Who was the Husband Poisoner of Renaissance Italy?

Odourless, tasteless, colourless, lethal. In the mid-17th century, men were dropping like flies in Italy. And this wasn't just the plague - it was the work of the poison Aqua Tofana. So what is Aqua Tofana? And who was its apocryphal purveyor, Giulia Tofana? In this episode we are diving back to Renaissance Italy to learn more about a circle of women poisoners, and the men they chose to murder. How did they eventually get caught? What is their legacy? Kate is joined by Cathryn Kemp, author of historical novel, 'A Poisoner's Tale'. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Bertwixters! It's me, Cade Lister. How are you? Nice to see you again. Pull up a chair, pull up a chair, let's make some room at the back for everyone else. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Today is a particularly spicy episode, because we're talking about the history of poisoning husbands. So don't be getting any bright ideas, you lot, I know what you're like. Right, on with the show!

• 1:11Kate Lister?

  We are in Rome in the 1650s, and ugh, there are so many people around. Don't they know that there's just been a plague? Shouldn't they all be at home, self-isolating? There's quite a queue for the bakers. They seem to be up early for mass, and they're chattering quietly beside the doors of the Chiesa di Santa Maria. There are families, couples, old maids, young women, lots of young women, actually. Lots of widows. Why are there so many widows here? Is there some kind of widow festival on that I am unaware of? But all of these women have one other woman in common, the notorious Juliana Tofana.

• 1:53Kate Lister?

  And quite how this woman has been responsible for making as many widows as I'm seeing around here is the subject of today's episode. Let's get out of here, Bertwixters.

• 2:26Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. In early modern Europe, dying young was alarmingly common. Oh, it just was. You know that it was. But 600 deaths would raise suspicion. Huh? 600 deaths of men, 600 deaths of married men, no less, are going to raise an eyebrow, even at a time when death and disease, war and famine were pretty everyday occurrences. And in Rome in the 1650s, this is exactly what happened. And things got so out of control that the Pope himself had to get involved. So what happened to these men? And why? How exactly does Julia Tofana fit into this picture?

• 3:11Kate Lister?

  I am joined by Catherine Kemp, who spent a long time searching for Julia and her network of poisoners while researching her novel, A Poisoner's Tale.

• 3:26Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Catherine Kemp. How are you doing?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I am very well, Kate Lister. How are you?

• 3:34Kate Lister?

  I am thrilled to be talking to you. That's how I am. This is actually quite a requested episode. I get this one quite a lot. Could you do something on Aqua Tofana? And you, having written about this notorious and fascinating case, are the person to talk to. So I'm thrilled. That's how I'm doing.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Well, I'm absolutely delighted to be here. I mean, Julia has been an obsession of mine for the last 10 years. So any opportunity to speak about her, I'm absolutely delighted to.

• 4:03Kate Lister?

  Do you remember when you first heard about her? What started the obsession?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my son was very young. He's 12 now. I was literally up overnight with him when he was very small. And it's one of those, you know, times when you just kind of go down the rabbit hole of internet research. And for some reason, I was researching arsenic for reasons I can't disclose on here.

• 4:24Kate Lister?

  As you do.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  As you do.

• 4:27Kate Lister?

  Whilst feeding a small child.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Well, feeding a small child, of course. And she kind of popped into my computer screen and I was like, oh my gosh. And then of course I started researching her and I saw that there'd been nothing meaningful written about her. There were lots of kind of, you know, email sites and people talking about her, but there was nothing actually very meaty. There was nothing that really got into who she was and how she behaved and the whole thing. So I thought, well, okay, it has to be me, you know, I need to write this. So I kind of started off, I mean, I've been a ghostwriter for a really long time. And at that time I was still just doing nonfiction for publishers and for authors. So I kind of thought, okay, well, I'll make a nonfiction book about Julia Tufana, you know, I mean, that would be the obvious choice.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  And so I spent months and possibly years like trying to research her and trying to find primary sources, you know, that evidenced her. And it was so patchy and there was really nothing very substantial. There has since been stuff that's come to light. At the time it was like, okay, well, this is where a novelist goes to work in these spaces. Created by the fact that women weren't documented back in those times, you know, the fact that their lives were largely unrepresented. You might have a birth certificate or a death certificate, but that's really it. If it's not a woman from a high class sort of family. So at that point I decided that I was going to write Julia.

