Convents Were Often Swept by Mass Craziness
Throughout much of history, convents contained large numbers of nuns who had been forced into them by their families, and once in, they were compelled to lead lives many of them found disagreeable. They were confined in prison-like conditions, and led stressful lifestyles not of their own choosing, that included celibacy, hard work, poverty, and unquestioning obedience. They were bossed around by authority figures who had the right to compel compliance with coercive measures ranging from the imposition of extra labor, to confinement in cells, to withholding food and water. Physical chastisement and punishment were also available, including whipping and caning. Defiant nuns could even be turned over to ecclesiastic courts, where, if things went particularly bad, a hardheaded nun could end up burned at the stake for witchcraft or demonic possession.
Such conditions of longstanding communal stress and fear were textbook causes for the outbreak of mass mental disorders, which swept medieval convents every now and then. One of the more bizarre such incidents occurred in a French convent in the Middle Ages, when a nun started meowing like a cat – an animal viewed at the time not as a cute and cuddly pet, but as being associated with the Devil.
Before long, other nuns joined in, and soon the whole convent was meowing. It eventually became chorus-like, with all the nuns joining in collective caterwauling for several hours each day. The cacophony alarmed and upset the neighbors, particularly in light of cats’ association with Satan and demonic possession. Pleas to stop were not heeded, so soldiers were eventually called in and ordered to whip the meowing sisters into silence. That finally brought the outbreak to an end.
Another bizarre outbreak swept a 15th century German convent, when a nun started biting others in her convent. Before long, the behavior spread and the convent was full of crazed nuns running around and biting each other. As described by a 15th century doctor: “A nun in a German nunnery fell to biting all her companions. In the course of a short time all the nuns of this convent began biting each other. The news of this infatuation among the nuns soon spread and it now passed convent to convent throughout a great part of Germany principally Saxony and It afterwards visited the nunneries of Holland and at last the nuns had biting mania even as far as Rome”
As seen above, the German biting nuns’ outbreak did the French meowing ones one better by not being restricted to a single convent. As news of the biting nuns spread, so did the bad habit, and soon, other convents throughout Germany were similarly afflicted. Before long, the mania went international, and convents in the Netherlands as far north as Holland reported outbreaks of biting nuns. The hysteria also travelled south and crossed the Alps into Italy.
The authorities were baffled and alarmed, and attempted various countermeasures as “the Nuns, at length, worried one another from Rome to Amsterdam“. When prayers and masses failed, the Church resorted to exorcisms and the casting out of devils and demons, but to no avail. So they resorted to a more basic approach, and threatened to flog or dunk into water any nun who bit another. That worked, and after a few salutary examples were made, the nuns quickly came to their senses and the biting fever broke.