Every year in the creep to Halloween, a handful of journalists, bloggers, and podcasters play a well-meaning yet dubious trick on their audiences. “If alehouses were ‘the devil’s schoolhouse,’” writes Judith Bennett in Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 . “Then women were the devil’s schoolmistresses.”Let’s survey the evidence that suggests brewsters form a basis for our conception of witches. (Photo by Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images) Getty ImagesIt wasn’t just brewers, saints, and goddesses practicing the magic of fermentation. There's little, if any, historical evidence directly linking real brewsters to witch trials.

Source: Forbes October 31, 2021 02:26 UTC