Medieval Death Trip

We conclude St. Patrick's Confessio this episode, taking a look at Patrick's education and literary style, as well as the cultural context of missionary activity in the 5th century. We also are left wondering if that money was just resting in his account... (/FatherTed)

Today's Texts:

Patrick. Confession. St. Patrick: His Writings and Life, edited and translated by Newport J.D. White, Macmillan, 1920, pp. 31-51. Google Books.

References:

Adams, J.N. An Anthology of Informal Latin, 200 BC - AD 900: Fifty Texts with Translations and Linguistic Commentary. Cambridge UP, 2016.

Bieler, Ludwig. "The Place of Saint Patrick in Latin Language and Literature." Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 6, no. 2, Apr. 1952, pp. 65-98. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/1582579.

de Paor, Máire B. Patrick: The Pilgrim Apostle of Ireland. Regan Books–HarperCollins, 1998.

Gellrich, Jesse M. Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts of Writing, Politics, and Poetry. Princeton UP, 1995.

Hood, A.B.E, editor and translator. St. Patrick: His Writings and Muirchu's Life. Phillimore, 1978.

Kelly, David. "St Patrick's Writings: Confessio and Epistola." Saint Patrick's Confessio, Royal Irish Academy, 2011, www.confessio.ie/more/article_kelly#.

McCaffrey, Carmel, and Leo Eaton. In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish, from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English. New Amsterdam Books, 2002.

Olden, Thomas, translator. The Confession of St. Patrick. George Drought, 1853. Google Books.

This March, we're going back to one of the earliest surviving St. Patrick texts, his own autobiographical Confessio. This episode we'll hear the first half, which covers Patrick's abduction from the coast of 5th-century Britain into slavery in Ireland and continues up to the start of his mission to convert the Irish some thirty years later.

Today's Text:

Patrick. Confession. St. Patrick: His Writings and Life, edited and translated by Newport J.D. White, Macmillan, 1920, pp. 31-51. Google Books.

References:

Adams, J.N. An Anthology of Informal Latin, 200 BC - AD 900: Fifty Texts with Translations and Linguistic Commentary. Cambridge UP, 2016.

Bieler, Ludwig. "The Place of Saint Patrick in Latin Language and Literature." Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 6, no. 2, Apr. 1952, pp. 65-98. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/1582579.

de Paor, Máire B. Patrick: The Pilgrim Apostle of Ireland. Regan Books–HarperCollins, 1998.

Gellrich, Jesse M. Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts of Writing, Politics, and Poetry. Princeton UP, 1995.

Hood, A.B.E, editor and translator. St. Patrick: His Writings and Muirchu's Life. Phillimore, 1978.

Kelly, David. "St Patrick's Writings: Confessio and Epistola." Saint Patrick's Confessio, Royal Irish Academy, 2011, www.confessio.ie/more/article_kelly#.

McCaffrey, Carmel, and Leo Eaton. In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish, from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English. New Amsterdam Books, 2002.

Olden, Thomas, translator. The Confession of St. Patrick. George Drought, 1853. Google Books.

Get more info at: http://www.medievaldeathtrip.com

For Valentine's Day, we have a tale not so much of love, but of supernatural seduction. This is the story of a chaste young woman of the town of Dunwich stalked by a devil, as reported in The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth. We also take a look at real and fictional Dunwich (a town of the Lovecraft mythos), and examine what exactly (or inexactly) an incubus was thought to be.

Today's Text:

The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, written by Thomas of Monmouth and translated by Augustus Jessopp and M.R. James. Cambridge UP, 1896. [Available on Google Books.]

References:

Bryant B.L. "H. P. Lovecraft’s 'Unnamable' Middle Ages." Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture, edited by Gail Ashton and Dan Kline, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 113-128.

Isidore of Seville. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Translated by Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof with Muriel Hall, Cambridge UP, 2006.

van der Lugt, Maaike. "The Incubus in Scholastic Debate: Medicine, Theology, and Popular Belief." Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, edited by Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler, Boydell & Brewer, 2001, pp. 175-200.

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.

Listeners! This weekend (Feb. 9-10) I'll be updating many of the descriptions and tags on old episodes in our podcast RSS feed. There is a possibility that some podcast manager apps (especially iTunes) will interpret these changes as a whole lot of new episodes being posted and may try to download them all.

As a precaution to save bandwidth, you might go to your settings for this podcast in your podcast listening app and set it to download only the most recent episodes so that you don't end up getting duplicates of the whole back catalogue.

In this final episode in our holiday chess series, we finish off the last pages in William Caxton's The Game and Playe of the Chess, looking at the pawn and the importance of the common people to the realm, and we consider the how to explain pawns becoming queens in a medieval context.

This fourth installment of our holiday chess series finishes off the back rank of pieces: the bishop (or alphyn), the knight, and the rook. We also explore a long-standing Wikipedia beef over rook terminology, and recommend a modern board game that plunges you into the paranoid world of zombie survival.

Caxton, William. The Game and Playe of the Chesse. Edited by Jenny Adams, TEAMS Middle English Text Series, U of Rochester, 2009, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/adams-caxton-game-and-playe-of-the-chesse.

Chapter Images:

Early bishops, knight, and rook: Sotheby's Arts of the Islamic World Auction (20 April 2016), Lots 100 and 101. http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/2016/arts-islamic-world-l16220.html

Later bishop: http://ancientchess.com/page/play-courier-chess.htm & https://www.zafiyashop.xyz/vintage-chess-c-1_204_205_298/antique-vintage-wooden-st-george-black-bishop-chess-piece-spare-p-3500.html

Later bishop/rook comparison: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41694919?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Dowel pieces: http://www.chess-museum.com/regency-chess-sets.html

Staunton pieces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staunton_chess_set#/media/File:JaquesCookStaunton.jpg

In the third episode of our holiday series of excerpts from William Caxton's The Game and Playe of the Chesse, we learn about how the king and queen move, which was a bit different in the 15th century than it is today. We also consider the difficulty of working out the rules of an ancient game, even when you have the remarkable fortune to find them written down, as seen in the case of the Royal Game of Ur.

In this second installment of our holiday series of excerpts from William Caxton's The Game and Playe of the Chesse, we hear about the layout of the chessboard and what it represents. We also look at some of the games that chess replaced in Europe, including the Roman ludus latrunculorum, the Celtic fidchell or gwyddbwyell, and the Norse tafl or hnefatafl. And finally, we consider different ways in which the board of a board game might be constituted.

We kick off a holiday miniseries of chess lore from William Caxton's The Game and the Playe of the Chesse with one version of how chess was invented. We then some historical corrections to this account and also hear one of the earliest written accounts of chess, the Persian Chatrang-namak.