• 5:49Kate Lister?

  For anyone who's listening, who maybe hasn't heard this name before, that there may be some people out there going, who, who, Julia, who? Can you get, just give us an overview of who this woman is and perhaps why she's so notorious?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Julia Tufana, or the legend of Julia Tufana, was that she was a 17th century Italian poisoner. And along with her circle of poisoners, that included other kind of outcast women, healers and herbalists and midwives. They created an, an undetectable poison that they would dispense to the downtrodden women of Naples and Rome. In order for those women to cure their bad marriages by getting rid of their abusive husbands. Because these were the days when women had, you know, no agency, no choice very often about who they were married to. And, you know, domestic abuse wasn't illegal. So women were treated pretty appallingly. I mean, Italy at the time was renowned for its

• 6:44Speaker 01

  poison, for supplying, you know, it was the kind of where poison was crafted and it was called an Italian divorce, you know, there was that. But Julia herself became someone that women went to for that very specific purpose, to get rid of their husbands.

• 6:58Kate Lister?

  I'm not advocating this, right, to anyone listening. I'm not saying, but I am, I am just gonna say I can understand how this particular demand arose because you've got a situation where, as you say, women very often don't have a choice whether they're being, their marriage is arranged, or even if it's not, like, you kind of have to get married because you can't possibly earn your own money on your own. And then, once you're there, you're married, usually very young, you're not going anywhere. You can't get divorced at this point. I mean, I think perhaps divorce was a possibility, but you had to be rich enough and the Pope had to say, it's just not happening for normal people. There's no rights in law. Domestic abuse is completely common. I mean, you'd have to be really, really

• 7:40Kate Lister?

  extreme for people to even notice it at the time. So where are you gonna go if you're married to an absolute dickhead who's making your life an utter, utter, utter misery? Hello, Julia.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 7:52Kate Lister?

  I'm not condoning it.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  No, of course. And we live in a different age now where we hope there are resources and there is support there for women who need it. And in those days, that simply wasn't there. Women were, as you say, you had to marry for some kind of protection and also for money to be able to live. And often that went terribly wrongly. And, you know, there was no other way out. So what do you do? I mean, Julia's circle was actually called the savior of women. That's how women kind of referred to this group of women.

• 8:18Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what was really interesting about them, and you've got Giovanna de Grandi, you've got Graziosa Farina, you've got Laura Crispolti, you've got Girulama Spana, who was said to be Julia's daughter, though there isn't really any evidence linking them, and Maria Spinola, and of course, the legend of Julia Tufana. That these women, they were dealing with women from all strata of society, from the very highest, you know, Anna Maria Aldabrandini, who was a duchess, was supplied with the poison, and washerwomen at the washing streams were supplied with the poison. And the way they did their business was, there's a place in Rome that legend says was an apothecary shop for the circle of poisoners, and they, by day, would give out.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Simple herbal remedies and of course it only takes a few times to say, well, actually, what are those bruises? And, you know, and to see women in a great deal of distress. So they kind of had connections across the whole of the sort of social sphere of Rome in those days. And that's what really fascinates me, that this isn't just a kind of women at the very bottom who were doing this. You know, it went all the way up to a duchess.

• 9:25Kate Lister?

  So you alluded just earlier there to the legend of Julia Tofana. And I suppose a story like this, trying to unpick fact from fiction must be incredibly difficult. So what do we even know in terms of hard facts of who this woman was? She definitely existed that much. There is truth to this story. It's not complete fantasy.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Not, well, not necessarily. There are theories that Julia was actually a composite of those five women who were executed as witches and poisoners in 1659 in Campo di Fiore in Rome. And if you go on any of the night tours in Rome, and I went on a few as part of the research, you know, there are different tales from Romans about their own legends, that she was an old woman who lived in the hills, that she was this and that. And there's very little evidence to show that someone called Julia Tofana existed, except there was an American academic called Craig Monson, who in 2020 published a book. He got access to the actual trial records that have been hidden by the Vatican since the 18th century, because obviously they didn't want to know that these women had

• 10:31Speaker 01

  sort of threatened society in the way they had with their kind of nefarious deeds. So these secret records sort of revealed a huge kind of network of women involved in this. And there's no one actually called Julia Tofana in those records.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  So there was a woman called Julia Mangiardi, who they say died in 1651. So that would have predated the trial. And really, there were so many gaps and so many assumptions. And even the Sicilian notaries at the time, some say that she existed and some say she arrived in Rome, even there were diarists saying that she walked into Rome with her daughter, Jirulama. But, you know, we don't actually know. And that's the point at which the novel came alive for me, actually, because these are the gaps that we need in imagination. I could then create the character of Julia as my own.

