The other day my kids were talking about cats and someone made a comment about black cats. My oldest child just casually threw out the oft repeated fact that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats and associated them with witches.
As soon as he said that I asked myself, "Were people in the Middle Ages superstitious about black cats?"
Because our society's track record for accurately understanding what people thought in the Middle Ages isn't exactly stellar (see the Myth of the Flat Earth). So that sent me down a rabbit hole trying to find out where the superstition about black cats actually came from.
The thing is, the idea that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats has all the hallmarks of a "zombie fact". A zombie fact is something people just keep repeating and everyone just accepts it as fact, but if you dig down and try to find out if it is actually true you will find little to no evidence for it.
So we have two questions to investigate.
1. What evidence is there that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats?2. When did people start associating black cats with witches? Did this idea actually come from the Middle Ages?
For question 1, you can find plenty of websites repeating the claim that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats. You can even find it stated as fact on Wikipedia. It is something that is considered so common knowledge that it doesn't even require a source citation.
But in a few places there are people who actually try to cite sources in support of the idea that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats. So I started digging.
One common piece of evidence given is a Papal Bull (formal letter from the Pope) issued in 1233 by Pope Gregory IX titled *Vox in Rama*. One author, who was influential in spreading the idea that the superstition about black cats came from the Middle Ages, wrote that in the letter Pope Gregory IX called for the mass killing of cats and claimed that black cats were satanic.
Unfortunately for the claims made by this author you can actually go read the actual letter (and have Google translate it from Latin, the word for cat in Latin is "gattus").
In the letter Pope Gregory goes into excessive and lurid detail about supposed satanic rituals happening in the Holy Roman Empire at the time. There is talk about a frog the size of a dog that the Satan worshipers kiss on its rear end, there is general depravity and sexual orgies, and at one point in the satanic ritual there actually is a black cat that the satanists bow to and kiss (again on its rear end).
That's it. No call for the extermination of cats. No declaration that black cats are of the devil. There is no indication that these things actually happened, just that these were random rumors that filtered down from Germany to Rome. The actual letter was not set generally to the entire Catholic Church, but only to the Bishops of three cities in the Holy Roman Empire. It's impossible to determine the exact impact of these letters, but there is very little indication that they significantly affected the state of things in those three cities, let alone in the entire Holy Roman Empire.
On top of this, this particular piece of evidence was not mentioned until the 1990s when it showed up in a few books on the subject. This Papal Bull had largely gone unnoticed throughout history until the 1990s. This has all the indications of someone who had a conclusion and went looking for evidence to support it.
Sometime in the late 1800s a few sources began mentioning a connection between cats and witches supposedly widely accepted in the Middle Ages. They were sparse on the details and even more sparse on the evidence. Generally they appeal to three sources for the origin of the connection between cats and witches. Interestingly none of the three sources actually came from the Middle Ages, yet they are used as evidence that people in the Middle Ages thought this way.
The first thing that gets cited as evidence that black cats were associated with witches is the case of the Witches of Belvoir.
In 1618 three women, a mother and her two adult daughters, were arrested in England for murder and witchcraft. Interestingly the charge of witchcraft was actually valid, because by their own admission they practiced witchcraft and attempted to cast spells on the local Lord and Lady (who both died, for unrelated reasons, but still their deaths were the basis for the murder charge). So while actually charging someone for practicing witchcraft is ridiculous, and it is an incredible miscarriage of justice to execute someone for witchcraft, they actually did practice witchcraft.
So where does the cat come in? Well it turns out that the mother did have a pet cat (there was no indication it was black). There were also allegations that she could turn into a cat, but the same reports also said she could turn into a mole and a white dog. For some reason the much, much later sources who mention the cat connection also fail to mention the dog connection. But sources at the time do not fixate on her cat. Her cat was only incidental to the whole thing.
