The Reeve's Tale: A Medieval Miscellany with Andrew Reeves

As we approach Halloween, it's only appropriate that in this episode we discuss ghosts and revenants in the Middle Ages. Today's episode will be an interview with Alexander Zawacki. Dr. Zawacki is a lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Göttingen. He also publishes a Substack called It's Only Dark, a discussion of all things spooky. Link: It's Only Dark

Further Reading

Primary Sources

Joynes...

Medieval people had a working, observation-based theory of the structure and working of the cosmos. As a result, they also had a science of magic. You may be asking: A science of magic? Isn't that a contradiction? I hope that by the end of the episode, you'll see that it isn't. We'll briefly cover astrology, magic, and alchemy, and along the way, we may find an answer to that age-old question: magnets, how do they work?

Furt...

How did medieval people understand their relation to the objects seen in the sky, from the sun and moon, to the planets and stars? In this episode, we'll talk about how medieval people understood the shape and structure of the known universe from God setting things into motion to our own world.

Further Reading

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.

Here it is again! This time...

In addition to God, the devil, and the angels and demons, medieval people believed in a class of beings living just outside of sight, of creatures that you'd see only from the corner of your eye. These creatures associated with glens and groves were often known as the fairies, or the elves, and they're going to be the topic of this episode.

Further Reading

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge Univers...

In the 1160s, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem made a play to conquer Egypt, assisted by the forces of the Eastern Roman Empire. Although these armies came within an ace of victory, in the end, they were outmaneuvered by the forces of Aleppo, and it would be Saladin who conquered the Fatimid Caliphate. In this episode, I'll be discussing this lesser-known story from the history of the Crusades.

Special thanks to my friend and c...

Most of what we read by medieval people themselves of course comes down to us in the books that they left us. That much is obvious. But what exactly does it mean for the book to have been a physical object? How was the book made? Who bought books? To answer these and other questions, I'll be discussing the nature of the medieval book as a physical thing.

Further Reading

Clemens, Raymond, and Graham, Timothy. Introduc...

What, if anything, can dreams tell us? Medieval people had all sorts of beliefs about whether dreams could be predictive or if they should be avoided as deceits. Much of what they believed was the heritage of Greco-Roman and biblical beliefs, to include the Bible, myth, and philosophy of mind. In this episode, we'll do a quick run-through of what medieval people believed about dreams and their predictive power.

Further Reading

There's a lot of material out there that didn't quite make it into the Bible over the course of the second and third centuries. Some of this material, called apocryphal or pseudepigriphal, is stuff that fits in with the tone of the rest of scripture and is edifying. Other material, though, gives us giants and wizards, dragons and lions, and a boy Jesus who is quite frankly terrifying. That's what we'll be discussing in this episode...

A key feature of medieval culture and civilization was the presence of the Catholic Church. You might wonder where precisely the Catholic Church comes from, or indeed, where we get our Bible from in the first place. In this episode, I'll largely be discussing the origins of the Christian religion and how catholic Christianity ties in with that. I'll also discuss the views of modern scholars who don't always agree with the tradition...

This is the opening episode of my podcast on the European Middle Ages. I'll explain what exactly we mean by the Middle Ages and why they're both relevant to us today but also different and alien. I hope that it will whet your appetite for more of my material on all things medieval.

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