• 11:22Kate Lister?

  So it could be that Julia Tofana was like a brand name, like Anne Summers or like Ashley Madison. That that's it's that big of an industry that this was a brand name they were operating under.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  That's really interesting because yes, and there could be some facts among this, that a woman called Tia Fania Di Adamo was executed in July sixteen thirty three in Palermo in Sicily. And she is said to be the mother of Julia Tofana. And the link being the fact that you would very often take your mother's maiden name as your surname, particularly if it was an unusual one. And of course, we have Aqua Tofana, which was the name of the poison. And they all kind of link back and and so this brand was already there with Aqua Tofana. And in some ways, that may be the source of the branding kind of coming through. But even so, in the trial records in Rome, it was called Aqua T, like little water. So it wasn't actually referred to by anybody during the trial as Aqua Tofana.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  So you know, I love this mystery around all of this, that, you know, we we can't be sure about anything. And that's when it becomes about more than the details of the story. It becomes about this kind of story of defiance and sort of rebelling against, you know, their social strictures and rebelling against the natural order, which was men are above women and then above men is God. And that's that. And you don't mess around with that. It became such a threat that the the Pope Alessandro the Seventh actually got involved.

• 12:49Kate Lister?

  Wow. What did he get involved in? Was was he the one involved in taking all the documents? Because there were trials, weren't there?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Leading up to sixteen fifty nine, there were trials and there were forty six other women who were supposedly interred or banished.

• 13:03Kate Lister?

  Quite a lot, isn't it?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  It's a lot of women involved, but the only women who were killed were the ones that dispensed the poison. They weren't the actual, the ones who actually killed the men. So they went right to the heart of it. And Alessandro the Seventh, he was an inquisitor, he was the inquisitor of Malta. And he had a pretty scary reputation. He had a thing about witches and heretics because the whole thing, they were all mixed up together. So it was both a secular and a religious crime and it all sort of this kind of melting pot of sin, really. And so he had the governor of Rome, Stefano Bracchi, personally hunt these women down, you know, into the stews and the brothels and the back streets of 17th century Rome, finding these women.

• 13:46Kate Lister?

  So talk to me about who some of these women were, because we're not sure if Julia actually exists. Maybe she does. Maybe she's a brand name. Maybe she's several people. We're not entirely sure. But who were arrested and what do we know about what they were doing? Because I'm fascinated in like, how is a business, how on earth did this operate? So who were they?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Well, they were incredibly entrepreneurial and, you know, obviously business women weren't really a thing back then. So there's a lot to be said for men hating the fact that women had this kind of economic agency. But so we have Maria Spinola, who, and these are the women who definitely existed. And she was from Sicily. And I really loved writing her character because she was described in some of the evidence as having kind of contact with the spirits and with, you know, you walk out with the sort of fairies and the elves. But she was a very prolific thief and a sex worker, as any outcast women were kind of forced into that role, literally to feed themselves. She had a few husbands and she had a daughter who she had to put into an orphanage because she couldn't afford to

• 14:49Speaker 01

  feed her. And that daughter died in that convent orphanage. So, you know, Maria was a really kind of tragic character, actually. And then alongside her, we have Giovanna de Grandis. To me, she felt like a very sympathetic character in that she was quite, she was one of the women who dealt with the more kind of lower class, as they would have said, women. She went to the washing streams. She met women at mass. She was a midwife, but she was mostly a washerwoman. I mean, and she had, I think it was four marriages, if I'm remembering correctly. And, you know, the same kind of treatment from men. So you kind of get the feeling that these women all had histories with men. They had not been treated very well. And then we have Graziosa Farina, and she was an absolute

• 15:34Speaker 01

  pleasure to write because she was an older woman with this flame red hair that she used to henna herself. And she was obsessed with pilgrimage. She used to sleep on the steps of the churches rather than in her hovel or anywhere, because she said she was closer to God. And at the same time, she was dispensing poison.

