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Aqua Tofana, Part Two
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On today's episode, we talk about the poisoners' ring, and how the women were ultimately discovered and caught.
Check out our YouTube channel, Fixate Today: Grey Matters
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Fixate Today Gone Tomorrow'
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Fixate Today Gone Tomorrow. I'm Nikki and I'm here with my Aunt Joy. We are two neurodivergent ladies who obsess about various topics. Joy is autistic and I have ADHD and we are letting our hyperfixations fly.
00:00:15
Speaker
Today we are fixating on Aquatofana. Music
00:00:29
Speaker
Welcome back, everybody.
What was Aqua Tofana?
00:00:30
Speaker
We're talking no more Aquatofano. We're part two of talking about lady poisoners. Yeah, before we get too far in, I'm gonna run through my sources again.
00:00:39
Speaker
The podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, YouTuber Bailey Sarian. The book The League of Lady Poisoners by Lisa Perrin. Allthingsinteresting.com.
00:00:51
Speaker
aspectsofhistory.com, mike-history.com, and the dash is a word, not the symbol, and Wikipedia. Very cool. Can you refresh my memory or or refresh where we're at?
00:01:05
Speaker
I've got the memory of a fish, so. Yes, we are in seventeenth century Italy. we are Very Catholic, very patriarchal. Once a woman got married, she became a husband's property.
00:01:19
Speaker
Women had very few legal rights, period. But then when they were married, they fell under basically the jurisdiction of their husband. We talked last time about the poison created, ah possibly created, at least sold by Julia Tofana called Aqua Tofana.
00:01:37
Speaker
Generally, this was used to um allow women to murder their husbands. It was disguised often as cosmetics or holy oil, so the product could be hidden in plain sight.
Who was Julia Tofana?
00:01:50
Speaker
The main ingredient was arsenic, but last time we talked about some of the crazy rumored ingredients. And today I want to start talking about kind of the business structure of what these women were doing in at this time, which is kind of astounding. It is. Yeah. No, it's exciting. They were such entrepreneurs. What are they? Boss babes?
00:02:11
Speaker
Be your own boss. Sell poison. Bringing home the bacon. its Okay. All right. So we are in Rome, Italy now. Giulia Tofana has opened a cosmetic shop, but we all know what she's selling.
00:02:27
Speaker
So it did function. as a cosmetic shop, but also had specific clients who were referred in. A client had to be referred by either a former customer or somebody that will see that Julia had kind of a group of women and they were all working together.
00:02:48
Speaker
So I see this as like, yeah, there's the regular traffic who comes in her cosmetic shop. And then the referrals are the ones who are yeah know the secret menu items. Yeah, probably get taken to like the back room.
00:03:02
Speaker
Yes, exactly. New clients had to be vouched for. But this worked because Julia's clients were incredibly protective of her. Somebody would only send Julia a client if the person was completely trustworthy.
00:03:15
Speaker
Part of this was Julia was doing things to help protect a lot of these women who were in these horrible situations. But also... Julia kept receipts and clients would be discovered if Julia was ever arrested.
00:03:29
Speaker
So there's twofold. they They trust her and they like her, but also they could go down with
Coaching for Innocence: How Women Used Aqua Tofana
00:03:35
Speaker
her. Women who acquired the poison would be coached on how to act during the poisoning, including calling doctors for help.
00:03:43
Speaker
They had to play this up. I think that was a good service that they were provided with. Right? Exactly. They were also coached on to act after the death. They would demand a post-mortem examination.
00:03:55
Speaker
Knowing it wouldn't show anything because it was so difficult to detect this in organs. And then because of that specifically, like demanding the autopsy, this would elevate a widow and her ah validity as being innocent.
