“Times are tough, but they could be worse” is the eternal message of our show. This time, we’re talking about persecution and rebellion–how certain groups were oppressed for political purposes in medieval (and early modern, and modern) Europe, and some people and groups who rebelled, in both a personal and more broadly political way. From Boudica to Hrotsvit to Jack Cade, join us to talk about how people in the middle ages took power back from the elites.

1/ Link to Plague episode!

2/ You can tell I’m not a real historian because they would not be allowed to describe the French Revolution as “a messy breakup.”

3/ R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.

4/ Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, originally published in 1946, translated by George J. Becker and published in English in 1948. The most famous quote from this essay is “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” It’s a little eerie to go to the Goodreads page in search of quotes and see how many people’s reviews (from the 2017–2020 period) say something like “Wow, this feels eerily relevant for what’s going on right now.” [Unfortunately, I think it’s always relevant!–JN]

5/ Bhabha, Homi K., “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture. (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92.

6/ Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

7/ Boudica! (dies 60 CE) See Episode 58, note 11.

8/ Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (973–no later than 1002). Episode 22 is about her!

9/ Margery Kempe (1373–after 1438) was awesome. See Episode 36 note 17 and Episode 70.

10/ St Francis of Assisi (c.1181–1226). We’ve talked about him a lot! There’s more on his stigmata way back in Episode 4! Also, check him out in Episode 23 (on his Christmas pageant).

11/ Peasants’ Revolt (so called) in 1381.

Justice, Steven. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Shakespeare’s version of the Adam/gentleman joke comes from the famous Gravedigger scene in Hamlet V.i:

GRAVEDIGGER: There is no ancient gentlemen but gard’ners, ditchers, and grave-makers. They hold up Adam’s profession.

[Second Gravedigger]: Was he a gentleman?

GRAVEDIGGER: He was the first that ever bore arms.

[Second Gravedigger]: Why, he had none.

GRAVEDIGGER: What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the scripture? The scripture says Adam digged. Could he dig without arms?

12/ Jack Cade’s Rebellion (1450).

Shakespeare again! 2 Henry VI IV.ii:

Dick: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

13/ Florence’s Ciompi Revolt (1378–1382).

14/ Defenestrations of Prague. Episode coming soon!

15/ Victor Hugo (1802–1885) wrote Les Misérables (1862) about the 1832 June Rebellion.

16/ We’re about to post this just after the suspect in the murder of a health insurance CEO has been caught, despite extensive sympathy for him from a large portion of the public. The public reaction demonstrates the anger people currently have toward wealthy institutions that cannot be held accountable, an anger that is similar to the anger of some of the people and revolts that we discussed. One of the things we didn’t discuss during this episode is that once anger and vitriol have been stirred up, they become very difficult to control (and there’s a lot of anger going around right now).

Postscript: We got through all that without a the people are revolting joke. Wow.

The Ramayana is not the oldest story in the world, but it’s definitely in the running. Composed starting in the 700s BCE, it has been carried to all corners of the earth and translated into many languages and cultures, traveling along several distinct lines of migration, yet it remains largely unknown in the west. In honor of Em’s new novel Troth, join Em and Jesse as they discuss the story and its translations.

0/ You can get Em’s new novel here (https://books2read.com/u/mg68Xz)! Or scoop up a signed copy here (https://xanthippe42.itch.io/troth).

1/ Arsene Lupin was created by Maurice Leblanc in 1905, and The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar came out in 1910. According to my notes from the time, the actual thing I was confused by was the combination of the French “la tenure de veleurs” (a velvet wall hanging) that was adjacent to “le manteau de la cheminee” (a mantlepiece) becoming in English, “a velvet chimney-mantel,” which I don’t think is a thing.

The book also contained the observation, “La justice obéit souvent à ces entraînements de conviction qui font qu’on oblige les événements à se plier à l’explication première qu’on en a donnée.” meaning “Justice [also law officers, I guess] often obeys the training of its beliefs that one obliges the events to bend to the first explanation that one gave.” Which seems to be still true.

2/ Being so long, the text is thought to have been composed over a long period. It is thought that the earliest parts were composed no earlier than about 750 BCE, and the later parts could have been written as recently as the 3rd century CE.

3/ Some non-academic sources of info about partition: Ms. Marvel (Disney+ show, episode 5), Dr. Who (Series 11, episode 6), Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

4/ For more on the “300 Ramayanas” controversy, see “Censoring the Ramayana,” Vinay Dharwadker, PMLA 127.3 (May 2012), pp. 433–450. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2012.127.3.433

5/ Earliest manuscript: 6th century BCE (See this article.) Prior to its discovery in 2015, the earliest manuscript was assumed to be from the 4th century BCE, attributed to Valmiki (the putative author of the Ramayana).

