The Scholar's Armchair

What did the past smell like? And why does the modern world smell the way it does? I’m joined by historian Dr Will Tullett to explore the strange, surprising and often overlooked history of smell. His new book, *Sniff: A History of Smells*, takes us from old books, Shakespearean theatres and perfume to pollution, synthetic scents, warfare and extinction. We talk about why the past may not have sme...

Direct access to God. Women in the pulpit. A refusal to bow to religious and social authority. The first Quakers challenged seventeenth-century England—and paid a heavy price. Historian Dr Erica Canela joins me to discuss her book, Zealous: A Darker Side of the Early Quakers. We explore how the devastation of the British civil wars helped give rise to a radical faith, and why its earliest follower...

Shakespeare’s sonnets are love poems—but they challenge almost everything we might expect love poetry to do. In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I’m joined by Professor Roland Weidle of Ruhr University Bochum, author of A Comprehensive Guide to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, to explore how Shakespeare transformed the sonnet tradition. We discuss why the poems resist a straightforward biographical r...

Who was the real Emily Brontë? How did a seemingly quiet young woman living in a Yorkshire parsonage create Wuthering Heights , one of the wildest, darkest and most extraordinary novels in English literature? And why does Emily Brontë remain such an enigmatic figure nearly two centuries after her death? In this episode of The Scholar's Armchair , Dr John Burton talks to Deborah Lutz , Professo...

What happens when exiles create a cultural world of their own? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, Dr John Burton talks to Dr Annalisa Nicholson of King’s College London about her fascinating book, A Salon-in-Exile: Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London. Nicholson reconstructs the remarkable intellectual salon established in London by Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Ma...

Can poetry act as a time machine into the past? What can a poem reveal about history that archaeology, chronicles and official records cannot? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, Dr John Burton talks to Professor Catherine Clarke about her fascinating book A History of England in 25 Poems, which tells more than 1,300 years of English history through poetry. Beginning with Cædmon’s Hymn and...

How much freedom do we really have to write the story of our own lives? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with Anne E. Fernald about her new book, Her Own Voice: Eight Women Who Rewrote Life and Art. With Virginia Woolf and 'A Room of One’s Own' as a guiding presence, Anne tells the stories of eight remarkable twentieth-century women: Margaret Wise Brown, Eileen Chang, Ver...

Was Charles Dickens not only one of the great novelists, but also one of the great psychologists of the Victorian age? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, Dr John talks to Tyson Stolte, Associate Professor of English at New Mexico State University and author of Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind. We explore a side of Dickens that is often o...

What happens to religion in poetry when belief itself becomes uncertain? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with Professor Annarose Steinke about her book Religious Culture in Modernist Verse: Form, Belief, and Twentieth-Century Poetics. Steinke explores the fascinating and often unexpected ways that twentieth-century poets continued to draw upon Christian imagery, ritual and litur...

How did medicine become something we buy? And what happened to the women who had provided much of our everyday healthcare for centuries? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with Karen Bloom Gevirtz about her fascinating book The Apothecary’s Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity. We tend to think of the history of modern medicine as a straightforward sto...

How American was Shakespeare’s England? We tend to imagine the English Renaissance as the world of Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh and the great voyages of discovery. But what happens when we reverse the direction of travel and ask not simply what England did to the Americas, but what the Americas did to England? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I talk to historian Dr Lauren Wor...

Can words be treason? Can a writer be held responsible not simply for what they do, but for what they write? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with Marius Hentea, Professor of Modern Anglophone Literature at the University of Poitiers, about his new book Literary Treason: Authors on Trial in the Wake of the Second World War. In the aftermath of the Second World War, writers and in...

What does mysticism have to offer us in a secular age? Have we lost not only religious faith, but our capacity for wonder, ecstasy and experiences that take us beyond ourselves? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with philosopher Simon Critchley about his book On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy. Mysticism, Critchley argues, need not mean supernatural visions or religious belie...

