June 11, 2021 • 20 mins
Holly and Tracy compare the Apicius cookbook to cooking today, as well as some confusion over ingredients in the cookbook. They then talk about the life of Struensee, how scholars of medical history interpret the work of the doctor, and Mads Mikkelsen.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we talked about
what's believed to be the first cookbook in the Western world.
This week, ded A Coquinadia epicious is easier to say. Um.
(00:27):
I Also I like how when you listen to Latin
pronunciations by people living in Italy, it does not sound
nearly the same way that a lot of other folks
would say them. No, and also usually sounds more beautiful. Um.
This one was super fun, and I kept writing little
notes to myself about stuff I wanted to talk about
(00:50):
one thing that I thought was really interesting. We talked
a lot about Wellings translation, since that was the first
English translation of this collection, and I have to say
it's it's quite fun to me because he mentions like, no,
we have to be really unbiased and really clear. But
like any writer or any human, he has bias that
(01:13):
appears in the text um. And he kind of clearly
has a great deal of reverence and appreciation for these
classical ways of cooking. Uh. And he writes about how
people mistreat their food these days. Um, and he he
feels like when he was writing this, which again was
(01:34):
in the mid nineteen twenties, he makes the case that
we're eventually going to return back to a lot of
these Roman techniques of cooking because of the ways that
agriculture is going to change due to over consumption and whatnot.
So it's kind of an interesting one to get his
editorial asides included in the in the uh, the analysis
(01:55):
because there's a translation of the text. But like most
books that you will read about this cook book, now
there's a huge section that's really like an analysis and
discussion of what it contains, in what it means, and
he occasionally drops his editorial thoughts, Oh sure, which is
pretty funny. This also always I always talk about this,
(02:17):
thinking about how our time will be perceived in the
future and wondering if there will one day be someone
trying to pick apart the Bob's Burger's Cookbook and wonder
how important it was culturally. Oh yeah, which came to
mind because it's one I'm using a lot right now.
I've been, I've been, uh, I have watched my way
through several of your cooking You've done I think two
(02:39):
cookbooks that I have kept an eye on the Star
Wars one and the Bob's Burgers one, and I'm always
like incredibly fascinated by what the recipe is, whether it
turned out deliciously like, whether it has been added into
your your households, my regular rotation rotation well, and now
I'm also doing there's another Star Wars one. I did,
(02:59):
the gal Lexi's Edge one, all of those many which
are really really like regulars at our house now. But
there's also a Star Wars baking book that came out
just last month, and I have really enjoyed that when
it has some really good stuff. I feel like in
the in the realm of sort of branded novelty cookbooks,
of which which are things that I have always loved,
(03:20):
they have really stepped up across the board. It used
to be like they're very cutey recipes and it usually
involved like combining a lot of prefab ingredients. But now
they're like, no, let's teach you how to make a
cake like from scratch, which I love. It's great, But yes,
I wonder if one day they'll be like everyone put
Tika masala on their burgers. It's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
(03:44):
that's not that's not common at all. There is also
a there are a lot of people if you wanna
just kind of cruise around, you can do that on
Pinterest who sponsored the episode, or on you know, any
search engine if you look for anything that's like Roman
cooking or cook like a Roman. There are a lot
of people who have either sort of brought some of
(04:05):
these recipes up to date. Or there's a YouTube channel
that you you also stumbled across, which is called a
Taste of the Ancient World, and it's um hosted by
this woman named Sally Grainger who is a historian and
a cook, and she's kind of cooking through some of
these recipes. There was an interesting moment though, because she
(04:27):
mentions that it's very important in her project to follow
these recipes to the letter as much as possible, knowing
obviously you have to like interpret things like measures, which
you don't get. That jumped out to me because several
of the translations that I had read in their commentaries
kind of say exactly the opposite of like you can't
(04:48):
do this as a literal read like there's no way
to do it. This is more like in the spirit
of this recipe sure, which I found very interesting, and uh,
you know, she also mentioned several times that like they're
things that you have to make from scratch, they're not
just ingredients that would be available. One of her episodes
is making a cheesecake and you basically have to make
(05:08):
the cheese yourself first, and that kind of brings up
that that thing that I touched on very briefly about
like there would have been enslaved labor to do those
those hard preparation pieces, so it's very easy to be like, oh, yes,
make a cheese and then do this and then it
will be delicious. I'm also going to tell you a
story of my own hilarious foolishness. I'm excited in reading
(05:35):
that description of Trimalchio's table. I'm so embarrassed, but it's
also so funny that I'm delighted at my own foolishness. Um,
there's like a mention in it of dormice. It didn't
occur to me that people ate dormic. So I was
reading it dormous and I'm like, what is this ingredient?
