I worked in Jülich just shy of 6 years and never heard this story! I don't know if people know it and are shy about it or don't know it. But I've taken the tour of the citadel (which also serves as the local history museum) and didn't catch it there either.
The lies were published from a safe distance of four or five hundred kilometers away, close enough for someone to have heard of it, but not close enough the go check on till long after the money was in the bank.
Given that the broadsheet looks like it was printed in Augsburg in Bavaria and Jülich is up near the Dutch border you're probably right, far enough away that no-one was able to question it.
So, I don't know why I am surprised that "fake news" came about more or less immediately after selling printed news became possible, but anyway, worth pondering. Making up stories that are interesting has always been easier than investigating true stories and writing about them in an interesting way.
> Perhaps partly a response to the anxieties engendered by both the Inquisition and the Reformation
I really hate when these kinds of wild and dull speculations are peppered into articles.
In this case it is also rather ironic since the very set of events claimed to have happened were also likely caused by similar wild and ignorant speculation.
This is a terrible article, both poorly argued and ideologically biased. The other story presented, about a peasant named Peter Stubbe who turns into a werewolf undermines its central premise, tying the phenomenon of imagined werewolfs to certain feminist ideas, or at least shows them to not be gender-specific in any meaningful way. Peter was said to have especially preyed on women. He was a "bad guy" in the same way that the she-werewolves were "bad girls". Plus it's his story which includes, as presented, accusations of sexual (shall we say) misbehaviour, so whence the conclusion at the end?...
I worked in Jülich just shy of 6 years and never heard this story! I don't know if people know it and are shy about it or don't know it. But I've taken the tour of the citadel (which also serves as the local history museum) and didn't catch it there either.
I expect it was never a story there.
The lies were published from a safe distance of four or five hundred kilometers away, close enough for someone to have heard of it, but not close enough the go check on till long after the money was in the bank.
Given that the broadsheet looks like it was printed in Augsburg in Bavaria and Jülich is up near the Dutch border you're probably right, far enough away that no-one was able to question it.
So, I don't know why I am surprised that "fake news" came about more or less immediately after selling printed news became possible, but anyway, worth pondering. Making up stories that are interesting has always been easier than investigating true stories and writing about them in an interesting way.
> Perhaps partly a response to the anxieties engendered by both the Inquisition and the Reformation
I really hate when these kinds of wild and dull speculations are peppered into articles.
In this case it is also rather ironic since the very set of events claimed to have happened were also likely caused by similar wild and ignorant speculation.
This is a terrible article, both poorly argued and ideologically biased. The other story presented, about a peasant named Peter Stubbe who turns into a werewolf undermines its central premise, tying the phenomenon of imagined werewolfs to certain feminist ideas, or at least shows them to not be gender-specific in any meaningful way. Peter was said to have especially preyed on women. He was a "bad guy" in the same way that the she-werewolves were "bad girls". Plus it's his story which includes, as presented, accusations of sexual (shall we say) misbehaviour, so whence the conclusion at the end?...