Ask a Medievalist

Summary

In the words of the great philosopher Toto, “I bless the RAINS down in AFRICA.” [This song plays every year at the Saturday night dance at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, otherwise known as Kalamazoo. Very medieval. –Jesse]

We explore Africa from a decolonizing viewpoint, including words of wisdom from deceased UW–Madison professor Dr. Harold Scheub, an interesting conversation about the Crusader or Shah ‘Abbas Bible, and the traditions of Ethiopian Christianity, and a few digressions about Mt. Rushmore, trans people and film, the movies Coming to America and The Last Samurai, and some discussion of the spread of religions and Jewish genetics.

Notes, Annotations, and Corrections

1/ The creation of global trade routes and a global system of economics is a major theme of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which covers approximately 1649–1715.

2/ The Chinese did “discover” America in 1421. Allegedly. According to a book by a British man who had no particular training in history and, in fact, not even a bachelor’s degree; also the book was allegedly worked on by over 130 ghost writers and no one fact-checked it. SO, uh. Probably not. Incidentally, the explorer given the honor of discovering the US was Zheng He, who I think we mentioned in another episode–he was a Muslim eunuch, explorer, and diplomat who became an important figure at the court of the Yongle Emperor.

3/ Various pipeline projects have been cancelled. Sort of. [Yeah, the US Court of Appeals already set aside the verdict of the lower court and said the Dakota Access Pipeline can keep running while the court battle rages on. –Jesse]

4/ The guy who carved (part of) Mt Rushmore (he died) and (a non-surviving part of) the monument to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy (he was kicked off the project and his work blasted off the mountain; this is the monument we mention carved on Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, GA) was Gutzon Borglum. (The LCotC bas relief DOES feature Traveler, in case you have been keeping track, along with the horses of Jefferson Davis (Blackjack) and Stonewall Jackson (Little Sorrel). Neither of the other two horses is cool enough to have their own Wikipedia page though.) Borglum was an odd duck–he was a child of Mormon polygamist immigrants, Freemason, and if not an actual Klan member then someone who was deeply involved in Klan politics. He also carved a bust of Abraham Lincoln from a six-ton block of marble, won a prize for carving Union General Philip Sheridan (one version stands in Washington DC, one in Chicago), and did another statue of progressive IL governor John Peter Altgeld. His son, who took over Mt Rushmore after his death, was named Lincoln.

5/ Netflix documentary: Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen. Apparently 80% of Americans don’t know any trans people. That’s so crazy. Apparently I know a lot more trans people than average. [I’m not giving links to D.W. Grifith, but definitely look him up if you want to. More importantly, look up Susan Stryker. She has great books; check them out at your favorite local library or bookstore.–Jesse]

6/ The Nazi anatomy text was Topographische Anatomie des Menschen by Eduard Pernkopf.

The remark about how white supremacy is the playing field we all stand on was something Fran Lebowitz (a writer who exists primarily to occasionally be interviewed by the New Yorker, as far as I can tell) said (in an interview with

Summary Welcome to part two of our series on decolonization. This week, Em and Jesse discuss what the Middle Ages looked like in the Americas before the arrival of colonizers. We take brief looks at the Mayan, Aztec, Mississipian, and Moche civilizations and a few of their many achievements. With some fun digressions about the …

Continue reading "Episode 12: The Americas Before Colonization"

Summary

Welcome to part two of our series on decolonization. This week, Em and Jesse discuss what the Middle Ages looked like in the Americas before the arrival of colonizers. We take brief looks at the Mayan, Aztec, Mississipian, and Moche civilizations and a few of their many achievements. With some fun digressions about the Confederate battle flag, Em’s panic-inducing trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, and the noises that eagles make.

Notes, Annotations, and Corrections

1/ Daily Show from 2001 reminds us that Colbert is a master. [OK, this was 19 years ago! My sense of time during my own life is bad.–Jesse]

Daily Show 2015

Daily Show in 2017 on Confederate Memorial Day

On Bree Newsome’s removal of South Carolina’s Confederate flag.

