Rumor Mills

The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend

Veronique Campion-Vincent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351492515
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The goal of this volume is to explore the social and political dynamics of rumor and the related concept of urban or contemporary legend. These forms of communication often appear in tandem with social problems, including riots, racial or political violence, and social and economic upheavals. The volume emphasizes the connection of rumor to a set of social concerns from government corruption and corporate scandal, to racial, religious, and other prejudices. Central to the dialogue are issues of truth, belief, history, public policy, and evidence.Rumor has been recognized as one of the most important contributing factors to violence and discrimination. Yet, despite its significance in exacerbating social discord and mistrust, little systematic scholarly attention has been paid to the political origins and consequences of rumor. Rumor is defined as a proposition for belief that is not backed by secure standards of evidence. Rumor can be traditional or not, and can be expressed as a simple claim of fact. In both instances groups of claim-makers, operating out of their own interests and with a set of resources, attempt to depict reality, and if possible, impact the future.The need for this book is underscored by changing patterns of technology. What in the past was grounded in face- to-face interaction is now often found on the Internet, which is a major source of rumor. An appreciation of how new electronic forms of communication affect communal belief is essential for explicating rumor dynamics. The volume is comprehensive. Essays cover race and ethnicity, migration and globalization, corporate malfeasance, and state and government corruption. While editors and contributors well appreciate the dynamic nature of rumors and legends, the high quality of the effort make it evident that the issues that are raised and reoccur will serve to channel and inspire research in this major field of communications research for years to come.

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Dramatic Rumors and Truthful Appearances

The Medieval Myth of Ritual Murder by Proxy

Jody Enders

Centuries before rumors and legends came to circulate so widely and rapidly over the Internet and in various print media, the medieval and Renaissance worlds had their own ways of disseminating largely fictitious narratives that wove their way into the social fabric of legal, political, and religious life (Gauvard 1994; Beaune 1994). The challenge for the folklorist lies in the realization that a vast series of crucial resources attesting to the real social consequences of medieval legendry has been recorded, edited, published, and classified not as stories but as history (Davis 1987; Boureau 1998, 2001; White 1973; Mali 2003; Green 1999). Indeed, such a European vernacular as French has consistently employed the term histoire to denote both the object of storytelling and the historian’s craft (Le Goff 1992: 101–03).

At a historical moment when reputation was everything and when the dreaded rumor mongers were stock characters in courtly poetry and romance, medieval audiences gathered together in myriad ways to consume fictional and nonfictional information. They assembled in the streets to hear heralds announce royal, civil, or municipal edicts; priests preached to them from pulpits; prosecution and defense clashed in public trials; and, for purposes of the present essay, spectators flocked to a popular art form available to anyone interested in seeing it on the town square: drama. One particular play regaled its viewers with two of the most notorious anti-Semitic legends of all time. It was the anonymous fifteenth-century French Mistere de la Sainte Hostie (The Mystery of the Sacred Host; hereafter, Sainte Hostie or SH); and it told the tale of a fallen Christian widow who was burned at the stake for murdering her own child after conspiring with a Jewish moneylender to test and torture Christ as He was literally “embodied” in a consecrated communion wafer, i.e., the “sacred host” of the play’s title. The Sainte Hostie thus made present in performance a legend of host-desecration, on one hand, which warranted that bloodthirsty, usurious Jews regularly tortured the incarnation of Christ in the sacred communion wafer (to see if the wafer would bleed); and a variant on the myth of ritual murder, on the other, which had it that Jews readily engaged in the killing of Christian children for their supposedly salvific blood (Pochia Hsia 1988:1–10; Nirenberg 1996; Rubin 1999; Fabre-Vassas 1997; Sofer 2003:chapter 1). Unique in its conflation of both strands of anti-Semitism for the stage, it sheds new and troubling light on theater’s own role in creating, propagating, and fomenting the bigotry, discrimination, and abuse associated with rumors and legends. At the same time, the Sainte Hostie shows that drama itself (as both genre and process) is a proper object of inquiry for scholars seeking to understand a social phenomenon that is nothing if not consequential: the veritable “formation of a persecuting society” (Moore 1987).