00:04:12
Speaker
If you did something to your husband, you wouldn't want the autopsy, right? Well, anyway, this brings me back to like that what we talk about on a lot of our other past topics. I mean, like Alec Murda murders and Micah Miller. I mean, there's kind of the same, like the husband's behavior afterwards in both instances brought a lot of attention to the case that maybe had they had this coaching, maybe they would have done a better job.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah. I think that's also pretty telling of men and women in a lot of ways. And of course, this isn't a blanket statement. We're never black and white here. But the men in those cases are very confident in themselves.
00:04:54
Speaker
And it's it's like a hubris thing, right? If their actions are the things that have brought or will be bringing them down because they aren't, I'm guessing, I can't imagine J.P. Miller is listening to the people who are like, can you stop and just like quiet down?
00:05:10
Speaker
Like stop pushing people? Like stop who yelling at protesters? and No, I mean, I could definitely see that. Yeah, both men are like, they have that i'm sense of invincibility.
00:05:22
Speaker
Because they've and they've gotten away with a lot of stuff their whole lives. So, but yeah I'm sorry. no No, Bringing it back to this, though. But yeah, it's that behavior is... after doing such an act is is such a clue.
00:05:36
Speaker
Also, I mean, again, amazing that we're talking about like, actually, we haven't gotten, you haven't said it it again, have you? The post-mortem, like asking, yeah did you? right okay Yeah, also, again, crazy that we're still talking about like the autopsies, the post-mortems, um even this far back and how that plays into the look of guilt or innocence. Right, right. And it's it's, I feel like a double-edged kind of thing because I'm a big believer in Perhaps noticing behavior of somebody who's accused of something, but not basing an accusation on that, if it makes sense.
00:06:08
Speaker
Everybody behaves differently with loss and things like that. yeah But I feel like yeah if you're in a situation that an autopsy is suggested by an authority or by somebody, you know...
00:06:20
Speaker
And the person says, no, we don't need that. Like, that shouldn't be a red flag. I mean, yeah, don't I'm not sure how I feel on that one either way. Because i was like, i I know. Because I always think like, okay, what what what is what is the purpose of this autopsy? What what knowledge will we yeah gain? Or what are we trying to gain? Yeah. Yeah.
00:06:41
Speaker
um I feel like if there, I feel like this is strictly like if there's any question. True. About any elements of a death. Like it's more like that. and it And that if, if the person being asked is like, no, it's fine. It's like, we're going to clock that. yeah No, it's fine. And can we, can we get that cremation going? Yeah. He's just going to move on here.
00:07:02
Speaker
That should be a bit of a red flag, I feel like. And maybe, again, not reason enough to accuse anybody of anything, but just like we need to keep looking into this a little bit.
00:07:13
Speaker
Little eyebrow raising. Yes,
The Network of Poison: Expansion and Secrecy
00:07:15
Speaker
exactly. So Julia Tofana had a stepdaughter. This is so this is, again, one of the confusing names that it's a mashup of some of the other names we've talked about last episode, you know, brings us back to kind of the who's who and what's happening. And the story's been passed down so much. and Names are very similar.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah. So just keep that in mind. So we're going to talk about a woman named Girolana Spara, who was Julia Tofana's stepdaughter, Julia oddly enough, was a widow. So Girolana was thought to have sold Aquatofana to aristocrats through her work as an astrologer.
00:07:53
Speaker
I was so afraid I said aristocats that I like panicked and was like aristocrats.
00:08:00
Speaker
You weren't worried about saying astronomer? No, I was so focused on aristocats. I didn't notice astronomer and astrologer.
00:08:10
Speaker
no I did it though. You did it. Another woman involved in this poisoning ring named Giovanna de Grazis, who had connections to working class women.
00:08:22
Speaker
She would sell to the lower class who didn't have as much money and didn't have as many resources. She would hang outside of the churches, which is one of the only places that women were allowed to gather publicly and like chat and catch up. So, so much for that referral system.
00:08:38
Speaker
Well, I think. ladies. You want to hear I got? Yeah. Like anyone having marriage problems? Yeah. It is. Men were warned not to let their wives congregate together out even outside of the churches. It's not appropriate.