Jesse: Trevor Noah is amazing, but I miss Jon Stewart soooooooooooo much. Why can’t we have both? (I guess we’ve proven we don’t deserve such bounty.) Many, many sobbing emojis.

2/ Berlin Wall: 1961–1989 (or 1991, depending on how you’re counting).

3/ Madison had statues of Forward (a lady who is kind of our symbol?) and Hans Cristian Heg pulled down. HCH is an interesting case because he was a Norwegian immigrant and an abolitionist, anti-slavery activist (who led Wisconsin’s anti-slave-catcher militia), politician, and prison reformer who died of wounds received at the Battle of Chikamauga. However, just because he was pretty great for his time doesn’t necessarily mean that he would be great by our standards today–I’ve seen some allegations that he wasn’t exactly pro-Black (which aren’t really substantiated in any news article, so I don’t know); he was also a “49er,” meaning he went West to participate in the Gold Rush–incidentally, Wisconsin’s motto, “Forward,” is partially about Westward expansion, which is, you know, a lot about the Federal Government massacring (or permitting the massacre of) various indigenous peoples in order to permit (White) settlers to move in. (Also it feels weird to think about Wisconsin as “West.” Hmm.) So–I get it. I don’t totally believe that the people who pulled down the statues were aware of these things when they were doing the destruction–I think they were just angry. Buuuuuut you know, whatever, seems justified.

Also they (i.e., the same group that pulled down the statues) beat up a state congressperson, but no one was upset about that for some reason. (He is a Democrat, and Republicans control the House and Senate here, so that’s probably why we didn’t hear too much.) He has since co-sponsored legislation with Republicans that would make it a crime to pull down statues. I feel like he might be taking the wrong lesson from this.

I wanted to add a note on the guy who got arrested (Yeshua Musa, who was a local BLM activist), because while I think I gave the story as I understood it at the time, it’s worthy of thinking more about–he has been indicted on federal extortion charges and faces up to 40 years in federal prison. Also, he wasn’t demanding money from local businesses (as I suggest in the podcast discussion), he was demanding a meal. Whatever else I have to say about his behavior, I do pretty much feel like the Justice Department has made the decision to charge the heck out of him in order to use him as an example.

Summary “Pulling down statues isn’t erasing history….erasing history is the fact that you live on land stolen from a people you can’t name.” Em and Jesse dive into  the theory and practice of decolonization–what does it mean, what are post-colonial studies, and how can we put this knowledge into practice, reforming our views of our …

Continue reading "Episode 11: Decolonization: Theory and Practice"

Summary

“Pulling down statues isn’t erasing history….erasing history is the fact that you live on land stolen from a people you can’t name.” Em and Jesse dive into  the theory and practice of decolonization–what does it mean, what are post-colonial studies, and how can we put this knowledge into practice, reforming our views of our modern American lives as well as the Middle Ages? This episode has a lot of the decolonization theory, and coming episodes will have a lot more of the practice part, but this episode does have some fun discussions of pulling down statues, weird characters in Thomas Pynchon novels, non-English versions of Shakespearean plays, and various forms of Orientalism in fine art, like the odalisque and the picturesque.

Notes, Annotations, and Corrections

1/ Harriet Tubman projected on the side of the Lee statue. Sometimes it blows my mind that she lived recently enough that we have a photograph of her. She died in 1913! [Agreed–super amazing and impressive! Also, the only Confederate statue left on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA as of 7/10/20 is Lee. Richmond has taken down Jackson, Stuart, and Maury (Davis was already gone). Arthur Ashe will hopefully be the lone statue on the formerly problematic street very soon. The statue I discuss in Libby Hill Park (the Confederate Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, which was on top of a really tall column on top of a hill overlooking the James River) has been taken down as well. History marches forward, and the former capital of the Confederacy attempts to help form a more perfect union.–Jesse]

2/ Malcolm Gladwell has a really good bit about plaques placed on offensive monuments to “contextualize” them in this episode of Revisionist History. (I don’t think I really need to tell you that RH is a really good podcast overall and I recommend it–Malcolm Gladwell has definitely sold 1000% more books than I have and has a huge following. Nevertheless, it’s a great podcast.–Em)

3/ So I looked this up for episode 10 but I don’t think I mentioned it in the notes–the family apparently originally built the statue basically in the middle of a corn field, and then later the city caught up with it (I believe they gave it to the city and then the city developed in that direction).

