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By Root 545 0

short and powerless, is the life I did not lead, and cannot lead no matter how long I drag on, and will never fully understand. Petronilla's exultant face is the one I cannot leave behind me. She follows, just out of view, and all the rippling voices are hers.

Quiconques veut d'amors joïr

Doit avoir foy et esperance

Having had faith and hope enough to last her short lifetime, did it come down to love in the end? Was that what she feasted on, among the rats in Kilkenny gaol? How could I be loved by such as her?

For all my sheer elastic skin, I am a hollow woman. My ribs are an empty cauldron now; my breath couldn't put out a candle.

I start the car. My one faith is that I will find some trace of Petronilla. My one hope is that she will teach me how to die. My only love now, the only one whose face I can remember. There, around some corner, she burns, she burns.

Note

My main source for "Looking for Petronilla "is the entry for 1323 in Raphaell Holinshed's The Historie of Ireland (1577). The Bishop of Ossory's Latin manuscript account of the trial was edited by Thomas Wright as A Contemporary Narrative of the Proceedings Against Dame Alice Kyteler (1843). A useful account of the case is found in St. John Seymour's Irish Witchcraft and Demonology (1913, 1989). The song quoted is the anonymous rondeau "Quiconques Veut d'Amors Joïr," available on the Gothic Voices album The Medieval Romantics.

Petronilla de Meath was burnt alive in Kilkenny in 1324. Dame Alice is said to have escaped to England.