00:08:55
Speaker
I guess they were warned not to eat the food that their wives cook. No. Just you can't let them talk. you So this ring grew. These three main women kind of grew that the poison was being exported to other cities outside of Rome and Palermo.
00:09:11
Speaker
But they were also networking. So the women were using other women they trusted, fortune tellers, underground doctors, abortionists, who women would go to and the they would figure out who needed their help and report back to Julia and Girolana and Giovanna and say, this woman needs your help. Can you go have a conversation?
00:09:38
Speaker
There was even a group founded by a fallen priest named Father Girolama, not to be confused with Girolana Giovanna.
00:09:53
Speaker
So his brother was an apothecary. who got arsenic to the group. AKA a their drug dealer. Correct. And this is where, through this priest, Father Jirolama, was how they started selling the holy oil that they kind of delivered the vials of. If they weren't selling it cosmetically, this was the priest who was handing it out as an ointment or a holy water or something like that.
00:10:19
Speaker
So this holy ointment was thought to fight like acne and other blemishes. And that's how it was. It was marketed, but it was actually labeled as poison because it was, it was like, whatever this oil was, it's like, you just put a little bit on your face. Don't ingest it. Don't do anything else, which again,
00:10:39
Speaker
makes it so husbands are like oh i don't want anything to do with those cosmetics over there i don't care but like they're poison i'm not touching them
00:10:49
Speaker
the old warning labels do not ingest if you do call 9-1-1 right away yeah and so so this priest also added a level of um legitimacy two Wait, this was the fallen priest, though.
00:11:05
Speaker
So it's just a little, just a little. Yes, right. Exactly. But yeah, there's, there's so much of like, husbands just didn't care what like, yeah, like, I don't care what you're using. Just keep it away from me. I've i've got to go hunt foxes or something.
00:11:23
Speaker
So the women in this ring were obviously mostly in it for money. There are some noble things that they did to help other women, but let's be real. However, they would sometimes give the poison to women for free who like desperately needed a way to escape a marriage.
00:11:39
Speaker
not sure whether that's a commendable thing. I know. It's very confusing. I'm quite sure how to think about that.
How did the Authorities Discover Aqua Tofana?
00:11:46
Speaker
I know. In 1658, authorities became aware of this a group of poisoners.
00:11:52
Speaker
More likely, authorities were being paid off to look the other way and probably knew about this group before then. But something happened that they were now openly looking at. That's one more time.
00:12:03
Speaker
Move forward to today and think about South Carolina. Again, going back to To J.P. Miller, Alec Murdoch, for those of you who know.
00:12:14
Speaker
South Carolina, lots of lots of authorities looking the other way. Tales as old as time. Exactly. Basically, again, tales old as time. Except for us, it's not magical underworld. It's trafficking at this time. yeah But yeah the magical underworld was an open secret.
00:12:30
Speaker
So authorities knew that all these things were happening. They might not have known details. They might not have known what exactly. But they knew to look the other way. But women kept financial records. These women were keeping track of things. They had the receipts.
00:12:42
Speaker
Which, on the one hand, is bad for an investigation. On the other hand... They've got a lot of leverage over people who came to them as clients. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, i was going to say my initial thought on that was like, well, that was kind of dumb. But yeah, I guess there's i guess that ah information can be used in two different ways. It's like Ruby Frankie keeping her a journal yeah of abuse. yeah excuse So there are a couple of versions as to what brought down this group.
00:13:12
Speaker
One version is that too many people were speaking out during their Catholic confession that the Pope had to say something about it. Okay, I going to say when we get into this part, to me, these are silly.
00:13:26
Speaker
Yes. yeah it's um I love that, though, that the Pope was like, can y'all stop poisoning? All right. This is getting to be an issue, guys. This is too much.
