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We’re deep in the witchy end of the Renaissance now…. women falling into trances, communing with the dead, healing the sick, and charging for it, which honestly sounds like a pretty solid business model. Meanwhile men called the Căluşari are dressing as women, leaping around with swords, and apparently killing people with no legal consequences whatsoever. The church is not thrilled about any of this, but it’s been going on for thousands of years and a strongly worded sermon isn’t going to cut it. The post The Smell of Evil – The Renaissance #247 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We’ve finally made it to witch trials…. sort of. First: an 80-year-old man in 1692 Livonia confessing to being a werewolf, werewolves who apparently lose battles against sorcerers armed with broomsticks, and a fertility cult called the Benandanti who leave their bodies in the shape of butterflies to fight for good crops using fennel stalks. Then the Waldensians, who just wanted to preach poverty and got 700 years of massacre for it. And then the witch trials of 1430s Switzerland, where the accused were confessing to flying on chair legs with the help of a hallucinogenic salve applied in a manner Cameron declines to leave ambiguous. The post Werewolves Lost Again – The Renaissance #246 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We’ve been building up to witches for a while now, and this episode we take a detour back to the second century CE…. because of course we do. Before Christians started accusing Jews of ritual murder, cannibalism, and orgies, Romans were accusing Christians of exactly the same thing. The stories just get recycled. Then we get into women flying at night with the goddess Diana, Herodias engineering the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and how 1,500 years later she somehow ends up co-leading the witches. Next episode: werewolves. The post Head on a Platter – The Renaissance #245 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We finally get to the witches. Only took us a couple of hundred episodes. The trail leads through the Black Death, tortured confessions about poisoned powders and boiled infants, a German theologian named Nider who wrote the first book on witchcraft in 1435, and a judge who apparently knew an extraordinary amount of detail about secret devil-worshipping covens…. under torture, of course, which is famously reliable. By 1438 the template is basically set: broomsticks, covens, babies in pots, and 700 followers on the verge of becoming lords of the country. Between 1400 and 1775 roughly 100,000 people would be prosecuted. About 80% of them women. The post The Devil’s Recipe Book – The Renaissance #244 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Twelve Genoese galleys dock at Messina in 1347 carrying rats, fleas, and Yersinia pestis…. and within weeks Europe is looking for someone to blame. Spoiler: it’s the Jews. Also the beggars. Also, possibly, the planets. Pope Clement VI tries to point out that Jews are dying of the plague too, which you’d think would settle the matter. The post Blame the Jews (The Plague Made Them Do It) – The Renaissance #243 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

The Beguines were a movement of independent women who lived like nuns, owned property, preached in the vernacular, and answered to no man or church…. which, predictably, the church absolutely could not stand. We work through three of the great Beguine mystics, including Marguerite Porete, who spent 18 months on trial giving the Inquisition the silent finger before being burned alive in Paris in 1310. Her book survived, was read seriously by theologians for centuries, and wasn’t definitively credited to her until 1946 because obviously a woman couldn’t have written anything that sophisticated. The post The Silence of Marguerite – The Renaissance #242 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

The Jews have been expelled, the lepers have been burned, and somebody clearly had a plan…. we just don’t know who. We dig into the mechanics of medieval conspiracy theories, how the same story spread across France at a speed that makes you go “hmm,” and why the whole thing is basically a template that’s still being photocopied 700 years later. Also: the Pied Piper of Hamelin was apparently a real event, and the rats didn’t show up until 275 years after the fact. The post Rats, Jews, and the Man with the Flute – The Renaissance #241 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

The King of France issues a royal edict blaming the lepers for poisoning the wells…. conveniently leaving out the Jews, who had just paid him 150,000 livres – roughly a third of the entire royal annual revenue. Pure coincidence. We also get a forged letter from the future, a secret room full of incriminating ram-skin, and a dragon that God apparently sent to signal it was time to murder somebody. The post A Goodly Sum – The Renaissance #240 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We’re still talking about the Great Leper Scare of 1321 and now we’re deep into the trials. We’ve got lepers across France being rounded up, tortured into confessions, and burned at the stake, because Jesus loves nothing more than the smell of burning human flesh. Under torture, we’ve got Jews implicating the the Muslim King of Granada, the Sultan of Babylon, and a tall dark man with a scimitar who was apparently just standing around at the conspiracy meeting ready to cut heads off. We also drill down into immurement. That’s where you brick someone up inside a wall. Medieval Christian love and compassion at its best. The post The Tall Dark Man with a Scimitar – The Renaissance #239 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We’re still talking about the Great Leper Scare of 1321 – where lepers, Jews, Muslims, and the devil himself are allegedly conspiring to poison the wells and topple Christendom. It’s the juicy tale of how a rumour spiralled into a pyramid scheme of scapegoating that ended with 160 Jews burned alive in a ditch. Today we talk about how it was connected to the Great Famine of the early 14th century and a bunch of Christian teen beggars who decided to force Jews to convert. There's something secret here that only members can see. Probably an audio player or something. If you want to listen to one of our many free episodes, go here. [button link="https://therenaissancetimes.com/category/podcast/free/" type="big"] FREE EPISODES[/button] The post POISON IN THE WELL – The Renaissance #238 (The Witches Part 2) appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We are taking a break from Michelangelo to talk about lepers, Jews and... WITCHES!  Today we start with the 1321 leper panic in France, where thousands of people were burned alive or locked up for life based on tortured confessions of a supposed plot to poison the water supply and take over the world. Along the way we get hot and heavy with the French royal family — adultery, assassinations, a king who reigned for four days, and a woman who may have murdered her own infant nephew with a pin — before connecting it all to the origins of Europe's first mass segregation program. It's the archaeology of conspiracy theories.  The post Burn the Lepers – The Renaissance #237 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

