September 11, 2025 • 46 mins
Part of the reason a lot of people figure nothing much went on during the Middle Ages is because we’ve lost a whole lot of sources telling us what actually did happen. Through malice and misfortune, medieval manuscripts have been destroyed in their thousands. So, how do we know what may have gone up in smoke? And what can we do to keep our beloved manuscripts safe? This week, Danièle speaks with Robert Bartlett about the manuscripts we’ve lost by accident and by design, and how these precious documents are being preserved today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three hundred and six
of the Medieval Podcast. I'm your host Danielle Sebolski. Part
of the reason a lot of people figure nothing much
(00:22):
went on during the Middle Ages is because we've lost
a whole lot of sources telling us what actually did happen,
through malice or misfortune, sometimes both at the same time.
Manuscripts have been destroyed in their thousands, So how do
we know what may have gone up in smoked and
what can we do to keep our beloved manuscripts safe.
(00:43):
This week I spoke with doctor Robert Bartlett about the
many manuscripts we've lost by accident and by design. Robert
is Professor Emeritus at the University of Saint Andrew's and
the author of many books, including the Wolfson Literary Prize
winning The Making of Europe, Conquest, Colonists and Cultural Change.
Eagle Eyed History Buffs will also have seen him on
(01:05):
several BBC series, including Inside the Medieval Mind, The Normans
and the Plantagenets. His new book is History in Flames,
The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts. Our conversation on
what we've lost Some truly spectacular moments of destruction and
how our precious documents are being preserved today is coming
(01:27):
up right after this. Well, thank you so much, Robert
for coming to speak to us about history and flames.
It is such a pleasure to meet you. You have
an incredible resume. I hope people will learn more about
your work after this, but for now, thank you so
much for being here.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
My pleasure, my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
So you've just written a book about history and flames,
the destruction of manuscripts. Why did you think it was
important to write about how they're disappearing rather than the
ones that we still have.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I think it's important when people consider the past to
realize that the evidence is not complete. What we have
is a very small sample of the evidence of the past,
and people could presume that we know the past, but
I don't think we do know the past. I think
it's more precarious than that. And it's particularly true of
(02:19):
the medieval period because in the medieval period, as you know,
the written evidence is all manuscript it's all written by hand,
it's prior to printing. So sometimes very important texts survive
only in one manuscript, and they might not survive. And
we certainly don't have even a tiny fraction of what
was written in the Middle Ages. So it's the precariousness
(02:41):
of the past making people aware that we haven't got
a straightforward textbook account of what happened, not just in
the medieval period, but also in the modern period too,
and we need to approach it critically. And one of
the things we've got to be critical about is what
evidence is there, and how does that evidence survive? And
where does it survive? Why do we know? How can
(03:02):
you know things that happened eight hundred years ago? I mean,
where do you start? And what things have been selected?
And what's there a principle of selection? What things have
been lost? And that's tricky, of course, because you're trying
to then talk about what doesn't exist. It's quite hard
to talk about what doesn't exist, but you can try.
And an example I gea of is Beowulf, and I
(03:24):
think if anyone has ever heard of a medieval poem,
the chances are it's Beowolf, because of course it's been
made into films, it's been made into video games, it's
been translated hundreds of times. It survives in one manuscript,
and that one manuscript was not read as far as
we know there's no evidence of it being read before
(03:44):
the Tudor period. When someone who's reading it writes his
name on it, so that's how we know one person
read it, and there's no evidence of it going this
and it doesn't go into print, it's not copied until
we get up to the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century,
it's in the library, the Cartonian Library, the library owned
by Sir Cottom, which is why it's called that. And
(04:05):
in seventeen thirty one there's a fire in the library
and just by pure chance, many many things were destroyed,
many things, hundreds of manuscripts were destroyed, but they will survive.
Just a little child, a little bit, you know, the
binding away, and it's a big kind of child on
the edges, and that's what survived. And that still wasn't
printed for another thirty or forty years, so that just
(04:27):
kind of comes through. But the merest fluke, we'd have
no knowledge whatsoever available if that hadn't happened. And then
of course once it survives, once it gets into the
time of print, then the printed copy can multiply, you know, greatly.
And we're through and we've got bail. As we know
but how many other books, how many other poems, how
many other texts didn't make it through. That's one thing
(04:50):
I should think about.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Yes, well, this is one of the reasons why I
didn't become an Anglo Saxonist, because it's too hard. There
aren't enough papers. So I love the fourteenth century. But
even then surging really didn't make it either. So yeah,
it's all about chance. So one of the things that
you do at the beginning of the book is look
through the ways people have tried to calculate how much
(05:12):
it's missing. So what did you learn from looking into
what's not there?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
I think I learned the narrow chance that some of
the texts have of coming through. If you're talking about
Western Europe and the tradition of culture, most of the
Latin classics, they certainly don't survive in texts from the
ancient Roman period. They survive in texts copied out. They
(05:38):
surviving copies made in the medieval period, and in particular
in the Carolingian period the ninth century, when for some
reason there was a real concentration of copying out these texts.
And so we can get a list of things produced
in the Roman period. We can get a list of
the things that survive now, and we have a huge
(06:00):
chunk that has disappeared. If you go back to the Greeks,
it's even greater. So we're talking about say, the great
Athenian dramatists, you know, like these Skillus and these people,
And if you look at that, you can say roughly
that ninety percent of their plays had disappeared. So that's
what your God has taken into account. And of course
you concentrate on what survived for very good reason. But
(06:24):
you've always got to say to yourself, Okay, how would
the picture be different if the ninety percent hadn't disappeared?
If we could put that ninety percent into the picture,
And that, of course is largely hypothetical, but you can try.
And then you look at production, how many manuscripts were
being produced, And you have to be a little bit
(06:45):
skeptical of people who try and say there were ten
million manuscripts written in the Middle Ages. Right, it's all
a bit figures conjured up from the blue, you know,
but there obviously was some total figure in someone's the
mind of God, he would know. And you've got clear
evidence that the amount of stuff that is being written
(07:06):
increases over the course of the Middle Ages rather dramatically,
so you've got the ability You've just mentioned the case
of the fourteenth century compared with the Anglo Saxons. I mean,
you can put all the written evidence for Anglo Saxon
England on one big table easily. The fourteenth century. You
can't read it in a lifetime, you can't read it
(07:26):
in a dozen lifetimes. Right, So there's been a complete
change in the amount of material being produced. So that's
one thing. The production. And in the book I talk
about the conditions of production. I talk about what did
they write on and how many scribes were there? And
how fast do medieval scribes right, you know, things like this.
So this is the production level. And then you've got
the destruction level. And that's one of the things I
(07:48):
concentrate on. And in what circumstances is their destruction and
is the destruction random among body? Is it complete? Is
it ever controlled? I can trust the dissolution of the
monasteries in England, which was chaotic and resulted in probably
eighty five percent of the monastic libraries disappearing. And you
(08:11):
can sort of sometimes find fragments and things, you know,
they find things like pages of medieval books used for
wrapping butter and stuff like that. You know, it's kind
of very dramatic. And then later in the Napoleonic period,
a large number of monasteries were closed down in Bavaria
in southern Germany, and that was done with a kind
of controlled and careful process. Where should these books go?
(08:35):
They had a committee in charge of it. They divided
up the categories of books, and there you'll find that
the medieval libraries went more or less intact into the
State Library of Bavaria, which is still there. You can
still go to Munich and you can still see all
these hundreds of books from these medieval libes. So that's
(08:55):
one of the more complete things. That are the conditions
under which things have. And I talk quite a lot
of course about the history of libraries and archives and
when they began, because some of them have an enormous continuity.
The Archive of the Crown of Aragon, which is in Barcelona,
has a continuous history from the fourteenth century up to
the present day, and that's rare, very rare. But then
(09:18):
of course you've got archives that are destroyed, which is
one of the things I actually silk about in the book.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yes, And one of the things that you take time
to pull apart is the difference between a library and
an archive. So can you tell us where the difference
is and what is kept in these things?
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Put very simply, a library is where you have books,
and an archive is where you have documents. And that's
an oversimplification, but it's a good starting point. And you'll
find nowadays in modern European cities and in elsewhere in
the world, but I'm talking about medieval Europe, you'll always
find things like the British Library, which is full of books,
(10:00):
and a little bit out of London, in q there's
the National Archives. And for one kind of thing, you're
good at one, and one kind of thing you go
to the other. In London you have to take an
underground train from one to the other. But in places
like Paris and Rome, the archives and the libraries are
very close to each other, which is much more convenient.
So you've got basically somewhere you go to have books,
(10:21):
and those books, some of them might be practical books,
they might be administrative, but for the most part they
are books with texts with maybe theology, maybe history, all
sorts of things. And the administrative stuff is the archive,
the archive that is produced by the workings of government,
and that means that the survival of it is rather different,
(10:43):
because when you've got a day to day government, you
need administrative documents. But when the document is ten years old,
or when the document is twenty years old, do you
need it anymore? It's taking up space. The example I
give is the very oldest less written in English, in
Old English, which is from the tenth century I think,
(11:06):
and it survives in Canterbury Cathedral Archive, and it's a
very short that but it's been sitting there on the
shelf for a thousand years. In the twelfth century, the
Canterbury Cathedral monk went and had a look at it
and he wrote on the back useless that is no
longer got any relevance. On the other hand, he didn't
(11:28):
say useless and throw it out right. He kept it there.
