Kathy Stuart knew without a doubt that her students were connecting with her when she became the subject of their memes.
Her class from a couple years ago set up a Discord, and among the notes they shared from class they also began uploading sketches of Stuart that matched the course content. Stuart wearing a Viking helmet. Stuart with a devil’s horns and tail. Stuart gleefully holding an excised liver.
“It's an honor to have them make a drawing of you, where they think they're capturing something about you,” said Stuart, a professor of history in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. “They share it with me and they know that I love it.”
With a frequently playful approach, Stuart invites students to engage deeply with very serious topics like stigma and persecution in early modern Europe. Students leave with a strong grasp of history and lessons that are directly relevant today.
This year, the Associated Students, University of California, Davis (ASUCD), the undergraduate governing body on campus, honored Stuart with its Excellence in Education Award. Stuart also received this award, which is the only teaching award on campus that is entirely nominated by students, in 2011.
Stigma from the Middle Ages to modern times
This past year, Stuart taught two of her main upper-division courses on early modern Europe, one on crime and punishment and the other on witchcraft and witch hunting.
The first several weeks of the course on crime and punishment are about the processes of ‘stigmatization’ as the sociologist Erving Goffman described in his 1963 book Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. He defines stigma as “an attribute, behavior, or reputation which is socially discrediting in a particular way.”
The class then applies this process of stigmatization when analyzing concepts of deviance during from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, which then particularly centered on Jews. It was during the 1200s that the first legislation in Europe was passed that required Jews to wear a yellow circle to identify themselves as Jewish. This practice began in Italy and then expanded widely across Europe by the 1400s.
In the 1930s, the Nazi government in Germany revived the practice, replacing the yellow circle with a yellow star.
“It wasn't the Nazis who invented this kind of literal stigma,” said Stuart, “but they were reviving a medieval practice that had become grotesque in the modern era.”
Unraveling the roots of antisemitism
Stuart focuses a lot of her research on gender, and she said that gender is key to understanding the roots of antisemitism. In medieval times, she said, there was a widespread belief that Jewish men menstruated.
This idea was actually grounded in an archaic medical belief that the body was made up of four humors, which are fundamental fluids: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. Describing a person’s personality as their ‘temperament’ comes from this concept of humors: a person’s temperament reflected the mix of those four humors in their body.
This belief remained dominant right up until the end of the 1700s and the birth of modern science during the Enlightenment.
According to this concept, men have a preponderance of yellow bile and blood which makes them hot and dry. Women have more phlegm and black bile, which makes them cold and wet. This meant that women could not burn off excess humors, like men did, so women had to excrete excess noxious humors through menstruation.
“If you then argue that Jewish men menstruate, what you're saying is Jewish men are not fully men,” said Stuart. “Misogyny often intersects with antisemitism. That's just one example of how we interweave gender, age, wealth, class ethnicity and religion to figure out how social structure worked in the early modern period.”
Teaching about witch-hunts in an age of conspiracy theories
Stuart’s research has recently gained a much broader audience this past year. Her latest book, Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), was the basis for the Austrian film The Devil’s Bath.
Stuart, who also received this year’s Excellence in Teaching for Global Learning Award from UC Davis Global Affairs for her long-running study abroad program in Vienna, said that teaching about the European witch-hunt has become much more challenging in recent years, as ancient conspiracy theories such as the blood libel, which was the belief that Jewish people used the blood of Christians in religious rituals, have reemerged in modern form.
To help students make the connection between the past and present, she brings videos sharing conspiracy theories into the classroom to analyze.
“Because we are currently experiencing a variety of conspiracy theories, I feel that my class on the European witch hunt is much more relevant than it ever was before,” said Stuart.
Antisemitism is woven into all present-day conspiracy theories, she said, even when the main target is not directed at Jews.
Stuart said she is inspired by satire. She frequently returns to Voltaire’s Candide, which is a playful but scathing critique of prejudice, religious interolerance and human-made suffering.
“I think history is deadly serious,” said Stuart, “but that doesn't mean that we have to take ourselves seriously all the time.”
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