is as lazy as the old sneer. A useful mechanism inside an old practice does not vindicate the theory around it. Humoral bleeding drained the sick. Microsurgical leeching saves tissue. Both involve a leech. They are not the same medicine.

The point is not that medieval medicine was secretly modern. The point is that modern contempt for the past is often as intellectually lazy as the superstition it claims to expose.

The blood libel is the dark case. In the medieval column, the monks of Norwich accused local Jews in 1144 of murdering a boy named William in a ritual killing. That accusation spread across Europe for centuries. When the Black Death struck in 1348 and 1349, Jews were accused of poisoning wells, and whole communities were massacred, as at Strasbourg in 1349. These were not modern inventions about medieval people. They were medieval beliefs, and they were murderous.

Look at their shape. A hidden elite harms children in secret while the authorities cover it up. Only the awakened can see it. In the modern column, the QAnon story about elites harvesting children for adrenochrome echoes that shape. It is its own modern creature, but it grew from a very old pattern. The costumes are new. The skeleton is eight hundred years old.

Both columns at once

None of this makes the Middle Ages a golden age. Literacy was limited and unevenly spread. Hierarchies were harsh and often brutal. Medicine could not see a germ or reliably treat an infection. Jews were expelled and massacred. Heretics burned. People believed many things we rightly reject.

A truthful picture keeps both columns honest. The medieval world was neither an unbroken night nor a modern world in disguise. It was roughly a thousand years of very different places and centuries. A peasant in eighth-century Francia did not share one mind with a physician at fourteenth-century Montpellier, and a learned monk did not see the sky the way an illiterate farmer did. Baghdad and Paris were not interchangeable. The phrase “the medieval mind” hides all of it.

Even the label “Dark Ages” has an author. Petrarch, in the fourteenth century, spoke of the centuries after Rome as a time of darkness, and he mostly meant the decline of good Latin. Renaissance humanists liked the image because it made them the light. Protestant polemicists and Enlightenment writers liked it because it made Rome the darkness. Every generation found the metaphor useful. That usefulness is the whole reason it survived.

The two modes produce two errors. The first mode flatters us. It pins our own inventions on the dead and lets us feel superior to people who never believed them. The second mode should humble us. The worst medieval ideas did not stay medieval. They are in our feeds this week.

The diagnostic question

So let me ask the question directly, of you and of me. When I repeat a story about how foolish people used to be, am I trying to understand them, or trying to feel better about myself?

That question stings. It should. The myth of medieval ignorance is flattering. It tells us we are the smart ones, the grown-ups at the end of history. It asks nothing of us but a chuckle. And it trains a habit of mind that does not stay in the past. The person who accepts a caricature of the thirteenth century will accept a caricature of his neighbor and his opponent. He will also be ready to believe the next story about a secret elite, because he has already learned to prefer a good villain to a hard fact.

Historical humility is not nostalgia. It does not ask us to admire bloodletting or long for the feudal manor. It asks only that we let the dead speak for themselves before we speak for them. Read the Canon Episcopi before you share the meme about nine million witches. Look up Alexander Hislop before you repost the one about Ishtar.

The people of the Middle Ages were wrong about many things. So are we. The difference is that they cannot answer back. That is exactly why we owe them accuracy.

~PW 🌮🛶

For Further Reading

• Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2016.
• Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450.2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
• Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
• Numbers, Ronald L., ed. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
• Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians.New York: Praeger, 1991.