In 1661, a magistrate in Wiltshire confiscated a vagrant drummer's drum. Then the drum started playing itself. For two years. This is the story of the haunting that terrified Restoration England, attracted a Royal Society fellow with a notebook, and left fingerprints on the Salem witch trials.

Snarkives Podcasts will always be free to listen. If you want to help keep the lights on, Moxie in treats, and me caffeinated enough to keep posting episodes, you can toss a few dollars in the tip jar:

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Sources

Michael Hunter, "New Light on the Drummer of Tedworth," Historical Research 78 (2005)

Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus (1681) — available via Internet Archive

Julie Davies, Science in an Enchanted World: Philosophy and Witchcraft in the Work of Joseph Glanvill (Routledge, 2022)

Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World (1693)

A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (Methuen, 1985)

Episode art: engraving from Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus (1681). Public domain.

A whole war. Fifty thousand dead. Six hundred ships lost. And it might have started with a jar containing a severed ear that may or may not have ever been shown to Parliament. This week I found the War of Jenkins' Ear and I cannot stop thinking about it.

Snarkives Podcasts will always be free to listen. If you want to help keep the lights on, Moxie in treats, and me caffeinated enough to keep posting episodes, you can toss a few dollars in the tip jar:

https://ko-fi.com/snarkives

Sources

Robert Gaudi, The War of Jenkins' Ear: The Forgotten Struggle for North and South America, 1739-1742 (Pegasus Books, 2021) https://amzn.to/42ql3Bt

J.K. Laughton, "Jenkins's Ear," English Historical Review 4 (1889): 741-749

Evan M. Graboyes and Timothy E. Hullar, "The War of Jenkins' Ear," Otology and Neurotology 34 (February 2013): 368-372

Philip Woodfine, Britannia's Glories: The Walpole Ministry and the 1739 War with Spain (Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 1998)

Jeremy Black, Walpole in Power (Sutton, 2001)

Pennsylvania Gazette (Benjamin Franklin), October 7, 1731

Treaty of Utrecht, 1713

Paris, 1730s. Apprentices. Starving. Their master's cats eating better than them. What happens next is exactly as unhinged as it sounds.

Snarkives Podcasts will always be free to listen. If you want to help keep the lights on, Moxie in treats, and me caffeinated enough to keep posting episodes, you can toss a few dollars in the tip jar:

https://ko-fi.com/snarkives

Sources

Robert Darnton, "The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History" (Basic Books, 1984) - https://amzn.to/4dnaC7T

Nicolas Contat, "Anecdotes typographiques" (Oxford Bibliographical Society edition, 1980)

Roger Chartier, "Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness," Journal of Modern History, Vol. 57, No. 4 (1985)

Dominick LaCapra, "Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre," Journal of Modern History, Vol. 60, No. 1 (1988)

Harold Mah, "The Epistemology of the Sandwich," in Intellectual History and the Return of Literature (1991)