MURDER MYTHS: FROM MEDIEVAL EUROPE TO CAPE COD (1)

TICKETS:  $15 per person. Purchase tickets online via this link, or pay cash at the door.

Many beliefs—and outright lies—about murder, have arisen through the centuries. We consider three:

Blood libel: the vicious lie that Jews in the Middle Ages murdered Christian children to mock Christianity and to obtain blood for use in their own religious rites. How did that tragic invention begin, and grow?

Optography: the hopeful belief that the last image a murder victim saw would be imprinted on the retina—and could be recovered to identify the killer.

Cruentation: the superstition, often called the ordeal of the bier, holding that God might help solve a murder by causing a corpse to bleed afresh or otherwise signal the nearness of its killer. . . with a late recorded instance occurring here on Cape Cod.

Join us for a thrilling evening with guest speaker, Gregory Williams, to delve into this spin-tingling topic!

Guest Speaker Bio:

Gregory Williams was a District Court judge for 15 years, retiring in 2015—for his last ten years, he was First Justice of the Edgartown District Court. A citizen of both the U.S. and Canada, he holds degrees from Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) (B.A., English); Queen Mary College, University of London (M.A., English [20th-century British Literature], and Washington and Lee University School of Law (J.D.). He talks on such topics as Massachusetts historical crimes, notable Cape Cod figures, and the romantic-macabre.

He has served on the boards of several Cape non-profits,and is the immediate past-president of the Sturgis Library Board. His Facebook page, Gregory Williams Speaks, continues to signal his scheduled events, and also offers peeks at odd bits of history, art, and music.

TICKETS:  $15 per person. Purchase tickets online via this link, or pay cash at the door.