And at some point it may be the case that
someone says, Okay, this stuff is hopelessly out of date,
but we'll keep it for historical purposes. And that's one
of the things that's very important for archives. And so
you've got continuity of archives, discontinuity of archives, the difference
(11:50):
between archives and libraries, and libraries of course depending on
what kind of books they have in them, because people
value certain books and not others. When the French Revolution
came along, the monasteries were all closed down and became
property of the state, and the value of what was
in them, lots of people thought we can get rid
of the lot, right, and there were bonfires of books.
(12:12):
In fact, my opening example in the book The History
and Flames is of a bonfire in Paris during the
French Revolution when hundreds of manuscripts were destroyed, and they
obviously thought, what is this stuff? This is a collection
amount of made which showed the ancestry of the nobles.
They didn't care about the actor if the nobles right,
(12:34):
burn the lot. So that's the difference between archives and libraries.
Putting it very.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Generally, right, Well, maybe it's time to start getting into
destruction because when it comes to libraries and archives, there
might be different reasons to destroy them. Sometimes this is intentional,
sometimes it's accidental. So there's one medieval example in the
book that I can think of, and that is the
Peasants' Revolt, and this is a targeted attack on documents.
So let's get into this medieval example. What happened during
(13:01):
the peasants Reward.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
There was a definite attack on documents of all kinds
in Cambridge, which is a very well attested example. The crowds,
the rebels sacked the colleges and took their title deeds
and their documents. They regarded the colleges with probably very
(13:23):
good reason, as oppressive landlords, and they wanted to smash
the lot and they smashed the seals. The wax seals
get bashed with sticks and things like this, and they
have a big bonfire in the middle of the town. Meanwhile,
in the countryside, one of the things that happened was
that all the court rolls were burned. The court roles
(13:44):
recorded the peasant holdings and the terms that the peasants
held their land on, so those were the things that
kind of governed their lives, and they also regarded them
as instruments of oppression and the court role the court
rolls with hundreds of cases of the court roles and
manor court roles being burned by rebels in the countryside,
(14:04):
and so there was a very practical side to it,
there's no question about that. But it also went beyond that,
because people began to associate writing with their oppressive overlords,
and writing itself became a kind of target. There's a
famous story of when all these documents had been burned
(14:24):
in the middle of Cambridge and an old lady as
she's called called Margaret Stirr comes along and she picks
up the ashes of the burnt books and throws them
in the air, and she says, away with the learning
of the clerks, Away with it. And the learning of
the clerks meant writing and documents and all the things
(14:45):
that she presumably not able to read or write, regarded
with suspicion, and you can understand why they might be suspicion.
And so you have cases like that where they're very
definitely the people are post to burning manuscripts know what
they're going for. In seventeen oh one, I think it
(15:05):
was when there's an attack on the documents in the
courts in Naples, there's a large uprising. They go straight
for the records of the criminal court and burn them,
and they notice the next day that the ashes of
the books are much thicker and deeper where the criminal
court have been, because that's what they want to destroy.
(15:27):
They're much deeper than the other things that were burned,
So you definitely get that. You're definitely get an association
of you can get an association of writing with an
impressive class who are controlling you by this skill, this
special skill they have now.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yes, exactly, keeping you out of that skill deliberately and
then using that skill against you. You can see why
people would be so upset about it and target this
so directly in this case. For sure. Many of the
examples in your book are from modern history, and of
course this is still you actually know a lot about
medieval history. You chose to go with modern history here,
(16:04):
and one of the things that you talk about is
the rise of nationalism as having a big part of
both the collection and the destruction of these manuscripts. So
tell us why nationalism was such an important part of
your argument.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
I look at five case studies of massive destruction of
medieval manuscripts that all happened in a few hours. That's
what I'm looking at. Obviously, there's the attrition all the time,
you know, there's flood and fire and mice and all
sorts of things eating away at this. But I'm looking
at spectacular examples and They all have two things in
(16:41):
common which are connected with nationalism and connected with the state.
That is, these collections are a sign that the state
is taking the preservation, not the destruction, but the preservation
of medieval manuscripts seriously. They create public record offices, they
have municipal libraries, they have state archives. All these things
(17:06):
are the creation mainly of the period after the French
Revolution the nineteenth century into the twentieth and so it's
the state taking on responsibility. And the European state in
this period was nationalistic. It saw itself as a nation state.
We are the French, we are the Germans in centric
and that was an impetus to historical inquiry because they
(17:30):
wanted to say, we are going to tell our nation story.
And whatever you think of that, it's very good for
getting people to go out and publish and edit and
study medieval manuscripts.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It happened all over. The Germans were in the forefront
of it, perhaps because their nation had not had a
state for a while, so they wanted to make a
big deal about it. And the other thing is, of
course that these destructive moments are to do with war
and violence, and in almost every case there is a
nationalist element to the conflict. Sometimes it's very straightforward, it's
(18:06):
two nations so on fighting each other. Sometimes it's more complicated.
The Irish case is an obvious one where you have
a struggle over the future of Ireland actually going on
within Ireland. The most sort of elaborate of them all,
I think, is the destruction of Strasbourg, the municipal library
in Strasbourg in eighteen seventy because Strasbourg had been a
(18:27):
German city in sixteen eighty one it was annexed by
the King of France. There were the fourteenth of France,
so it became French, but it was still culturally very distinct.
Lots of German we was spoken there, and they were
allowed to carry on having Protestant worship in Strasbourg when
the rest of France didn't. So it's a very mixed
sort of situation. And during the so called Franco Prussian War,
(18:48):
the Prussian artillery bombard Strasbourg and they destroy the municipal library,
and in it they destroy this text that I talk
about at some length. It's called the Garden of Delights,
and it was obviously a very beautiful hundreds of pages
of full page illustrations, really magnificent, and of course that
(19:09):
was produced in medieval Germany, so the Germans are actually
destroying something that is part of their own, as it were,
national heritage because of the complexities of this border situation,
and so you'll find nationalism of all kinds both leading
people to invest in scholarship and invest in their history.
(19:30):
That's a very big development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
But also the conflicts are having a kind of a
side effect, particularly with the high level of damage that
can be done with modern weapons. That's the crucial thing
I think why the modern period is so important. Mass
destruction of that record as well.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yes, well, I think you've given us a good outline
of what happens in Strasbourg, and that's the place that
I wanted to start next, because your book is not
just about destruction. It's also about how we preserve things
in the wake of destruction. And this is a really
good example because the destruction of the records in Strasbourg
happens in eighteen seventy, so this is pre when photography
(20:11):
was becoming a fit. I'm not very good with modern history,
so I don't know when people started using cameras. But
this is pretty early. So how did they reconstruct this book?
This is something that you spend some time on in
your book, So tell us how they put together what
was lost.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Sure there is photography around in eighteen seventy, but it
hadn't been applied to this particular volume. And later in
the book I talk about another beautiful example that had
been photographed before it was destroyed, that's the Epstorf map.
But in the case of Strasbourg, we have a lot
(20:46):
of evidence of people being really interested in this manuscript
the Garden of Delights, and they do things like they
copy out the texts, which are not perhaps the most
important part of it. They start from early, I think
round about eighteen fifteen something like that. Very early they
start producing what they can of, what we would call reproductions.
(21:10):
Now they can't do it by photography in eighteen fifteen,
but they do it by tracing and then by printing,
so they can make many copies of these copies. Lithography
is the system of printing they use. And there are
some people who are really the heroes by doing this.
I mean, obviously the man whose name you can't forget
is count bastard. I mean he was a dedicated I
(21:33):
mean he was a soldier, he thought, and he was
very important in the French army. But he then turned
his attention to reproductions of medieval manuscripts, and you've got
a government grant to do it. Some of his reproductions
were sent to the Great Exhibition in London in eighteen
fifty one. I mean he was a really dedicated managers
(21:53):
and he was one of the people who produce. He
taught himself lithography in order to make copies of the
images in the Garden of Deliance. So you've got this
long tradition and then of course in eighteen seventy, full stop,
there's no chance of making any more drawings or prints
or trace sings because it's gone. So that's when people
(22:15):
begin to say, okay, well, let's gather up what we
can from all the people have looked at it over
the past seventy years, sixty or seventy years. So we've
got that wind, that just that window of opportunity when
there are erudite people interested in the medieval past, studying this,
writing about it, and making images from it. And that's
(22:36):
what we have if we actually had the parchment. If
we actually had the original, we could do things with
it now that are just beyond belief. In the nineteenth century,
you know, the chemical analysis that could be done, all
these wonderful things that have come along, digitization, photography, and
so on. They didn't do that because they didn't have
that technology. And that means that that's when the ability
(22:59):
to reconstruct that volume ends with the technology available in
eighteen seventy and they've done wonderful work. I mean, this
is one of the things. I do have good news
in the book as well as bad news. I have
heroes and heroines who are the people who are very
hard to reconstruct in some way or another, something that
is lost, something that is no longer there. And there
(23:21):
is a huge, not life size exactly, but very large
volume which is an attempt to reconstruct that particular volume,
the Garden of Delance, which was produced for a German
nunnery in the late twelfth century, and we know that
it was commissioned by the abbess Abbess Herad, and inside
a pictures of Abbess Herad and all her nuns with
(23:44):
all their names written underneath it. It's very charming, it's
a really nice thing, and what we see when we
look at pictures of that is not a twelfth century
image but count Bastard's work from the nineteenth century. And
you just have to be aware of that good as
you're going to get. But it's a very, very much
good site, better than nothing at all.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Well, yes, that's the thing. What's so incredible about this
story is people had taken the time to trace the
images and to write out what was in the book itself,
because this is so rare in itself. The people that
were taking the time because they're handwriting what's in the
book before they can even make a facsimile of it.
