It’s A Devil of a Time in Eseldorf: The Chronicle of Young Satan, Chapter 4 • The Devil According to Mark Twain
About this episode
This episode explores Chapter 4 of The Chronicle of Young Satan, focusing on the witch panic in Eseldorf and Mark Twain's portrayal of societal fears and subversion.
Chapter four of The Chronicle of Young Satan is where Eseldorf stops being a quirky medieval village and starts being a place where people get burned. The witch panic has expanded beyond old women — it's anyone now, children as young as eight or nine — and Twain illustrates this with two stories that land hard: eleven convent schoolgirls starved and isolated until one confessed to dancing with Satan at the sabbath (the commission fed her every detail from a papal checklist two centuries old), and Gottfried Narr's grandmother, who confessed immediately and voluntarily, because she'd done the math on her options. Into this atmosphere, Father Adolf spots his opening. Margaret's mysterious wealth — the cat's contributions, the lavish spreads, the wine nobody can explain — has people talking. He sends spies in disguised as friends, tests samples of the food, and when it stays real and rots on a normal schedule, decides that proves it's a new kind of witchcraft. Then he crashes her party for forty guests, and Satan slides into him like a transparent film and fills a wine bottle from a two-pint bottle, tells the room "it is nothing, anybody can do it," juggles a hundred brass balls in…
People in this episode
Host: TruStory FM
Topics covered
- witchcraft
- Mark Twain
- medieval village
- Satan
- subversion
- confession
- societal panic
Keywords
- witch panic
- Mark Twain
- Eseldorf
- The Chronicle of Young Satan
- Satan
- confession
- medieval village
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: The Chronicle of Young Satan
Places: Eseldorf
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- Everybody Loves Satan!: The Chronicle of Young Satan, Chapter 5 • The Devil According to Mark Twain
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