And I was like trying to look it up and
(05:57):
I was like, oh no, just tiny little dormice that
seems like a lot of work. I had a similar
experience the first time I read through your outline, because
I I feel like, if it had said dormouse singular, right,
I would have clocked it totally, but I it doesn't.
(06:21):
It was plural, and my brain was like, what is it? Dormity?
I feel somewhat better now, Wing We both landed at this.
What is this? What is this new thing? I didn't know? Yeah? Yeah,
I also I And then when I heard you say
it out loud as we were recording, I was like,
all right, dormouse, Yeah, I know what a dormouse is. Yeah, well,
(06:45):
and it's um. I mean, to be fair, there are,
like we said, some other ingredients that you've got to
figure out what they are or find someone else who
has figured out what they are, which is really the
case for me. So in that case, I thought, oh,
I don't I don't know what this is. I didn't know.
This is another one that people are probably gonna be like,
um dang dong. People have been using that forever yeah lovage,
(07:08):
Oh yeah yeah as an herb never never on my radar.
So I'm like, what is that? And then I'm like, oh,
it's actually quite commonly. Yeah, that's definitely an herb. I
would not say that's an herb I have in the
cabinet right now, but it's definitely, I think, a thing
I know of and uh have seen growing in herb
(07:31):
gardens and stuff. Yeah, I mean there are plenty of
herbs that I don't know, but I'm sure. Um. I
had a conversation recently with a friend of mine who
is a very smart person, who did not know that
savory was also an herb, like a thing like, No,
savory is a descriptor and I'm like, no, but it's
also also an actual ingredient. It's like, oh uh. Even
(07:56):
in modern cooking, we're all still learning about things some
people like I saw some Twitter threads over the weekend
that we're about how in a lot of the world,
cuisine involves layering different flavors over one another to make
these like really nuanced, interesting combinations of flavors. But in
(08:20):
Europe the trend became too to combine like flavors because
food should taste like itself. Um. And I was like, wow,
I am intrigued by this idea and now want to
go research it more. All I can think of is
Remi and Ratatui going no, now take a bite of
this with this, I mean, anyone can cook, right, And
(08:44):
the reasoning for it in in the Twitter threads that
I read was that when spices became more widely available,
it was no longer like the exclusive domain of rich
people to be able to have spiced food, and like
that drove this trend. I have not been able to
confirm that yet, but I was like, this also, very
(09:06):
interesting idea. It's interesting that you mentioned that because that
is another thing that comes up in that Velling translation,
because his thing was like, note in this how at
this time, you know, they're grinding up their pepper and
everything fresh, and they're integrating that with the cooking. And
he was like, now, today it's very common to like
(09:27):
cook a thing and then season it, and it's never
really is delicious, and that's why we end up throwing
gravy and sauce all over everything because we don't actually
know what any meat tastes like, you know, when it's
actually roasted properly. Which is interesting that that that ties
into a thing you have been thinking about as well. Yeah, yeah,
(09:47):
I really want to make that weird p lasagna. Yeah,
I mean, that sounds really interesting to me. I also
really like peas, so I historically am not the peas
biggest fan. I don't mind them, but they're just not
like a thing I would naturally gravitate to. And sometimes
I'll leave them out of a recipe and go like
lant peas um. But somehow I don't know. Casserole of
(10:11):
layers of peas with bacon and leaks and basically whatever
you have on hand and the ground up pine nuts
with all of what that sounds like a beautiful young thing,
and that white sauce sounds quite good. That might happen
at my house. But then it also makes you think, right,
this is what I love about cookbooks. And I I
(10:33):
didn't know that I loved cooking for a long time
in my life because my mom was one of those
people that like the kitchen was her domain and get
out of my way and don't bug me in the kitchen. Um,
So I didn't get to do a lot of cooking
when I was younger, and then when I really started
to and discovered I loved it. One of the things
that I love about cookbooks for me is how they
kind of unlock your imagination where You're like, oh, I
(10:54):
could do this as written, but what if instead of peas,
I used chick peas, or you know, like anything, anything,
any subout that you do want a recipe. That's what
kind of gets me excited always when I'm looking at recipes,
want I want to make this as written, and then
I want to make a crazy version, yes, other stuff
(11:14):
that's not mentioned here and see what happens, because that's
just fun. That's that's what makes kitchens fun for me. Creativity.