On this episode, Michelangelo is done waiting around in Rome — he packs up and heads back to Florence, effectively ghosting the Pope before the Pope can ghost him any harder. Julius II is furious and tries every trick in the book to drag him back, including leaning on Florence's own leader Soderini, who knows you can't bully a prima donna and writes the most flattering letter of recommendation in Renaissance history. We end with Michelangelo finally heading to Bologna to face the music — or the Pope, which at this point might be worse. The post Ghosting the Pope – The Renaissance #236 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Michelangelo gets summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II — the baddest, most belligerent pope who ever lived — to build the greatest tomb the world has ever seen. Mickey heads to Carrara for six months to find the perfect marble, starts dreaming of flooding Rome with giant statues, and then one of the most famous sculptures from antiquity gets dug out of the ground right in front of him. We also get into why Julius II absolutely despised the Borgias, and Cameron rocks his new Michael Caine glasses throughout. The post The Warrior Pope and the Marble Dreamer – The Renaissance #235 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

In this episode of The Renaissance Times, Cameron and Ray dive deep into Michelangelo's three extraordinary marble and painted roundels — the tondos — created during his Florence years between 1501 and 1506. Beginning with the origins of the tondo format itself (those circular domestic artworks that started life as elaborately painted birth trays brought to mothers who'd survived childbirth), the hosts examine what makes Michelangelo's approach so audaciously different from everyone else's. In the Taddei Tondo, now housed in the Royal Academy of Arts in London, his signature *non finito* technique — deliberately leaving sections rough and unpolished — makes Baby Jesus emerge luminously from raw marble while John the Baptist lurks in the background in a pose that raises some eyebrows and a great deal of laughter. The Pitti Tondo, now in the Bargello in Florence, features a proud, regal Virgin Mary whose head breaks the boundary of the circle itself — a deliberate choice, since both works were designed to be viewed from below, above a doorway. Then comes the main event: the Doni Tondo, the only surviving panel painting by Michelangelo, which Ray declares — with complete sincerity — his single favourite painting in the world after encountering it unexpectedly in the Uffizi. Cameron breaks down Michelangelo's use of *cangiante* colour technique — swapping to entirely different colours to create shading rather than using Da Vinci's smoky *sfumato* — producing something that looks, as Cameron puts it, like it was lit by a social media ring light compared to the gentle atmospheric glow of the Mona Lisa. The hosts also dig into the painting's contested symbolism: the pagan nudes lounging in the background, the possible Dominican theological argument about Mary's sanctification at the moment of conception, and the conspicuous placement of Christ's anatomy. Then there's the business drama — when patron Agnolo Doni tried to pay 40 ducats instead of the agreed 70, Michelangelo doubled the price to 140 and told him to pay up or hand back the painting. Doni paid. It's a pivotal moment: the artist as rockstar, commanding the room and rewriting the rules of patronage in Renaissance Florence. The post The Price Just Doubled: Michelangelo, the Doni Tondo, and the Birth of the Artist as Rockstar – The Renaissance #234 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

In this episode of The Renaissance Times (Episode 225), Cameron and Ray return to Florence to explore Michelangelo’s earliest surviving sculpture, Madonna of the Stairs (Madonna della Scala)—a marble relief carved when he was just fifteen. They marvel at his prodigious skill, discussing how this modest, unfinished piece already reveals his genius for depth, motion, and emotional complexity. Along the way, they detour through Florence’s real estate market of the 1500s (where a thirty-three-year-old Michelangelo was rich enough to buy five adjoining properties), laugh about Renaissance lifestyles, and draw irreverent but sharp connections between theology, symbolism, and art history—from cherubs in the Book of Ezekiel to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction speech. It’s a lively, funny, and deeply informed tour through the early stirrings of one of art’s great minds. There something secret here that only members can see. Probably an audio player or something. If you want to listen to one of our many free episodes, go here. FREE EPISODES The post Renaissance #225 – Teenage Michelangelo: The Buff Baby Jesus and the Marble Prodigy (Michelangelo, part 3) appeared first on The Renaissance Times.