'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages

Nov 10 2024 49 ep. 57 mins 35
'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages Podcast artwork

Talking about popular conceptions of the Middle Ages and their historical realities. Join Richard Abels to learn about Vikings, knights and chivalry, movies set in the Middle Ages, and much more about the medieval world.

  History  Education  Society & Culture
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A medieval election

Nov 10 2024 50 mins  
Send us a textI know. Just what everyone needed, an episode about an election. To take a break from reading and watching election postmortems, I decided to return to one of my favorite teaching texts, the monk Jocelin of Brakelond’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. This is more of a personal memoir of what Jocelin saw and experienced as a monk than it is the standard m

Con games, scams, and deceits of the medieval Near East exposed: "The Book of Charlatans"

Oct 18 2024 55 mins  
Send us a textThis episode is devoted to a truly unique and pretty weird Arabic text, The Book of Charlatans by an obscure early thirteenth-century Arabic scholar, Jamal al-Din 'Abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari, commonly known simply as al-Jawbari. At the behest of a Turkman sultan, al-Jawbari composed an encyclopedic guide to the scams, con games, and trickery practiced in the cities of th

Crusaders and Settlers in the Holy Land: Who Went and Why

Aug 03 2024 64 mins  
Send us a textIn this episode I talk with the distinguished historian of the crusades Dr. Steven Tibble about the motivations of crusaders and of those Europeans who settled in the Crusader states of Outremer. Steve is the author of five books dealing with the crusades, the most recent of which is Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land (Yale University Pres

The Battle That Destroyed the Military Forces of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: Hattin (1187)

Jun 19 2024 66 mins  
Send us a textOn 3-4 July 1187 the Sultan of Egypt and Syria Saladin enjoyed the greatest military victory of his career. The Battle of Hattin, a two-day battle fought along the road leading to the town of Tiberias and, on the following day, on the Horns of Hattin, an iron-age hillfort above that road, is one of the few decisive battles of the Middle Ages. (In this episode, Richard

Norway's highest-grossing film: Liv Ullmann's Kristin Lavransdatter (1995)

Jun 06 2024 23 mins  
Send us a textYes, Kristin Lavransdatter is the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time. That isn't as impressive as it might sound, as the movie only brought in $3.7 million in box office receipts, but virtually all of that came from domestic sales. Pretty much unknown outside Scandinavia, the movie was a sensation when released in Norway in 1995. An estimated two-thirds of th

Medieval Adultery in the Movies (with Kat Tracey)

Jun 04 2024 69 mins  
Send us a textThis is the final episode--sort of*--of a multi-part series about medieval adultery in literature, history, and popular culture. My co-host Professor Larissa 'Kat' Tracey and I review how adultery has been dealt with in movies about the Middle Ages. We begin with three Hollywood medieval epics, "The Kingdom of Heaven," "Braveheart," and "The Last Duel," and then turn

Medieval Adultery in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Opera and Literature (with Kat Tracey)

May 25 2024 81 mins  
Send us a textThis is the third of a multi-episode series in which I chat with Dr. Larissa ‘Kat’ Tracey about literary representations of medieval adultery and its reality. In this episode Kat and I survey and discuss the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary treatments of medieval adultery, focusing on the stories of La(u)ncelot and Guinevere and of Tristan/Tristram

Medieval adultery, part 2 (with Kat Tracy): Tristan and Iseult and a late twelfth-century "National Enquirer" story

May 07 2024 68 mins  
Send us a textThis is the second of a three part series with my very special co-host, Dr. Larissa 'Kat' Tracy, about adultery in the Middle Ages. In the previous episode, Kat and I talked about the Lancelot and Guinevere story. In this episode, we tackle the other great medieval tale of adulterous love, Tristan and Iseult. We begin, however, with a possible contemporary historical

Jerusalem in the Twelfth Century (with Dr. John Hosler)

Apr 16 2024 63 mins  
Send us a textIn this episode, my very special guest Dr. John Hosler draws upon the research he undertook for his book Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace (Yale University Press, 2022) to discuss what Jerusalem meant in the thought and imagination of Christians and Muslims in the twelfth century, and the role the city played in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As John

St. Thomas Becket, 2: the Martyrdom

Apr 01 2024 68 mins  
Send us a textIn this episode my co-host Dr. Jennifer Paxton and I explain the principles and personal grievances that led to the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket and the significance of that event for Church-State relations in medieval England. We also talk about T.S. Eliot’s and Jean Anouilh’s plays about Thomas’ martyrdom, and the movies based on those plays. This is the sec