We kick our 2019 with a return to narrative history, hearing about a terrible way to die and how not to profit off the deaths of others during a plague from William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum, and we also look all the way back to the first book of Samuel to learn how to rid oneself of some particularly uncomfortable plagues from God. We also discover how Raiders of the Lost Ark should have ended.

Today's Texts:

William of Malmesbury. Chronicle of the Kings of England. Edited by J.A. Giles, translated by John Sharpe and J.A. Giles, George Bell & Sons, 1895. Google Books.

Wycliffe, John and John Purvey. Wycliffe's Bible: A Modern-Spelling Version of the 14th-Century Middle English Translation. Edited and translated by Terence P. Noble, Createspace, 2012.

References:

Drummond, David. Mouse Traps: A Quick Scamper through their Long History. North American Trap Collectors Association, 2005.

Farber, Zev. "Unspoken Hemorrhoids: Making the Torah Reading Polite." TheTorah.com, https://thetorah.com/unspoken-hemorrhoids-making-the-torah-reading-polite/.

Kiser, Lisa J. "Resident Aliens: The Literary Ecology of Medieval Mice." Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, Ohio State UP, 2015, pp. 151-167. Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/11171687/Resident_Aliens_The_Literary_Ecology_of_Medieval_Mice.