Let's go eat, let's do. This week, we talked about
Johann's Truancy. Who what a story that is? Yeah, I
(11:34):
um so. In your in your introduction at the top
of the episode, you talk about how this story is
a lot better known where it actually happened. And it
cracked me up a little bit because there have been
various times that I've been, you know, reading about some
historical figure who is not from the US and whose lives,
(11:57):
whose life and actions like aren't that directly connected to
US history in an obvious way. Uh. And sometimes you
know something that was written in let's just say that
UK will kind of be like, well, as everyone knows
he did this, this and this and I'm like, I
don't know that, right. Yeah, there is actually UM a
(12:21):
medical center in Germany called Struency House, and they talk
about Johann Struency on one of their their websites pages
and and how they try to uphold his ideals in
terms of, you know, treating people with from all strata
of the social spheres with care, with equal care. And
(12:44):
so he clearly you know, has has name recognition in
a way that I don't think he gets over here
at all, because, like I said, I had to really
like you find very abbreviated versions of his life story
in English, but like any of are really like in
depth stuff, you either have to go to UM a
(13:05):
scholarly journal that has translated part of it, or like
I did in some of it, like I got English
translations that were done decades and decades and decades ago
for some of them. UM. So it's a little bit
a little bit trickier, and it explains why it might
be harder for less likely for people in the U
(13:25):
S or in primarily English speaking countries to know about him. UM.
There have been a number of fictional pieces written, and
there's a film I think from twelve that's in Danish
um about him. But again that's not necessarily going to
be what most US audiences are are engaged with. It's
(13:49):
it's such a good story though, right like in my head.
There's a version of this story that stars a very
young Mad's Michelson and it's quite appealing. Okay, I think
he's in the Danish movie, but I and I don't
even know which character he plays. I haven't seen that movie. Um,
but I want him to be in everything anyway, and
(14:11):
he's darling, so I, as I was doing my research,
I just pictured him. The one thing that really jumped
out at me, and we didn't really focus on it
a lot. We mentioned that, um, the Queen was quite
young when she died, but struancy was as well. He
was in his thirties. He wasn't you know when you
think about someone who has kind of risen and seized
all this power in in my head anyway, I tend
(14:32):
to think of, uh, someone a little bit older who
knows the world well enough to really execute on their ambitions.
Men A was quite young, uh, Which It's that's another
one of those things where I go, oh, if he
hadn't gotten himself into trouble, he had just been a
doctor and advocated for reform in all of these things
(14:55):
that that, Like I said, his ideals seemed to be
pretty good it. I'm sure there were problematic aspects of
it that I'm not privy too or haven't examined. Um, Like, well,
if he had just become a statesman and had advocated
for reform in those areas, could he have done a
lot more with his life? Yeah, than the way it
played out where a lot of his reforms initially got
(15:17):
rolled back anyway, I don't know, is the answer. That's
that's Milan Kundera's unbearable likeness of being there's only one
way through and you don't know the other possibilities. Yeah,
So my weird thought process during all of this, UM,
I have been watching the the c W TV show
(15:40):
Rain on Netflix. It has become the show that I
watched while I'm on the exercise bike, and I kind
of describe it as Mary Queen of Scott's fan fiction,
because Mary Queen of Scott's is a central character, but
a lot of the plot has no basis in reality whatsoever.
(16:01):
And toward the end of the series, uh at, one
of the other central characters UM is Charles the ninth
of France and the depiction of Charles the ninth of
France really reads a lot like what we just talked
about today. I was like, hmmmm, this is interesting to
(16:23):
me how it just seems like a totally different royals
personality was picked up and put onto here. That's probably
not what happened, but right, but you can cherry pick
the most interesting parts, right um of a completely different
monarch shower. I mean, at that point it's fictionalized. It's fictionalized.
(16:49):
Really really interesting to me how much medical scholarship has
been devoted to trying to figure out what was really
happening with Christian the seventh based on Struancy's writing. You know,
there there is a big case made both for schizophrenia
and for porphyria, depending on which scholar is looking at it.
(17:12):
They're certainly valid ways that they landed each of those.
