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

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I interview Professor Nora Berend of the University of Cambridge about her new book El Cid; The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary (Pegasus Books, 2025). We discuss how the historical Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, a ruthless and ambitious mercenary who served both Christian and Muslim rulers in the violent and chaotic political world of late eleventh-century Iberi...

Send us Fan Mail This is the second of our two part series on the Norman Conquest. In it Jenny and I discuss the military challenges faced by King Harold Godwinson and Duke William of Normandy and the battles of Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge, before turning to look closely at the Battle of Hastings (which did not actually take place at Hastings). I hope you will join us. There is a host of book...

Send us Fan Mail This is the first half of a two part series on the Norman Conquest of England. My cohost for both parts is a veteran of this podcast, Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America. Jenny is one of the very best historians of Anglo-Norman England, so this is a subject right up her alley. In this episode we explore the historical background leading up to the Norman Conqu...

Send us Fan Mail Yes, I know that Octavian IS Augustus, but this episode is about how Gaius Octavius became Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, and in doing so replaced the old Roman Republic with a military autocracy masquerading as a republic. This is the conclusion of our three part series on the fall of the Roman Republic. My cohost for all three episodes has been my good friend Dr. Jennifer Paxton...

Send us Fan Mail This is the second of a three part series about the fall of the Roman Republic. My cohost for all three episodes is Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America. We actually had been planning only two episodes, but the story is long and detailed, so we thought that three would be best. In episode one, Jenny and I explained the workings of the Roman Republic and the mi...

Send us Fan Mail For the fiftieth (!) episode of this podcast, I'm taking a few centuries detour from the Middle Ages to talk about the fall of the Roman Republic. In this episode, the first of a two part series,  my cohost Dr. Jenny Paxton and I talk about the political and cultural institutions of the Roman Republic in the late second and first centuries B.C.E.*. We explain how and why a re...

Send us Fan Mail I 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 monastic chroni...

Send us Fan Mail This 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 the medie...

Send us Fan Mail In 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 Press, 2024).  W...

Send us Fan Mail On 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 explains why...

Send us Fan Mail Yes, 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 the coun...

Send us Fan Mail This 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...

Send us Fan Mail This 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 and Isolde/Isolt...

Send us Fan Mail This 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 ana...

Send us Fan Mail In 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 is a professo...

Send us Fan Mail In 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 second of a two part s...

Send us Fan Mail This is the first of a three part series about adultery in the Middle Ages.  My co-host for both is Dr. Larissa 'Kat' Tracy. Last month Kat and I talked about my favorite medieval romance, Chretien de Troyes' late twelfth-century French poem "Yvain: The Knight with the Lion."  Unlike the more famous medieval romances of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan a...

Send us Fan Mail This is the first of two episodes on the career, historical context, and "afterlife" of England's most famous--and controversial--saint and martyr, St. Thomas Becket. My co-host for both is a veteran of this podcast, Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America. In this episode we set the historical scene for Becket's martyrdom. Among the topics th...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode Ellen and Richard talk about what a "crusade" was in the Middle Ages. Richard explains what modern historians mean by the term "crusade"--and why there is so little agreement. He also offers a response to a question posed by Nicholas Morton in the previous episode: How did the medieval Church reconcile its doctrine of love of enemy and its pacif...

Send us Fan Mail My guest for this episode is Dr. Nicholas Morton, whom you may remember from our first episode about the Mongols. Today Nick and I will be talking about crusading warfare, in particular, about the military activities and challenges faced by the Crusader States established in the Levant by the First Crusade.  Among the topics we will discussing are the different approaches to warfa...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode my guest host Professor Larissa 'Kat" Tracy and I discuss my favorite medieval romance, Chrétien de Troyes' late twelfth century poem, "Yvain, the Knight with the Lion."   We place the poem within its historical context--the first European industrial and commercial revolution, and the emergence of a courtly society and culture--and analyze...

Send us Fan Mail Last May, I spoke with Professor Nicholas Morton about the Mongols and their impact upon the medieval Near East.  This episode digs deeper into that subject, focusing on the Mongol conquest and destruction of Baghdad in February of 1258.  The Mongol sack of Baghdad is notorious for its brutality. Estimates of the number killed range from 90,000 to the 200,000 claimed by the leader...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, the second of a two part series, Dr. Chrissy Senecal and I continue our discussion of the Old English epic poem Beowulf .  In it we talk about the challenges of translation and look at literary and cinematic adaptations of the poem. Sound clips in this episode: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” soundtrack (composer: Ennio Morricone) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Send us Fan Mail This is the first of a two-part series on the most famous monster story in pre-modern literature, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf . My co-host for both is Dr. Christine Senecal of Shippensburg University. In this episode Chrissy and I talk about the poem itself. We begin with the story of the hero Beowulf and how as a youth he kills two monsters ravaging the mead-hall of King Hr...

Send us Fan Mail This is a revised--and a lot longer--version of our twenty-first episode ("Some thoughts about Hanukkah by a (secular) Jewish medieval historian").  That episode was  just what the title said, some thoughts about the role of Hanukkah in contemporary America and the Middle Ages. In it Ellen had a throwaway line about the Puritan war on Christmas. I thought that our listen...