00:13:38
Speaker
Another version is one of the women was entrapped by police through a woman who came in undercover. That's complicated. Wow. I know. But they do it. I mean, they do it now.
00:13:51
Speaker
A duke, a prominent duke in the area had died a year earlier. There was questions of it being poison, which it became more public. And there was more kind of people looking eyes on it.
00:14:03
Speaker
And it was like, oh, we've gotten a little too cocky. Like we're a little that he's that's a little too big for kind of a step too far. Also, more people were dying. It was There is a plague going around ed they could have just been killing more men that it was like, this is more than the plague. What's happening? It's only men.
00:14:23
Speaker
Women aren't getting the plague.
00:14:27
Speaker
I, again, still feel like people are dropping dead all the time anyway. Yes. And so yet another version of how they were caught was a new client came to Julia. This woman, think if I'm remembering correctly, wasn't vetted like at the same level as a lot of women were.
00:14:44
Speaker
Like there wasn't somebody. Maybe she was just one of the ones gathered. Exactly. So this woman prepared her husband's dinner of soup and put two drops of the poison into his meal.
00:14:55
Speaker
But he demanded that he have a glass of wine first. So in the process of her like putting the soup down and then going to pour him wine, she couldn't follow go through with it. So she yelled at him not to eat the soup and then felt too guilty about why. She just stopped him, but she wouldn't tell him why. Okay, yeah, I wasn't quite getting like why the wine threw this off by so much.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It was just because like, it's that time that your brain has a little bit of time to be like, oh, this is a bad idea. I gotta undo it. She maybe should have poured herself a glass at that point too. So because she didn't tell him why he needed to stop eating it, she just like panicked and told him to stop. He beat her until she told him what was in the soup.
00:15:38
Speaker
He brought her to authorities in Rome, who then tortured her until she confessed and named names. Yeah, that didn't turn out too too good. Yeah. So again, those are all theories about how they all got caught.
00:15:51
Speaker
Probably a little bit of everything. I mean, not the Pope one, I can't imagine. But we do know authorities knew about something. Somebody, because people love Julia, somebody had warned her that she needed to flee. And she went to a church, a local church, and just asked for sanctuary.
00:16:08
Speaker
But by this point, things were getting out of control with the rumors going around and she was really we're looking at you know, a woman being hunted like a witch, there was a rumor that she had poisoned the entire water supply of Rome.
The Capture and Execution of Julia Tofana
00:16:23
Speaker
So people are like in a frenzy trying to get this woman now. Well, and there may be a sliver of truth in this, in that, I mean, arsenic can poison the groundwater.
00:16:34
Speaker
So it is possible that, that something like that had happened or at some point and um and, and then finding a way, you know, they kind of twist the story to then. Yeah. Yeah. fit what they need it to yeah yeah so because ah so many people are freaking out more people are freaking out than our allies to her at this point somebody revealed her location at this church and the church then handed julia to the authorities the story goes that she was tortured by authorities until she confessed to 600 murders i would fold so quickly this is what this is why it could not have been my pharmacist side hustle back i would too
00:17:10
Speaker
the day no i the slight the littlest bit of discomfort and i'm like i'll tell you anything you want to know i will give you turn off the ac and i will give up government secrets so but also having said this uh take any confession given through torture with a grain of salt we know she was guilty of facilitating quite a few murders but 600 is a lot but who's to say So an angry mob stormed the church after that rumor spread about the groundwater. You've got to watch out for the mobs.
00:17:44
Speaker
Those mobs will always... exactly pitchforks especially the angry ones yeah yeah i'm sure there's some torches exactly so july uh 1659 julia was executed
Trials and Social Disparities Post-Julia's Execution
00:17:56
Speaker
with her daughters and three employees the execution site was a popular one called campo di fiori which is translated as the field of flowers Oh, that's so lovely. It's a beautiful, beautiful spot for an execution.
