We are taking a break from Michelangelo to talk about lepers, Jews and… WITCHES!
Today we start with the 1321 leper panic in France, where thousands of people were burned alive or locked up for life based on tortured confessions of a supposed plot to poison the water supply and take over the world. Along the way we get hot and heavy with the French royal family — adultery, assassinations, a king who reigned for four days, and a woman who may have murdered her own infant nephew with a pin — before connecting it all to the origins of Europe’s first mass segregation program. It’s the archaeology of conspiracy theories.