This is an IHeart podcast.

Why is a soap opera Western like Yellowstone so wildly successful?

The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network.

So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West

and come to understand

how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.

Listen to the American West with Dan Flores on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from

Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. The year was 1588 and the soon-to-be parents were eagerly

awaiting their child's birth with excitement and trepidation. In 1588, you couldn't blame

any couple for feeling nervous about childbirth, but Petrus and Catherine, the parents, had bigger

worries even than getting through the birth with mother and baby alive. Catherine was a perfectly ordinary woman,

but the father was the French court's most unusual-looking member. The question everyone,

including the parents, wanted to know, was what sort of child this baby would be.

As soon as he or she was born, they would know if the wrath of God or the superstition

of myth might be waiting for them.

As her labor progressed, Catherine gasped with pain.

She gritted her teeth, squeezed her eyes, and focused only on the immediate

task ahead of her. As the contractions overtook her more and more heavily and frequently,

she did what any mother of any child does. She pushed. And then the baby came, crowning with hair at the top of her head, a new baby girl.

But no one had been too terribly concerned about what the baby's sex would be.

...