Witches and Relics in the Time of Plague

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE STONE WITCH OF FLORENCE (2024)

By Anna Rasche

Park Row, 368 pages

★★★★

 

If you’ve ever studied medieval history, there’s much to like about The Stone Witch of Florence. If you’re a serious scholar of the period, there much that might annoy you. As a recovering medievalist it had elements that made me grab it: witchcraft, the Black Death, church corruption, and just enough accuracy to dissuade me from screaming, “Rubbish!” and hurling it across the room.

 

This is a historical novel written by a gemmologist that flirts with fantasy, folklore, and feminist wish fulfilment in blurring the rare with the customary. As modern Wiccans remind us, the word “witch” is often defined by whatever eyes are looking at it. What word would you attribute to a woman who uses gemstones to heal? Is she a folk physician, a heretic, a rock-wielding mesmerist, a threat to public health?

 

In her debut novel Anna Rache juxtaposes her beleaguered heroine Ginevra de Gasparo with church beliefs in the efficacy of relics. It is 1348, the year the Plague begins to ravage the Italian peninsula. (Think medieval; there’s no such thing as a unified Italian nation-state.) Prior to the outbreak of the Plague, Ginevra’s great ambition was to become a member of the physician’s guild of Florence, which got her banned from the city. Some women were allowed to join guilds, but not many. But let’s not romanticize a medieval physician whose practices of using leeches, bleedings, blistering, and unguents in ways that often differed from the “cures” of witches only in the gender of the applicant. 

 

The terms Plague and Black Death are often used interchangeably though they were not the same thing. The Beath Death looked scarier, with the patient’s body growing pus-filed buboes. Yet it was the most-survivable form of plague; the highly contagious airborne pneumonic plague had a death rate of close to 100 percent. Patients went from health to death in less than a day. (Shades of the early days of Covid, anyone?) Depending on where you were, the Plague carried off between 30-60 percent of the entire population between 1348-51. So were “stone witches” such as Ginevra blamed and burned at the stake? No; witch killings gathered steam between the 15^th-17^th centuries.  In the mid-14^th, it was often the case that only heretics believed in witches at all. Ginevra was allowed back to an increasingly-empty Florence with a vague promise from Inquisitor Michele (male) that he might support her application to the guild.

 

There is a catch, of course. Ginevra is also drawn into what is more of a crisis of public faith than of public health. Michele wants Ginevra’s aid in finding out who is stealing relics from local churches. It is a matter of urgency. After all, if what remains of the populace concludes that faith can’t save them, what need is there for the church, priests, or inquisitors? As Rache writes, “Florentines were not exactly known known as the most pious of peoples.” Pre-Plague Florence was as much a city of bankers, merchants, and luxury, despite its fame for holding numerous important relics. One by one they disappear–the left arm of San Filippo Apostolo, the leg of the martyr Miniato, the skull of San Zenobio, and other items deemed sacred and miraculous? What is to be made of vials of colored water left in their place?

 

All of this builds a strange symbiosis between Michele and Ginevra, though her strongest alliance is with the  wealthy Lucia, who supports her and aids in investigating the mystery of missing relics. As happened so often during the Plague, wealthy men fled the cities for the allegedly miasma-free air of the countryside. In an odd way, the rich were right about that. We now know that fleas hosted by black rats and bred in filthy medieval cities were big culprits in spreading the Plague.

 

The Stone Witch of Florence is an unusual novel. Does Rasche intend us to contrast the official veneration of magical relics with the presumed superstition of Ginerva’s Plague immunity with her pure crystal quartz, her energy with garnet, and her ability to drink men under the table with a piece of amethyst under her tongue? Probably. Are we to draw conclusions about power versus the poor? However you read this novel, rest assured it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors.

 

Rob Weir