Seeing that Maria was pleased, Julia continued, “I heard from someone that a slave who went to graze the livestock spotted wild cats at the edge of the forest. It seems they also heard the cries of kittens. If you want to keep one, I could ask them about it.”

In the Middle Ages, people weren’t particularly friendly to cats. They feared these creatures whose eyes glowed in the dark, thinking they were incarnations of demons. But that was something that would happen later on. Now, cats weren’t yet associated with demons or rumored to be the pets of witches, so most people merely disliked them rather than hunting them...