Future paper topic: Cats and Gender in Medieval Europe

This horrifying incident on campus made me think about the treatment of cats in the Middle Ages and how they always seem to be the ones to get tortured and maligned if any animal is going to be. I was especially interested in the folklore of cats and their connection to witches, and I wondered if a connection could be made between medieval attitudes toward women as witches with cats as companions, and the modern stereotype of the crazy cat lady or the sad single woman who lives with her cats.

Then again, here is a very different kind of cat companion from an Old Irish monk's poem: 

Version by W.H. Auden:
Pangur, white Pangur, How happy we are
Alone together, scholar and cat
Each has his own work to do daily;
For you it is hunting, for me study.
Your shining eye watches the wall;
My feeble eye is fixed on a book.
You rejoice, when your claws entrap a mouse;
I rejoice when my mind fathoms a problem.
Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other;
Thus we live ever without tedium and envy.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdtamsHbqJ1qbisi2o1_r3_400.gif

It would be very interesting to sort out the cultural and folkloric origins of these different beliefs about cats, evaluate them with respect to gender and female sexuality, and follow them into the modern era.