6/ Valmiki: the traditional author of the Ramayana. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valmiki

7/ A summary of the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramayana#Synopsis

8/ Shakuntala: episode 15

9/ The quote Dr. Jesse reads is from “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation” in The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan (131–160). (Jesse is paraphrasing p. 134.)

10/ Silk Road, if you missed it, was episode 83 “Old Silk Road, Take Me Home.”

11/ Kannada is a Dravidian language spoken in southwestern India.

12/ The Chakri dynasty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chakri_dynasty

13/ The Ramakien: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramakien

14/ The Ramayana of Valmiki: The Complete English Translation, edited and translated by Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman. Princeton Library of Asian Translations. Princeton University Press, 2021.

15/ The proto-Indo European root for “cat” is maybe *kat-, but the reason all the European words look similar is because they come from the Latin “cattus.” In fact, one etymology blog (https://www.etymologynerd.com/blog/cats-and-kittens) suggests that because the animal was traded a lot, it’s hard to get back beyond a certain point because everyone’s word was the same.

Interestingly, the word “textile” (from the Latin “texere”) and the word “technology” (from Greek “tekhne”) both share the same PIE root: *teks-.

16/ Brief Gilgamesh digression: Utnapishtim is in the section of Gilgamesh where the big G is searching for the key to immortality after Enkidu dies, but the reasons why the flood (which he tells G about) actually happened are kind of opaque. Utnapishtim survived because one of the gods (Ea) leaked the plan to U and told him what to do.

In memory of Wrigley Njus-Kirk, The Best Puppy (May 28, 2009–November 18, 2024), we’re reposting our episode on dogs this week! You can check out the original notes here: http://askamedievalist.com/2021/03/26/episode-29-dyou-like-dags/

We’ll be back with regular episodes next week! Until then, give your puppy a pat and keep it medieval!

One time, Em got drunk and started texting Jesse about the bronze age collapse. This is the result.

1/ Em studied abroad in Tianjin, China. It was very educational. I learned that black vinegar is good for your health, that there are mushrooms called ear mushrooms (wood ear, but I only recognized one character), and that I can explain that my stretched earlobes didn’t hurt in several languages. Also, some beer has a relatively low amount of alcohol in it, and if you put it in the freezer, it will freeze and the bottles will shatter. (Perhaps I should say I learned that my classmates didn’t know this.)

2/ Books about how the Church was awesome and saved civilization: How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahil.

3/ Spoiler: They finished the restoration of Notre Dame in time for the Olympics. (Unusually for us, we recorded this in July 2024—before Biden dropped out of the race, as you can maybe tell from the tenor of some of the commentary.)

4/ To be honest, if the fall of Rome was a simple story, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire wouldn’t be six volumes long, right?

5/ Ramses II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II

6/ The Battle of the Delta article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Delta

7/ The Sea Peoples are a famous…myth? Explanation by modern historians of something they didn’t understand? Both of these things? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples

8/ Mycenaean Greece: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece. We talked about the Mycenaeans in episode 68 note 9

Minoans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization We talked about the Minoans in Episode 2 note 9, episode 68 note 9, and episode 75 notes 12–14.

Cyclades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycladic_culture We only talked about Cycladic Culture briefly in episode 2 note 9, but we have an upcoming episode on Cycladic art!

9/ We just talked about the Ever Given and the rights of truckers in episode 84 notes 1 and 3! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given (What a weird coincidence!) Also, see John Oliver talk about trucks and waiting! (Start at the 5 minute mark.)

10/ Actually, to the point about “a hundred years ago, if it rained too much, maybe they just didn’t have corn”–a hundred years ago, corn was actually such a major part of the American diet that pellagra was considered an epidemic! This is because corn does not contain vitamin B3 (niacin), and people in poor, rural areas and institutions ate a largely corn-based diet, since it was cheap compared to other things. It was in about 1926 that Dr. Joseph Goldberger established that adding brewer’s yeast to these diets would prevent pellagra. (Interestingly, the nixtamalization of maize, a traditional process that involves soaking the grain in limewater, introduces niacin!)