• 15:50Kate Lister?

  Interesting take.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  They're really complex characters and I think that's what's so interesting about them.

• 15:57Kate Lister?

  They don't sound very rich. They sound like they're quite poor women. So I'm wondering how lucrative this old poisoning business was. Because if I was going to knock up a poison that someone was going to use to off their husband, I would be charging top dollar for that, quite frankly.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I think with the Duchess, yes, absolutely, you charge top dollar. And for most of the women that they saw, they were poor women. You know, these are women who don't, and who can't get money from their husbands because their husbands command the money. So if they do have any, their husbands take it anyway. And so I think a great deal of it was given away, actually. You know, I mean, obviously, Julie, they ran the poppy career.

• 16:34Kate Lister?

  Just out of the goodness of their hearts.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  And there was Jirulama as well. So just to add to those women, Jirulama Spanner, who was called an astrologer. I have her as Julia's daughter, and that sort of seems to be the connection, potentially her stepdaughter or daughter. And she was really interesting because she used to party with nobility, that she was invited as this kind of curiosity to read people's cards, to look into horoscopes. Obviously, it was banned by the Catholic Church. So it was a case of, you know, the nobility sort of flirting with heresy.

• 17:07Kate Lister?

  Was she telling fortunes along the lines of, you're going to die a horrible, horrible death?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Possibly not to her patrons, but she did predict the Pope's death, which almost got her executed. So, I mean, she was one of the five women at the end who was executed anyway. But yeah, it was a really big deal back then to tell a fortune. You know, you're in the, literally in the heart of the Catholic sort of state, yeah.

• 17:33Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Catherine and Julia after this short break.

• 17:45Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 18:26Kate Lister?

  Do we have any idea what this poison was? It's gone down in history as Aqua Tofana, The Little Water, a few other names as well. Do we have any idea what it was? I mean, I suppose it could have been anything, but do we have anything in the records?

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Generally, it was said to be arsenic belladonna, which of course means beautiful woman in Italian, and it was given to women quite routinely to make their pupils bigger and attract a lover, and lead. And the idea was that they were all boiled together to create this odorless and tasteless poison. There's no concrete evidence that it was that combination, but it seems to be the most likely. But at the same time, all poison was pretty much undetectable back then. In the 17th century, arsenic was undetectable. But the idea was that it was meant to be a slow-acting poison, so you could actually almost predict someone's death. So you could stage it very carefully over a few weeks or months, with one drop in their broth or in their wine.

• 19:25Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:27Kate Lister?

  If you were going to do this, if you were going to be like, my husband, he's a hideous, abusive whore, I need to get out of it. You wouldn't want something that works straight away, because that would be too obvious, that if you took a bite of something and keeled over, that everyone's looking at you. So I suppose you would want something that you could get a bit of distance from, something that might look like any one of the hundreds of illnesses doing the rounds at the time.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was all about, you know, death and disease was commonplace, wasn't it? And particularly with the symptoms that you had with arsenic poisoning, you know, very thirsty, high fever, dysentery, gastroenteritis, all of that kind of, you know, it could have been any number of diseases. But there was one really curious thing that I found in a few sources, was that people were saying that... When they died with this poison, their corpses looked full of vitality. They had a lovely blush on their cheeks, the sheen of their skin was perfect. And I found that really interesting. And ultimately, the recognition of that was what brought them down because the duke that the Duchess had poisoned.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  He was laid out in his coffin in one of the cathedrals and one of the great churches and he looked like he'd just, you know, come back from riding with his horses. He looked so full of vitality and alive, yet of course was dead, that that's when the questions started being asked.

• 20:45Kate Lister?