00:18:12
Speaker
Five poisoners go on trial. So these are five of the clients in addition to the women who were executed. The five poisoners who went on trial were mostly poor beggar women. Could they be poor because their husbands were dead?
00:18:25
Speaker
They couldn't make a living? Well, only two of the five had been married. Oh, okay. It was just... Some scapegoats? Oh, wait, no, I read that wrong. But yeah, like of the main players in the Poisoner Ring, for the women at least, not the priest, only two of them were married.
00:18:40
Speaker
And so not all of them were widows. Two of them were pretty happily married for a while. So they were just in it for the money. Yeah, yeah. In fact, Julia for a little while was was married and happy.
00:18:52
Speaker
And it is possible that the stepdaughter we talked about a little bit before. So ultimately, her husband did die, but I believe it was like actual natural causes. Like something happened and he passed away.
00:19:04
Speaker
And this his daughter carried on the ring after Julia died. That's possible. So of the other women in the group, DeGrandis named names, likely after being tortured.
00:19:15
Speaker
And Spana held up for months of torture before confessing. Again, ah drop it a minute. Yeah. Another woman of last name. so sorry. Sprapato.
00:19:26
Speaker
um it was reported she had her hands tied behind her back and tied above their heads. So their shoulders would slowly dislocate. That was the torture they used. Some women who named names were immediately still hanged with the other women who were executed.
00:19:39
Speaker
in total, 46 of the murders went to trial, were heard in court. Spano reportedly said, quote, I've given this liquid to more people than I have hairs on my head. ah More than 40 lower class widows are put on trial and imprisoned. One is hanged.
00:19:56
Speaker
And that's where you can kind of see like the mania of it and like the that I don't think all 40 of these lower class widows used the poison, you know, but it's it's.
00:20:09
Speaker
A lower class widow lost a husband at the same time to sweep her up with the rest of them. Yeah. I mean, because to be honest, they probably didn't have the financial means or freedom to be able to go out and make a purchase like this, especially under the guise of cosmetics. I don't think your lower class women were purchasing a whole bunch of cosmetics, you know. So again, scapegoat.
00:20:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And historically, women live longer than men. And lower class life at that time is going to mean probably a lot of illness.
00:20:42
Speaker
And, you know, how it's not unlikely that a husband dies. Right, right. But they had this all going on. We're just gonna, you know, lump them all together. Get the, yeah, get everybody off the streets.
00:20:53
Speaker
Yeah. Makes sense. Most of the cases that involved spousal abuse of the husband being incredibly abusive to their wives were entered into court records through the trial, which is interesting.
00:21:04
Speaker
However, it was not allowed to be a justification. it was presented by the prosecution as motive for why all of these women killed their husbands, not like... These women had no other choice.
00:21:17
Speaker
but Look at these horrible women not accepting their beatings. So strangely enough, the wealthy clients didn't go on trial. The Pope intervened to keep names out of the trial of these wealthy women.
00:21:31
Speaker
Many of them had been interrogated all separately. And basically they It would be considered nowadays turning states evidence. The priest that we talked about, he was not put on trial. However, he may have already been dead. We don't know.
00:21:46
Speaker
So after all the trials and everything, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI, had legal paperwork linking 600 deaths to poison, to this poisoning ring.
How did Records Influence the Legend of Aqua Tofana?
00:21:58
Speaker
Again, I wrote it that way because that doesn't necessarily mean 600 deaths occurred. doesn't necessarily mean that Julia murdered 600 people or had a hand in murdering 600 people. She was tortured and said that.
00:22:09
Speaker
The emperor said, well, good enough for me and filed paperwork. So that is now like on the books is what happened. i I think, yeah, we have to question the record keeping of the day, but. Well, yes, especially because the trial records were locked away because the pope didn't want anyone to know how to make the poison.
00:22:26
Speaker
Also, I'm guessing didn't want people to know names that weren't it. is Yeah. And again, i like, let's think about this. This is mostly going to be upper class aristocratic women simply because they are the ones who could afford it This is being sold as a cosmetic product.