What if modern chemistry didn’t replace alchemy—but was born from it? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I’m joined by science writer Kit Chapman to discuss his fascinating book, The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry. Most of us think of alchemy as the failed attempt to turn lead into gold. But Kit argues that this familiar story misses the point. Long before mod...

How did people decide who to trust with their lives before modern medicine? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I’m joined by historian and literary scholar Dr Alanna Skuse to discuss her fascinating book, The Surgeon, the Midwife, and the Quack: How to Stay Alive in Renaissance England. We explore the strange and surprising world of Renaissance medicine, where surgeons, midwives, physician...

Death is one of the few experiences every human being shares, yet in the modern world it has become something we rarely talk about. How did that happen? And what have we lost by pushing death to the margins of everyday life? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with social historian and bereavement counsellor Molly Conisbee about her remarkable book No Ordinary Deaths: A People’s His...

Who was the real Lord Byron? Was he really the brooding, scandalous Romantic we’ve inherited through legend? Or was there a very different Byron hiding in plain sight—in the extraordinary letters he wrote to friends, lovers, family and fellow writers? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with Professor Andrew Stauffer about his acclaimed new book, Byron: A Life in Ten Letters. Rather...

What if the way we read is changing the way we think? In this episode of The Scholar's Armchair, I speak with cognitive neuroscientist and reading researcher Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid and Reader, Come Home, about one of the defining questions of our digital age. Maryanne begins with a remarkable personal story. After a lifetime devoted to literature and the science of reading,...

John Keats is often remembered as the poet of beauty and “negative capability.” But what if he was also one of the most profound thinkers about uncertainty? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with Dr Li Ou about her book Keats and Scepticism. We explore a side of Keats that is often overlooked: a poet deeply engaged with questions of knowledge, perception, imagination, and the limi...

Read the book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691235301/natural-magic?_gl=1*1dmglc8*_up*MQ..*_ga*MTczMjY1MDM3LjE3ODIyMTg4Njg.*_ga_N1W9JWKLY3*czE3ODIyMTg4NjckbzEkZzAkdDE3ODIyMTg4NjckajYwJGwwJGgxODg0NTE5NzQ3 Emily Dickinson is often imagined as a secluded poet, withdrawn from the world and writing from the privacy of her room in Amherst. But what if she was actually responding to on...

What exactly is a goblin? Today we imagine goblins as fantasy creatures from Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons, Harry Potter, and video games. But where did they come from, and why have they survived for centuries while so many other monsters have faded away? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with historian Matt King about his fascinating book A History of Goblins. We trace the goblin’s...

Are our buildings changing because we are changing? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with Amritt Flora, Course Leader for the MA Interior and Spatial Design at Chelsea College of Arts, about the emergence of a possible metamodern shift in architecture and design. Our conversation begins with a simple observation. Over the last decade, design students seem to be approaching the wo...

Have we lost the inner life? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with author and cultural critic Lesley Chamberlain about her book Rilke: The Last Inward Man and the enduring relevance of one of Europe’s greatest poets, Rainer Maria Rilke. Chamberlain argues that Rilke stood at the end of a long tradition of inwardness: a tradition that saw the inner life as a source of meaning, cre...

What makes Odysseus the most enduring figure in all of literature? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I’m joined by Joel P. Christensen to explore one of the most fascinating characters ever created: Odysseus. From Homer’s Odyssey to modern films, novels, and even war narratives, Odysseus has never stopped changing. He is a hero, a liar, a survivor, a strategist, and perhaps one of the fir...

What did the Victorians really think of Jane Austen — and how did they reshape her legacy? In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with Prof Cheryl A. Wilson, author of *Jane Austen and the Victorian Heroine*, about the surprising afterlife of Austen in the nineteenth century. We often think of Austen as timeless — but as Dr Wilson shows, the Victorians didn’t just admire her. They *use...