We're Not So Different

folks, it's the holidays and so we decided to post some prompts on twitter and bluesky and answer some questions about history, life, and culture from the general audience. we cover everything from Chinese feudalism to the Panera lemonade that kills you to counterfactuals on how imperial Italy could've become a world superpower and whether there was a Medieval concept of coolness analogous to what...

folks, we've got podcaster, historian, dad-aficionado, and friend of the show Patrick Wyman back on the show to talk about dad culture, what it means to be a dad as opposed to just a father, Medieval dads, dad-coded behavior, and much more. this is Patrick's 3rd appearance on the show and we love to have him on. you can check out his podcasts, the Fall of Rome, Tides of History, and the Pursuit of...

this time, we take a dive into the backlog of questions from our patrons and answer a few of them. we tackle everything from how to explain the Middle Ages to a 5 year old, to how bad was Henry VIII really to Eleanor Rykener and even who was the worst person in the Middle Ages. we cover 11 questions in total and it's a lot of fun, enjoy!

as you may have heard, the Princes in the Tower are in the news again, 540 years after their supposed deaths. recently, Philippa Langley, who famously help find Richard III's body in a parking lot back in 2012, hosted a television special in the UK which alleged a new theory about the Princes in the Tower: they survived and later returned to the island in attempts to take back the throne. as you m...

folks, we're finally doing a review of Ridley Scott's 2021 Medieval history film, The Last Duel, a film that asks the question: what if Ridley Scott just didn't do all the stuff he's known for and instead made an intimate portrait of a Medieval soap opera in the style of Rashomon that revolves around both an obscure land dispute based on manorial custom and a lengthy legal proceeding. it is a surp...

folks, in this episode we brought in a special guest and friend of the show, Phoebe Roy, co-host of the Ten Thousand Posts and Masters of Our Domain podcasts, to talk with us about depictions of Tudor England in books and TV. the Tudors are, of course, a foundational aspect of English history and culture, so it's interesting to see the many and varied depictions they get nowadays, especially when...

Long cold open this time, actual episode starts around 18 mins in. Luke and Eleanor close our their series on the Medieval Arthurian canon in style, covering the rest of the post-Galfridian era to the end of the Middle Ages. finally, at long last, we get the real connective tissue in place to link all these disparate stories and narratives together into a cohesive canon that can be understood to m...

this time, the series on Arthuriana continues into the post-Galfridian era. following Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, which created the narrative structure and foundation of the Arthurian canon we know today, a whole bunch of writers got in on the fun and started adding to that template. in this case, we focus on 7 stories that begin to flesh out the knights who make up Arthur's...

update: the last 3 minutes of this episode got cut off in the initial upload for unknown reasons, the file has now been fixed. sorry about that and enjoy! in our 4th installment in the Arthuriana series, we finally get to the work that truly defines Medieval Arthurian legend: Geoffrey of Monmouth's 1136 magnum opus, Historia Regum Britanniae aka The History of the Kings of Britain aka the Galfridi...

our series on Arthuriana continues as we move past introductions and start talking about the stories that make up the early part of the Arthurian canon, known as the pre-Galfridian (aka before Geoffrey of Monmouth). these stories survive to us in Welsh and Latin from roughly 600 to 1135 AD and show how the Arthurian legend was being built using other existing tall tales to flesh out the narrative...

we're back with more talk of Arthurian legend. this time, we continue to trace the canon into the Modern era, from its nadir in the Early Modern period to its resurrection in the 19th century by Lord Alfred Tennyson and finally to taking its place as a foundational myth in the English-speaking world. then, we introduce a host of recurring characters, settings, and tropes that commonly appear both...

folks, we're finally doing that series on King Arthur and the Arthurian Legends you've all been asking for. Luke and Eleanor start the series by talking about Arthur and the legends more broadly before discussing how a bunch of people in the Middle Ages built a cohesive, narrative canon with defined literary cycles out of a bunch of Welsh spoken-word stories without the aid of the internet or any...

