'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages
Talking about popular conceptions of the Middle Ages and their historical realities. Join Richard Abels to learn about Vikings, knights and chivalry, movies set in the Middle Ages, and much more about the medieval world.
Episodes
I finally saw the movie "Conclave," and really enjoyed it. As you probably know, it is about the contentious election of a pope in a conclave of the college of cardinals. The movie, however, never explains what the word conclave actually means or how and why that papal electoral procedure began. This episode will remedy that omission.
The intro music is from the Academy Award nominated overture to the mo...
In this second episode of a three part series, my favorite cohost Ellen and I survey the development of the papacy from the eighth through the early eleventh century. Among the topics we discuss are who and what the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties of Francia were; Pope Zacharias' legitimization of Pepin the Short's deposition of a puppet Merovingian king and his elevation to the throne; the "donat...
In this first episode of a three part series, my favorite cohost Ellen and I survey the development of the papacy over its first seven centuries. I have to confess that along the way I got somewhat off topic talking about the Roman persecution of the Christians. But it is an interesting subject in itself and worth exploring, and as 31 of the first 32 popes are venerated as martyrs--some with more reason than others--i...
In this episode I interview Professor Nora Berend of the University of Cambridge about her new book El Cid; The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary (Pegasus Books, 2025). We discuss how the historical Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, a ruthless and ambitious mercenary who served both Christian and Muslim rulers in the violent and chaotic political world of late eleventh-century Iberia was transformed into the national he...
This is the second of our two part series on the Norman Conquest. In it Jenny and I discuss the military challenges faced by King Harold Godwinson and Duke William of Normandy and the battles of Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge, before turning to look closely at the Battle of Hastings (which did not actually take place at Hastings). I hope you will join us.
There is a host of books on the Battle of Hastings and the Nor...
This is the first half of a two part series on the Norman Conquest of England. My cohost for both parts is a veteran of this podcast, Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America. Jenny is one of the very best historians of Anglo-Norman England, so this is a subject right up her alley. In this episode we explore the historical background leading up to the Norman Conquest and the claims of the three rivals...
Yes, I know that Octavian IS Augustus, but this episode is about how Gaius Octavius became Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, and in doing so replaced the old Roman Republic with a military autocracy masquerading as a republic. This is the conclusion of our three part series on the fall of the Roman Republic. My cohost for all three episodes has been my good friend Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of Ame...
This is the second of a three part series about the fall of the Roman Republic. My cohost for all three episodes is Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America. We actually had been planning only two episodes, but the story is long and detailed, so we thought that three would be best. In episode one, Jenny and I explained the workings of the Roman Republic and the military, economic, and cultural factors...
For the fiftieth (!) episode of this podcast, I'm taking a few centuries detour from the Middle Ages to talk about the fall of the Roman Republic. In this episode, the first of a two part series, my cohost Dr. Jenny Paxton and I talk about the political and cultural institutions of the Roman Republic in the late second and first centuries B.C.E.*. We explain how and why a republic designed to govern an Italian c...
I know. Just what everyone needed, an episode about an election. To take a break from reading and watching election postmortems, I decided to return to one of my favorite teaching texts, the monk Jocelin of Brakelond’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. This is more of a personal memoir of what Jocelin saw and experienced as a monk than it is the standard monastic chronicle. It contains the fullest account of...
This episode is devoted to a truly unique and pretty weird Arabic text, The Book of Charlatans by an obscure early thirteenth-century Arabic scholar, Jamal al-Din 'Abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari, commonly known simply as al-Jawbari. At the behest of a Turkman sultan, al-Jawbari composed an encyclopedic guide to the scams, con games, and trickery practiced in the cities of the medieval Middle East. Al-Jawbari not only c...
In this episode I talk with the distinguished historian of the crusades Dr. Steven Tibble about the motivations of crusaders and of those Europeans who settled in the Crusader states of Outremer. Steve is the author of five books dealing with the crusades, the most recent of which is Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land (Yale University Press, 2024). We examine the roles played by religiou...
On 3-4 July 1187 the Sultan of Egypt and Syria Saladin enjoyed the greatest military victory of his career. The Battle of Hattin, a two-day battle fought along the road leading to the town of Tiberias and, on the following day, on the Horns of Hattin, an iron-age hillfort above that road, is one of the few decisive battles of the Middle Ages. (In this episode, Richard explains why there were so few battles.) The battl...
Yes, Kristin Lavransdatter is the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time. That isn't as impressive as it might sound, as the movie only brought in $3.7 million in box office receipts, but virtually all of that came from domestic sales. Pretty much unknown outside Scandinavia, the movie was a sensation when released in Norway in 1995. An estimated two-thirds of the country's population have viewed it. ...
This is the final episode--sort of*--of a multi-part series about medieval adultery in literature, history, and popular culture. My co-host Professor Larissa 'Kat' Tracey and I review how adultery has been dealt with in movies about the Middle Ages. We begin with three Hollywood medieval epics, "The Kingdom of Heaven," "Braveheart," and "The Last Duel," and then turn to the focu...
This is the third of a multi-episode series in which I chat with Dr. Larissa ‘Kat’ Tracey about literary representations of medieval adultery and its reality. In this episode Kat and I survey and discuss the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary treatments of medieval adultery, focusing on the stories of La(u)ncelot and Guinevere and of Tristan/Tristram and Isolde/Isolt/Iseult The episode begins with an op...
This is the second of a three part series with my very special co-host, Dr. Larissa 'Kat' Tracy, about adultery in the Middle Ages. In the previous episode, Kat and I talked about the Lancelot and Guinevere story. In this episode, we tackle the other great medieval tale of adulterous love, Tristan and Iseult. We begin, however, with a possible contemporary historical analogue, a scandal involving Countess El...
In this episode, my very special guest Dr. John Hosler draws upon the research he undertook for his book Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace (Yale University Press, 2022) to discuss what Jerusalem meant in the thought and imagination of Christians and Muslims in the twelfth century, and the role the city played in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As John is a professor at the Army's Command and Gener...
In this episode my co-host Dr. Jennifer Paxton and I explain the principles and personal grievances that led to the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket and the significance of that event for Church-State relations in medieval England. We also talk about T.S. Eliot’s and Jean Anouilh’s plays about Thomas’ martyrdom, and the movies based on those plays. This is the second of a two part series. If you haven’t already done so,...
This is the first of a three part series about adultery in the Middle Ages. My co-host for both is Dr. Larissa 'Kat' Tracy. Last month Kat and I talked about my favorite medieval romance, Chretien de Troyes' late twelfth-century French poem "Yvain: The Knight with the Lion." Unlike the more famous medieval romances of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Isolde, "Yvain" celebrat...
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