00:22:42
Speaker
So ah yeah my guess is having to, having, protecting them, the upper class more. Weird. And that still happens today too. A lot of these records were discovered in 1880.
00:22:54
Speaker
so we had these records, but that gave us 200 years of myth-making and storytelling, which really muddied the waters and what actually happened. So I do you want to talk about other other kind of like poisoning rings or or things like that did happen. So I want to talk about some of those stories.
00:23:12
Speaker
So these likely weren't aqua tofana, but it is possible that they they were or they were some different concoction sold by somebody else or things like that.
00:23:24
Speaker
So we're going to France now. We're going from Italy to France.
The Affair of Poisons in 17th Century France
00:23:30
Speaker
1670 to 1682, King Louis XIII was the monarch in France.
00:23:38
Speaker
And this period is known as the affair of poisons. So an aristocratic woman killed her father and two brothers and tried to kill her husband. The legend said that this woman was practicing poisoning poor people in the hospitals first.
00:23:55
Speaker
She was arrested and tortured with something called the water cure. Which also just like the way we torture people is wild. She was made to drink 16 pints of water.
00:24:08
Speaker
Yeah, this is a new type of torture. I'd not heard of. I've heard of water poisoning. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I've not heard of like people knowing enough to intentionally do that to someone. one But.
00:24:20
Speaker
After drinking all that water, she did confess and then was beheaded. She had claimed, um and I don't see why this would be false, but who knows, um she had claimed that she had been sexually assaulted at the age of seven, likely by her father.
00:24:34
Speaker
And was made to start sleeping with her brothers. She didn't want to get married. She was, if this is, if her story is true, rightfully afraid of men. Didn't want to get married. And then when she did get married, she wanted a divorce because it wasn't good for her.
00:24:46
Speaker
She had even like gone so far as to attempt to separate her finances from her husband. Because she was an aristocratic woman. But that's also difficult to do even if you're rich woman. She had started...
00:24:59
Speaker
seeing somebody outside of the marriage and when her father found out about this he realized his reputation was at stake her his daughter was having an affair outside of marriage so he had her lover arrested and put in prison to put a stop to that so even when she was married she was now under the control of her father still her husband now and probably her brothers but so the women's there's no names in this too which makes it all so tricky but The aristocratic woman's lover who was in prison met a court poisoner while he was there.
00:25:36
Speaker
And this court poisoner taught him how to make aqua tofana or some variant of it. Like you said, it's all about networking. Exactly. And when he was released from prison, he became a licensed alchemist.
00:25:55
Speaker
What the? Come on. Was there a licensing process back then? Right. Your barber is your doctor. Licensed alchemist.
00:26:06
Speaker
yeah I just thought that was funny. I know. I love that. But because he had his license, he could get arsenic without anybody questioning him. This concoction was arsenic mixed with essence of toad. yeah I am wondering what the s ah essence of toad added to this formulation.
00:26:25
Speaker
I know. I agree. Was it needed or would the arsenic have just done it on its own? Probably the arsenic's fine. just marketing. Again, maybe it's marketing, intellectual property, like he's made his own concoction now.
00:26:36
Speaker
Oh, yeah. ah Yeah, exactly. It's a new patent. So he gave this to the woman who then killed her brothers and father with this basic poison. When she was caught...
00:26:48
Speaker
she was discovered with vials of this arsenic based poison like on her. so it was like, yeah, we know what happened. However, the ah I hate saying, I hate calling the lever.
00:27:00
Speaker
it's So gross. The man she was seeing outside of her marriage saved all of the letters that would incriminate her. so I'm like, he's not a great guy either, is he? But they weren't found until after his death. like, yeah, this part kind confusing to me. But what that did was that kind of after everything, it confirmed that this happened. Yeah.