4/ As of my writing these notes (7/6/2020), the Lee monument is still up, but the judge who issued a stay of removal has recused himself from the case. Another lawsuit alleging that removing the statue would hurt home values in the area has already garnered FOUR judicial recusals… However, looking at the area on Zillow, none of the recently sold houses appear to use adjacency to the REL monument as a selling point, so I am unconvinced that the property devaluation argument will hold any water (one rental does appear to mention the house being situated at “the Lee circle on Monument Ave.,” but that seems more like trying to give a cross-street than anything else; they could certainly just say “the Dolly Parton circle” if the monument were replaced). [Yes, I believe that “back in the day” (i.e., until a few years ago), the Lee statue was used as a selling point. That no longer happens, but I’m sure some people who still live in the area bought their houses in those days (or their family did), and they might not realize that the statue is now degrading their house’s value rather than enhancing it.

Summary In which we discuss iconography (the study of icons), primarily so we can talk about the protests relating to/attempting to tear down the Robert E. Lee (and other major Confederate) statue(s) in Richmond, VA. But there’s also some good stuff on Medieval iconography, Kehinde Wiley, GB Trudeau, and Beyoncé. Notes, Corrections, Annotations 1/ For …

Continue reading "Episode 10: Icons and Iconography"

Summary

In which we discuss iconography (the study of icons), primarily so we can talk about the protests relating to/attempting to tear down the Robert E. Lee (and other major Confederate) statue(s) in Richmond, VA. But there’s also some good stuff on Medieval iconography, Kehinde Wiley, GB Trudeau, and Beyoncé.

Notes, Corrections, Annotations

1/ For reference, Charlottesville has a population of about 48k people, while Richmond has a population of 227k (similar in size to Madison, actually).

Jesse: True! However, the greater RIchmond metropolitan area actually had 1,263,617 people (in 2016) while the greater Madison metropolitan area had 654,230 (in 2017). The Richmond area is actually pretty big for a city that feels fairly small. Also, UVA’s student population is 21,985, so the university is a very significant presence. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1819, and the school is occasionally called “Mr. Jefferson’s University.”

2/ Maggie Walker. The daughter of a former slave (and Union spy!), she was the first Black woman to charter a bank in the US. She was an advocate for African Americans and women; later, when she became confined to a wheelchair due to medical problems, she became an advocate for the disabled as well. The statue of her was unveiled in July of 2017, just about a month before the Charlottesville protests (which were around August 13, 2017). Here is the statue.

3/ Would the modern US’s relationship with African Americans be significantly different (better) if Lincoln had lived? There’s no easy answer to the question, because Northerners were anti-slavery but also generally anti-Black. Still, Lincoln was a master politician. Also this seems like a great starting point for a steampunk novel for anyone who is way more into historical research than I am. (And, like, I’m half of a podcast about history, so–be really into it.)–Em.

Jesse: Lots of scholars argue about this. The question is, would Reconstruction have continued longer than it did? For example, Mississippi elected two African Americans to the US Senate during Reconstruction–Hiram Rhodes Revels in 1870 and Blanche Bruce in 1875. Imagine if that had continued! Unfortunately, the compromise of 1877 (which made Rutherford B. Hayes president) effectively ended Reconstruction and ushered in the era of Jim Crow. If Lincoln had been president at the beginning of Reconstruction rather than Johnson, would it have made a difference? Would Reconstruction have been harder to end? Would it have become more integral to US politics? Hard to know, but worth considering. Lincoln’s assassination was a terrible tragedy, but we frequently think to ourselves “at least the war was over.” Unfortunately, in many ways the fight for Civil Rights was just hitting its stride, so Lincoln’s assassination may have made a very real, very important difference by removing him from the presidency and installing Andrew Johnson (a Democrat and former slaveholder from Tennessee who did not value the rights of African Americans but did value the rights of (white) Southerners).

