RECAP
So, to sum up what I’ve deduced about Dame Alice Kyteler’s life, based on the answers I received from the yes-and-no stones:
She wasn’t what we call a witch today. She did practice some form of magic, but the yes-and-no stones were very cagey about what kind. She did murder her first husband. She didn’t murder her second and third husbands, whose deaths appear to have been more miscalculation than willful harm. Her fourth husband died of completely-unrelated causes which she made no contribution to. (Ironic, given that the one husband’s death she had absolutely no hand in was the one which finally got her in serious trouble). She was well-thought-of enough by a couple of her in-laws that they tried to protect her from Bishop Ledrede. When they no longer could, she fled Ireland and lived comfortably for another six years in England. She was stabbed to death in a property dispute with a neighbor. She was either sixty-seven years old or fifty years old when she died, depending on which birth-year is accurate.
CONCLUSIONS ABOUT DAME ALICE KYTELER’S CASE
Dame Alice Kyteler and her son, William Outlawe Jr. must’ve had a very winning manner about them in order for her last three husbands to have married her, and to have left her and William Jr. so much property. This case illustrates three dynamics at work in the witch hunts of the succeeding centuries, the notions that 1.) A woman with any sort of power, whether it’s money, property or looks, must be ruthlessly suppressed and taken down, because clearly she gained this power via witchcraft. 2.) Accusing someone of witchcraft was an easy, convenient and fabulous way of eliminating a problem, while simultaneously benefiting yourself and 3.) As Petronella’s fate illustrates, the powerless were a convenient target for projecting ‘otherness’ onto, and scapegoating for society’s ills.
In doing a yes-and-no stones investigation, you have to cut off the questioning at some point. But some questions still linger. What was the distressing course of action William Outlawe Sr. was contemplating which bothered Alice Kyteler so much that she’d kill him to prevent it? Did the 1302 accuser know something? How did William Outlawe Jr. learn his mother murdered at least one husband? Did Alice Kyteler feel any subconscious motivation to kill her second and third husbands, even if there was no conscious intent there? Was there any collusion between her 1302 accuser and her step-children? Did her step-children think she killed all her husbands? Would a mental health professional today find Richard Ledrede, the Bishop of Ossory, to be mentally-ill, if they could test him?
One final, curious story about Dame Alice Kyteler, dating from this century. In 2003, an American artist named Paddy Shaw, visiting New York City, visited a library there where he learned about Alice Kyteler(He’d never heard of her before). Returning home to the Midwestern state where he lived, he was inspired to paint her portrait. The portrait then went on exhibition at locations around the world for the next several years. In 2008, after its world-tour, Shaw made a gift of the portrait to Kyteler’s Inn.
That same year, a Kilkenny resident named Claire Nolan had just come out with a work of historical fiction, based on Dame Alice Kyteler’s life. Surprisingly, Shaw’s portrait of Dame Alice Kyteler was an almost exact match to the author! Neither artist nor author had ever met. Even the garment Shaw painted Alice Kyteler wearing, Clair Nolan said, looked like the black velvet dress she wore to lectures about her book. The main difference between them, Nolan said, was the eyes. Dame Alice’s eyes looked colder, meaner somehow.
Coincidence? Or was it Dame Alice at work? One wonders…