Their handwriting this taking it home for their notes for studying,
(24:28):
and this is just something that is a one in
a million shot, you know, maybe not one in a million,
but still pretty rare. So this is an incredible story,
I think.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, I think it's. One of the things that the
book addresses is the background to it is the growth
of scholarship in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
That is addressed to the question of what have we
got in terms of physical remains the manuscripts that are
(24:59):
from this period, either from the point of view of
the images, as in the case of the Garden of Delights,
or in the case of text, which texts have we got?
And the work that goes on after the destruction is
really a kind of review of the scholars. After the
destruction of the State's Archives of Naples in nineteen forty three,
(25:21):
the archivist there, Ricardo of Flangeri. He had kept a
list of all the people who come and worked in
the archive for the previous thirty years of forty years,
and he wrote to them all and said, do you
have any transcripts? Do you have any copies you've made?
And some of them really came up trumps because they
had actually hand copied many, many things from his archive
(25:43):
which he could now publish. And of course you haven't
got the original, but you've got the text. So that's
another example.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
It's a win. It's a very very tiny win, but
it's still win.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, well it's something, you know. That's what they said.
The destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in
nineteen twenty two, that has been followed by one hundred
years of people trying to fill that gap. One hundred
years and some of the things they've looked at are
transcripts made in the seventeenth century, transcripts made in the
(26:16):
nineteenth century. You go wherever you can, and maybe sometimes
these transcripts aren't very good, but you say, well, what
else have you gone? Right, And that's how it's done.
And then of course you've got sometimes you have in
the case of Ireland, some of the material was actually
duplicated in England because Ireland was under the rule of
(26:37):
the King of England, and so some of those documents
produced in Ireland are then sent to England for various reasons.
So you've got that, and then of course you know
sometimes it's very strange because the Public Record Office of
Ireland was created in eighteen sixty seven and this destruction
(26:57):
took place in nineteen twenty two years earlier. Herbert Wood,
who was in charge of the archive, had published an
entire volume describing the contents of this Public Record Office,
you know, very detailed. So you've got pages and pages
and papers, so you know what was in there and
you know what was lost. And he's talking about the
happy consequences of centralizing the documents, right, and the happy
(27:22):
of centralizing the documents was that they could all be
blown up in one day, and that's the irony of it.
So the lucky documents are the ones that weren't sent
weren't sent to the public record office, you know. I mean,
it's the ones that missed out on that are more
likely to survive. And the same is true of some
of the other things. The Ebsdorf Map is one of them,
which was housed in the state archive in Hanover and
(27:45):
for most of its existence, the Ebsdorf Map, which is
a huge it was a huge map of the world.
It was twelve feet by twelve feet, right, it's the
largest map of the world that we know of from
the Middle Ages. Everyone knows that, I think everyone knows.
Many people know of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, which is
one animal skin. You know, it's made on one animal skin.
It's nice, it's beautiful, it survives. But the Ebstorf Map
(28:08):
was thirty animal skins, so I mean it was huge,
and that was kept by the nuns of Ebstorf, and
it had sat around and no one knew anything about it,
and it was kind of gathering dust there. And then
if it hadn't been sent to Hanover, it would still
be there, it would still be intact. You know, it's
sent from this place of forgetfulness but refuge to a
(28:34):
central place. And the central places are the ones that
get bombed and shelled and everything. So that's how that worked.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yes, is that irony. We'll put it in a safe place.
It ends up not being the safest place with that actually,
for people who have wandered around the internet or liked
at medieval stuff, the Ebstorf map is the one with
Jesus's face at the top that you really see so
clearly in his feet at the bottom. It's not the
only map in which this happens, but this is the
most famous one.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Yeah, it's a remarkable map. I mean, and that was photographed.
I mean the photography was not very good, but I
mean it was photographed. So you've got something like a
photographic reproduction of it from the eighteen nineties. The thing
that struck me as always as very ironic about all
this is that sometimes when war came, sometimes efforts were
(29:22):
made to get these things to safe places, and sometimes
that worked and sometimes it didn't. And Naples is the
most ironic because the State Archive of Naples, which was
a very rich archive and a complete run of central
documents for the Late Middle Ages that was housed in
Naples itself, the city of Naples, which was being bombed
(29:43):
by the Allies, by the Americans and the British because
across the Italians were on the other side, and so
they decided to move most of the important medieval documents
about twenty or thirty miles away to a villa in
the hills nearby for safety. And things were moving very fast.
The Italians changed sites, they surrendered, and now the Germans
(30:07):
were no longer their allies, they were their enemies, and
the German troops are all over Italy, and so suddenly
the whole thing is flipped and German troops come to
this villa where the archives are being stored, and it
doesn't seem as if they were particularly aiming at the villa,
but they burned the villa down and the archive in it.
So it's by being put out of Naples into some
(30:29):
place which is meant to be perfectly safe, and suddenly
the political situation and the military situation just reverses within
a matter of weeks. It's very dramatically. I'm talking about weeks,
and of course that's one of the things that happens
there or in the case of Chatra. Shartra has, as
you know, a very famous cathedral with magnificent stained glass.
They put that into crates. When the Germans invaded in
(30:52):
nineteen forty they put that into crates. They ship checked
several hundred miles away to a cellar in a castle
way down south right. They survived. The books were sent
just like in the case of Naples, the books were
sent to a villa about twenty miles away, and that
would have made what they would have been safe there, except,
of course, the German occupation of France continued, and the
(31:16):
German authorities seem to have wanted to say, well, things
are back to normal. Now, okay, you needn't worry. You've
got the protection of the German forces. As long as
you behave yourself. France needn't worry about destruction. And so
the German officers in charge of cultural affairs insisted that
all the books go back from that villa into Chartre itself,
(31:38):
where they were bonded in the lead up to D
Day in nineteen forty four. That's one of these ironies
of the situation. That's why you see, I had to
put nationalism in there, as both the creative and the
destructive force, and state power as a destructive and constructive
force as well.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yes, absolutely, And this is one of the things that
was sort of jarge up for you about the Key
of Charta, because you're like, it's a way, it's fine,
it's okay, but then it has to be brought back
and you know this is hindsight going no, but like, honestly,
you don't want to put this in a city where
it can be vulnerable. And in the case of Charlta,
it wasn't the cathedral that was meant to be bombed,
(32:17):
it wasn't the archaeve that was meant to be bombed,
but it got bombed anyway, and I think you know,
could see that coming, or.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
You know, all the evidence suggests that it was a
terrible accident, the bombing of the center of Sharta. They
were sense to bomb the airfield, which would make perfect
sense because the landings in Normandy were going to take
place in a month or two. And the accounts that
you've got are rather contradictory, but they certainly add up
(32:46):
to there was a mistake or it was an accident,
rather than that it was actually intended. But of course
the result is the same, and the medieval manuscripts go up,
and then it just so happens that quite a few
of them have in fragments child fragments. There are hundreds
and hundreds of fragments and these have all been digitized
(33:07):
and photographed and identified. I mean, it's been an amazing
and it's amazing to think of, you know, the sort
of labor that's gone into it and the attempt just
to sort of save what you can from the past.
Fortunately that was catalog, that was catalog in the eighteen nineties.
So you've got this catalog which tells you what was there,
so you know what was there, and you've got these fragments,
(33:28):
and the only thing you haven't got is the real stuff,
the actual library. It's gone. It's gone.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yes, what a shame. Well, these examples that you have
from World War two are surprising in a way. This
one that we're talking about now seems to have been accidental,
but given the fact that the Nazis were very concerned
with preserving cultural heritage so that they can use it
for their purposes, it's kind of amazing that so many
things were destroyed. But this was a gigantic war. Things
(33:55):
are going to be destroyed. But the example that you're
saying of Naples, this is a deliberate burning of papers,
and this it seems almost out of character for the
regime that we're talking about. So this was not only
heartbreaking from a historical perspective, but also a little bit puzzling.
It seems like pure revenge, which can be a destructive
for a solid soon.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah, there were hearings about it after the war, and
as far as one can work out, the most likely
situation is that this was a time when government had
more or less broken down in Italy and the Italian
government was now officially surrendered. The German troops were taking
over Italy, so there was a lot of resistance to them,
(34:37):
so there was fighting between German troops, not so much
between them and the Italian soldiers, but Italian resistance fighters.