I mean, I'm not a doctor, so I would not
pretend like, yes, this one is the bet. I don't know, um,
but I see where like the symptomatic behavior lines up
with a list of symptoms that we would recognize today.
It's a little bit of a weird space because normally
you and I always talk about like we wouldn't try
(17:34):
to um diagnose anybody historically because they're dead, they cannot
be examined, and we are not doctors and we are
not doctors. Um. And this is a unique, a particularly
unique situation because I mean, we're not doing it, but
but for medical scholars to do it, they are working
with source documentation from his doctor um, which makes it
(17:58):
kind of interesting. Another thing that I didn't mention in
the main episode because I couldn't find One of the
things that's mentioned is a verification of it, was that
Christian the Seven himself did not think of Struancy as
a bad person at all. Um. And there are even
(18:19):
some indications that he had wished that he could have
saved Struancy and his his close friend that was also beheaded.
Of course, no one was really listening to what he wanted,
even in his moments of lucidity, so that didn't help
at all. But um, it's a what a tangle humans.
(18:39):
M hmmm mm hm hm. I feel like we should
figure out a way to end this on a more
up thing. Um. I'm trying to think of a more
up thing. Do I know him more? Oh? Yes, so
I was right? M A royal Affair is the Danish
historical drama that was made in It does star Men's Michelson,
(19:03):
which everything should, um, just as a rule of thumb,
everything should star Man's Michelson. So I didn't pull that
right out of thin air. And he does play struncy.
But even so he would have been I think, and
this is no shade to Man's Michelson a little old
for the role at that point, because he was born
(19:24):
in nineteen sixty five, which means he's how much. Yeah,
he would have been a little old. Um Again, it's
Ma's Michelson. Play whoever you want. When everyone that's fine,
It's just fine. There's a fun place to wrap it up.
Everybody think about MAT's Michelson. Uh. If this is your
(19:46):
actual weekend coming up, we hope that it is a
good one and that you get some rest and recuperation
and maybe watch good films with MAT's Michelson in them.
If this is not your weekend per saying you're working,
we hope that goes as smoothly as possible, that people
are as nice to you as possible, uh, and that
you make it through without too much stress. Otherwise we
will see you all back here tomorrow with a classic episode,
(20:07):
and then on Monday we'll be here again with brand
new stuff. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we talked about
what's believed to be the first cookbook in the Western world.
This week, ded A Coquinadia epicious is easier to say. Um.
(00:27):
I Also I like how when you listen to Latin
pronunciations by people living in Italy, it does not sound
nearly the same way that a lot of other folks
would say them. No, and also usually sounds more beautiful. Um.
This one was super fun, and I kept writing little
notes to myself about stuff I wanted to talk about
(00:50):
one thing that I thought was really interesting. We talked
a lot about Wellings translation, since that was the first
English translation of this collection, and I have to say
it's it's quite fun to me because he mentions like, no,
we have to be really unbiased and really clear. But
like any writer or any human, he has bias that
(01:13):
appears in the text um. And he kind of clearly
has a great deal of reverence and appreciation for these
classical ways of cooking. Uh. And he writes about how
people mistreat their food these days. Um, and he he
feels like when he was writing this, which again was
(01:34):
in the mid nineteen twenties, he makes the case that
we're eventually going to return back to a lot of
these Roman techniques of cooking because of the ways that
agriculture is going to change due to over consumption and whatnot.
So it's kind of an interesting one to get his
editorial asides included in the in the uh, the analysis
(01:55):
because there's a translation of the text. But like most
books that you will read about this cook book, now
there's a huge section that's really like an analysis and
discussion of what it contains, in what it means, and
he occasionally drops his editorial thoughts, Oh sure, which is
pretty funny. This also always I always talk about this,
(02:17):
thinking about how our time will be perceived in the
future and wondering if there will one day be someone
trying to pick apart the Bob's Burger's Cookbook and wonder
how important it was culturally. Oh yeah, which came to
mind because it's one I'm using a lot right now.
