The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster by Shelley Puhak
Erzsebet Bathory, a 16th-century Hungarian countess, is frequently infamized as history’s most prolific female serial killer, alleged to have murdered housemaids and peasant girls by the hundreds, torturing them, draining their young bodies of blood so she could employ it in her toilette. Virgin blood, the ultimate anti-aging elixir. So goes the story, anyway, and it’s a good one, lurid and salacious, packed with a full serving of fairy-tale tropes: the gothic castle in the dark Eastern European wood; the vain, decadent, sadistically self-absorbed aging female villain; blood sacrifice; scores of innocent virginal victims. In some versions, there are even talking wolves. Bram Stoker took the Bathory legend as inspiration for Dracula, and nods to the so-called “Blood Countess” scamper rampant as rats through the canon of female vampire fiction, on film and on the page. Indeed, a new movie is out this month revisiting the abominations of the depraved maiden killer, by all signs a classy affair, co-written by Nobel-Prize-winning Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek and starring French icon Isabelle Huppert.
So, yes, it’s a rousing little yarn, but, as Shelley Puhak evinces in The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster, it’s probably total baloney. Puhak dips into the archives, reviewing deeds, letters, and court transcripts, as well as recent scholarship on the Bathory case, and returns with scant evidence to bear out Bathory’s murderous rep. Instead, that portrait that emerges is of an independent woman targeted for character annihilation by a clique of choleric men resentful of her undainty step outside the lines of decorous feminine dispossession. The real story of the Blood Countess would appear to go something more like this: when Bathory’s husband died of the plague, she inherited his land and his political position as lord-lieutenant of two counties, to the horror of high-status men in the region, who were of the view that she should have neither, and thus concocted a gory saga of rabid madwoman debauchery to justify seizing her lands and exiling her from public life. People have been inclined to believe the smears, then and now, because women of influence are just not very well liked. Go figure. Puhak deftly argues the case for Bathory’s exoneration in this gripping blend of whodunit and feminist historical redress.
For fans of historical true crime, vampire lore, debunking misogynist mythology, and Eleanor Herman’s Off with Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power.
I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right by Matt Kaplan
Apparently our theme for this month is posthumously vindicated Hungarians, since the leading man of Matt Kaplan’s new book about disgraced-only-to-be-later-proven-absolutely-correct scientists is Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century Hungarian doctor who had the zany idea that it might be prudent to pause to wash one’s hands in between mucking around with dissection theatre cadavers and delivering babies, considering how many women were dying from a mysterious fever in the days following childbirth at the hospital where he worked. He suspected there might be some connection between the women’s deaths and their doctors’ unsalutary hygiene habits. Semmelweis’s colleagues and hospital administrators, offended at the insinuation of uncleanliness, were not overly friendly to this theory, nor to his research in support of it. Semmelweis was fired, shunned, and mercilessly mocked for his fanatical obsession with life-saving basic disinfection practices. Discredited and reviled, he died in an asylum from a gangrenous wound believed to have been inflicted when he was beaten by asylum guards. Today, of course, he is revered as a pioneer of infection control, and referred to as “the savior of mothers.” Although Semmelweis’s is perhaps the cruelest case of scientific cold-shouldering Kaplan recounts, the ill-treated Hungarian is far from alone in his persecution, as the author’s wide-ranging collection of historical and contemporary parallels amply demonstrates. Science, despite its mandate of constant questioning and questing after new discoveries, is not always as receptive to change as one might hope. Indeed, it can be brutally stodgy; stick-in-the-mud institutional paralysis too often reigns. I Told You So! is an enlightening (and sometimes infuriating) history of the underdogs who have taken on the thankless task of thinking against the grain, and a searing indictment of intellectual complacency.
For fans of character-centered popular science, medical and scientific history, and apostasy in every field.
