accusations of serious crimes.
Such dogma would never have been accepted in relatively enlightened
medieval Europe. Clerics, church officials, and monks such as Erasmus of
Rotterdam, Poggio Bracciolini, and François Rabelais taught men and women to think and to question. That’s the path to a more just, more enlightened world. Today men are taught to “listen and believe” women making
No later than early in the sixteenth century, a Dominican friar in his homily on Good Friday presented to a crowded congregation the story of a pregnant nun who claimed to have been raped. Erasmus reported in his Colloquies that a butcher relayed the story to a fishmonger. The butcher explained:
No later than early in the sixteenth century, a Dominican friar in his homily on Good Friday presented to a crowded congregation the story of a pregnant nun who claimed to have been raped. Erasmus reported in his Colloquies that a butcher relayed the story to a fishmonger. The butcher explained:
A young man had laid with a nun. Her swollen belly provided subsequent proof of the act. The nuns were called together, with the abbess presiding. The nun was accused. There was no grounds for status inficialis {controverting the facts}.