10/ Linear A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

Cypro-Minoan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypro-Minoan_syllabary

We talked about trade moving across Asia and into Europe, but what about trade going North–South? Like the Silk Road, there was a lot of Trans-Saharan trade going back a long time. Goods like salt, ivory, gold, beads, and metal goods–as well as enslaved people–crossed hostile conditions to travel from as far south as Ghana and Mali to northern Africa and the Middle East, and from there into Europe. Join Em and Jesse as they discuss these lesser-known but incredibly interesting routes.

1/ The Ever Given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given (yeah, we recorded this a while ago).

2/ Ducks: The Friendly Floatees Spill! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Floatees_spill 

3/ John Oliver talks about trucks and waiting! (Start at the 5 minute mark.)

4/ Sacha Baron Cohen turned out to be a terrible person. Surprising? Not really.

5/ Nintendo was originally founded in 1889. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo 

6/ Cannabis discovered in Chinese tombs

7/ Chinese coins in England! 

8/ Shoshonean Prayerstone Hypothesis 

9/ History of the De Beers Corp: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~lcabral/teaching/debeers3.pdf

10/ History of diamond advertising: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/

11/ Somehow over the past two years since we recorded this, the salt/salary thing turned into a throwaway line in Em’s new novel Troth. Never say I don’t learn nothin’ from this.

The Silk Road spanned four thousand years and lasted for centuries–it’s hard to think of anything comparable in scale. From the second century BCE until the mid-15th century, jade, silk, tea, horses, the plague, and more flowed across the Eurasian continent. Join Em and Jesse as they talk about it–and also about Route 66, the origin of the word “tea,” Mongolian horses, and other questionably relevant things.

1/ Route 66 celebrates its centennial in 2026! https://www.route66-centennial.com/ The google doodle was April 30, 2022: https://doodles.google/doodle/celebrating-route-66/ It recognized the day in 1926 that the designation “U.S. 66” was proposed for the route.

2/ Tom Robbins did write a book called Another Roadside Attraction, but the family of clowns was in Villa Incognito. I refuse to link to those books on Wikipedia. You cannot read a summary of a Tom Robbins novel; they must be experienced.

3/ The Green Book: https://www.loc.gov/item/2016298176/

It was inspired by The Jewish Vacation Guide, a book published in 1917 that did a similar thing—list places where road-tripping Jews would be welcome.

The LOC site suggests that after the Civil Rights act of 1964 passed, the kinds of discrimination the book helped people avoid stopped happening and so the guide stopped being published. But I’ve talked to Jews who went on motorcycle road trips across the country and stopped at various establishments in the south in the late 70s and felt they were, in modern parlance, extremely sus, vibes are off, etc. So, like, sundown towns maybe went away but the people’s attitudes did not change as quickly.

4/ It was Turkmenistan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9QYu8LtH2E

The mention of Azerbaijan on Last Week Tonight.

5/ Bongbong Marcos was elected in 2022. We taped this one a while ago.

6/ Podcast episode on textiles: Episode 33 (on women artisans and textiles), Episode 54 note 15 (on the Bayeux Tapestry), and Episode 62 on tapestries.

7/ Mongolian horses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_horse

They live outdoors in temps that get down to -40 degrees. There are more horses than people in Mongolia right now.

In trying to source the cheese-making story, I have learned that horse’s milk cannot be made into cheese, because the lactose level is too high! So it’s probably not cheese that was made that way, but fermented mare’s milk—airag—which needs to be churned while it’s fermenting.

8/ Famously, people call it “chai” if it arrived in their country by land (for example, India, most of peninsular SE Asia, Russia, Japan) and “tea” if it arrived by boat (e.g., England and all of their colonies). Both of these words come ultimately from the Chinese “tu”, which became “cha” in Mandarin but “ta” and “te” in Min, a group of Chinese languages spoken in Fujian province and Taiwan (among other areas—there are over 70 million speakers! And you’ve never heard of it!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_tea has a nice table with different words in different languages if you’re interested in the linguistics here.

9/ The thing Em says about a Mayan god of zero appears to be incorrect. However, linguistically, in at least one Mayan dialect, yesterday and tomorrow are always expressed as “day minus one” and “day plus one” respectively—today is always zero. (https://baas.aas.org/pub/2021n1i336p03/release/2) The Mayans were a long-lived and pluralistic society and in retrospect it’s not right to say, “The Mayans thought,” because when did they think this? Which group? Today they are still over six million people speaking twenty-eight languages! Their earliest villages were established before 2000 BCE and their last city fell in 1697 CE.

9/ Rabban Bar Sauma (c1220–1294) was a Nestorian (named for Nestorius). We discussed miaphysitism and dyophysitism in Episode 48 (see note 14).

Join Em and Dr. Jesse as they talk about the last two branches of the Mabinogi.