Luke and Eleanor are back to talk about the meme that's been making the rounds for the past few weeks: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? we discuss how often we actually think about Rome and its successor states before moving on to talk about why this meme became so popular, why guys actually think about the Romans so often, why is this question so weirdly gendered, and more! we had a...

today, we have on Kleio Pethainou, a doctoral candidate at the Univ. of Edinburgh, to talk about Medieval humor and the lesser-known but still awesome tradition of Fabliau. Fabliau are bawdy, humorous stories, often filled with some level of social commentary, that started out in France in the High and Late Middle Ages. we talk with Kleio about what they were, what they mean, and even hear a great...

last time, we talked about two famous Medieval women, Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. they were both titans in their own respects but there's a small issue with Eleanor's legacy and that's her 4 idiot failsons. while Eleanor's daughters were apparently quite proficient, her 4 sons who survived to adulthood, Henry the Young King, Richard, Geoffrey, and John, were all giants morons who...

in this one, we revisit our occasional series on the lives of prominent Medieval women as we discuss Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. though they made their impacts felt in different ways, they were each monumentally important. Hildegard was a polymath who made her mark in the realms of religion, music, and science. Eleanor, meanwhile, was raised from birth to be in politics, ruled re...

we're back for another episode off Medieval what if scenarios. it's late, we all know it's late, it's fine. What if the Norman Invasion failed? What if Constantinople held out in 1453? What if Arthur Tudor, Henry VIII's older brother, hadn't died early? well, there's only one way to find out...

folks, today we move out of the realm of actual history and into the realm of alternative history as we take a look at some Medieval "what if..." scenarios. We go through a series of historical events, change one small detail, and see how things would've been different, if at all. What if the Moors won the Battle of Tours? What if the English won the Hundred Years War? What if the Chinese never di...

this time, we embark on another occasional series we're going to do from time-to-time going forward and this one is all about Medieval fail sons who squandered the fortunes, power, and goodwill engendered by their parents and were just general fuck-ups. Today, we're talking about the two fail sons of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV: Wenceslas IV, King of Germany and Bohemia and Sigismund, Holy Roman...

in this episode, we discuss the entertainment that you would see at a Medieval court: troubadours, dancers, jugglers, and, of course, jesters. we take a look at these professions, what their performances were like, how and why they were hired, and more. then we talk about the unique position held by medieval jesters and how it was a real thing and not just something fake you'd see in a fantasy nov...

we're back to talk about a huge facet of Medieval life: going to the market. what were they like? what was a market town? what could you buy there? who went to market? how were they run? were Medieval goth kids hanging out at the market like they do at the mall? we will discuss all of that plus the social and cultural functions that markets allowed for and more.

in this episode, we start an intermittently recurring series where we explore the lives and times of two famous Medieval women. and while these will usually be about women who lived and rose to prominence during the Middle Ages, we kinda had to start with two women from an earlier era who were nonetheless extremely important: Mary, the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. we talk about who they wer...

we are back and we're talking Medieval mining. we often discuss the elaborate jewels and metals used for ostentatious royal displays and the iron weapons shaped by blacksmiths for war but how does all that metal get out of the ground? who's doing the work to dig it out? what mining technology and methods were present during the Middle Ages? what does the Roman Empire have to do with all this? we w...

it's time for another mailbag episode from our backlog of questions from our patrons. since we usually answer one question an episode, we can't possibly get to all the questions, so we do these mailbags from time-to-time. in this one, we cover a wide range of topics from the Brother Cadfael mystery series to church debate structure to Medieval Switzerland to hair removal practices and even pirates...

we are back and this time we're doing a deep dive into Medieval wool production and how it undergirded the economies of much of Europe and turned places like England, Flanders, and the cities of the Hanseatic League into petro states for wool. we look at how it was produced, what it meant, why something so simple could come to predominate the continental economy and more!