Hello, it’s so lovely to welcome you back. So, as we looked at the lighter side of tales last time I start my newest letter with talk of dark doings, powerful poisons, apothecaries, fortune tellers and crime . Or is it crime? I’ll tell you the story of two different women and you can tell me if what they did was wrong or was it just correcting the power balance of the time. Let me take you back to Rome in the 17th Century. It wasn’t a safe city, if cities ever are, but in the 17th Century life was extremely cheap. People died regularly from disease and violence, children often didn’t make it to adulthood. Even the aristocracy weren’t immune but sometimes the problem wasn’t the dying. It was that the dying didn’t happen quickly enough and when that happened there were solutions.
How is this connected to Folklore, Food and Fairytales, I almost hear you thinking. Well firstly I first heard about the two women in a book called The Dark History of Chocolate by Emma Kay which I recommend to everyone. When I interviewed Emma for the book she told me all about how she had been fascinated by a poison which was often administered to husbands in their luxury hot chocolate late night drink. Secondly one of the poisoning rings was shut down due to soup. Thirdly poisoned food is big in fairytales. Think Snow White.
Let’s talk about poison and power and how poison is often the weapon of those who don’t have the power, either physically or socially. Consider a time when marriage was seldom about love but was about contracts, social status, money, land or even protection. It was considered at the very least, impolite to try to take over land if your daughter was sitting in the manor in the middle of it, nursing your grandchild.
Imagine you are a young woman of this time, did you even meet your husband before the wedding? Did you have an opinion about the fact that he was 50 when you were barely fifteen? If you did, it didn’t matter. Women were property, assets to achieve what their fathers and husbands wanted. All the men weren’t monsters but it’s unsurprising that there is a whole variant of fairy tales where a beautiful young women is forced to marry a monster or at the very least a beast. It allowed many actual young women, beautiful or otherwise to believe that there might be a gentle heart under a forbidding countenance. Even if there wasn’t.
As a result there were many unhappy marriages and if you were female there was only one way out, death of a least one of the parties. Death doesn’t always happen conveniently, and if you had had enough of cruelty, domestic violence and having baby, after baby then you needed to take action. Before I tell you the tale of the two women who helped those women enjoy the peace of widowhood, I will say, in fairness, that there were definitely some women involved in the story, who’s motive was mostly financial. If you believe in feminism you have to be able to believe that a sister can be capable of terrible behaviour too.
Before we continue with our tale, I must say that these women have become folk heroes to some but that we don’t have huge amounts of actual historic evidence that they definitely both existed and plied their deathly trade. What the evidence does say is that it is likely there were two female poisoning rings operating in Rome at around the same time.
Anyway back to our two poisoners. Our first is Hieronyma Spara or La Spara, she was a fortune teller and witch who worked learned through her visits with charms and talismans to the noble women of Rome who might be in need of her services. She distributed the poison (most likely arsenic) which was odourless and colourless. She also invited women in groups to her hoe in order to instruct them in the art of arsenic poisoning and what foods and doses should be used to avoid suspicion. She was so good at her work that she was really only discovered because so many priests received confessions about the killing of husbands that the church started to investigate. The found a profusion of widows had appeared and sent in an undercover noblewoman to request poison due to the ill-treatment of her husband. She was provided with the potion and La Spara and her accomplices were arrested and tortured. They and many of their customers were executed or punished via various humiliating means.
In some versions of the tale La Spara was executed without ever providing evidence about her customers or her sources and in others she said that she had learned her knowledge of poisons from an apothecary named Giuilia Tofana. We’ll never know if this was true but coincidentally Giulia Tofana is our other poisoner. There are many versions of her story too but the consensus is that she poisoned 600 men over 18 years with her special poison solution known as Aqua Tofana, starting at age 13 in Palermo.