Em’s books can all be found here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C5XX9BH3 (or at many other fine internet sites.)

1/ The previous episodes were: Episode 78 (introduction), and episode 79 (branches 1 and 2). Also, we’re still using The Mabinogion translated by Sioned Davies (2008, Oxford University press) Link.

2/ People still alive: Pryderi, Cigfa, Manawyden, Rhiannon, Arawn

3/ Bank of England inflation calculator: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator

4/ Branch four: Trigger warnings for sexual assault.

5/ The film in which Bernie walks around by himself (in the US Virgin Islands) is Weekend at Bernie’s II. In the first film, his body is just repeatedly stolen. For some reason it was on TV constantly in 1994 or so. I don’t remember it well but I don’t think I have to in order to assert it has loads of super sketchy voodoo representation. Among other things, I’m sure.

6/ Guards, Guards! is by Terry Pratchett. Did we say that?

Did you see a headless (possibly satanic) angel rising from the stage during the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics, or Winged Victory? Or did you wonder, as we did, how the two happen to be so similar, when angels in the bible are often described as having six wings, or wheels, or four faces and many eyes, or voices that sound like many people speaking at once? And actually, now that we mention it, why are apples so common in Mediterranean myths? Join Em and Dr. Jesse as we talk through the Olympics closing ceremony, its symbolism, and how the modern Christian imagination is inextricably tied to Greek myth.

1/ Bobby Gibb was technically the first woman to run Boston in 1966. Katherine Switzer ran it in 1967 and the officials’ attempts to eject her produced the photos described.

2/ The apple/evil pun only works in Latin (not Greek). Also, although both the Septuagint and the Vulgate use a generic word for fruit in Genesis, the word for apple (which Latin got from Greek) not only served the Latin pun but brought an accrual of meanings from the Greek world (which, as we discussed in this episode, is presumably why the apple became the de facto fruit in the garden).

3/ Dan Smith’s blog: https://danaturg.blogspot.com/2024/07/dramaturgy-of-paris-olympics-opening.html

4/ The Hymn to Apollo was in episode 46.

Last week, the 2024 Summer Olympics started in Paris with an opening ceremony that featured nods to several musicals, a heavy metal band named after Godzilla, a bit of an aria from Carmen, and of course, a tableau of drag queens and gender bent fashionistas referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s 1498 painting The Last Supper. Or perhaps they were referencing Jan van Bijlert’s 1640 work Le Festin des Dieux (The Feast of the Gods). Join Em and Dr. Jesse for a wide-ranging conversation about the history of the games, the video game Assassin’s Creed, camp, kitsch, and Susan Sontag. Oh, no, sorry. That tableau. Spoiler: Jesse had thoughts.

No notes today. Also, Em’s mic sounds bad because like a noob she didn’t check what Audacity was recording with. Sorry for the slightly less than pristine sound quality.

The Mabinogi: what’s it actually about, when you get down to it? Join Em and Jesse as they discuss the first two branches, in which Pwyll meets Arawn, lord of the underworld, and has adventures; in which Pwyll meets Rhiannon and has a lot more adventures than maybe he bargained for; and in which Bendigeidran, Branwen, and Manawyden fight Ireland.

0/ Find links to Old Time Religion here, or buy it directly from Ingram Spark here. If you are seeing this during the month of July 2024, it (and Dionysus in Wisconsin) are currently 75% off at Smashwords.

1/ The Mabinogion translated by Sioned Davies (2008, Oxford University press)

The Horse in Celtic Culture: Medieval Welsh Perspectives ed. Sioned Davies and Nerys Jones (University of Wales Press, 1997)

2/ Randomly, there’s a fairly well-known professor of graphic design who shares my original surname. I don’t think we’re related.

3/ Branch one major characters:

4/ For our thoughts on The Green Knight (both story and film), hunt down Episode 60.

5/ Geoffrey of Monmouth (c1095–c1155). Extremely responsible for King Arthur mythos. See episode 60 on The Green Knight!

6/ The early modern Irish “Children of Lir“:

Different from “The Children of LLYR” (from the Mabinogion) and not related to Shakespeare’s King Lear

7/ The actual children of Llyr (from the Mabinogion):

8/ The Gundestrup caldron: this cauldron is clearly ceremonial (not for everyday use), but cauldrons generally are very communal and demonstrate the importance of being a good host

9/ A torc is a stiff metal neck ring (aka really iconic jewelry from the Bronze age through the Middle Ages, found throughout Europe from the Balkans through Celtic regions)