In Our Time

By BBC Radio 4History

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In Our Time episodes

February 18, 2021 Medieval Pilgrimage
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea and experience of Christian pilgrimage in Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries, which figured so strongly in the imagination of the age. For those able and willing to travel, there were countless destinations from Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela to the smaller local shrines associated with miracles and relics of the saints. Meanwhile, for those unable or not allowed to travel there were journeys of the mind, inspired by guidebooks that would tell the faithful how many steps they could take around their homes to replicate the walk to the main destinations in Rome and the Holy Land, passing paintings of the places on their route.
The image above is of a badge of St Thomas of Canterbury, worn by pilgrims who had journeyed to his shrine.
With
Miri Rubin
Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London
Kathryn Rudy
Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews
And
Anthony Bale
Professor of Medieval Studies and Dean of the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London
Producer: Simon Tillotson
51 min
February 11, 2021 The Rosetta Stone
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most famous museum objects in the world, shown in the image above in replica, and dating from around 196 BC. It is a damaged, dark granite block on which you can faintly see three scripts engraved: Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle and Hieroglyphs at the top. Napoleon’s soldiers found it in a Mamluk fort at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast, and soon realised the Greek words could be used to unlock the hieroglyphs. It was another 20 years before Champollion deciphered them, becoming the first to understand the hieroglyphs since they fell out of use 1500 years before and so opening up the written culture of ancient Egypt to the modern age.
With
Penelope Wilson
Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Durham University
Campbell Price
Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum
And
Richard Bruce Parkinson
Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson
48 min
February 04, 2021 Emilie du Châtelet
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the outstanding French mathematicians and natural philosophers of the 18th Century, celebrated across Europe. Emilie du Châtelet, 1706-49, created a translation of Newton’s Principia from Latin into French that helped spread the light of mathematics on the emerging science, and her own book Institutions de Physique, with its lessons on physics, was welcomed as profound. She had the privileges of wealth and aristocracy, yet had to fight to be taken seriously as an intellectual in a world of ideas that was almost exclusively male.
With
Patricia Fara
Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge
David Wootton
Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York
And
Judith Zinsser
Professor Emerita of History at Miami University of Ohio and biographer of Emilie du Châtelet.
Producer: Simon Tillotson
50 min
January 28, 2021 Saint Cuthbert
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northumbrian man who, for 500 years, was the pre-eminent English saint, to be matched only by Thomas Becket after his martyrdom in 1170. Now at Durham, Cuthbert was buried first on Lindisfarne in 687AD, where monks shared vivid stories of his sanctifying miracles, his healing, and his power over nature, and his final tomb became a major site of pilgrimage. In his lifetime he was both hermit and kingmaker, bishop and travelling priest, and the many accounts we have of him, including two by Bede, tell us much of the values of those who venerated him so soon after his death.
The image above is from a stained glass window in the south aisle of the nave in Durham Cathedral: 'St Cuthbert praying before his cell in the Farne Island'
With
Jane Hawkes
Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of York
Sarah Foot
The Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church Cathedral
And
John Hines
Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University
Producer: Simon Tillotson
57 min
January 21, 2021 The Plague of Justinian
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the plague that broke out in Constantinople 541AD, in the reign of Emperor Justinian. According to the historian Procopius, writing in Byzantium at the time, this was a plague by which the whole human race came near to being destroyed, embracing the whole world, and blighting the lives of all mankind. The bacterium behind the Black Death has since been found on human remains from that time, and the symptoms described were the same, and evidence of this plague has since been traced around the Mediterranean and from Syria to Britain and Ireland. The question of how devastating it truly was, though, is yet to be resolved.
With
John Haldon
Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies Emeritus at Princeton University
Rebecca Flemming
Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge
And
Greg Woolf
Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London
Producer: Simon Tillotson
49 min
January 14, 2021 The Great Gatsby
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss F Scott Fitzgerald’s finest novel, published in 1925, one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. It is told by Nick Carraway, neighbour and friend of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby. In the age of jazz and prohibition, Gatsby hosts lavish parties at his opulent home across the bay from Daisy Buchanan, in the hope she’ll attend one of them and they can be reunited. They were lovers as teenagers but she had given him up for a richer man who she soon married, and Gatsby is obsessed with winning her back.
The image above is of Robert Redford as Gatsby in a scene from the film 'The Great Gatsby', 1974.
With
Sarah Churchwell
Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London
Philip McGowan
Professor of American Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast
And
William Blazek
Associate Professor and Reader in American Literature at Liverpool Hope University
Produced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson
56 min
December 31, 2020 Eclipses
To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Guy Garvey, lyricist and lead singer of the band Elbow, has selected the episode on eclipses, first broadcast in December 2020. Solar eclipses are some of life’s most extraordinary moments, when day becomes night and the stars come out before day returns either all too soon or not soon enough, depending on what you understand to be happening. In ancient China, for example, there was a story that a dragon was eating the sun and it had to be scared away by banging pots and pans if the sun were to return. Total lunar eclipses are more frequent and last longer, with a blood moon coloured red like a sunrise or sunset. Both events have created the chance for scientists to learn something remarkable, from the speed of light, to the width of the Atlantic, to the roundness of the Earth, to discovering helium and proving Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
With
Carolin Crawford
Public Astronomer based at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College
Frank Close
Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford
And
Lucie Green
Professor of Physics and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London
Producers: Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
51 min
December 17, 2020 The Cultural Revolution
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Chairman Mao and the revolt he led within his own party from 1966, setting communists against each other, to renew the revolution that he feared had become too bourgeois and to remove his enemies and rivals. Universities closed and the students formed Red Guard factions to attack the 'four olds' - old ideas, culture, habits and customs - and they also turned on each other, with mass violence on the streets and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Over a billion copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book were printed to support his cult of personality, before Mao himself died in 1976 and the revolution came to an end.
The image above is of Red Guards, holding The Little Red Book, cheering Mao during a meeting to celebrate the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, August 1966
With
Rana Mitter
Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford
Sun Peidong
Visiting Professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris
And
Julia Lovell
Professor in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
Produced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson
49 min
December 10, 2020 John Wesley and Methodism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Wesley (1703 - 1791) and the movement he was to lead and inspire. As a student, he was mocked for approaching religion too methodically and this jibe gave a name to the movement: Methodism. Wesley took his ideas out across Britain wherever there was an appetite for Christian revival, preaching in the open, especially the new industrial areas. Others spread Methodism too, such as George Whitefield, and the sheer energy of the movement led to splits within it, but it soon became a major force.
With
Stephen Plant
Dean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge
Eryn White
Reader in Early Modern History at Aberystwyth University
And
William Gibson
Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford Brookes University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History
Produced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson
52 min
December 03, 2020 Fernando Pessoa
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Portuguese poet Pessoa (1888-1935) who was largely unknown in his lifetime but who, in 1994, Harold Bloom included in his list of the 26 most significant western writers since the Middle Ages. Pessoa wrote in his own name but mainly in the names of characters he created, each with a distinctive voice and biography, which he called heteronyms rather than pseudonyms, notably Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and one who was closer to Pessoa's own identity, Bernardo Soares. Most of Pessoa's works were unpublished at his death, discovered in a trunk; as more and more was printed and translated, his fame and status grew.
With
Cláudia Pazos-Alonso
Professor of Portuguese and Gender Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College, University of Oxford
Juliet Perkins
Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Portuguese Studies at King’s College London
And
Paulo de Medeiros
Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick
Producer: Simon Tillotson
51 min