In this essay, I argue that the Sainte Hostie facilitates a distinctive if disturbing transhistorical understanding of the ways in which theater renders rumors and legends not less real but more real for having been performed. First of all, when the play was staged in 1513 in the northern French city of Metz, its enactment of the execution of a fictional mother for infanticide could not have failed to recall the real execution in that city a decade earlier of an actual mother burned at the stake for infanticide in a much publicized trial and punishment. In that way, the Sainte Hostie conferred an illusion of factuality on anti-Semitic legendry because part of its plot appeared to be “ripped from the headlines.” Second, by dint of theater’s quintessential capacity to bring real and fictional evidence before the eyes of witnesses (whom we call “the audience”), the Sainte Hostie hands down an important variant of the infamous Paris legend of 1290. According to that legend, an impoverished Christian widow had aided and abetted a Jew—Jacob Mousse in the Sainte Hostie—in the beating, boiling, stabbing, and torture of a sacred communion host, which bleeds and then resurrects itself, thereby demonstrating to supposed infidels that the host is truly the embodiment of a Christian savior (Felibien, Histoire de la ville de Paris, Vol. 1, book 9:458–60, Vol. 2, book 16:833; Rubin 1999:40–46; Enders 2002:118–130, 226–27).¹ In a sort of “Act II” that has received no critical attention whatsoever, the play completes its avenging narrative with the presumably cathartic retribution against that conspiratorial widow, who is designated only as the Mauvaise Femme or “Evil Woman.”² After escaping to Senlis with a new identity as a chambermaid at an inn, she is raped seven years later by a valet, becomes pregnant, and ultimately murders her newborn baby. When condemned to be burned at the stake, she tenders a public confession not only to the infanticide but to that other “great crime” that was all too well known from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries throughout Europe (Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris 417–18):

I have done something even worse;

And have a much greater offense on my conscience.

To tell the truth, it was seven years ago

That I was to receive my Savior

On Easter Day.

To my detriment, I sold

The sacred host to a false Jew

Who was burned at the stake in Paris.

(SH, fol. 34v–35r; my emphasis)

Third, her specific association of the two offenses constitutes a new twist on the old story of ritual murder in that, when a Christian baby is killed at the end of the Sainte Hostie, it is not at the hands of a host-torturing Jew at all. Instead, that sinister task is left to an evil Christian widow who has exterminated her own family by consorting socially and economically (if not sexually) with Jacob Mousse in what I can only think to call a myth of “ritual murder by proxy.” Here, I invoke by analogy the contested modern term that is so frequently applied to contested events: the heinous Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome (MBPS), according to which psychologically defective mothers allegedly harm their own children (Schreier and Libow 1993; Allison and Roberts 1998). We shall see that this syndrome is more relevant to the medieval world of host desecration and ritual murder than it might first appear, permitting the exploration of the eerie similarities between two seemingly different legends that are separated by over four hundred years of history. Indeed, MBPS prompts us to ask just who is more “medieval” in their social responses to rumor and legend: the religiously oriented citizens of the 1500s or the scientifically oriented citizens of the late 1900s.

The alleged psychological disorder of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome gets its name from the more fanciful “Munchausen Syndrome,” in which sufferers induce real illnesses in themselves. In contradistinction, MBPS is said to affect unbalanced mothers who harm not themselves but their children, who stand in by proxy for the self. Ostensibly, an MBPS mother might place bleach or other household poisons into the food, intravenous lines, or blood products of her biological or foster children in order to engender real somatic symptoms. As Schreier and Libow have argued in their controversial (if standard) manual on the subject, Hurting for Love (1993), the MBPS mother’s misguided quest for attention takes precedence over the life’s blood of the innocent, victimized children in her care, who suffer and may even die as a result. More germane still to the present inquiry, Schreier and Libow claim that theatricality is central to the MBPS mother’s choices insofar as she seeks to play a kind of starring role on the stage of medicine: “It is to the world of the impostor that we must turn for this understanding. Impostors are not content to play out their mendacious roles in private: they must have an audience” (ibid.:123).

Notwithstanding the scientific imprimatur bestowed upon those pronouncements, sociologists David B. Allison and Mark S. Roberts (1998) have drawn on medieval history itself to contest both the motivations and the very existence of the MBPS mother. They counter persuasively that Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome is actually a pseudo-psychopathology, a legend that, like so many reputation-killing medieval accusations of witchcraft, has largely targeted innocent, lower-income women. In a self-perpetuating, self-justifying legal cycle whose real legal and social consequences are set in motion by the mere existence of an accusation, such women may then be tried and wrongly convicted of child abuse. Rejecting the notion of the MBPS mother as author and actress of a mortal drama, they assert with distinctly Foucauldian flair that the considerable body of evidence mitigating against the existence of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome has done little to compromise the widespread belief that the disorder is real. Folklorists and sociologists would likely concur that, at a minimum, it is notoriously difficult to dislodge from the popular imagination legends that seem factual (Dégh 1996; Das 1998; Fine and Turner 2001; Brunvand 1999). For Allison and Roberts, it is the tenacious legend of MBPS itself that urgently threatens the destruction of families:

