#Sad medieval cat paintings how to

This 1789 painting, Old Maids at a Cat’s Funeral, stands as a perfect example of the rhetoric of the time. And as resentments towards these women grew, so did the popularity of the stereotype. Unfortunately, because single women of the time were so often viewed as a nuisance-without access to jobs, unmarried women had to rely on the kindness of relatives for financial support-the cat lady became a figure of ridicule. In the early 18th century, as the witch trials were widely recognized as a grave miscarriage of justice, single women with cats were suddenly transformed in the public eye from frightening fiends to figures to be pitied. A century later, demonic, power-hungry cats remained a major theme of the Salem witch trials. That didn’t stop his book from being embraced by zealots everywhere.īy the time England executed its first witch in 1566 (a 63-year-old by the name of Agnes Waterhouse), the fact that she reportedly had a murderous, blood-drinking cat named Satan seemed totally plausible for many who heard about her case.

#Sad medieval cat paintings how to

His views on witches, and how to eradicate them, were so extreme, even other Catholics of the time couldn’t support them. The German who wrote it, Heinrich Kramer, was inspired to do so after being ordered to leave his diocese by the church. Then in 1486, the now-infamous Malleus Maleficarum (aka “the Witch Hammer”) book arrived.

‘Forgive us,’ says the master, and the one next to him repeats this. They incline their heads towards the cat. First the novice, then the master, then each one of the order who are worthy and perfect, kiss the cat on its hindquarters. a black cat about the size of an average dog, descends backwards, with its tail erect. In 1232, Pope Gregory-a man fond of torturing people for information-wrote a letter to Germany’s King Henry VII in which he described a Satanic ritual that involved worshippers kissing the rear end of a magical cat: Worse, cats garnered a reputation for being minions of Satan. In an effort to rid the world of non-Christian gods, deities other than the Holy Trinity were stigmatized and rebranded as evil. Everything was going pretty swimmingly for cat ladies then, until the Roman Catholic Church showed up in the Middle Ages.