And there had been attacks on German soldiers in that area,
and the Germans had a policy of reprisals, and so
the idea was we'll burn a couple of villas as
reprisals for the attacks on German soldiers. And it seems
(34:59):
like that they didn't know that this house to this
huge archive. It seems likely that's the case. I'm not
quite sure. It's a long time ago. I mean, and
the fog of war. You've heard of the fog of war.
This is definitely the fog of war.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
That's right. You don't want to admit to burning something
so important just out of pettiness. I say pettiness. I
think you understand what I mean here. But this is
obviously existential conflict. But it seems like retribution, I guess,
is where I'm trying.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
To go with this.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
So let's move forward in time to now. So as
somebody who's been studying the destruction of manuscripts reconstruction of manuscripts,
what do you see happening now? How are people preserving them?
Speaker 4 (35:44):
Well?
Speaker 2 (35:44):
I think the very big question now, very big is digitization.
And of course digitization is wonderful. I can go online
and if I'm looking up some text I don't know,
it'll come up online and they'll say would you like
to see a manu script? And I'll say, yes, you
know some The next thing I know, I'm looking at
a manuscript in Valencien or something like that. Of course,
(36:06):
the downside is I haven't got excuse to go to Valencien,
and so your research trips are much more limited than
they are otherwise, but you can go very quickly to
an array of source material and an array of manuscript
material that is just it would have been unthinkable twenty
to thirty years ago. And it's continuing. It's continuing, and
(36:26):
I suppose the big issue that anyone everyone thinks about
is how permanent can the storage be? Is digitization forever?
It's the technology going to remain exactly the same. If
the technology changes, are things going to get lost and
be irretrievable. There's a famous example which is in nineteen
eighty six, which is the centenary of Doomsday Book, which
(36:51):
was made in ten eighty six, the BBC, the British
Broadcasting Corporation, decided to kind of have a modern doomsday book,
and they did a certain of the whole country and
they put all the data in and they put it
on a particular system, a storage system, and that was
kind of like going to bring our own doomsday book. Unfortunately,
within ten years that retrieval system was completely obsolete and
(37:14):
no longer function, and that material is inaccessible and it's
as if it had never been. And that's the kind
of extreme example, and maybe some of the problems for
them are not the problems we have now. But that's
where you've really got to sort of think of how
safe is this, how precarious is it? I mean, a
long term imaging. You know, it's expensive. You've got to
(37:36):
have the right technology. That's one of the things I
thought would be really big now. No, of course, you know,
old fashioned wars. They still can you know, pack a punch.
When Timbuctoo was taken over by Islamists a few years ago,
lots of stuff in the Timbuctoo Library disappeared. And the
Timbuctoo Library is a very important reservoir of medieval Islamic writing.
(37:59):
So there's still dangers of that that still can happen.
But I think that we can be relatively positive and
hopeful that the technology for storing and reproducing manuscripts is
now at the stage where if you can do it,
then the chances are you've preserve that not simply in
(38:23):
terms of having a copy of it for the future,
but making it accessible to anybody with a laptop or whatever.
You know. I mean, that's and that's astonishing, that's just astonishing.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yes, Well, and one of the things that is happening.
I just wanted to get your take on and we
don't talk about it. You don't talk about it in
the book. Is people are creating facsimiles now and they
will sell facsimilies of an amazing book. What do you
think about that? Is this a good way to access
the past? Or do you prefer digital images?
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Well, I prefer digital images because they're much cheaper.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Of course, you know that is true.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Actually, there's a pretty expensive you know, it's nice. It's
nice to have a facsimile, you know, I mean, and
you can browse to it. And so the most expensive
book I've ever bought is not a fact simile of
a medieval manuscript, but a fact simile of a facsimile
of the medieval manuscript which is the hottest deliquy Are
in the Garden of Delights with Count Bastard's Lithographic Prints.
(39:19):
I bought that, and that's the most expensive book I've
ever bought. So I do have my weaknesses, but I
think really for practical purposes, digitization it's the thing, isn't it.
And also, of course it's much easier to magnify the
image and things like that, you know, it's the way
of the future.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
I think, yes, I still think there'll be people going
and looking at maybe able manuscripts and medieval archives and
getting them magnifying glass out and saying is that a
C or is it a t you know, I mean,
I think these things will still happen.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yes, And in fact they're encouraged. People who are archivists
and librarians are encouraging people to come and look at
these manuscripts because they are meant to be looked at.
They're meant to be more moved and touched, and if
they're not, then that is damaged in its own rate.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
And also there's the smell. I mean, I think the
smell of medieval parchment is very distinctive. It's very exciting.
I also remember that the very first time I went,
I saw a medieval manuscript in real life, many years ago,
when the British Library was still part of the British Museum,
and I remember two things about it. What one was
I was looking at the pattern on the skin on
(40:26):
the actual sheet and the little dots which is where
the hair follicles of the animal were, So I thought,
this is a calf or something that lived eight hundred
years ago and here since the follicles, and the other
one was the smell. So of course you can reproduce
the follicles online, but the smell, I think they haven't
got round to that yet. Maybe that's the next stage.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Yes, that's all we need in that tactile sense of
turning the pages, because they are it feels much different
from paper by the follicles. Of course, that's what speaks
to you, all of us. I think that in the
dirt indeed, indeed, yes, well, I want to thank you
so much for being here and telling us all about
these examples of manuscripts that were preserved and destroyed, because
(41:11):
I think this is a conversation that needs to keep happening.
And I'm very grateful that you've come on to remind
us to look at this every once in a while
because this is such an important part of our history.
So thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
It's been a great pleasure.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
To find out more about Robert's work, you can visit
his faculty page at the University of Saint Andrews, or
you can find him on Wikipedia. His new book is
History in Flames, The Destruction and Survival of medieval manuscripts.
Before we go, here's Peter from medievalis dot net to
tell us what's on the website. What's going on?
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Peter?
Speaker 4 (41:46):
Hey, Hey, So, if you find yourself in Venice, and
I'm sure you want to be sure, yes, you will
want to take a look at that statue of a
bronze winged lion that's like at Saint Mark's. Okay, it's
basically the symbol of like the Venetian Republic. So it
turns out that statue is actually Chinese.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Whoa. I mean, I shouldn't be surprised because there is
a lot of trade happening between the Far East and
Venice at this time. But tell us tell us all
about it.
Speaker 4 (42:17):
Yeah. Yeah, So a few researchers did the scientific tests
and confirm that the stone is actually from China. And
their best part of this, it's likely a tombstone from
the Tang dynasty. Whoa, And it was likely brought to
Venice by Nicolo and Matthew Polo, the father and uncle
(42:39):
of Marco Polo.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Wow. I mean that would just be totally neat right,
all wrapped up in a nice shiny bow.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
They think while they're in Beijing, they were in Beijing
from twelve sixty four to sixty eight. They figure that
they may have went into like a warehouse where these
Tang dynasty tombstones were being kept, because it's at a
time when these tubestones were getting taken away from their
original spots, and they had it shipped to Venice anise pedestal,
(43:09):
and a few things have been added, like the wings
over the years.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Okay, so it was originally a line without wings, yes,
and then it got glammed up once it got to Venice.
Speaker 4 (43:18):
Yes, yes, pretty much glammed up. It's like there's bits
and pieces that have over the years had to be redone.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Wow, well that is a super interesting bit of news.
Speaker 4 (43:27):
Awesome indeed indeed that I thought that was a lot
of fun. And we have kind of a similar pieces.
Thomas Smith is writing for the first time on Medievalist
dot net and he is telling us the story of
why a Chinese sword can be found on a crusader's
effigy that's sitting in New York.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
I love this and Tom is so great. I'm so
glad that he's getting articles on Medievalist dot net so
that more people can see his work.
Speaker 4 (43:51):
It was so nice so easy to put his piece online,
So thank you very much. Tom's the very good work there.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Anything else for us this week?
Speaker 4 (44:01):
Yeah, and beyond that, we have a few other news stories.
When it was interesting, a new Viking hairstyle was found
courtesy of a thousand year old gaming piece.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
I love that when a new Viking hairstyle drops on
the internet.
Speaker 4 (44:14):
Yeah, it looks kind of like a wavy hair, kind
of like a nineteen seventies look.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
Oh nice.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
So we have all that and much much more on
medievals dot net this week.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Well, thank you Peter for stopping by and letting us know.
Speaker 4 (44:28):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
It's last call from my online class, Calamity and Change
and Introduction to the Fourteenth Century, which starts this Friday,
September twelveth. Every week for five weeks, we'll talk about
the ins and outs of fourteenth century life and I'll
answer all your burning questions about this period. And for
the next day or two, the back to School sale
is still on, so you can get fifteen percent off
(44:51):
with a coupon code back to School All one word.
You can find it all at Medieval Studies dot thinkivik
dot com. I'm looking forward to to seeing you there. Finally,
a big thank you as always to all of you
for supporting my work by listening, sharing, letting the ads
play through, or becoming patrons on patreon dot com. Patrons
(45:13):
are everyday heroes because without you, none of this would
be possible. To find out more or to become a patron,
please visit patreon dot com slash Medievalists for everything from
flames too dames, follow Medievalist dot Net on Instagram at
medievalist net or blue sky at Medievalists. You can find
me Danielle Sebalski across social media at five and Medievalist
(45:37):
or five minute Medievalist, and you can find my books
at all your favorite bookstores. Our music is by Christian Overton.