00:27:19
Speaker
The woman claimed that a lot more people were involved in things like this and everyone would be shocked with the names she knew. and this sent the men of the court into a frenzy.
00:27:30
Speaker
But what it did was yeah it also led to um the breakup of like the magical underworld scene in France. Yeah, i feel like we've had the downfall of the underworld scene probably happened. They weren't tolerating that anymore. Every 10 years or so, right?
00:27:45
Speaker
Yeah, pretty much. Because also we have another moral panic against witches. um so this aristocratic woman is now deemed a witch. And basically what they mean by witches is weird, weird women.
00:27:57
Speaker
like We would both totally be witches. Yeah, we would absolutely be witches. This whole event, the affair of the poisons, led to 36 executions that sprung out of like a witch hysteria.
00:28:12
Speaker
A priest was involved in this who confessed. I think at this point, if I say confessed, it means tortured. was tortured. he He said he performed black masses and he was executed.
00:28:24
Speaker
and another thing that always comes back around, there were rumors of babies being killed for ritualistic purposes. I think I always throw that in there. Always. There's not a good legend.
00:28:36
Speaker
it's It's like ah any mass hysteria, any moral panic, satanic panic, witch trials. It's always that, right? Always, yeah, sacrifice the baby. So from this, like the conspiracy of poisoners who the aristocratic woman said, there's so many people, there's so many people really collapsed because one woman got drunk and bragged.
00:28:57
Speaker
Which is so relatable. Right? However, her and her children were burned at the stake. What did kids ever do? Right. 46 priests were apprehended in this. They weren't executed, but they were put into like group homes and monitored for the rest of their lives. yeah I don't really get where the additional priest. I mean, like we had the one guy.
00:29:14
Speaker
Yeah. so I think it was just like, we can't risk it. They've talked to this this one poisoner lady one time before. Well, or confessions maybe. Yeah, right. So the next next kind of big poison ring was in 1702.
00:29:28
Speaker
This was more quiet. are ah Suspects were arrested pretty quietly. And this really solidified the generational need for women to escape being considered property.
Vigilante Justice and Modern Parallels
00:29:41
Speaker
Because now it's not hysteria anymore. Now it's like people aren't talking about this as much, which is good. On the one hand, we're not like burn the witch. But on the other hand, it's taking the conversation forward.
00:29:52
Speaker
of like, why is this happening out? It's more like, no, this group of people are poisoning people. We'll get rid of them. um So for a lot of women, they they were like determined for the next generation that their daughters would have it better. Their daughters would have more freedoms.
00:30:07
Speaker
So the legend of this one single woman, Julia Tofana, encapsulates the true history of this group of women in this time period. It became such a widespread panic that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart claimed he had been poisoned with Aqua Tofana.
00:30:26
Speaker
I think he got food poisoning one time and it was like, I'm poisoned.
00:30:32
Speaker
And, you know, what I think that one of the things we can take away from it is when society couldn't protect women, women turn to vigilante justice.
00:30:43
Speaker
And I wouldn't say a lot of the things women do for each other these days are vigilante justice. But so often it's like when social justice issues are happening, women are kind of leading the charge.
00:30:55
Speaker
Women are speaking up for one another and trying to care for one another. And it's made it so society more and more being forced to reckon with things and hopefully a lot of ways decide that, yeah, we do need to protect women.
00:31:10
Speaker
But obviously it's a slow progress. Yes, it is. But it's progress. It is progress. So if we're thinking back to, so just from a urban legend components.
00:31:23
Speaker
So what, I mean, I'm just going to like the little key things here, right? So secondhand narrative. So where it's, passed like through i mean and yeah i mean we was even like specifically from the all the different names and the connections and the stepdaughter and the oh yeah yep i know so yeah i know i know this person that well and even like at the time like in the moment it was being secondhand because there was such a need for uh secrecy so from like day one of of it it is secondhand
00:31:55
Speaker
storytelling all right then we have the plausible but fictional and i think that that i mean i i really do believe in in my mind it came down to yes this this was a woman who was you know concocting cosmetics realized what she had and what these products could be used for a little creative and uh you know and mm-hmm could market them for dual purpose.
