The History Cafe

We’re back here at the History Cafe!  (along with major epidemics…maybe I should not make to big a deal of that…)  But considering the current pandemic and sitting in my house on lock-down along with much of the rest of the world, it seemed like a good time to revisit one of the touchstone’s of epidemic disease: The Black Death.  The Black Death, as we discuss, is one of those medieval topics where our understanding has actually changed radically in just the last couple of decades.  For a decade or so, there was significant debate about the exact nature of the disease, its origin, and why it killed so many people in the fourteenth and subsequent centuries.  Recent archaeological and genetic evidence have answered some persistent questions while raising a host of others.  We now know more than ever about the genetic history of the bacteria and how the Black Death in Europe relates to outbreaks of plague all over the world.  However, we also have many new questions about the persistence of the plague in Europe, and the connections between genetic shifts and the virality and lethality of the disease.

My guest on the podcast is professor Abigail Agresta from George Washington University in DC.  I talked to her for a previous podcast (which is a pretty good one, if I do say so) on the anti-Jewish riots in Valencia and Spain more broadly in 1391.  So if you have not heard that podcast, go back and listen to it HERE.  We go through both the classic story of the Black Death, as well as what new research has to say about this fascinating history.

Oh, and since I’m trying to streamline this podcasting process, I will be posting the podcasts with food images as usual, but I won’t put in a nice description since it tended to just slow down posting…and really this podcast is about history, not food.  Hopefully no one is too disappointed by this.  E-mail me, though, if you want to know what the pictures are of (when it’s not obvious).

 

Bibliography or links mentioned in the episode:

In Our Time podcast (From a few years ago)

And Cambridge put together a whole list of podcasts on epidemics, plague and otherwise!  Lots of options.

And some reading:

Ellen Arnold’s guest blog post at “How did we get in this mess?”

And she tweets on many medieval things @EFArnold

The classic narrative:

Benedictow, Ole J.  The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History. Boydell and Brewer, 2004.

Attacks on the classic narrative:

Herlihy, David.  The Black Death and the Transformation of the West. Harvard University Press, 1997.

Cohen, Samuel Kline.  The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. Oxford University Press, 2002.

The new understanding (and there is much more of this…e-mail me if you want):

Green, Monica, editor.  Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death; The Medieval Globe vol. 1 (2014).

This has several articles by authors we mention in addition to Monica Green’s own introduction which lays out many of the new directions in plague research.

Well, it’s been a year since my last podcast and this podcast took a couple of months to edit. Bad turn around time all around.  But I’m still here and still more or less at this!  I will hopefully be doing more in the future, but might have to have another few months hiatus before I really get back to producing them.  In the meantime, this is a lengthy podcast with a wide variety of thoughts about both past and present and nationalism and white supremacy.  But it’s all inflected through the life of a German conductor named Wilhelm Furtwangler.  He was a true romantic, something of an idealist, and fairly unrepentent about his own ideals.  That said, he didn’t really know what to do with the Nazi regime and its virulent anti-semitism.  He himself seems not to have been anti-semitic, but also seems to have refused to believe how far the Nazi’s could go.  All through the war, Furtwangler continued to fight with the Nazis in power, while never deciding to leave Germany until the very end (almost literally the very end…in January of 1945, he left Austria for Switzerland when he heard he had been threatened – again – with arrest by the regime.)  His belief that music transcended politics is still a common idea, particularly in symphonic or abstract music, but as my guest elaborate, such a view can be pretty problematic.

 

My guests are both musicologists and composers (and, it turns out, they are Jewish, but that’s not necessarily the point) so it’s a solid cast of people to talk about musical ideals, art, politics, and representations of evil ideas.  Stan Charkey taught composition and music history at Marlboro for years; Etan Nasreddin-Longo studied composition and musicology at the University of Chicago and taught for a while at UC Riverside.  At the end of our discussion, we even conclude with a contemporary (it really was contemporary when I recorded this…it’s still recent) set of events surrounding similar questions in our own day.  As usual, there are a lot of references to pieces of music and a few snippets in the video that I have listed below if you want to link to them.