  I was just about to ask you, how did they get caught? Because this, this does seem like it's, it's virtually undetectable, you know, it's, like you said, it could have been any cause of death. There's, there's nothing, there's no tests for arsenic. People are dying of these types of stuff. All the time, although maybe looking back, maybe it was always arsenic. Maybe that's why so many people were dying like this. But how did they get caught?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  So there'd been plague in Rome in sixteen fifty six. So there were a lot of people dying. So for a long time they got away with it because obviously there were lots of corpses and they were hanging about in the streets and they were having to sort of burn them and, and you know, there's all sorts of terrible stuff going on. But then people started to notice that there were lots of young widows, like literally young widows walking around Rome. And people started to confess in the confessional with their priests. And there's a famous sort of example, yes, and people, and so some of these priests were starting to come to the priestly bosses to say, look, you know, women are coming here and saying they're getting hold of this poison. What do we do? And there was then one woman who actually confessed that she'd poured the whole thing into her husband's soup and she slapped his hand away.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  And kind of saved his life, but also obviously her husband realised that she'd been trying to poison him. And she came and they gave her a kind of immunity to tell them all about it. So it was sort of, it kind of happened over time. And they put posters up in the streets of Rome saying, if you know anything about the Sicilian, you know, alluding to Julia. Yeah, well, these are the symptoms. And if you know anything, you are now obliged in both law and with the church to to tell us immediately. And and you know, they had inquisitors all over Rome, like working from the churches. Because they knew that women could meet at mass. That was really one of the main places that women could meet and sort of dispense the vials of acquitafana or acquetta while they were praying.

• 22:42Kate Lister?

  Damn it, damn it. It's just people not just talking too much. And I I hadn't thought of the confessional. God, yeah, imagine being that priest of just woman after woman after woman just coming in all saying the same thing. Yeah, I think maybe we need to do something about this. All right. So the posters have gone up. People are talking. I guess, I guess if enough people are doing this, eventually somebody's going to get nervous, somebody's going to crack, somebody's going to confess something. And then are they rounded up pretty quickly? I mean, was this was this a group of women who were working together? Or were they working independently of one another?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  So they were working as a circle of poisoners. So it was a very well organised enterprise. And I think the scale of it became very shocking, you know, to really the whole of Italy and then on into the rest of Europe at the time. But no, what they did was they set up a kind of sting and they had a fake client come along and say that they had a terrible husband and they had to go over there. And it was Giovanna de Grandis who got into that mess and then was arrested. She'd been picked up by the Inquisition a couple of times prior to that, but she hadn't had any of the acquetta on her apart from one sort of occasion that's in the book. But they finally kind of had them because, you know, e- even though it was, you know, it was the 17th century, but they still needed evidence.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And they actually couldn't execute them without confession, which of course is why torture was used. So anyway, they set up this sting, they caught her in the act of handing over this vial of poison, they tested the poison, the dog died, you know, and and it sort of went from there. And then they kind of, they had them. But they brought in so many people. I mean, it was a huge operation by Stefano Bracchi over many months. You know, the I I think the trial papers are 1400 pages worth of notes from the notary.

• 24:28Kate Lister?

  Oh my god. So if they were tortured, could we make the argument that they were tortured into confessing and that they were false confessions? Or is there just a lot of other evidence that says, yeah, they definitely did do this?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  I think it's a bit of both. There's no doubt that they were dispensing poison, but whether they wanted to confess to it is another matter. Because they could, they knew that they couldn't be executed without confession. In the end, though, the Pope did actually kind of make new rules and just go ahead anyway. Because it had become such a huge scandal across Europe that these women were defying, like I said, the natural order of men. And it had gone up to being a duke. And I think also the Pope was like, well, who's to say I'm next? You know, whether I'm next or not. It kind of touched the edges of those in power. And this is why they were just determined to execute them. I believe that Jirulama wasn't tortured, but the rest were.

• 25:20Kate Lister?

  There's something so insidious about the use of poison. Because you can see why this would frighten the establishment as much as it did. And I think it's the fact that it's poison that, because they say poison is a woman's weapon, don't they? I mean, really, any woman could, could murder a husband if she wanted to. You'd probably get caught, but let's face it, you, you could do that. But it's, it's the fact that it's, it's put into food. And that's traditionally something that a woman does from, it sort of gets right to the heart of that threat to the patriarchy. That at your home, where you're supposed to be your lord and your master, the woman can actually subvert all of that and take you down.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  That's so interesting. And it's the point where you're nurturing and you're in that fully female role. And that you're supporting and nurturing and, and feeding and nourishing. And actually, it's almost like the great betrayal, isn't it? And it's undermining something without having to do it in a way that involves the law or, or economically. Or those things that women were shut out of. It was all they had. I mean, that's the only way they could. It was set up that way, wasn't it?