00:32:23
Speaker
I guess you could say. Yeah. She did exist. She's a real person. She did have a business like that, that all that's real, but it's, it's, you can't necessarily verify a lot of the other things. But my guess is she became knowledgeable of just how toxic arsenic could be. And she became, um she was savvy and intelligent and, yeah you know, put it all together. And I mean, obviously seeking,
00:32:49
Speaker
financial gain but also social justice what do you have i mean contemporary setting i don't know if we can yeah i don't know if we can we can use that in uh and this urban legend but i think they could you know back then yeah yeah you know it was the way i see that is like most urban legends like even like the historical scary story one not historical but like the call is coming from inside the house babysitter one like There are all of these ways that those stories get a modern slant to it.
00:33:19
Speaker
And, you know, I think even there are true crime stories today that there's a poison component to it. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That can even become like, did this one woman did this thing?
00:33:32
Speaker
And she poisoned her husband and whatever, whatever. So I think it's like, if we're considering this as possibly being an urban legend as it was happening. Absolutely. That is, you know.
00:33:43
Speaker
And we do see like, as it is something that that if you look at the dates, it is spread out over an extended period, not ah not a full century, but um multiple decades. All right. ah Relatable protagonist.
00:33:57
Speaker
The main character is often an ordinary person. Yeah. She meant every man, every woman. She wasn't aristocratic. She was on her own trying to build a business.
00:34:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. No, I, i agree. an Anonymity of writer witness. Well, it's quite a ways back in history and word of mouth. And I think that goes back to kind of the, and ah and also the, the secondhand, like, you know, how stories travel there,
00:34:23
Speaker
There are some documents she kept, financial records, but also documents were taken by the Catholic church. And so, yeah, it's. And then it says like some details are kept vague, but then some things are like details are like almost over.
00:34:38
Speaker
Yeah. Like I'm, I'm thinking, I'm thinking the soup lady. Yeah. His husband wanted to glass a glass of wine. Yeah. Almost offered a little too many details. Right.
00:34:48
Speaker
Right. And then, I mean, big one, moral or warning. And I mean, like you said, I mean, vigilante justice, when there's no other forms of ah of justice for women to seek. Yeah. um In these, when they're trapped.
00:35:04
Speaker
And what's interesting too is, is the historical trope of like a hysterical woman when in this story it's reversed.
Gender Dynamics and Historical Narratives
00:35:15
Speaker
It's, it's the men who are leading the moral panic, who are scared, who, yes, um hopefully maybe some of them change their behavior because of this, but who knows, but it's, it's, I think that's so interesting. It's, it's the men leading the crusade against this which I do think happens more often than not yeah but it's the women who are labeled crazy hysterical overreacting so much yeah so who who benefited then more from this history or this legend was the women for being able to have have be empowered to some extent uh because of the fear that they put into the men or the men because then there was reason for women to be falsely aused accused and scapegoated
00:35:58
Speaker
And continue to be property. We can't let them, if if they are let out of being under our thumb, they're going to go crazy. So I think the key is morality, time, legends.
00:36:09
Speaker
They're slow moving, but they're always moving. And we can learn, it we can always learn by looking back and like and finding the parts of it that that um are relevant to to our experiences still today. Yeah.
00:36:21
Speaker
Absolutely. Very nice. Well, this was a fun one. Yes. Very nice. Great topic. Well, thank you for researching arsenic and urban legends because they were things that I wanted to kind of touch on and then didn't.
00:36:33
Speaker
That's why we work together. All right. You got anything else? think that's Yeah. right. Well, thank you everybody for listening and we'll be back soon new topic. Take care.
00:36:45
Speaker
Bye.