Free Thinking

From a hanged man who came back to life to walk from Swansea to Hereford, to a woman who travelled from London to Evesham in a wheelbarrow, studying pilgrimage opens up a unique window on the world of the middle ages. Catherine Clarke, Anthony Bale, and Sophie Ambler explain to Shahidha Bari how research into pilgrimage helps us understand how medieval people thought about themselves and their lives, the kinds of things they worried about, how they spent their disposable income, and interacted with the politics of their day. Catherine Clarke is Professor of English at the University of Southampton and leads a project to reconstruct the medieval pilgrimage route from Swansea to Hereford. Anthony Bale is Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck University of London. Sophie Therese Ambler is Lecturer in Later Medieval British and European History at Lancaster University.

This podcast was made with the assistance of the AHRC - the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which funds research at universities and museums, galleries and archives across the UK into the arts and humanities. The AHRC works in partnership with BBC Radio 3 on the New Generation Thinkers scheme to make academic research available to a wider audience.

Michael Rosen and Kimberley Reynolds talk to Anne McElvoy about socialist fairy tales and radicalism in books for children. Nikita Gill and Katherine Webber on giving traditional tales a modern twist.

Reading & Revolution: An Anthology of Radical Writing for Children 1900-1960 is out now

Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables and Allegories from Great Britain is published on 13th November

Fierce Fairytales & Other Stories to Stir Your Soul by Nikita Gill is out now

Katherine Wheeler is the author of Only Love Can Break Your Heart and Wing Jones

A Very Very Very Dark Matter by Michael McDonagh is at the Bridge Theatre in London until 6th January

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The film director talks to Matthew Sweet about his career and his approach to dramatising history. His new film Peterloo depicts the 1819 massacre at a rally in Manchester where a crowd of 60,000–80,000 were demanding the reform of parliamentary representation. It follows his film about the painter Mr Turner and the 2004 film Vera Drake which depicted the 1950s - a period when abortions were illegal in England.

Peterloo is in UK cinemas from 2 November

Producer: Debbie Kilbride

How do you put the Bible on stage or make a modern medieval mystery play? Shahidha Bari talks to the National Theatre of Brent's Patrick Barlow as his play The Messiah starts at UK tour. New Generation Thinker Daisy Black watches a new medieval mystery play in Stoke. Plus the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition at the British Library sees a giant Northumbrian Bible returned to Britain for the first time in 1300 years. And historian Iona Hine discusses her research into how we understand biblical stories and what difference translation makes.

The Messiah by Patrick Barlow, with additional material by John Ramm, Jude Kelly and Julian Hough opens at Birmingham Repertory Theatre 18 Oct 2018 - 27 Oct 18 starring Hugh Dennis, Lesley Garrett and John Marquez. It tours to Cardiff, Sheffield and Chichester and then goes to the London West End.

Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War runs at the British Library from Fri 19 Oct 2018 - Tue 19 Feb 2019 covering 600 years and featuring 180 treasures including the Codex Amiatinus, a giant Northumbrian Bible taken to Italy in 716

The Mysteries - newly created dramas by Sam Pritchard and Chris Thorpe have been performed in five different venues across the North of England exploring the impact of different landscapes on communities. All of them can be seen at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester from 25 October–11 November 2018.

Iona Hine researches at the University of Sheffield. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hine/ Her thesis was called Englishing the Bible in Early Modern Europe.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Matthew Sweet takes to the woods with thoroughly modern witch, William Hunter, and writer and folklorist, Zoe Gilbert, to look for green men and suitable spots for a ritual. If modern magic is all about re-enchanting the world then old magic was more about fear and keeping witches out but as a new exhibition opens in Oxford, Dafydd Daniel and Lisa Mullen discuss whether magical thinking is an inevitable part of being human while in Marie Darrieussecq's new novel set in a not very far away and dystopian future, the forest is the last haven for fugitives.

Our Life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq also looks at clones and trafficking. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages.

Spellbound: Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft runs at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until 6 January 2019.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

What's it like to be banned from your own country or to have your writing spark a row? Rana Mitter's guests talk identity, borders, forest landscapes and the long impact of the Ottoman empire. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama is associated with the phrase "the end of history". His latest book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment looks at what he sees as the threats to Liberalism.

Alev Scott has travelled through 12 countries, talking to figures including warlords and refugees for her book Ottoman Odyssey: Travels Through a Lost Empire but she can't return to her birthplace. She's joined by New Generation Thinker Michael Talbot who teaches at the University of Greenwich and whose research has uncovered the drunken antics of soldiers in post World War I Istanbul. He's a contributor to http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/ and he reviews Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan -published now in an English translation by Yelda Türedi and Brendan Freely. It's the first book in the Ottoman Quartet, a narrative that spans the history of Turkey during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The writer is now in prison for life.

The Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her novel Flights. Her latest novel to be translated into English by Antonia Lloyd Jones is called Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead and became the film Spoor directed by directed by Agnieszka Holland. Her writing has been called anti-Catholic.

You can find more discussions about borders, home and belonging in this playlist of programmes https://bbc.in/2QALzkL

Putting women back into the C20th history of British philosophy. Shahidha Bari talks to Alex Clark about the 2018 Man Booker Prize, considers the thinking of Mary Midgley whose death at the age of 99 was announced last week and puts her alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch who were undergraduates at Oxford University during WWII. The In Parenthesis project of Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman asks whether you can call them a philosophical school.

http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/about/

Mary Midgely talks to Rana Mitter about her philosophy in 2009 https://bbc.in/2RRA4qF

What Nietzsche teaches us https://bbc.in/2OxoLFR

Radio 3's Into the Forest playlist of programmes https://bbc.in/2RUE1La

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Is soap opera the heir to the gothic novel? Is America seeing a resurgence of gothic TV and fiction? Shahidha Bari looks at new Gothic research with Nick Groom and Xavier Aldana Reyes. Vampires weren’t invented by horror writers, but were first encountered by doctors, priests and bureaucrats working in central Europe in the mid 17th century - that's the argument of The Vampire: A New History written by "the Goth Prof" Nick Groom from Exeter University. Xavier Aldana Reyes researches at the Gothic Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University and has written Spanish Gothic and Horror Film and Affect. We also hear about the TV research of Helen Wheatley from the University of Warwick

This podcast is made with the assistance of the AHRC - the Arts and Humanities Research Council which funds research at universities and museums, galleries and archives across the UK into the arts and humanities and works in partnership with BBC Radio 3 on the New Generation Thinkers scheme to make academic research available to a wider audience.

Helena Kennedy on #MeToo and the message it sends that the British legal system needs to get its house in order. Plus power in Pinter's plays and rape in Chaucer. Shahida Bari talks to theatre directors Jamie Lloyd and Lia Williams about language and the roles for women on stage in the Pinter at the Pinter Season, an event featuring all of Harold Pinter's short plays, performed together for the first time. And Professor Elizabeth Robertson has been researching references to rape in Chaucer's writing and attitudes towards consent in Medieval times.

Helena Kennedy's book is called Eve was Shamed: how British Justice is Failing Women

You can hear a longer conversation with Elizabeth Robertson in our new podcast about academic research https://bbc.in/2yrTZU5

The Scottish Clearances by Tom Devine, Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh.

Anne McElvoy presents a short film Is Capitalism Here to Stay for BBC Ideas https://www.bbc.com/ideas/ Browse their A-Z of Isms