• 26:27Kate Lister?

  Like, if you stab someone, too obvious. If you bash them round the head, you have to explain that. If they fall down the stairs, there has to be a backstory. Poison is just the perfect, I don't know what happened. I gave him a sandwich and then later on, I just don't know. But it is, there's something subversive and particularly frightening about it, that the threat is, that the call is coming from inside the house, is how this one feels.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  And it's silent, it's silent, isn't it? It's not raging outside the law courts. It's not trying to bring any kind of legal challenge to the establishment. It's completely hidden and completely silent. And that's kind of, that was the realm of femininity back in those days. It was backstage. And I hope that I've really sort of played that in the book as well, that really working with them being, they're not at the front of the stage, they're not players on the stage of men. They have to exist in the shadows and so of course, the shadows get murky at times.

• 27:22Kate Lister?

  And the scale of it must have been terrifying. Along with this realisation of like, shit. Like, maybe, not that we have to be nice to them, I'm sure nobody ever thought, maybe we should stop being horrible husbands. But like, the realisation that this is a mass enterprise and that women have been doing this for a very, very long time. And that must have been particularly terrifying for them.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think there are lots of different sort of versions of this, but they say between 600 and 1,000 men were killed as a result of this poison. And, you know, they were dispensing it and it went far and wide. You know, women were coming to them for this and then handing it to their neighbours, handing it to family members. It was travelling through Italy. It was unstoppable, basically. And men, you know, they can't infiltrate women's spaces. You know, you're not going to find men at the washing stream and you're not going to find men in the female parts of the churches where they're celebrating mass. And, you know, I think for men, that was particularly terrifying, that women had their own systems and their own way of operating that they could not control.

• 28:31Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Catherine and Julia after this short break.

• 28:44Speaker 02

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• 28:55Speaker 02

  I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership.

• 29:18Speaker 02

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• 29:42Kate Lister?

  So what happens to our friendly band of poisoners then? They've been tortured into confessing. I think I know what you're going to say. I don't think that this is a slap on the wrist type of an offence, but let's end their story. What happens to them?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  OK, well, I mean, I kind of get that done in the book straight away, so that we're in no doubt. Well, they're standing at the gallows. So five women were executed as witches and poisoners in 1659, and yet their legacy kind of lives on in the fear that it created. And even Mozart in the 1700s, when he was kind of on his deathbed, was saying, you know, I think someone has given me Aqua Tofana and calculated the exact moment of my death. So this fear, their legacy was one of real fear in the minds of men going forward, that women were capable of this and that they weren't actually very happy with being submissive, obedient, abused wives.

• 30:34Kate Lister?

  Why witchcraft? Why did they sling that one in there? I mean, they've got them as poisoners. Was that just, you just chuck it in for good measure? Why witchcraft as well?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, as part of it. I think that anything with female agency, anything involving outcast women.

• 30:47Kate Lister?

  Witch, witch!

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're a witch. They were herbalists and midwives. They're witches. They dispensed potions. They were witches. And, you know, witchcraft was bound in with heresy, which of course was both a secular and criminal offence. And it meant that you were against the Catholic Church. And, you know, that's what the Inquisition was all about. They were burning witches. So, yeah. I think it was just utterly assumed that that's how they were and that's what they were called.

• 31:11Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll just, we'll just bung that one in there as well. Now, obviously, they executed these women. They were hanged to death, I think, weren't they?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:19Kate Lister?

  They, they executed them and then that was it. No woman ever poisoned her husband ever, ever, ever again. We all learnt our lesson and stopped it, correct?

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And, um, and, you know, they hid the trial notes in the Castel D'Angelo for hundreds of years so that women didn't work out that they could actually go ahead and do these things. If you look at history, um, actually, poisoning isn't such a female crime. It has that kind of reputation and it has that sort of seductive reputation that it's a female crime, but it kind of bears out across all genders, you know, that anybody can do it.

• 31:55Kate Lister?

