Ode to Meyns Cornelisdochter van Purmerend | If you had lived in the present, we would call you a writer

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Dear Meyns Cornelis daughter van Purmerend,

We don't know each other yet. But if we had lived in the same time it would have been very different. Then I would have done my utmost to meet you. Centuries after your horrible death, many stories are still being told about you. What exactly of it is true I do not know. Only your end is certain. Though I hope you remember little of it. You are one of six women in Amsterdam accused of sorcery and sentenced to death. Your sentence was gruesome; like Engel Dirks thirteen years before you, you had to be burned alive in 1555, ‘to pulver’. Today we call this the witch hunt, and sometimes even the persecution of women, but neither term was known in your time. You are part of a gigantic group of mostly women who were murdered because they had supposedly turned to dark powers. In Europe, there are 50,000 to 60,000 of them. It is said that in the Netherlands the witch hunt was relatively less severe, although you have little use for such a statement. It angers me, as if suffering that occurred in lesser numbers is lesser. Here in Amsterdam, too, people gathered on Dam Square to watch a woman tied to a ladder to eventually be slowly eaten by flames. That does something to a place. That sinks into the stones, that sticks to the walls, that is what a city remembers. This theory has a name: Stonetape. Certain events sink in with the place where it happened, and what happened there repeats itself, maybe not in exactly the same way, but the ghosts survive. Sometimes even so much that it repeats itself. Not that witch trials still happen now, but women do still get murdered purely because they are women. This also has a term that probably doesn't mean anything to you yet: femicide.

Your life has become a saga. When I read about it, I cannot stop myself from pulling you by the sleeve to ask what is true and what is not. When you were still a servant, and everyone was out of the house, the door would have suddenly popped open. Twelve cats rushed in and gathered around your chair, where you had just been busy knitting. Paw in paw, the cats danced around you. According to the legend, you were stiffened with terror, but the animals danced around the room for no less than half an hour. That seems like a long time. Especially to stay stiffened with terror for that long. Didn't you want to dance along at some point anyway? I would feel that urge myself. And if the following story is to be believed, you were not at all so frightened. Because that same night when you crawled into bed, a fat tomcat was sleeping next to you. You grabbed the animal by its neck and threw it through the open window into the canal. As you turned around contentedly, there lay a wet tomcat. I don't know whether to tell you, or whether you have known this all along, or whether these are figments of your imagination that have been appropriated. I wish you could explain it to me yourself.

From the surviving accounts during the 1555 interrogation, it is clear that the legends told about you may have actually happened. You testified that for the last 20 years of your life, you were tormented and abused by women you yourself call ‘white whores’, who sometimes presented themselves to you in the guise of cats. So you really did see them. Whether they were actually there or not, you saw them. In your time, your visions were seen as demonic interference. Moreover, people around you were getting sick all the time, you had to deal with that. All those strange things you saw, that was not right. You were accused of heresy and sorcery. In the present, your reports are called hallucinatory, some people would label you mentally ill. I am not so sure. I think it's a lot simpler. If you had lived in the present, we would call you a writer. People would devour your books about a group of unhinged tomcats terrorising women. And when readers would ask you how you came up with all those ideas, you would calmly say without blinking: I saw it all with my own eyes. And no one spoke of the devil, no one would call you hallucinatory or mentally ill. You were a writer, nothing more, nothing less. Besides, I also think it would be better if we met in the present and not around 1555. I don't know what my fate in Amsterdam would have looked like at that time. To curb my madness during intense heartbreak, I wrote a book about a woman who slowly transforms into a dog, only to be eventually returned as a pet to her ex-lover. But in your time, I probably wouldn't have had a pen between my fingers, I wouldn't have found a way to channel my delusions. Maybe I would have been trudging down the street, moaning about a dog I would have preferred to be.

So I think it would be better if we met here. Horrific things still happen to women, I may not be able to protect you from that. But I can show you how my laptop works, I will slide pens and paper your way. Hoping for many more stories to come out. And I will take you to the Rijksmuseum, where they have an etching of your trial, made by Harry van Kruiningen in 1970. Because you are a legend to many in the present. Everyone should know you I will do my best to see to it that you are embraced. This letter is the beginning.

Sources:

Jo Spaans
Toverijprocessen in Amsterdam en Haarlem, CA. 1540- 1620*

B. Sliggers. 
Volksverhalen uit Noord- en Zuid-Holland. Utrecht, 1980. p. 60-62

Hans de Waardt
Tovenarij in Amsterdam (onsamsterdam.nl)

Justitieboeken (Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief)
 

The persecution of witches in Amsterdam:

Engel Dirks
Amsterdam, 1542 (burnt alive)

Meyns Cornelisdr.
Amsterdam, 1555 (burned alive)

Anna Jansdr.
Amsterdam, 1555 (sentenced to death)

Lysbeth Pietersdr.
Amsterdam, 1555 (death penalty)

Jannetgen Pieters
Amsterdam, 1555 (death penalty)

Volckgen Harmans
Amsterdam, 1564 (death penalty)

An unknown number of women were also banished from the city