Because of the largely uncritical acceptance of the MBPS theses, children have been outplaced, mothers have been convicted of “MBPS” abuse, families have been dislocated and broken up, and an entire general framework for the continuance of the “Munchausen” claim has been established. (1998: xxxi)

In the world of the Sainte Hostie, a different scapegoat was “outplaced” through psychological polemic as well as physical ghettoization and death penalties (Enders 2002:127–30): higher-income Jews—or, in the case of the Mauvaise Femme—their lower-income ritual murderers by proxy.

In that sense, what most compels our attention is the possibility of reading the Sainte Hostie alongside two contemporaneous events that seemed to authenticate its anti-Semitic pseudohistory of murderous Jewish conspiracies that never occurred by means of two real historical events that did occur: one from the legal annals, the other from the annals of theater. In an unusual wealth of extant textual evidence, we are able to consult not only the actual play-text of the Sainte Hostie (Bibliothèque nationale, Réserve, Yf 2915) as well as several accounts of an exceptionally vivid performance of that play in 1513 in the northern French city of Metz. There also survives, from a decade earlier in 1503, an equally vivid series of reports about a real execution in Metz of a real “evil woman” for a real infanticide, which is hauntingly similar to the one represented in the play. At least three separate chroniclers described both the execution of 1503 and the Pentecost theatrical performance of 1513 in such a way as to suggest that the Sainte Hostie had been, to use that modern term again, “ripped from the headlines”: Philippe de Vigneulles in his Chronique de Philippe de Vigneulles (hereafter CPV, 4:25–26, 154–55); that same author in his memoirs or Gedenkbuch (144–45, 244–45); Jacomin Husson in the Chronique de Metz (hereafter CMJH, 233, 280); and a number of other chroniclers whose narratives appear in Jean François Huguenin’s nineteenth-century composite edition, the Chroniques de la ville de Metz (hereafter CVM; Huguenin 1838:642; 687). I submit that, when the citizens of Metz (Messins) banded together in 1513 to watch the downward spiral of the Sainte Hostie’s Mauvaise Femme from conspiracy with a Jewish moneylender to infanticide to execution, they already knew—they could never have forgotten—the indelibly grisly ordeal of that other fallen woman who had been immolated for infanticide on 9 December 1503:

The poor wretch had her arms and legs and feet all burned down to the bone before the flames even so much as touched her face or her arms. For this reason, on account of the pain and suffering she endured, the ropes came undone since she was poorly tied up and she flailed around so much that she displayed her wretchedness to all the people. (CPV, 4:26)

A seeming echo of those actual events, the legend of the Sainte Hostie’s infanticidal Mauvaise Femme, a Jew-by-proxy, would likely have seemed more convincing because of theater. Whence my contention that, through the undisputed reality of both the theatrical performance of 1513 and the execution of 1503, the Sainte Hostie helped to authorize retroactively the dis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Rumor Matters: An Introductory Essay
• I The Social Production of Conflict and Prejudice
• Introduction
• 1 Dramatic Rumors and Truthful Appearances: The Medieval Myth of Ritual Murder by Proxy
• 2 Rumors in Times of War and Cataclysm: A Historical Perspective
• 3 Rumors and Religious Riots
• 4 Mafia in Meran?: Rumors and Legends Surrounding the “Leather Connection”: A Case Study
• II The Spread of Rumors
• Introduction
• 5 Psychological Motivations in Rumor Spread
• 6 From Evil Others to Evil Elites: A Dominant Pattern in Conspiracy Theories Today
• 7 Legend/AntiLegend: Humor as an Integral Part of the Contemporary Legend Process
• 8 How Rumor Begets Rumor: Collective Memory, Ethnic Conflict, and Reproductive Rumors in Cameroon
• 9 The Effects of Legends, Rumors, and Related Genres on Audiences
• III The Creation of Plausibility
• Introduction
• 10 Fashion, Topical Jokes, and Rumor as Short-Term Enthusiasms
• 11 Celebrating Arabs and Grateful Terrorists: Rumor and the Politics of Plausibility
• 12 Beyond Rumor and Legend: Some Aspects of Academic Communication
• 13 Negatory Rumors: From the Denial of Reality to Conspiracy Theory
• 14 Social Construction and Social Consequences: Rumors and Evidence
• Conclusion—Rumor and Legend: Seven Questions
• Index