20. From Meowing to Biting
Unfortunately, meowing nuns were far from the only example of medieval nuns driven into mass hysteria by the stresses of dismal lives behind convents walls. Meowing nuns and their caterwauling choruses hurt nobody – at least not physically. Not so the medieval biting nuns. Another of the bizarre outbreaks sweeping nunneries back then occurred in a fifteenth-century German convent, when a nun started biting other sisters. Before long, the behavior spread and the convent was full of crazed nuns running around and gnawing at each other.
As described by a contemporary doctor: “A nun in a German nunnery fell to biting all her companions. In the course of a short time all the nuns of this convent began biting each other. The news of this infatuation among the nuns soon spread and it now passed convent to convent throughout a great part of Germany principally Saxony and It afterwards visited the nunneries of Holland and at last the nuns had biting mania even as far as Rome“.
