Love In The Asylum

So, today was super boring. My manager was out sick (and thus not there to give me anything to do or find me anyone to shadow), the other new hire and I ran through all of our training packet material before lunch time, and you can only read so many product indexes on the company wiki before your brain starts to leak out your ears. I did my best to find useful ways to occupy myself, but I still ended up spending a lot of the afternoon texting back and forth with colourofsaying while trying to look like I was watching webinars about sales strategy.

Somehow during the course of this conversation we ended up plotting out an entire HBO series about the trial of the Templars. Not really sure how we got started on it, but seriously, it would FUCKING AMAZING.

The main character would be a French Templar of about 30 who had served at Acre/Outremer/Cyprus during the conflicts of the 1290s but was at the chapterhouse in Paris for the arrests in 1307. Sometime between 1307 and 1310 he confesses after being tortured, and after the executions in 1310 he's sent off to another order for his penitence - the framing device of the story would be his deathbed confession. There's plenty of focus on him and his crisis of faith in the order/the church and his survivor's guilt after confessing to heresy, but also major stories about the political conflict between Philip the Fair and Clement V, what James of Molay and the other Templar masters were up to, Hugh of Chalons and a few of the other knights that escaped the initial arrests, and some of the baby Templars.

William of Nogaret is the villain, because fuck William of Nogaret. (He's currently at the top of my list of Medieval Figures I Would Most Like to Punch in the Face. AND YES I HAVE A LIST.)

It would mostly be a political/historical drama, but it's HBO, of course it's also going to be full of sex. I desperately want a scene with Philip reading out his accusations of sodomy and indecent kissing by the Templars while he fucks a stable boy (I'm taking some historical license here, but not that much!). William of Nogaret is perving on everyone like a creepy fucker, including spying on a serving girl while jerking off and being ickily obsessed with hearing about all the torture the Templars suffered. Main Character Guy is...probably in love with someone. And the tiny bb!Templar he is mentoring will have a gay romance that starts in the flashbacks and continues while they are all in prison. (BB!Templar is going to die, but so is James of Molay and Philip and Clement and...basically everyone who isn't Main Character Guy. Fucking history, what can you do?)

The whole thing would be full of back-stabbing and political machinations and tragic sacrifices and secret arrests and wild denunciations in the middle of the papal court and paranoid conspiracies and torture and moral compromises in the face of horrible suffering and all the historical references a couple of medieval nerds can cram into a show. Tell me you wouldn't watch the fuck out of that.

Things I know about the European witch-hunts that make it very hard for me to appreciate pop culture:

1. The Spanish Inquisition? Comparatively not all that bad. Yes, they did some horrifyingly evil things, but they had a lot of legal and bureaucratic rules in place limited what was permissible for their agents to do - especially after a lack of rules led to a wholesale execution of Basques in Northern Spain based on shoddy evidence - which cut down on the atrocities committed by investigators in other nations. Also, since their focus was heretics rather than specifically witches, they wanted to convert people back to the true faith, so they didn't kill nearly as many as you'd think. And they stopped witch-hunting decades first, and decades before anyone else.

2. The English also didn't have that many trials (although the Scottish were quite voracious) because of some differences in rules of evidence and cultural attitudes. The heart of the witch hunting craze was what is now Germany and surrounding regions, but at the time it was a bunch of disconnected little territories ruled by minor princes and noblemen under an overarching but not very influential empire - some of them were Catholic, some of them were Protestant, and while historians can identify a lot of risk factors why some communities would have witch hunts and some wouldn't, it's still kind of a crapshoot. The French had some fun too, but the eastern Europeans didn't really get into it.

3. Witches were burned at the stake. They were also hanged. And drowned. And they died being tortured. And they were excommunicated and banished. Depends on the country and the court they happened to be in.

4. The witch trials didn't happen in the Middle Ages. In fact, almost no witch trials happened in the Middle Ages, because there were several pieces of relevant theology (and several other pieces of populist scare-mongering) concerning who witches were, what they did, and how much of a threat they were, that weren't published until the 1400s. The witch hunts happened in Early Modern Europe. There were actually two waves of witch trials, one in the late 1400s and one in the late 1500s/early 1600s (that one was a lot worse). Salem is actually totally an outlier, since a) the patterns of colonial witch trials (influenced by colonial theology as well as Afro-Caribbean and Native American folklore) are kind of different from Continential trials, and also it's way later than most of the European trials. They were still doing it across the pond, but not with nearly as much enthusiasm.

5. Most accused witches were women. In most countries. In some it was even. In others, like Iceland (and I think some places in Eastern Europe) it was mostly men. It's not as simple as saying the witch hunts were caused by misogyny, although the threat to the patriarchy caused by the changing roles of women did certainly play a part. In fact, we're still not entirely sure what the root cause of the witch hunts was - a lot of theories have been floated, from hatred of women (especially women who challenged the social structure by being single or angry or smart), to guilt over failing to observe social rules, to a monetary desire to sieze property, to fears over the changing religious landscape, to bad weather patterns, to hallucinations caused by bad grain, to a misinterpretion by theologians and laypeople over pagan practices observed by the peasantry. The truth is...probably some combination of all of the above. It is complicated, y'all.

I hate being all OCD about this kind of thing, particularly since I know I've told people not to stress out about things like Merlin being about as anachronistic as a guy in a Storm Trooper costume at a Ren Faire. But it was a really fascinating (if unbelievably horrifying) cultural phenomenon and it bugs me to have to sit there and go 'not true. Really not true. OMG HOW DID YOU GET THIS SO WRONG' every time it comes up. 

LOOK AT ME I'M HYPOCRITICAL. Oh well. A girl has to have some glaring contradictions in her life.