  Was it Agatha Christie that said that one in one of her books, that, that poison is a woman's weapon?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that's how we view it, isn't it? You know, that it is because it's hidden and silent and in the background that we kind of naturally assume it's like women's wiles, you know, this is like a very female thing to do. Um, which says more about men and their thinking, I think, than it does about women and their poisoning.

• 32:17Kate Lister?

  I think so. I think like poison, at the end of the day, I think it's actually, it's, um, again, I'm not advocating it, but it's a very clever method of killing because o- often leaves no trace. You can be well away from the victim by the time it happens. There's plausible deniability. Uh, the only thing that will trip you up now is obviously tests, is that, that it can be proven that it's happened. But I, I've never really understood that, that it was a woman's poison thing.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  It's almost like being rebranded, isn't it? As, you know, by men telling women how, how they behave. Whether it was just women that poisoned and whether it was just men that they poisoned, we don't really know. The poison was dispensed. It was to women who were in abusive marriages, but I don't think it was always. It was, I mean, the majority, of course, but, you know, again, I have it in the book that actually it can be inconvenient men or men that they're bored with or like boring marriages or. Just being in love with someone else. I mean, I'm sure that the

• 33:11Kate Lister?

  Wanting an inheritance.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  edges of this were blurred. And inheritance, of course. Yeah, that's all part, it's all part of it. Uh, but of course, we have the Borgia's who are famous for poisoning. And, you know, it was Cesare and it was the Pope who were famous for, I think it was Cantarella, wasn't it? So it's in a weapon of men as well.

• 33:28Kate Lister?

  When you start to look for it, husband poisoning syndicates can be found across Europe, right up, and I think the latest one that I found was in the, the early 20th century. Hungary in particular seemed to have been notorious for this. If you look at Victorian newspapers, every so often, a case very similar to this one pops up, husband poisoning syndicate, and it's some woman somewhere who was producing a poison. And it's interesting. And they get caught in the same way. It's a suddenly, the, the authorities start to notice, why is, why are there so many young widows around all of a sudden? What's, what's happening here? So I don't think that people did learn their lessons. And I would put money on the fact that these were not the only husband poisoners in operation.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  I'm absolutely sure, but there's something about this group that's caught the imagination. And, you know, that with, with all the rumours about what was in Aqua Tofana, how it was used. I mean, obviously, you know, poison isn't new. It's been used for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so there would have been poisoning going on regardless. But because it was a group of women, because it was these women, because of the legend of Julia Tofana, who was meant to be very beautiful, all of these things make it incredibly seductive. And certainly for me as a novelist.

• 34:43Kate Lister?

  What do you think the legacy of this is, as a final question? Is it just a fun story? It's easy to overly romanticise these things. Unfortunately, there is a lot of humour as well, because like I laughed about it. I mean, you can't help it. It's, it's so far in the past. It's, I think you, you can kind of do that. Like, these women were just bumping off their husbands. But it's quite a serious history, this.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  It really is. And I think it's part of our history as women and how we have created our own agency in our own ways and ways that are very dark. You know, were they murderers or were they saviours? I mean, we, you know, that's something that is a question that's still open for interpretation and. It's really about the history of women's voices not being heard and women's place in society not being acknowledged or equalised in any sense. So it's kind of a history of sort of our rage and our resilience and revenge and all of these things that that we've had to fight for in order to be able to be as free as we are now. But, you know, those those freedoms are being taken away all over the world. So this is a story that

• 35:50Speaker 01

  keeps coming back and keeps coming back because we cannot take our freedoms for granted. You know, we see what's going on in Afghanistan, we see what's going on in America, we see, you know, across the world, women are fighting for the most basic kind of healthcare and, you know, economic and legal status. So we do need to keep revisiting these stories. We do need to hear from figures in the past because we don't want to go back there, surely.

• 36:15Kate Lister?

  No, we don't. Catherine, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Come find me on Instagram, Catherine underscore Kemp, or on TikTok. So that's author.catherine.kemp, or on my website, of course, Catherine Kemp dot com and say hi.

• 36:33Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. And we'll just put a caveat, please don't poison your husband. Try therapy first, please. Thank you so much. You have been so much fun to talk to.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Kate. It's been a pleasure.

• 36:47Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Catherine for joining me. And if you liked what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. And don't be getting any ideas about bumping off your spouse. And if you do, that cannot be traced back to us. All right. We never met. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.