Thanks for listening and have yourself an awesome day
Speaker 2 (46:01):
To d
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three hundred and six
of the Medieval Podcast. I'm your host Danielle Sebolski. Part
of the reason a lot of people figure nothing much
(00:22):
went on during the Middle Ages is because we've lost
a whole lot of sources telling us what actually did happen,
through malice or misfortune, sometimes both at the same time.
Manuscripts have been destroyed in their thousands, So how do
we know what may have gone up in smoked and
what can we do to keep our beloved manuscripts safe.
(00:43):
This week I spoke with doctor Robert Bartlett about the
many manuscripts we've lost by accident and by design. Robert
is Professor Emeritus at the University of Saint Andrew's and
the author of many books, including the Wolfson Literary Prize
winning The Making of Europe, Conquest, Colonists and Cultural Change.
Eagle Eyed History Buffs will also have seen him on
(01:05):
several BBC series, including Inside the Medieval Mind, The Normans
and the Plantagenets. His new book is History in Flames,
The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts. Our conversation on
what we've lost Some truly spectacular moments of destruction and
how our precious documents are being preserved today is coming
(01:27):
up right after this. Well, thank you so much, Robert
for coming to speak to us about history and flames.
It is such a pleasure to meet you. You have
an incredible resume. I hope people will learn more about
your work after this, but for now, thank you so
much for being here.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
My pleasure, my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
So you've just written a book about history and flames,
the destruction of manuscripts. Why did you think it was
important to write about how they're disappearing rather than the
ones that we still have.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I think it's important when people consider the past to
realize that the evidence is not complete. What we have
is a very small sample of the evidence of the past,
and people could presume that we know the past, but
I don't think we do know the past. I think
it's more precarious than that. And it's particularly true of
(02:19):
the medieval period because in the medieval period, as you know,
the written evidence is all manuscript it's all written by hand,
it's prior to printing. So sometimes very important texts survive
only in one manuscript, and they might not survive. And
we certainly don't have even a tiny fraction of what
was written in the Middle Ages. So it's the precariousness
(02:41):
of the past making people aware that we haven't got
a straightforward textbook account of what happened, not just in
the medieval period, but also in the modern period too,
and we need to approach it critically. And one of
the things we've got to be critical about is what
evidence is there, and how does that evidence survive? And
where does it survive? Why do we know? How can
(03:02):
you know things that happened eight hundred years ago? I mean,
where do you start? And what things have been selected?
And what's there a principle of selection? What things have
been lost? And that's tricky, of course, because you're trying
to then talk about what doesn't exist. It's quite hard
to talk about what doesn't exist, but you can try.
And an example I gea of is Beowulf, and I
(03:24):
think if anyone has ever heard of a medieval poem,
the chances are it's Beowolf, because of course it's been
made into films, it's been made into video games, it's
been translated hundreds of times. It survives in one manuscript,
and that one manuscript was not read as far as
we know there's no evidence of it being read before
(03:44):
the Tudor period. When someone who's reading it writes his
name on it, so that's how we know one person
read it, and there's no evidence of it going this
and it doesn't go into print, it's not copied until
we get up to the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century,
it's in the library, the Cartonian Library, the library owned
by Sir Cottom, which is why it's called that. And
(04:05):
in seventeen thirty one there's a fire in the library
and just by pure chance, many many things were destroyed,
many things, hundreds of manuscripts were destroyed, but they will survive.
Just a little child, a little bit, you know, the
binding away, and it's a big kind of child on
the edges, and that's what survived. And that still wasn't
printed for another thirty or forty years, so that just
(04:27):
kind of comes through. But the merest fluke, we'd have
no knowledge whatsoever available if that hadn't happened. And then
of course once it survives, once it gets into the
time of print, then the printed copy can multiply, you know, greatly.
And we're through and we've got bail. As we know
but how many other books, how many other poems, how
many other texts didn't make it through. That's one thing
(04:50):
I should think about.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Yes, well, this is one of the reasons why I
didn't become an Anglo Saxonist, because it's too hard. There
aren't enough papers. So I love the fourteenth century. But
even then surging really didn't make it either. So yeah,
it's all about chance. So one of the things that
you do at the beginning of the book is look
through the ways people have tried to calculate how much
(05:12):
it's missing. So what did you learn from looking into
what's not there?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
I think I learned the narrow chance that some of
the texts have of coming through. If you're talking about
Western Europe and the tradition of culture, most of the
Latin classics, they certainly don't survive in texts from the
ancient Roman period. They survive in texts copied out. They
(05:38):
surviving copies made in the medieval period, and in particular
in the Carolingian period the ninth century, when for some
reason there was a real concentration of copying out these texts.
And so we can get a list of things produced
in the Roman period. We can get a list of
the things that survive now, and we have a huge
(06:00):
chunk that has disappeared. If you go back to the Greeks,
it's even greater. So we're talking about say, the great
Athenian dramatists, you know, like these Skillus and these people,
And if you look at that, you can say roughly
that ninety percent of their plays had disappeared. So that's
what your God has taken into account. And of course
you concentrate on what survived for very good reason. But
(06:24):
you've always got to say to yourself, Okay, how would
the picture be different if the ninety percent hadn't disappeared?
If we could put that ninety percent into the picture,
And that, of course is largely hypothetical, but you can try.
And then you look at production, how many manuscripts were
being produced, And you have to be a little bit
(06:45):
skeptical of people who try and say there were ten
million manuscripts written in the Middle Ages. Right, it's all
a bit figures conjured up from the blue, you know,
but there obviously was some total figure in someone's the
mind of God, he would know. And you've got clear
evidence that the amount of stuff that is being written
(07:06):
increases over the course of the Middle Ages rather dramatically,
so you've got the ability You've just mentioned the case
of the fourteenth century compared with the Anglo Saxons. I mean,
you can put all the written evidence for Anglo Saxon
England on one big table easily. The fourteenth century. You
can't read it in a lifetime, you can't read it
(07:26):
in a dozen lifetimes. Right, So there's been a complete
change in the amount of material being produced. So that's
one thing. The production. And in the book I talk
about the conditions of production. I talk about what did
they write on and how many scribes were there? And
how fast do medieval scribes right, you know, things like this.
So this is the production level. And then you've got
the destruction level. And that's one of the things I
(07:48):
concentrate on. And in what circumstances is their destruction and
is the destruction random among body? Is it complete? Is
it ever controlled? I can trust the dissolution of the
monasteries in England, which was chaotic and resulted in probably
eighty five percent of the monastic libraries disappearing. And you
(08:11):
can sort of sometimes find fragments and things, you know,
they find things like pages of medieval books used for
wrapping butter and stuff like that. You know, it's kind
of very dramatic. And then later in the Napoleonic period,
a large number of monasteries were closed down in Bavaria
in southern Germany, and that was done with a kind
of controlled and careful process. Where should these books go?
(08:35):
They had a committee in charge of it. They divided
up the categories of books, and there you'll find that
the medieval libraries went more or less intact into the
State Library of Bavaria, which is still there. You can
still go to Munich and you can still see all
these hundreds of books from these medieval libes. So that's
(08:55):
one of the more complete things. That are the conditions
under which things have. And I talk quite a lot
of course about the history of libraries and archives and
when they began, because some of them have an enormous continuity.
The Archive of the Crown of Aragon, which is in Barcelona,
has a continuous history from the fourteenth century up to
the present day, and that's rare, very rare. But then
(09:18):
of course you've got archives that are destroyed, which is
one of the things I actually silk about in the book.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yes, And one of the things that you take time
to pull apart is the difference between a library and
an archive. So can you tell us where the difference
is and what is kept in these things?
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Put very simply, a library is where you have books,
and an archive is where you have documents. And that's
an oversimplification, but it's a good starting point. And you'll
find nowadays in modern European cities and in elsewhere in
the world, but I'm talking about medieval Europe, you'll always
find things like the British Library, which is full of books,
(10:00):
and a little bit out of London, in q there's
the National Archives. And for one kind of thing, you're
good at one, and one kind of thing you go
to the other. In London you have to take an
underground train from one to the other. But in places
like Paris and Rome, the archives and the libraries are
very close to each other, which is much more convenient.
So you've got basically somewhere you go to have books,
(10:21):
and those books, some of them might be practical books,
they might be administrative, but for the most part they
are books with texts with maybe theology, maybe history, all
sorts of things. And the administrative stuff is the archive,
the archive that is produced by the workings of government,
and that means that the survival of it is rather different,
(10:43):
because when you've got a day to day government, you
need administrative documents. But when the document is ten years old,
or when the document is twenty years old, do you
need it anymore? It's taking up space. The example I
give is the very oldest less written in English, in
Old English, which is from the tenth century I think,
(11:06):
and it survives in Canterbury Cathedral Archive, and it's a
very short that but it's been sitting there on the
shelf for a thousand years. In the twelfth century, the
Canterbury Cathedral monk went and had a look at it
and he wrote on the back useless that is no
longer got any relevance. On the other hand, he didn't
(11:28):
say useless and throw it out right. He kept it there.
