The Bizarre Story Of Nuns Who Wouldn’t Stop Meowing In Medieval Times

There is no historical record of the name of a French nun, or the convent to which she belonged, or the exact date at which she started to meow like a cat.

There are different versions of this story, and they all center around one particular nun. She started meowing in the convent and soon the rest of them were meowing along. I’m pretty sure I was this nun in a past life. She was a trailblazer.

After a while the meowing was happening so regularly, that the nuns began scheduling daily (and I do mean every day) meowing sessions, which would last for hours on end. I know, I am confused as well, but bear with me.

There is a town where echoes of loud meowing were reportedly heard coming from a convent. The people were shocked at first since the convent was normally quiet. It turns out that the convent had a daily “cat concert.” I would have joined in that event for sure. I would have also thought it was some weird sermon or a large collection of people admiring cats, and I wouldn’t even think to judge them for that. Who am I to judge cats?

This went on day after day, and after the meowing sounds from within the convent persisted for a very long time, local authorities decided to post soldiers in front of the convent gates to prevent these strange sounds.

And that is what happened: they stopped! As soon as the soldiers told the nuns that they had had enough of the “sessions” and that they were going to whip them until they promised never to start meowing again, the collective urge was so much less powerful than the fear of pain that they all reportedly stopped meowing and have not done it again.

In Medieval Catholic belief, cats were associated with the Devil. When a convent of nuns imitated cats it wasn’t considered funny, rather a troubling sign of possession, so troubling that soldiers were summoned. We’re so lucky that has fallen out of fashion, because I have a whole colony of cats at my house that would freak out my neighbors!

The earliest known English appearance of this story is in an 1844 English translation of Hecker’s Epidemics of the Middle Ages. In a footnote on hysteria, Benjamin Babington includes the account of the meowing nuns. It doesn’t appear in the body of the text. It had apparently already circulated in French medical literature decades earlier, though no exact date survives.

Vague about his references, Babington provided no details about where he had read the story of the meowing nuns, or about the author or title of the book, saying only that it was “a good medical work.”

There is no year given, nor is the convent named in any of the previous versions. There is only mention of a very large convent in France. Without any of these specifics it is impossible to validate that this ever occurred or where or when. Therefore the story is unprovable.

Incidentally, a nearly identical account was given by Johann Georg Zimmermann in the 1780s in his book Solitude. Zimmermann’s attribution of the story to an anonymous French medical writer of great merit is suspiciously similar to that used by Babington in his footnote about sixty years later.

That Zimmermann’s account of events matches Babington’s so well in detail and wording suggests either that Zimmermann and Babington used the same unknown source, or that one copied from the other without acknowledgment. Details that appear in both versions include the many hours of meowing and the presence of soldiers.

While some have questioned Zimmermann’s credibility enough to ask if he had fabricated the entire story, historians have traced Zimmermann’s source of the tale to earlier French medical writers. Ultimately, the anecdote of the meowing nuns ends up being little more than a stepping stone in Zimmermann’s broader, and rather dated, argument about women and solitude, which is disappointing in its own right.

I’m going to leave the meowing nuns story in the realm of unclear, as there is no documentation that can prove it to be true, but there is nothing to prove it false either. This medical text (seemingly the same one referenced by Zimmermann and Babington) may be lost, destroyed, or maybe just waiting for someone to translate it. Someday, somewhere. I can only hope we find it.

But that is not the only unusual behavior attributed to nuns in old medical texts. Girolamo Cardano, an Italian scholar and physician, reported a similar case in the 16th century: a 15th century German convent was host to a nun with a penchant for biting other sisters.

From there, the biting spread to convent after convent in German lands. Soon biting had spread throughout Saxony and Brandenburg, worked its way to Holland, and even made it all the way to Rome. Church officials were alarmed because they feared this meant the Devil himself was roaming Europe.

In response to the outbreak, special masses and prayers were held, followed by exorcisms. Apparently, none of this worked and the only thing that stopped the epidemic was authorities promising to flog, beat, or dunk in water whoever could be caught biting another nun.

Historians believe the same conditions that led to biting outbreaks also led to meowing ones. Given the poverty, mandatory chastity, back-breaking labor and absolute isolation of convent life at this time it’s not difficult to understand why convent meowing outbreaks occurred. In fact, I’m quite sure I would meow as a coping mechanism if I was stuck in a convent for that long too. Meowing could save me as well.

I can live with meowing mania. I would prefer that, certainly, rather than what happened in the city of Strasbourg in 1518. The so-called Dancing Plague saw as many as 400 people dancing furiously in the street. The outbreak went on for months, and some of the dancers reportedly died from exhaustion or cardiac arrest. So manias of this sort weren’t limited to nuns.

The BBC show Doctor Who once featured humanoid feline nurses known as the Sisters of Plenitude, who ran a hospital on the planet New Earth. Cat nuns have reappeared in popular culture again, centuries later, this time with better special effects and with the details exaggerated, but it’s so similar to the French story that it’s impossible not to make the connection (even though it’s unlikely that the Doctor Who writers knew about it).

This content was created with the help of AI.