4/ The statue was unveiled on May 29, 1890. Interestingly, Lee had a famous horse named Traveller (so famous he merits his own Wikipedia page), who is not depicted in the piece–I assume that at 16 hands, he was felt to be too petite for the size of the sculpture. As someone else who is 16 hands tall,

Summary If heretics go directly to hell, and saints go directly to heaven, what happens if you burn as a heretic someone who later turns out to be a saint? Em and Jesse talk about Dante, sainthood and the inquisitio process, and finally look at the cases of two female saints, one of whom was …

Continue reading "Episode 9: Heretics and Saints"

Summary

If heretics go directly to hell, and saints go directly to heaven, what happens if you burn as a heretic someone who later turns out to be a saint? Em and Jesse talk about Dante, sainthood and the inquisitio process, and finally look at the cases of two female saints, one of whom was initially burned as a heretic, and one of whom was treated, ultimately, as a saint rather than a demoniac.

Annotations, Corrections, and Notes

1/ In fact, George Floyd was murdered on May 25th, so even though on the 31st it felt like the protests had been going on for weeks already, it was only one week, as noted, when we recorded this episode. Viva la revolution!

2/ Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman, Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 (link). [Quote from page 1.–Jesse]

3/ Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. The miniseries (available on Prime) is extremely charming.

Jesse: For more on Margery Kempe, see episode 6, note 29; episode 7, note 23; and episode 8, note 4. For apophatic mysticism, see episode 7, notes 12 and 15 (and the whole section on Marguerite Porete.)

4/ Jesse: [The millennium] has to mark something. What does it mark?

Em: Bigger fines at Blockbuster video.

For our younger listeners, during the “Y2K Crisis,” people were worried that when the year turned to “2000,” computers would read it as “00” and assume it was 1900, thereby somehow messing up a bunch of things. This was solved by people updating computers to read a date stamp with a four-digit year instead of a two-digit one, and nothing happened, except in a few cases overdue videos were found to have absurd fees (which were then waived).

For our even younger listeners, Blockbuster Video was a place you could go to if you wanted to rent video cassettes and DVDs in the days before internet-based streaming services.

The last functioning Blockbuster Video is in Bend, OR.

5/ Back in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a series of movies about Americans fighting the end of the world: Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Core are just a few of the films in this genre. Will Smith does actually literally punch an alien in the face in Independence Day. [I love Will Smith, and I love this scene (relevant moment at 0:46.)–Jesse]

Jesse: Monster movies can signify many things, but Godzilla’s apocalyptic sensibility is a direct response to nuclear war, which had made the end of the world suddenly appear to be an achievable goal for humanity. Specifically, Godzilla is a response to the US dropping two atomic bombs on Japan and causing a humanitarian catastrophe in a manner not previously seen in global history. So while the movie contains the message that humanity has caused its own destruction (by awakening Godzilla), there’s also the stark reminder that only the US has ever dropped a nuclear bomb on a country, and that country was Japan.

6/ Supernova records: Supernova SN 185, which appeared in 185 CE, was the earliest supernova to make it into human records, although some researchers have suggested that HB9, which happened around 4600 BCE, may have been captured in rock carvings in Kashmir, India.

7/ Eschatology: The study of the end of the world. [Quote from Bynum and Freedman, page 3.–Jesse]

Jesse: For an example of Christ at the Last Judgment in a rainbow nimbus, see Giotto’s Last Judgment in the Scrovegni or Arena Chapel. The Doomsday pageant from the Middle English York Cycle play was pro...

Summary Come with us into Hell. We’ll accompany Dante and Virgil as they pass through the nine circles and out into purgatory and heaven. On the way, we’ll chat about Margery Kemp and Julian of Norwich, Hellboy, D&D, Giotto’s Scrovengi Chapel, and the tendency of ogliarchs to use philanthropy to try and make people like …

Continue reading "Episode 8: Hell and Damnation"