And at some point it may be the case that
someone says, Okay, this stuff is hopelessly out of date,
but we'll keep it for historical purposes. And that's one
of the things that's very important for archives. And so
you've got continuity of archives, discontinuity of archives, the difference
(11:50):
between archives and libraries, and libraries of course depending on
what kind of books they have in them, because people
value certain books and not others. When the French Revolution
came along, the monasteries were all closed down and became
property of the state, and the value of what was
in them, lots of people thought we can get rid
of the lot, right, and there were bonfires of books.
(12:12):
In fact, my opening example in the book The History
and Flames is of a bonfire in Paris during the
French Revolution when hundreds of manuscripts were destroyed, and they
obviously thought, what is this stuff? This is a collection
amount of made which showed the ancestry of the nobles.
They didn't care about the actor if the nobles right,
(12:34):
burn the lot. So that's the difference between archives and libraries.
Putting it very.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Generally, right, Well, maybe it's time to start getting into
destruction because when it comes to libraries and archives, there
might be different reasons to destroy them. Sometimes this is intentional,
sometimes it's accidental. So there's one medieval example in the
book that I can think of, and that is the
Peasants' Revolt, and this is a targeted attack on documents.
So let's get into this medieval example. What happened during
(13:01):
the peasants Reward.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
There was a definite attack on documents of all kinds
in Cambridge, which is a very well attested example. The crowds,
the rebels sacked the colleges and took their title deeds
and their documents. They regarded the colleges with probably very
(13:23):
good reason, as oppressive landlords, and they wanted to smash
the lot and they smashed the seals. The wax seals
get bashed with sticks and things like this, and they
have a big bonfire in the middle of the town. Meanwhile,
in the countryside, one of the things that happened was
that all the court rolls were burned. The court roles
(13:44):
recorded the peasant holdings and the terms that the peasants
held their land on, so those were the things that
kind of governed their lives, and they also regarded them
as instruments of oppression and the court role the court
rolls with hundreds of cases of the court roles and
manor court roles being burned by rebels in the countryside,
(14:04):
and so there was a very practical side to it,
there's no question about that. But it also went beyond that,
because people began to associate writing with their oppressive overlords,
and writing itself became a kind of target. There's a
famous story of when all these documents had been burned
(14:24):
in the middle of Cambridge and an old lady as
she's called called Margaret Stirr comes along and she picks
up the ashes of the burnt books and throws them
in the air, and she says, away with the learning
of the clerks, Away with it. And the learning of
the clerks meant writing and documents and all the things
(14:45):
that she presumably not able to read or write, regarded
with suspicion, and you can understand why they might be suspicion.
And so you have cases like that where they're very
definitely the people are post to burning manuscripts know what
they're going for. In seventeen oh one, I think it
(15:05):
was when there's an attack on the documents in the
courts in Naples, there's a large uprising. They go straight
for the records of the criminal court and burn them,
and they notice the next day that the ashes of
the books are much thicker and deeper where the criminal
court have been, because that's what they want to destroy.
(15:27):
They're much deeper than the other things that were burned,
So you definitely get that. You're definitely get an association
of you can get an association of writing with an
impressive class who are controlling you by this skill, this
special skill they have now.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yes, exactly, keeping you out of that skill deliberately and
then using that skill against you. You can see why
people would be so upset about it and target this
so directly in this case. For sure. Many of the
examples in your book are from modern history, and of
course this is still you actually know a lot about
medieval history. You chose to go with modern history here,
(16:04):
and one of the things that you talk about is
the rise of nationalism as having a big part of
both the collection and the destruction of these manuscripts. So
tell us why nationalism was such an important part of
your argument.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
I look at five case studies of massive destruction of
medieval manuscripts that all happened in a few hours. That's
what I'm looking at. Obviously, there's the attrition all the time,
you know, there's flood and fire and mice and all
sorts of things eating away at this. But I'm looking
at spectacular examples and They all have two things in
(16:41):
common which are connected with nationalism and connected with the state.
That is, these collections are a sign that the state
is taking the preservation, not the destruction, but the preservation
of medieval manuscripts seriously. They create public record offices, they
have municipal libraries, they have state archives. All these things
(17:06):
are the creation mainly of the period after the French
Revolution the nineteenth century into the twentieth and so it's
the state taking on responsibility. And the European state in
this period was nationalistic. It saw itself as a nation state.
We are the French, we are the Germans in centric
and that was an impetus to historical inquiry because they
(17:30):
wanted to say, we are going to tell our nation story.
And whatever you think of that, it's very good for
getting people to go out and publish and edit and
study medieval manuscripts.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It happened all over. The Germans were in the forefront
of it, perhaps because their nation had not had a
state for a while, so they wanted to make a
big deal about it. And the other thing is, of
course that these destructive moments are to do with war
and violence, and in almost every case there is a
nationalist element to the conflict. Sometimes it's very straightforward, it's
(18:06):
two nations so on fighting each other. Sometimes it's more complicated.
The Irish case is an obvious one where you have
a struggle over the future of Ireland actually going on
within Ireland. The most sort of elaborate of them all,
I think, is the destruction of Strasbourg, the municipal library
in Strasbourg in eighteen seventy because Strasbourg had been a
(18:27):
German city in sixteen eighty one it was annexed by
the King of France. There were the fourteenth of France,
so it became French, but it was still culturally very distinct.
Lots of German we was spoken there, and they were
allowed to carry on having Protestant worship in Strasbourg when
the rest of France didn't. So it's a very mixed
sort of situation. And during the so called Franco Prussian War,
(18:48):
the Prussian artillery bombard Strasbourg and they destroy the municipal library,
and in it they destroy this text that I talk
about at some length. It's called the Garden of Delights,
and it was obviously a very beautiful hundreds of pages
of full page illustrations, really magnificent, and of course that
(19:09):
was produced in medieval Germany, so the Germans are actually
destroying something that is part of their own, as it were,
national heritage because of the complexities of this border situation,
and so you'll find nationalism of all kinds both leading
people to invest in scholarship and invest in their history.
(19:30):
That's a very big development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
But also the conflicts are having a kind of a
side effect, particularly with the high level of damage that
can be done with modern weapons. That's the crucial thing
I think why the modern period is so important. Mass
destruction of that record as well.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yes, well, I think you've given us a good outline
of what happens in Strasbourg, and that's the place that
I wanted to start next, because your book is not
just about destruction. It's also about how we preserve things
in the wake of destruction. And this is a really
good example because the destruction of the records in Strasbourg
happens in eighteen seventy, so this is pre when photography
(20:11):
was becoming a fit. I'm not very good with modern history,
so I don't know when people started using cameras. But
this is pretty early. So how did they reconstruct this book?
This is something that you spend some time on in
your book, So tell us how they put together what
was lost.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Sure there is photography around in eighteen seventy, but it
hadn't been applied to this particular volume. And later in
the book I talk about another beautiful example that had
been photographed before it was destroyed, that's the Epstorf map.
But in the case of Strasbourg, we have a lot
(20:46):
of evidence of people being really interested in this manuscript
the Garden of Delights, and they do things like they
copy out the texts, which are not perhaps the most
important part of it. They start from early, I think
round about eighteen fifteen something like that. Very early they
start producing what they can of, what we would call reproductions.
(21:10):
Now they can't do it by photography in eighteen fifteen,
but they do it by tracing and then by printing,
so they can make many copies of these copies. Lithography
is the system of printing they use. And there are
some people who are really the heroes by doing this.
I mean, obviously the man whose name you can't forget
is count bastard. I mean he was a dedicated I
(21:33):
mean he was a soldier, he thought, and he was
very important in the French army. But he then turned
his attention to reproductions of medieval manuscripts, and you've got
a government grant to do it. Some of his reproductions
were sent to the Great Exhibition in London in eighteen
fifty one. I mean he was a really dedicated managers
(21:53):
and he was one of the people who produce. He
taught himself lithography in order to make copies of the
images in the Garden of Deliance. So you've got this
long tradition and then of course in eighteen seventy, full stop,
there's no chance of making any more drawings or prints
or trace sings because it's gone. So that's when people
(22:15):
begin to say, okay, well, let's gather up what we
can from all the people have looked at it over
the past seventy years, sixty or seventy years. So we've
got that wind, that just that window of opportunity when
there are erudite people interested in the medieval past, studying this,
writing about it, and making images from it. And that's
(22:36):
what we have if we actually had the parchment. If
we actually had the original, we could do things with
it now that are just beyond belief. In the nineteenth century,
you know, the chemical analysis that could be done, all
these wonderful things that have come along, digitization, photography, and
so on. They didn't do that because they didn't have
that technology. And that means that that's when the ability
(22:59):
to reconstruct that volume ends with the technology available in
eighteen seventy and they've done wonderful work. I mean, this
is one of the things. I do have good news
in the book as well as bad news. I have
heroes and heroines who are the people who are very
hard to reconstruct in some way or another, something that
is lost, something that is no longer there. And there
(23:21):
is a huge, not life size exactly, but very large
volume which is an attempt to reconstruct that particular volume,
the Garden of Delance, which was produced for a German
nunnery in the late twelfth century, and we know that
it was commissioned by the abbess Abbess Herad, and inside
a pictures of Abbess Herad and all her nuns with
(23:44):
all their names written underneath it. It's very charming, it's
a really nice thing, and what we see when we
look at pictures of that is not a twelfth century
image but count Bastard's work from the nineteenth century. And
you just have to be aware of that good as
you're going to get. But it's a very, very much
good site, better than nothing at all.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Well, yes, that's the thing. What's so incredible about this
story is people had taken the time to trace the
images and to write out what was in the book itself,
because this is so rare in itself. The people that
were taking the time because they're handwriting what's in the
book before they can even make a facsimile of it.