I've been, I've been, uh, I have watched my way
through several of your cooking You've done I think two
(02:39):
cookbooks that I have kept an eye on the Star
Wars one and the Bob's Burgers one, and I'm always
like incredibly fascinated by what the recipe is, whether it
turned out deliciously like, whether it has been added into
your your households, my regular rotation rotation well, and now
I'm also doing there's another Star Wars one. I did,
(02:59):
the gal Lexi's Edge one, all of those many which
are really really like regulars at our house now. But
there's also a Star Wars baking book that came out
just last month, and I have really enjoyed that when
it has some really good stuff. I feel like in
the in the realm of sort of branded novelty cookbooks,
of which which are things that I have always loved,
(03:20):
they have really stepped up across the board. It used
to be like they're very cutey recipes and it usually
involved like combining a lot of prefab ingredients. But now
they're like, no, let's teach you how to make a
cake like from scratch, which I love. It's great, But yes,
I wonder if one day they'll be like everyone put
Tika masala on their burgers. It's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
(03:44):
that's not that's not common at all. There is also
a there are a lot of people if you wanna
just kind of cruise around, you can do that on
Pinterest who sponsored the episode, or on you know, any
search engine if you look for anything that's like Roman
cooking or cook like a Roman. There are a lot
of people who have either sort of brought some of
(04:05):
these recipes up to date. Or there's a YouTube channel
that you you also stumbled across, which is called a
Taste of the Ancient World, and it's um hosted by
this woman named Sally Grainger who is a historian and
a cook, and she's kind of cooking through some of
these recipes. There was an interesting moment though, because she
(04:27):
mentions that it's very important in her project to follow
these recipes to the letter as much as possible, knowing
obviously you have to like interpret things like measures, which
you don't get. That jumped out to me because several
of the translations that I had read in their commentaries
kind of say exactly the opposite of like you can't
(04:48):
do this as a literal read like there's no way
to do it. This is more like in the spirit
of this recipe sure, which I found very interesting, and uh,
you know, she also mentioned several times that like they're
things that you have to make from scratch, they're not
just ingredients that would be available. One of her episodes
is making a cheesecake and you basically have to make
(05:08):
the cheese yourself first, and that kind of brings up
that that thing that I touched on very briefly about
like there would have been enslaved labor to do those
those hard preparation pieces, so it's very easy to be like, oh, yes,
make a cheese and then do this and then it
will be delicious. I'm also going to tell you a
story of my own hilarious foolishness. I'm excited in reading
(05:35):
that description of Trimalchio's table. I'm so embarrassed, but it's
also so funny that I'm delighted at my own foolishness. Um,
there's like a mention in it of dormice. It didn't
occur to me that people ate dormic. So I was
reading it dormous and I'm like, what is this ingredient?
And I was like trying to look it up and
(05:57):
I was like, oh no, just tiny little dormice that
seems like a lot of work. I had a similar
experience the first time I read through your outline, because
I I feel like, if it had said dormouse singular, right,
I would have clocked it totally, but I it doesn't.
(06:21):
It was plural, and my brain was like, what is it? Dormity?
I feel somewhat better now, Wing We both landed at this.
What is this? What is this new thing? I didn't know? Yeah? Yeah,
I also I And then when I heard you say
it out loud as we were recording, I was like,
all right, dormouse, Yeah, I know what a dormouse is. Yeah, well,
(06:45):
and it's um. I mean, to be fair, there are,
like we said, some other ingredients that you've got to
figure out what they are or find someone else who
has figured out what they are, which is really the
case for me. So in that case, I thought, oh,
I don't I don't know what this is. I didn't know.
This is another one that people are probably gonna be like,
um dang dong. People have been using that forever yeah lovage,
(07:08):
Oh yeah yeah as an herb never never on my radar.