This does seem early but her father was apparently an apothecary himself and her mother was executed for murdering him. There is conjecture that Aqua Tofana was Giuilia’s mother’s recipe which she used to kill her own abusive husband and that she used it herself to kill her own husband before moving to Naples and then to Rome. Giuilia was incredibly cautious who she worked with and had a well respected apothecary business selling medicines and cosmetics which provided her with cover and good social status. She did however disguise her poison which it was believed was an untraceable liquid mixture of arsenic, Belladonna and lead in cosmetics, which as cosmetics often held these ingredients anyway was excellent camouflage. She also hid her liquid in small bottles of liquid known as St Nicholas’s tears or Manna di San Nicola de Bari. St Nicholas’s tomb seeps a liquid to this day and the liquid is was believed to have miraculous powers so people did not ever investigate these fake bottles as the real thing was often sold by apothecaries.
How was she caught if not through her own mistakes then? Well, through soup. Soup was her downfall as one of her customers had placed some of the poison, which was slow acting and mimicked natural decline if administered correctly, in her husband’s soup before she had cold feet. She stopped him from eating the soup but he was suspicious and she confessed. He had her arrested and under torture she gave up Giulia Tofana as her supplier. She was told by loyal friends that she was being hunted down and escaped to seek sanctuary in a church. She was eventually forced out by rumours of well poisoning and executed by strangulation and her body was left in the garden of the church in which she sought sanctuary. She provided the number of 600 murdered men the authorities before her death sentence.
Ready for some light relief now? We must remember the balance after all.
I’ll continue with some more cheese based folklore, I think, just because cheese makes everything better. Last time we talked about tyromancy and this is also about a very specific cheese for divination. This, however, is a longer process than taking a good look at the lines in your Shropshire blue and then deciding there is an excellent meal in your future. This takes serious work. Laomachan or little mouldy one could only be made on one of the four festival days Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain although which one achieved the best results is knowledge now lost to us.
The cheese had to be made from milk from a cow that had eaten mòthan or bog violet, it must then be kept for twelve months until the anniversary of the festival on which it was made. On that day a hole was made in the rind through which the diviner could look through the smoke vent in the top of the house. The name of the first person seen through the two holes would be the diviner’s future spouse. Alternatively, usefully for anyone who fancies a modern trial of this, you could also place the cheese under your pillow and then you would dream of your future spouse bringing gifts. If you then ate the cheese the following day you would be protected from fairies, ghosts and will’o the wisps but only if you approached the whole process with faith and sincerity of heart.
I have another herbal remedy for you this week, this time it’s Daffy’s Elixir, which could be used to treat pretty much anything including ‘The Stone in Babies and Children; Convulsion fits; Consumption and Bad Digestives; Agues; Piles; Surfeits; Fits of the Mother and Vapours from the Spleen; Green Sickness; Children's Distempers, whether the Worms, Rickets, Stones, Convulsions, Gripes, King's Evil, Joint Evil or any other disorder proceeding from Wind or Crudities; Gout and Rheumatism; Stone or Gravel in the Kidnies; Cholic and Griping of the Bowels; the Phthisic (both as cure and preventative provided always that the patient be moderate in drinking, have a care to prevent taking cold and keep a good diet; Dropsy and Scurvy’ according to Lindsay Fleming in her article in Notes & Queries. Obviously I can’t provide medical advice but it does seem to me that anything with this much alcohol in it could make most things feel better if only in the short term!
This and our recipe are from The Housekeeper’s Pocket Book by Sarah Harrison from 1739.
Our interestingly named recipe of the week is Lady Yarborough’s excellent Lemon Cream.
I have absolutely no idea who Lady Yarborough was but I can definitely picture her ordering it from her cook, propped up in bed on pillows in a very pretty nightgown, after a long night of parties and that same cook definitely making some extra for herself and the housekeeper for to enjoy whilst meeting for gossiping purposes. You may have a totally different picture but it sounds delicious. I can imagine it served with lavender shortbread biscuits and some smoky grey tea outside on a sunny late afternoon.
Having started in the dark we end in the light, until next time ……
Some sources:
Dark History of Chocolate - Emma Kay - https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/A-Dark-History-of-Chocolate-Hardback/p/19247
MacKay London Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds, (London, 1852) 206-208
Fleming, Lindsay (June 1953). "Daffy's Elixir". Notes and Queries. Oxford University Press: 238–9. doi:10.1093/nq/CXCVIII.jun.238
Carmina Gadelica ii, 110-113.