Their handwriting this taking it home for their notes for studying,
(24:28):
and this is just something that is a one in
a million shot, you know, maybe not one in a million,
but still pretty rare. So this is an incredible story,
I think.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, I think it's. One of the things that the
book addresses is the background to it is the growth
of scholarship in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
That is addressed to the question of what have we
got in terms of physical remains the manuscripts that are
(24:59):
from this period, either from the point of view of
the images, as in the case of the Garden of Delights,
or in the case of text, which texts have we got?
And the work that goes on after the destruction is
really a kind of review of the scholars. After the
destruction of the State's Archives of Naples in nineteen forty three,
(25:21):
the archivist there, Ricardo of Flangeri. He had kept a
list of all the people who come and worked in
the archive for the previous thirty years of forty years,
and he wrote to them all and said, do you
have any transcripts? Do you have any copies you've made?
And some of them really came up trumps because they
had actually hand copied many, many things from his archive
(25:43):
which he could now publish. And of course you haven't
got the original, but you've got the text. So that's
another example.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
It's a win. It's a very very tiny win, but
it's still win.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, well it's something, you know. That's what they said.
The destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in
nineteen twenty two, that has been followed by one hundred
years of people trying to fill that gap. One hundred
years and some of the things they've looked at are
transcripts made in the seventeenth century, transcripts made in the
(26:16):
nineteenth century. You go wherever you can, and maybe sometimes
these transcripts aren't very good, but you say, well, what
else have you gone? Right, And that's how it's done.
And then of course you've got sometimes you have in
the case of Ireland, some of the material was actually
duplicated in England because Ireland was under the rule of
(26:37):
the King of England, and so some of those documents
produced in Ireland are then sent to England for various reasons.
So you've got that, and then of course you know
sometimes it's very strange because the Public Record Office of
Ireland was created in eighteen sixty seven and this destruction
(26:57):
took place in nineteen twenty two years earlier. Herbert Wood,
who was in charge of the archive, had published an
entire volume describing the contents of this Public Record Office,
you know, very detailed. So you've got pages and pages
and papers, so you know what was in there and
you know what was lost. And he's talking about the
happy consequences of centralizing the documents, right, and the happy
(27:22):
of centralizing the documents was that they could all be
blown up in one day, and that's the irony of it.
So the lucky documents are the ones that weren't sent
weren't sent to the public record office, you know. I mean,
it's the ones that missed out on that are more
likely to survive. And the same is true of some
of the other things. The Ebsdorf Map is one of them,
which was housed in the state archive in Hanover and
(27:45):
for most of its existence, the Ebsdorf Map, which is
a huge it was a huge map of the world.
It was twelve feet by twelve feet, right, it's the
largest map of the world that we know of from
the Middle Ages. Everyone knows that, I think everyone knows.
Many people know of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, which is
one animal skin. You know, it's made on one animal skin.
It's nice, it's beautiful, it survives. But the Ebstorf Map
(28:08):
was thirty animal skins, so I mean it was huge,
and that was kept by the nuns of Ebstorf, and
it had sat around and no one knew anything about it,
and it was kind of gathering dust there. And then
if it hadn't been sent to Hanover, it would still
be there, it would still be intact. You know, it's
sent from this place of forgetfulness but refuge to a
(28:34):
central place. And the central places are the ones that
get bombed and shelled and everything. So that's how that worked.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yes, is that irony. We'll put it in a safe place.
It ends up not being the safest place with that actually,
for people who have wandered around the internet or liked
at medieval stuff, the Ebstorf map is the one with
Jesus's face at the top that you really see so
clearly in his feet at the bottom. It's not the
only map in which this happens, but this is the
most famous one.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Yeah, it's a remarkable map. I mean, and that was photographed.
I mean the photography was not very good, but I
mean it was photographed. So you've got something like a
photographic reproduction of it from the eighteen nineties. The thing
that struck me as always as very ironic about all
this is that sometimes when war came, sometimes efforts were
(29:22):
made to get these things to safe places, and sometimes
that worked and sometimes it didn't. And Naples is the
most ironic because the State Archive of Naples, which was
a very rich archive and a complete run of central
documents for the Late Middle Ages that was housed in
Naples itself, the city of Naples, which was being bombed
(29:43):
by the Allies, by the Americans and the British because
across the Italians were on the other side, and so
they decided to move most of the important medieval documents
about twenty or thirty miles away to a villa in
the hills nearby for safety. And things were moving very fast.
The Italians changed sites, they surrendered, and now the Germans
(30:07):
were no longer their allies, they were their enemies, and
the German troops are all over Italy, and so suddenly
the whole thing is flipped and German troops come to
this villa where the archives are being stored, and it
doesn't seem as if they were particularly aiming at the villa,
but they burned the villa down and the archive in it.
So it's by being put out of Naples into some
(30:29):
place which is meant to be perfectly safe, and suddenly
the political situation and the military situation just reverses within
a matter of weeks. It's very dramatically. I'm talking about weeks,
and of course that's one of the things that happens
there or in the case of Chatra. Shartra has, as
you know, a very famous cathedral with magnificent stained glass.
They put that into crates. When the Germans invaded in
(30:52):
nineteen forty they put that into crates. They ship checked
several hundred miles away to a cellar in a castle
way down south right. They survived. The books were sent
just like in the case of Naples, the books were
sent to a villa about twenty miles away, and that
would have made what they would have been safe there, except,
of course, the German occupation of France continued, and the
(31:16):
German authorities seem to have wanted to say, well, things
are back to normal. Now, okay, you needn't worry. You've
got the protection of the German forces. As long as
you behave yourself. France needn't worry about destruction. And so
the German officers in charge of cultural affairs insisted that
all the books go back from that villa into Chartre itself,
(31:38):
where they were bonded in the lead up to D
Day in nineteen forty four. That's one of these ironies
of the situation. That's why you see, I had to
put nationalism in there, as both the creative and the
destructive force, and state power as a destructive and constructive
force as well.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yes, absolutely, And this is one of the things that
was sort of jarge up for you about the Key
of Charta, because you're like, it's a way, it's fine,
it's okay, but then it has to be brought back
and you know this is hindsight going no, but like, honestly,
you don't want to put this in a city where
it can be vulnerable. And in the case of Charlta,
it wasn't the cathedral that was meant to be bombed,
(32:17):
it wasn't the archaeve that was meant to be bombed,
but it got bombed anyway, and I think you know,
could see that coming, or.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
You know, all the evidence suggests that it was a
terrible accident, the bombing of the center of Sharta. They
were sense to bomb the airfield, which would make perfect
sense because the landings in Normandy were going to take
place in a month or two. And the accounts that
you've got are rather contradictory, but they certainly add up
(32:46):
to there was a mistake or it was an accident,
rather than that it was actually intended. But of course
the result is the same, and the medieval manuscripts go up,
and then it just so happens that quite a few
of them have in fragments child fragments. There are hundreds
and hundreds of fragments and these have all been digitized
(33:07):
and photographed and identified. I mean, it's been an amazing
and it's amazing to think of, you know, the sort
of labor that's gone into it and the attempt just
to sort of save what you can from the past.
Fortunately that was catalog, that was catalog in the eighteen nineties.
So you've got this catalog which tells you what was there,
so you know what was there, and you've got these fragments,
(33:28):
and the only thing you haven't got is the real stuff,
the actual library. It's gone. It's gone.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yes, what a shame. Well, these examples that you have
from World War two are surprising in a way. This
one that we're talking about now seems to have been accidental,
but given the fact that the Nazis were very concerned
with preserving cultural heritage so that they can use it
for their purposes, it's kind of amazing that so many
things were destroyed. But this was a gigantic war. Things
(33:55):
are going to be destroyed. But the example that you're
saying of Naples, this is a deliberate burning of papers,
and this it seems almost out of character for the
regime that we're talking about. So this was not only
heartbreaking from a historical perspective, but also a little bit puzzling.
It seems like pure revenge, which can be a destructive
for a solid soon.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah, there were hearings about it after the war, and
as far as one can work out, the most likely
situation is that this was a time when government had
more or less broken down in Italy and the Italian
government was now officially surrendered. The German troops were taking
over Italy, so there was a lot of resistance to them,
(34:37):
so there was fighting between German troops, not so much
between them and the Italian soldiers, but Italian resistance fighters.
And there had been attacks on German soldiers in that area,
and the Germans had a policy of reprisals, and so
the idea was we'll burn a couple of villas as
reprisals for the attacks on German soldiers. And it seems
(34:59):
like that they didn't know that this house to this
huge archive. It seems likely that's the case. I'm not
quite sure. It's a long time ago. I mean, and
the fog of war. You've heard of the fog of war.
