Bitches Brew

You see a witch, I see an alewife.

Every time I teach my feminist beer history class, Bitches Brew, I start by describing an alewife, that medieval marvel of a woman who brewed beer for her family — a very important job because beer water was basically the only boiled water in medieval Europe, which means it was the only water that wasn’t poisoning people to death with bacteria — and sold the excess at the local village market. The alewife’s most trusty tool was her big iron cauldron, which she used to cook the grains she fermented into beer. It was because of all the grain that she was often surrounded by her beloved cats, her mouse patrol. When she had extra ale to sell, she placed a broom out in front of her home or barn to signal passerby. Or, if she brewed more than a little extra, she headed to the market, where she wore a tall, pointy black hat so she’d stand out above the other vendors and shoppers, so she’d be easy to spot in a crowd.

I’m describing a witch, of course!

Long before dark magic hysteria broke out in the United States and Western Europe in the late 1600s, the church waged war on a whole different group of women, the ones who made a living brewing beer. It was the “made a living” part that really irked them; women shouldn’t be capable of “making a living” without a husband, because it made lots of women not want to get husbands at all. If women had their own money, it meant they could make their own decisions, and often those decisions involved teaching more women how to brew and sell beer, so that they could make their own money, and then their own decisions, and then teach even more women the secret recipe for devilish independence. The church absolutely could not abide that kind of patriarchal disruption, so they coaxed painters, sculptors, poets, and playwrights to join their campaign to destroy the image of the alewife.

They were following Dante’s own blueprint, really. When he published The Divine Comedy and Inferno — which is to say: when he created what we now think of as hell — in the early 1300s, people couldn’t help but notice that the burning, seething, dismembered underworld was full of Florentines that Dante personally knew. Hell was swarming with thieves and flatterers, murderers and lusters, traitors and people who ate one too many pieces of pie for dessert, Brutus and Judas and Dante’s neighbors. Nobody loved Dante’s interpretation of hell more than priests and painters. Flesh-eating bugs, boiling blood, immutable fire, reptiles with appendages designed for flaying frauds and fakes — endless creative tortures and Dante had tossed his own personal enemies into the fray. The church followed suit, commissioning the Doom paintings that now dominate European churches, vivid depictions of Jesus’ final, flaming Judgement.

Individual churches had all kinds of sway about what went into the Doom paintings they commissioned. Churchgoers might not be able to read Dante or the Bible, but they sure could understand what it meant to see a bunch of gamblers in chains burning alive when they peeped the Doom painting on their church’s back wall when they left Sunday service. There’s so much local variation in Doom paintings because each parish was targeting their own regional sins. There are, however, some constants. Alewives, for example. More alewives are depicted in hell in religious art in Europe than any other profession.

Top Left: Norwich Cathedral’s Roof of Bosses. Top Right: Doom painting at Holy Trinity church, Coventry, Warwickshire. Bottom: Doom painting at St. Thomas in Salisbury.

England's biggest doom painting, at St. Thomas in Salisbury, features an alewife holding a stein of beer while cradling a literal demon to her bosom. A local journalist wrote that she was “giving her tormentors the glad eye” because she was obviously “looking forward to a diabolical party.” In Norwich Cathedral’s “Roof of Bosses,” one of Satan’s demons carts a random sinner off to hell in a wheelbarrow. He’s crying, covering his eyes, and a naked alewife is riding piggyback on the demons’s shoulders, sloshing her beer around. The Doom painting at Holy Trinity church, Coventry, Warwickshire features three alewives doing gal pal stuff with a giant, beastly demon. One of them clutches the demon’s bicep, flirtatiously, as they all guzzle ale and giggle while wearing ostentatious hats.

In 1534, a rambling morality play gained huge praise and traction in Chester, England. Over the course of the week, the theater troupe played out the end of the world, the fire and brimstone and Christ’s last round of punishments. Jesus released all kinds of sinners to hell during the play, and by the end of the week, most of them had repented because they didn’t want to get chomped on by a frozen Satan in hell’s basement for all eternity. Loan sharks, hitmen, jewel thieves, cult leaders — demons wheeled them into the pits of torture, and Jesus tromped in and pulled them back out, one-by-one. He left one person burning: The alewife. She was beyond redemption. She and her little hat and her frosty mug were left behind.

In 1550, English poet John Skelton wrote The Tunning of Elenor Rumming about a devious alewife.

She is ugly fayre;
Her nose somdele hoked,
And camously croked,
Her skynne lose and slacke,
Grained lyke a sacke;
With a croked backe.
And had broken her shyn
At the threshold comyng in,
And fell so wyde open
That one myght see her token.

Even Shakespeare couldn’t help himself. In Taming of the Shrew, alewives are played as one long fat joke. But mostly Shakespeare’s perpetual alewife, Mistress Nell Quickly (as in “quick lay”), is a bawdy, loose, cheating, dirty inn keeper with ties to the criminal underworld. She appears in Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Henry V; and The Merry Wives of Windsor. (She also appears in Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s 1948 majority opinion that upheld a Michigan Law that prevented women from working in bars that weren’t owned by their husbands or fathers. Women serving beer led to “wantonness, brawls, frays, and other inconveniences,” Frankfurter wrote, pointing to Doom paintings and other fictional depictions of alewives as proof.)

Top Left: The Tunning of Elenor Rumming (1550). Top Right: Woodcut Witch (1689). Bottom: Western European alewife, circa 1300 (Note the broom).

By the time the Witch Trials rolled around, the Church’s propaganda had become so successful that alewives were some of the most reviled people in the entirety of Christendom. And so, when the church was deciding how to visually portray these evil witches, they leaned into the image of the alewife. There is, in fact, almost no distinction between the woman drawn on the cover of The Tunning of Elenor Rumming (1550) and the woodcut witch (1689) that the Church commissioned right before the Witch Trials began. The pointy hats, the cauldrons, the brooms, the ‘hooked noses,’ the ‘crooked backs,’ the cats.

Every little witch you see this Halloween, every witch you’ve seen your whole entire life, they’re based on our medieval heroes, the alewives! And the propaganda in the Church is still going strong.

“The feminist agenda encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians,” televangelist Pat Robertson famously said in 1992. “I’d never wanted to kill my child,” feminist scholar Ariel Gore wrote in her 2017 book, We Were Witches. “But the rest of what he said rang true. The rest of what he said rang very true to me.”