So I'm like, what is that? And then I'm like, oh,
it's actually quite commonly. Yeah, that's definitely an herb. I
would not say that's an herb I have in the
cabinet right now, but it's definitely, I think, a thing
I know of and uh have seen growing in herb
(07:31):
gardens and stuff. Yeah, I mean there are plenty of
herbs that I don't know, but I'm sure. Um. I
had a conversation recently with a friend of mine who
is a very smart person, who did not know that
savory was also an herb, like a thing like, No,
savory is a descriptor and I'm like, no, but it's
also also an actual ingredient. It's like, oh uh. Even
(07:56):
in modern cooking, we're all still learning about things some
people like I saw some Twitter threads over the weekend
that we're about how in a lot of the world,
cuisine involves layering different flavors over one another to make
these like really nuanced, interesting combinations of flavors. But in
(08:20):
Europe the trend became too to combine like flavors because
food should taste like itself. Um. And I was like, wow,
I am intrigued by this idea and now want to
go research it more. All I can think of is
Remi and Ratatui going no, now take a bite of
this with this, I mean, anyone can cook, right, And
(08:44):
the reasoning for it in in the Twitter threads that
I read was that when spices became more widely available,
it was no longer like the exclusive domain of rich
people to be able to have spiced food, and like
that drove this trend. I have not been able to
confirm that yet, but I was like, this also, very
(09:06):
interesting idea. It's interesting that you mentioned that because that
is another thing that comes up in that Velling translation,
because his thing was like, note in this how at
this time, you know, they're grinding up their pepper and
everything fresh, and they're integrating that with the cooking. And
he was like, now, today it's very common to like
(09:27):
cook a thing and then season it, and it's never
really is delicious, and that's why we end up throwing
gravy and sauce all over everything because we don't actually
know what any meat tastes like, you know, when it's
actually roasted properly. Which is interesting that that that ties
into a thing you have been thinking about as well. Yeah, yeah,
(09:47):
I really want to make that weird p lasagna. Yeah,
I mean, that sounds really interesting to me. I also
really like peas, so I historically am not the peas
biggest fan. I don't mind them, but they're just not
like a thing I would naturally gravitate to. And sometimes
I'll leave them out of a recipe and go like
lant peas um. But somehow I don't know. Casserole of
(10:11):
layers of peas with bacon and leaks and basically whatever
you have on hand and the ground up pine nuts
with all of what that sounds like a beautiful young thing,
and that white sauce sounds quite good. That might happen
at my house. But then it also makes you think, right,
this is what I love about cookbooks. And I I
(10:33):
didn't know that I loved cooking for a long time
in my life because my mom was one of those
people that like the kitchen was her domain and get
out of my way and don't bug me in the kitchen. Um,
So I didn't get to do a lot of cooking
when I was younger, and then when I really started
to and discovered I loved it. One of the things
that I love about cookbooks for me is how they
kind of unlock your imagination where You're like, oh, I
(10:54):
could do this as written, but what if instead of peas,
I used chick peas, or you know, like anything, anything,
any subout that you do want a recipe. That's what
kind of gets me excited always when I'm looking at recipes,
want I want to make this as written, and then
I want to make a crazy version, yes, other stuff
(11:14):
that's not mentioned here and see what happens, because that's
just fun. That's that's what makes kitchens fun for me. Creativity.
Let's go eat, let's do. This week, we talked about
Johann's Truancy. Who what a story that is? Yeah, I
(11:34):
um so. In your in your introduction at the top
of the episode, you talk about how this story is
a lot better known where it actually happened. And it
cracked me up a little bit because there have been
various times that I've been, you know, reading about some
historical figure who is not from the US and whose lives,
(11:57):
whose life and actions like aren't that directly connected to
US history in an obvious way. Uh. And sometimes you
know something that was written in let's just say that
UK will kind of be like, well, as everyone knows
he did this, this and this and I'm like, I
don't know that, right. Yeah, there is actually UM a
(12:21):
medical center in Germany called Struency House, and they talk
about Johann Struency on one of their their websites pages
and and how they try to uphold his ideals in
terms of, you know, treating people with from all strata
of the social spheres with care, with equal care. And
(12:44):
so he clearly you know, has has name recognition in
a way that I don't think he gets over here
at all, because, like I said, I had to really
like you find very abbreviated versions of his life story
in English, but like any of are really like in
depth stuff, you either have to go to UM a
(13:05):
scholarly journal that has translated part of it, or like
I did in some of it, like I got English
translations that were done decades and decades and decades ago
for some of them. UM. So it's a little bit
a little bit trickier, and it explains why it might
be harder for less likely for people in the U
(13:25):
S or in primarily English speaking countries to know about him. UM.
There have been a number of fictional pieces written, and
there's a film I think from twelve that's in Danish
um about him. But again that's not necessarily going to
be what most US audiences are are engaged with. It's
(13:49):
it's such a good story though, right like in my head.
There's a version of this story that stars a very
young Mad's Michelson and it's quite appealing. Okay, I think
he's in the Danish movie, but I and I don't
even know which character he plays. I haven't seen that movie. Um,
but I want him to be in everything anyway, and
(14:11):
he's darling, so I, as I was doing my research,
I just pictured him. The one thing that really jumped
out at me, and we didn't really focus on it
a lot. We mentioned that, um, the Queen was quite
young when she died, but struancy was as well. He
was in his thirties. He wasn't you know when you
think about someone who has kind of risen and seized
all this power in in my head anyway, I tend
(14:32):
to think of, uh, someone a little bit older who
knows the world well enough to really execute on their ambitions.