This is definitely the fog of war.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
That's right. You don't want to admit to burning something
so important just out of pettiness. I say pettiness. I
think you understand what I mean here. But this is
obviously existential conflict. But it seems like retribution, I guess,
is where I'm trying.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
To go with this.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
So let's move forward in time to now. So as
somebody who's been studying the destruction of manuscripts reconstruction of manuscripts,
what do you see happening now? How are people preserving them?
Speaker 4 (35:44):
Well?
Speaker 2 (35:44):
I think the very big question now, very big is digitization.
And of course digitization is wonderful. I can go online
and if I'm looking up some text I don't know,
it'll come up online and they'll say would you like
to see a manu script? And I'll say, yes, you
know some The next thing I know, I'm looking at
a manuscript in Valencien or something like that. Of course,
(36:06):
the downside is I haven't got excuse to go to Valencien,
and so your research trips are much more limited than
they are otherwise, but you can go very quickly to
an array of source material and an array of manuscript
material that is just it would have been unthinkable twenty
to thirty years ago. And it's continuing. It's continuing, and
(36:26):
I suppose the big issue that anyone everyone thinks about
is how permanent can the storage be? Is digitization forever?
It's the technology going to remain exactly the same. If
the technology changes, are things going to get lost and
be irretrievable. There's a famous example which is in nineteen
eighty six, which is the centenary of Doomsday Book, which
(36:51):
was made in ten eighty six, the BBC, the British
Broadcasting Corporation, decided to kind of have a modern doomsday book,
and they did a certain of the whole country and
they put all the data in and they put it
on a particular system, a storage system, and that was
kind of like going to bring our own doomsday book. Unfortunately,
within ten years that retrieval system was completely obsolete and
(37:14):
no longer function, and that material is inaccessible and it's
as if it had never been. And that's the kind
of extreme example, and maybe some of the problems for
them are not the problems we have now. But that's
where you've really got to sort of think of how
safe is this, how precarious is it? I mean, a
long term imaging. You know, it's expensive. You've got to
(37:36):
have the right technology. That's one of the things I
thought would be really big now. No, of course, you know,
old fashioned wars. They still can you know, pack a punch.
When Timbuctoo was taken over by Islamists a few years ago,
lots of stuff in the Timbuctoo Library disappeared. And the
Timbuctoo Library is a very important reservoir of medieval Islamic writing.
(37:59):
So there's still dangers of that that still can happen.
But I think that we can be relatively positive and
hopeful that the technology for storing and reproducing manuscripts is
now at the stage where if you can do it,
then the chances are you've preserve that not simply in
(38:23):
terms of having a copy of it for the future,
but making it accessible to anybody with a laptop or whatever.
You know. I mean, that's and that's astonishing, that's just astonishing.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yes, Well, and one of the things that is happening.
I just wanted to get your take on and we
don't talk about it. You don't talk about it in
the book. Is people are creating facsimiles now and they
will sell facsimilies of an amazing book. What do you
think about that? Is this a good way to access
the past? Or do you prefer digital images?
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Well, I prefer digital images because they're much cheaper.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Of course, you know that is true.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Actually, there's a pretty expensive you know, it's nice. It's
nice to have a facsimile, you know, I mean, and
you can browse to it. And so the most expensive
book I've ever bought is not a fact simile of
a medieval manuscript, but a fact simile of a facsimile
of the medieval manuscript which is the hottest deliquy Are
in the Garden of Delights with Count Bastard's Lithographic Prints.
(39:19):
I bought that, and that's the most expensive book I've
ever bought. So I do have my weaknesses, but I
think really for practical purposes, digitization it's the thing, isn't it.
And also, of course it's much easier to magnify the
image and things like that, you know, it's the way
of the future.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
I think, yes, I still think there'll be people going
and looking at maybe able manuscripts and medieval archives and
getting them magnifying glass out and saying is that a
C or is it a t you know, I mean,
I think these things will still happen.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yes, And in fact they're encouraged. People who are archivists
and librarians are encouraging people to come and look at
these manuscripts because they are meant to be looked at.
They're meant to be more moved and touched, and if
they're not, then that is damaged in its own rate.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
And also there's the smell. I mean, I think the
smell of medieval parchment is very distinctive. It's very exciting.
I also remember that the very first time I went,
I saw a medieval manuscript in real life, many years ago,
when the British Library was still part of the British Museum,
and I remember two things about it. What one was
I was looking at the pattern on the skin on
(40:26):
the actual sheet and the little dots which is where
the hair follicles of the animal were, So I thought,
this is a calf or something that lived eight hundred
years ago and here since the follicles, and the other
one was the smell. So of course you can reproduce
the follicles online, but the smell, I think they haven't
got round to that yet. Maybe that's the next stage.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Yes, that's all we need in that tactile sense of
turning the pages, because they are it feels much different
from paper by the follicles. Of course, that's what speaks
to you, all of us. I think that in the
dirt indeed, indeed, yes, well, I want to thank you
so much for being here and telling us all about
these examples of manuscripts that were preserved and destroyed, because
(41:11):
I think this is a conversation that needs to keep happening.
And I'm very grateful that you've come on to remind
us to look at this every once in a while
because this is such an important part of our history.
So thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
It's been a great pleasure.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
To find out more about Robert's work, you can visit
his faculty page at the University of Saint Andrews, or
you can find him on Wikipedia. His new book is
History in Flames, The Destruction and Survival of medieval manuscripts.
Before we go, here's Peter from medievalis dot net to
tell us what's on the website. What's going on?
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Peter?
Speaker 4 (41:46):
Hey, Hey, So, if you find yourself in Venice, and
I'm sure you want to be sure, yes, you will
want to take a look at that statue of a
bronze winged lion that's like at Saint Mark's. Okay, it's
basically the symbol of like the Venetian Republic. So it
turns out that statue is actually Chinese.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Whoa. I mean, I shouldn't be surprised because there is
a lot of trade happening between the Far East and
Venice at this time. But tell us tell us all
about it.
Speaker 4 (42:17):
Yeah. Yeah, So a few researchers did the scientific tests
and confirm that the stone is actually from China. And
their best part of this, it's likely a tombstone from
the Tang dynasty. Whoa, And it was likely brought to
Venice by Nicolo and Matthew Polo, the father and uncle
(42:39):
of Marco Polo.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Wow. I mean that would just be totally neat right,
all wrapped up in a nice shiny bow.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
They think while they're in Beijing, they were in Beijing
from twelve sixty four to sixty eight. They figure that
they may have went into like a warehouse where these
Tang dynasty tombstones were being kept, because it's at a
time when these tubestones were getting taken away from their
original spots, and they had it shipped to Venice anise pedestal,
(43:09):
and a few things have been added, like the wings
over the years.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Okay, so it was originally a line without wings, yes,
and then it got glammed up once it got to Venice.
Speaker 4 (43:18):
Yes, yes, pretty much glammed up. It's like there's bits
and pieces that have over the years had to be redone.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Wow, well that is a super interesting bit of news.
Speaker 4 (43:27):
Awesome indeed indeed that I thought that was a lot
of fun. And we have kind of a similar pieces.
Thomas Smith is writing for the first time on Medievalist
dot net and he is telling us the story of
why a Chinese sword can be found on a crusader's
effigy that's sitting in New York.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
I love this and Tom is so great. I'm so
glad that he's getting articles on Medievalist dot net so
that more people can see his work.
Speaker 4 (43:51):
It was so nice so easy to put his piece online,
So thank you very much. Tom's the very good work there.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Anything else for us this week?
Speaker 4 (44:01):
Yeah, and beyond that, we have a few other news stories.
When it was interesting, a new Viking hairstyle was found
courtesy of a thousand year old gaming piece.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
I love that when a new Viking hairstyle drops on
the internet.
Speaker 4 (44:14):
Yeah, it looks kind of like a wavy hair, kind
of like a nineteen seventies look.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
Oh nice.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
So we have all that and much much more on
medievals dot net this week.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Well, thank you Peter for stopping by and letting us know.
Speaker 4 (44:28):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
It's last call from my online class, Calamity and Change
and Introduction to the Fourteenth Century, which starts this Friday,
September twelveth. Every week for five weeks, we'll talk about
the ins and outs of fourteenth century life and I'll
answer all your burning questions about this period. And for
the next day or two, the back to School sale
is still on, so you can get fifteen percent off
(44:51):
with a coupon code back to School All one word.
You can find it all at Medieval Studies dot thinkivik
dot com. I'm looking forward to to seeing you there. Finally,
a big thank you as always to all of you
for supporting my work by listening, sharing, letting the ads
play through, or becoming patrons on patreon dot com. Patrons
(45:13):
are everyday heroes because without you, none of this would
be possible. To find out more or to become a patron,
please visit patreon dot com slash Medievalists for everything from
flames too dames, follow Medievalist dot Net on Instagram at
medievalist net or blue sky at Medievalists. You can find
me Danielle Sebalski across social media at five and Medievalist
(45:37):
or five minute Medievalist, and you can find my books
at all your favorite bookstores. Our music is by Christian Overton.
Thanks for listening and have yourself an awesome day
Speaker 2 (46:01):
To d
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