Medieval Insanity doesn't seem as obvious upon closer inspection

[trenton]

I have recently stumbled into this topic when exploring mythology. I started with hero archetypes, then villains, and then monsters. As I followed the origin of monster stories, I came to the medieval ages to find what on the surface looked like blatant insanity. Upon closer inspection, I started to realize that the apparent insanity wasn't as obvious as it first appeared. It has raised some interesting philosophical questions in terms of what we consider obvious and why.

A few of the monsters I started exploring were vampires and werewolves. I understood that the witch trials already had a bad reputation, but I learned that in addition to that there were also werewolf trials, pig trials, and beetle trials. Firstly, the vampire panics were explainable by ignorance concerning the decomposition process of the body. The process resulted in the appearance of nails and teeth continuing to grow, bloating which looked like feasting, and blood appearing in the mouth as a consequence of decomposition. Sometimes the bodies would appear fresher than expected, which appears to be the origin of vampire stories of blood sucking monsters.

Furthermore, the mental state of the people during this time period is explainable by food poisoning. Ergotism didn't have an understood cause. However, the fungal infection on rye often caused people to develop vivid hallucinations and delusions. This would explain the outsized fear of supernatural entities causing mass suffering if there was no way of confirming the existence of germs during that time period.

The most interesting part in my opinion were the pig trials. Animals were believed to have held moral standing to face human judgment for breaking the law. It sounds obviously crazy, but I started looking more concretely. The most difficult pig defense trials involved a pig entering a cottage due to hearing the sound of a crying infant. The infant was kept in a cradle near snout level. The pig would then eat the baby while the parents were doing long labor elsewhere. Pigs were often able to do this because cottages often didn't have doors and pigs commonly roamed freely. Pigs killing children happened frequently enough that it was considered as normal as babies dying from disease. This creates a weird contradiction in terms of how we determine if an animal has moral agency or not if we cannot experience what it is like to be an animal. This question isn't as easily answered from my point of view, although there might be a known explanation I haven't seen yet. Personally, I can see why someone would think that my cat has the capacity for willful moral agency because she jumps on the counter only at night when nobody is looking, but jumps down immediately and runs upon being discovered and therefore stopped doing it during the day.

The pig trials start to almost seem reasonable given the need for legal documentation of the cause of death, separating it from a death caused by human action. This would include issues such as killing a dangerous animal, similar to contemporary euthanasia for dangerous animals. It would include penalties for the owner if this animal has repeatedly shown violent behavior. It starts to look like the only crazy thing is the added layer of moral judgment to the pig with much of the behavior otherwise mirroring what we would expect for a dangerous animal that needs to be put down. The part that threw me off though was when I read about how confessions were extracted from animals. The idea was that a pig would publicly have its limbs mutilated. If the pig squirmed or squealed, then that counted as a confession and therefore met the gold standard of proof of guilt for that time. Much of the pig trials seemed almost reasonable until I looked at how confessions from animal defendants were extracted and interpreted.

I also have a hypothesis regarding shadow figures and sleep paralysis that I intend to explore later. I had nightmares with shadow figures myself and I am connecting to demon stories. It included the incubus and the succubus as sex demons who raped people while they were sleeping. This corresponds to my nightmares of being sexually assaulted by shadow figures during sleep paralysis, and this phenomenon is probably linked to real sexual abuse perpetrated by humans in many cases resulting in nightmares from PTSD. Shadow figures appear to represent a persons deep insecurities, hence they might also be satanic figures trying to harvest your soul. I believe I may have found an intersection between modern understanding of trauma, sleep disorders, and mythology which explains why ancient people would have attributed the phenomenon to actual demons. The advantage of blaming a demon is that the demon cannot be punished in the same way as a human who could therefore shift blame to things like demons who deceived a child. This would therefore allow the child molester to avoid accountability by gaslighting children into believing that it was an actual nightmare with a well known demon to explain it rather than the human actually being responsible for molesting the child. This sounds like something a child predator would realistically do in these circumstances.

If you are interested in exploring apparent insanity in medieval reasoning, are you able to find things that almost seem reasonable given the circumstances? How do we know animals don't have moral agency in their actions? How would you explain phenomenon if you didn't know germ theory? These seems like a rich topic in terms of how we know what we know and why people believe crazy things.