Men A was quite young, uh, Which It's that's another
one of those things where I go, oh, if he
hadn't gotten himself into trouble, he had just been a
doctor and advocated for reform in all of these things
(14:55):
that that, Like I said, his ideals seemed to be
pretty good it. I'm sure there were problematic aspects of
it that I'm not privy too or haven't examined. Um, Like, well,
if he had just become a statesman and had advocated
for reform in those areas, could he have done a
lot more with his life? Yeah, than the way it
played out where a lot of his reforms initially got
(15:17):
rolled back anyway, I don't know, is the answer. That's
that's Milan Kundera's unbearable likeness of being there's only one
way through and you don't know the other possibilities. Yeah,
So my weird thought process during all of this, UM,
I have been watching the the c W TV show
(15:40):
Rain on Netflix. It has become the show that I
watched while I'm on the exercise bike, and I kind
of describe it as Mary Queen of Scott's fan fiction,
because Mary Queen of Scott's is a central character, but
a lot of the plot has no basis in reality whatsoever.
(16:01):
And toward the end of the series, uh at, one
of the other central characters UM is Charles the ninth
of France and the depiction of Charles the ninth of
France really reads a lot like what we just talked
about today. I was like, hmmmm, this is interesting to
(16:23):
me how it just seems like a totally different royals
personality was picked up and put onto here. That's probably
not what happened, but right, but you can cherry pick
the most interesting parts, right um of a completely different
monarch shower. I mean, at that point it's fictionalized. It's fictionalized.
(16:49):
Really really interesting to me how much medical scholarship has
been devoted to trying to figure out what was really
happening with Christian the seventh based on Struancy's writing. You know,
there there is a big case made both for schizophrenia
and for porphyria, depending on which scholar is looking at it.
(17:12):
They're certainly valid ways that they landed each of those.
I mean, I'm not a doctor, so I would not
pretend like, yes, this one is the bet. I don't know, um,
but I see where like the symptomatic behavior lines up
with a list of symptoms that we would recognize today.
It's a little bit of a weird space because normally
you and I always talk about like we wouldn't try
(17:34):
to um diagnose anybody historically because they're dead, they cannot
be examined, and we are not doctors and we are
not doctors. Um. And this is a unique, a particularly
unique situation because I mean, we're not doing it, but
but for medical scholars to do it, they are working
with source documentation from his doctor um, which makes it
(17:58):
kind of interesting. Another thing that I didn't mention in
the main episode because I couldn't find One of the
things that's mentioned is a verification of it, was that
Christian the Seven himself did not think of Struancy as
a bad person at all. Um. And there are even
(18:19):
some indications that he had wished that he could have
saved Struancy and his his close friend that was also beheaded.
Of course, no one was really listening to what he wanted,
even in his moments of lucidity, so that didn't help
at all. But um, it's a what a tangle humans.
(18:39):
M hmmm mm hm hm. I feel like we should
figure out a way to end this on a more
up thing. Um. I'm trying to think of a more
up thing. Do I know him more? Oh? Yes, so
I was right? M A royal Affair is the Danish
historical drama that was made in It does star Men's Michelson,
(19:03):
which everything should, um, just as a rule of thumb,
everything should star Man's Michelson. So I didn't pull that
right out of thin air. And he does play struncy.
But even so he would have been I think, and
this is no shade to Man's Michelson a little old
for the role at that point, because he was born
(19:24):
in nineteen sixty five, which means he's how much. Yeah,
he would have been a little old. Um Again, it's
Ma's Michelson. Play whoever you want. When everyone that's fine,
It's just fine. There's a fun place to wrap it up.
Everybody think about MAT's Michelson. Uh. If this is your
(19:46):
actual weekend coming up, we hope that it is a
good one and that you get some rest and recuperation
and maybe watch good films with MAT's Michelson in them.
If this is not your weekend per saying you're working,
we hope that goes as smoothly as possible, that people
are as nice to you as possible, uh, and that
you make it through without too much stress. Otherwise we
will see you all back here tomorrow with a classic episode,
(20:07):
and then on Monday we'll be here again with brand
new stuff. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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