You (and everyone!) should listen to Mobile Suit Breakdown, probably the highest-effort podcast I ever heard. They’re not shit-talking about what they just saw or go on weird tangents, they do media criticism, provide background information, and do so. much. research.

It’s honestly spoiled me for regular podcasts. I’m like “You’re not going to give me the historical background for this? No research into the names?” But what can you do.

1000% recommended!

I mean, given how common "Praise" and "Pain" are in Puritain names, there could be an entire Kink clan of anachronistic fetish names.

Official Post of Massachusetts

Discovering in the tags there is some sort of meme I’ve missed about there being benefits to being a marine biologist.

It’s not the salary I will tell u that now

Oh also I use he/him pronouns now!

Better than the 1596 Marseille dolphin exorcism I suppose.

In 1596 dolphins were infesting the port of Marseille. Back in those days, y’see, dolphins didn’t have the cuddly image they enjoy today. They were pests and were causing damage.

So the cardinal of Avignon sent the bishop of Cavaillon to do something about them. In front of a huge crowd, the bishop sprinkled some holy water into the waters of the port and told the dolphins to begone. Whereupon the dolphins indeed turned tail in terror and fled, and were never seen again.

Still not as dramatic as Saint Bernard excommunicating the flies though.

What happened to the flies?

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux built a monastery in 1124, but it was plagued by flies. So the good saint promptly excommunicated them. By the next day the flied had died in such quantities that they had to be shoveled out.

Still not as nutty as the Basel rooster trial though.

*everyone in unison* um what rooster trial?

In 1474, a rooster in Basel did the heinous and unspeakable act of laying an egg. As everyone knows, an egg laid by a rooster will hatch into a basilisk (or cockatrice).

So to avoid the creation of a cockatrice (or basilisk), the rooster was tried, found guilty, and burned at the stake along with its egg. A huge crowd was present.

The “rooster” in this case was likely a hen that had developed male characteristics (it happens).

Still not as properly legal as the Savigny pig trial though.

Ok, clearly you want an excuse to talk about the pig thing, and I now DESPERATELY want to hear about the pig thing, so PLEASE tell us about the Pig Thing.

In 1457 a sow killed Jehan Martin, a five-year-old boy in Savigny. For that crime she was put on trial and judged guilty, and sentenced to be hanged from a tree.

Her piglets, however, were judged to have been innocent of the murder, and so were returned to the owner, with the caveat that he had to surrender them to the law if they were later found to have eaten any of the boy.

Not to be confused with a whole bunch of other, similar porcine trials.

I won’t mention the 1454 excommunication of eels in Lake Geneva then.

OK what did the eels do, and more pressingly why were they in communion with the church in the first place

Animals are expected to be part of the Church by default, that’s why they take excommunication so badly.

Felix Hemmerlin’s treatise on exorcism, cited by e.g. Wagner’s Historia Naturalis Helvetiae (1680), informs us that around 1221-1229, eels once infested Lake Geneva in huge numbers. So Saint William, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicated them and banned them from the lake, forcing them to live in only one part of it.

Plot twist: as far as we know, Saint William was never bishop of Lausanne.

There’s no way you have historical Christianity nonsense more silly than this to share

I’ve been trying to stay on brand and talk about animals only, but sure, few intersections of Christianity and the legal system get sillier than…

… the Cadaver Synod.

Pope Formosus (“Good-looking”) was pope from 891 to 896, and apparently accumulated a few enemies. After his successor Boniface VI enjoyed all of a 15-day papacy, the next pope elected was Stephen VI.

And he hated Formosus.

How much? He had the corpse of Formosus exhumed, dressed up in papal vestments, and put on trial for his failings as a pope.

End result? Formosus was found guilty of papal fail. The corpse was stripped of its clothes, three fingers on its right hand were severed (no blessings for u), and it was tied to weights and dumped in the Tiber.

Needless to say Stephen VI came to a sticky end. An angry mob deposed him, he was strangled in prison, and Formosus’s corpse was fished up and reburied with honors. And the later popes passed edicts ensuring this kind of silliness would not happen again.

Tune in next time when I tell you about how a lawyer defended a city’s entire rat population.

Please, the rats, give us the rats, i beg....

The story of the rats of Autun is also the story of Barthelémy de Chasseneuz (or Chassenée, etc.), a highly original and highly talented defense lawyer. That’s him here.

When the town of Autun was infested by rats in the early 1500s, they were accused of eating the province’s barley crop and were duly summoned to be judged in an ecclesiastical court of law. Chasseneuz was the defense attorney.

How do you defend an entire swarm of rats? You don’t, is the answer. You delay. Chasseneuz’s original defense was “my clients live all over the place, one summons won’t be enough”. So he got a court summons to be posted in all the infested parishes.

When the rats didn’t show up after the elapsed time delay, Chasseneuz proceeded to explain at length why. The rats didn’t come to court, he said, because of their enemies the cats, which are everywhere and always vigilant and hungry. “You cannot expect my clients to undertake a journey which would put them in mortal danger”, he argued in complete seriousness. “Thus they have the legal right to turn down a summons that endangers them”.

As far as we know, the rats never did appear in court, and remained unprosecuted.

Chasseneuz went on to have a distinguished career as a lawyer and was allegedly killed by a poisoned bouquet of flowers.