It was only sources in the late 1800s, more than 250 years later, that explicitly played up the connection to her cat. It was also about that time that her cat magically turned black, from it's original nondescript color. A few books from the late 1800s began to cite the case of the Witches of Belvoir as the start of the association between cats and witches, but that was only in retrospect and not based on what people thought at the time.
Another piece of evidence sources in the late 1800s cite for the connection between witches and black cats is a book on Demonology written by an Englishman named Edward Fairfax in the 1600s.
The problem is that while Edward Fairfax did write his book in the 1600s, and he did talk extensively about cats and witches (occasionally the cats were black), he seems to be rather unique in his connection between cats and witches. The other thing is that his book on Demonology was not widely known in the 1600s. The only known copies from his lifetime are all hand written, it was only in the mid 1800s, more than 200 years after he wrote it, that his book was actually published and widely distributed.
It was in the 1800s, the Age of Enlightenment and definitely not the Middle Ages, that his writings became influential. He is also the source on what is considered to be "standard lore" on werewolves. His ideas were particular to him and had no impact on people's superstitions until over 200 years after he died. Yet it is cited as evidence that people in the Middle Ages were superstitious about black cats and associated them with witches.
The last piece of evidence cited by sources in the late 1800s for the idea that cats were associated with witches in the Middle Ages was a book called "Beware the Cat!" published in the 1600s. It is a work of satire and a collection of stories, only some of which are about cats.
There is one story where a couple of characters are discussing a witch and one of them briefly speculates that she turned into a cat to escape her pursuers.
That's it. That's the only connection between witches and cats from the book. While the book itself is important from a historical perspective, it is considered one of the first English novels, it was not widely published or even known at the time and very few copies were made. It was not until 200 years later in the 1800s when it was republished in greater quantities that it became widely known.
In all of these sources from the late 1800s the connection between cats and witches is only mentioned incidentally and in passing. It is not presented as a major or critical concept. And in most of cases the color of the cat is not mentioned.
So how did the connection between witches and cats, especially black cats, become so ingrained if it was not really present or mentioned before the late 1800s?
It turns out that in the 1920s there were several puff pieces published for children that purported to explain "silly" superstitions that were common hundreds of years ago. Among these children's books were some that very explicitly made the connection between witches and black cats, complete with drawings of old ladies in black pointed hats holding black cats.
These books consistently claimed that it was people in the "Middle Ages" were the ones who believed these "silly" things. For their "authority" on the matter they usually, if at all, pointed to one of the three sources I mentioned above. About this time they add mentions to a "legendary cat" named Grimalkin, who is supposedly the ancestor of all cats owned by witches. The problem is that "Grimalkin" isn't the name of a cat. It's a Scottish word for wild cats in general.
The children's books from the 1920s that mentioned a cat named Grimalkin apparently just magicked the story out of thin air.
So as far as I can tell, what happened is that in the late 1800s a few more academically inclined books made passing reference to cats and witches, and pointed to a very select set of sources from the 1600s, which in reality were almost entirely unknown in their own time and only gained recognition after they were republished in the early 1800s. Even though these sources were not from the Middle Ages, the books citing them added the comment that these superstitions came from the Middle Ages. All without evidence.
Then in about the 1920s a number of children's books were published with tales of magic, and fairies, and everything, including stories about witches with their black cats. These children's books were not trying to teach children that that black cats were unlucky, or associated with witches, or the devil, they were just saying that people hundreds of years ago believed these "silly" superstitions (all without evidence). But these books were the first ones, in all of history to explicitly state that black cats (and specifically black cats) were associated with witches. They also very specifically stated that these ideas originally came from the Middle Ages, despite the fact that those ideas were not widely known until the late 1800s.
Quite ironically from those books people actually picked up the idea that black cats were unlucky and they were the actual source of all the superstitions about black cats. Quite literally the generation of people who grew up in the early 1900s, and their children, were the ones who first created the superstition about black cats. It did not come from the Middle Ages, it was accidentally created in the 1920s.
The black cat superstition is only a little over 100 years old and did not come from the Middle Ages.
