The Scope

Welcome everyone to this new podcast — the Chronicles of Christendom. By the time you’re reading or listening this there should be three episodes already available for listening, more if you come across this later.

This podcast is a place for me to showcase really cool medieval stories.

To be more specific I am going to cover medieval literature that has a certain mythopoetic nature to it which is going to include works of universal history and hagiographies alongside fictional works such, of course, Arthurian literature, but also epics, poems, lays, romances, and anything else that I find interesting and symbolically rich. I am also not opposed to potentially cover some philosophical and nonfiction works as well.

What do I mean exactly by medieval? Well, people debate what the exact time frame for the medieval period is, but we will define through a chiastic pattern by pinning its beginnings at the fall of Roman Empire in the west in 476, and mark the end as the fall of the eastern Roman Empire in 1453. This gives about one thousand years to work with. Now in terms of geographical scope I am going to include Europe plus the rest of the Mediterranean, so this means I won’t be covering the Oriental world during this period, as much as that stuff is interesting.

As the name “Chronicles of Christendom” suggests, there is going to be a particular Christian emphasis in this podcast. I’m not saying we will never cover any works which are non-Christian, but I can say pretty confidentially we will not be reading Maimonides or Islamic jurisprudence. While they both fit the geographic and temporal scope they don’t fit the thematic scope. Likewise as the subtitle — “a survery of Medieval literature” — suggests I want to be pretty broad. I don’t just want to focus on Anglo-Saxon poetry or just read Arthurian legends. I instead want to buck the academic trend of specialization and do a little bit of everything that falls within the thematic, temporal and geographical parameters. In the three pilot episodes released with this podcast we cover an Anglo-Saxon poem, a latin Hagiography from Hungary, and a French Arthurian poem. What this means, however, is that I am not an expert in any one of these texts. I’m an English monolingual, so while I will occasionally reference the original language for clarification or more nuance, it will basically be me either reading what someone else has to say about it or dictionaries which puts me at the whim of the competency, or lack there of, of other people. But the purpose of this podcast is not to give a definitive guide to any text. It exists to give you an introduction.

Methodology and Hermeneutics

When it comes to reading, and interpreting texts I am of the school that love is the most important thing you need. There is a time and a place to pick a text up and just tear it apart, with some of my other projects I have done more than my fair share of this. But when it comes to learning from texts, and this is what I hope I’ll accomplish, I am not going to apply the academic gaze which seeks to deconstruct texts and keep us down to earth. Rather, with loving these texts and seeking to learn from, instead of seeking to correct and lecture, we will allow these texts to take us up to heaven.

Practically speaking what this means is that I will read these texts in order to draw meaning out of them, not just data for an academic paper to publish. I will come at these works from a traditional Christian perspective and try to find the ways in which they tell us something about the structure of reality, in other words there will be a lot symbolic analysis. When weird things pop up I am going to assume that this is an opportunity to learn something, rather than apply a materialistic lens which brushes it off as mere superstition or fantasy. I hope that in the course of this podcast I will be able to impart this to y’all.

However, as I am an Orthodox Christian reading what will often be texts from the post-Schism Christian west. There will be still be things I disagree with, but my quibbles will be from (hopefully) an Orthodox perspective, and not the handwaving academic perspective which I see in medieval studies all too often stemming from an alleged position of superiority.

Podcasting Philosophy

I have listened to a lot of podcasts in the past. Several years ago I was probably listening to 20-30 hours of content a week. It was almost a full time job just keeping up with everything I was listening to. I have also been on the other end producing content. In 2018 I ran a mildly successful academic style history podcast.

However, this was at a time when I didn’t have a full time job so it was much easier. Now that I have more obligations I don’t listen to nearly as much content and have become more more picky about what I listen to.

One thing I realized when I had to become more selective is that so many podcasts have a really good premise but are just bad podcasts. The main culprit is that they don’t know how to balance information density. Either podcasts are way too dense and would serve better in some written form, but much more often I find podcasts to just be extremely informationally sparse. Podcasting fills a great niche in terms of information density from radio talk shows designed for an audience that’s tuning in and out, and more informationally dense mediums such as audio books that will brutally punish you for even a moment’s lapse in attention. The middle ground is being able to walk, drive, work out, or wash dishes with being able to break attention for a few moments and then return without being totally lost. Momentary lapses in attention shouldn’t be punishing when listening to a podcast, however attentive listening should also be rewarded. This is the goal for this podcast.

I’m outlining this to also keep myself in check. I hope that this podcast will fulfill these goals. I encourage you to check out the catalog of episodes. Thank you so much!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chroniclesofchirstendom.substack.com