 

Since this is such a long podcast, you will definitely need at least a couple of beers…you can make them German if you’re feeling perhaps slightly ironic, or if you’re feeling extra ironic, you could go with the He’Brew from Shmaltz Brewing in Clifton Park, NY.  In either case, I recommend a good Sauerbraten with Spaetzle (a sort Sauerbraten is not dissimilar from corned beef and the spaetzle is a noodle or dumpling popular in Jewish cooking but still popular today in Austria, Poland, and parts of Germany.)  It’s hearty stuff which you might need to get through this whole podcast!

Finally, in the podcast, we play excerpts from the following Furtwangler performances:

Beethoven 5 in 1945 (one of the first concerts of Berlin after the war)

Beethoven 9 in 1942 (For Hitler’s Birthday!)

Brahms 2 in 1945 (recorded days before he fled for Switzerland)

 

I have finally done the thing – I’ve had a couple of people ask me about doing something on medievalism (Fantasy…Lord of the Rings…you know, your basic medieval themed pop culture production.)  And in this case, we’re talking about Game of Thrones (yes, that’s Tyrion Lanniser eating Lamprey Pie over there).  There are lots of blogs and podcasts dedicated to this sort of thing, so I’ve always hesitated, but I finally struck on a topic that didn’t seem well represented out there in the interwebs and I found a great accomplice to talk with me and make sure I (an admittedly weak fan of the show) didn’t make any really glaring mistakes.  Elly Truitt is associate professor of Medieval History at Bryn Mawr college and writes about medievalism among other topics (medieval and modern cultural connections, modernity, etc) on her blog Medieval Robots.  She’s also done a podcast about her book of the same name (from UPenn Press).  She’s also published a couple of cool essays about medieval machines and medieval fantasy, so clearly this was the right person for the job and I’m really happy she agreed to do this.

In the podcast, we talk about the geographic assumptions implicit in the Game of Thrones world: what do the directions of North, South, East, and West mean in the world?  How do they identify people from hot or cold climates?  How do characters in the world deal with “foreign” people and what do they mean by that depending on where they come from?  It’s a good conversation and there’s plenty more to say – if you really disagree (or really agree, hopefully) talk about it in the comments…this is Game of Thrones after all.

And for a real Game of Thrones dish of food, I appreciated the detail that when Tyrion is berating Cersei about the need for Joffrey to participate in the battle against Stannis late in season 2, he compliments Cersei on the Lamprey Pie (which, apparently, he has a fondness for.)  It’s a great choice since both eel and lamprey were favorites of the European nobility in the late middle ages (The image to the right is a basic fish pie…but it could be eel or lamprey).  It is also a bit of an ominous food as the extremely cold and wet lamprey (according to humoral theory) was dangerous to eat without really dowsing it in strong hot spices (pepper, ginger, etc.) or even killing it by drowning it in wine.  Paul Freedman tells the story of how King Henry I of England, defied his doctors orders to stay away from such fish, ate a large plate of lamprey and died!  If you can get a hold of lamprey or eel (I personally have not had lamprey, but I do actually really like eel…in sushi, smoked, or in pie), you can make yourself a lamprey pie with one of a number of historical recipes.

The clips played in the podcast from the show come from:

Jorah Mormont narrating the “Free Cities” from the history and lore extras, Oberyn Martell talking to Varys in season 4, episode 6, and season 2, episode 7 in Qarth.

So as I say in the first two minutes of the podcast – I somehow

recorded and even edited this podcast back in June when England voted to leave the European Union and then I failed to post it.  (And then I go on to say that I want to get through editing and posting fasted.  Ha!)  But anyway, the night of election 2016 here in the US seems like a plenty opportune time to post the same ideas since Trump’s campaign has often been compared to Brexit itself.  Although as I write this it is not really yet clear if the surprise Brexit victory will repeat itself.

The podcast itself looks at how the 19th century ideas of nationalism have informed current political rhetoric.  I get a bit far afield, talking about various forms of possible political organization and thinking about what a “nation-state” means.  These are questions that all have long books written about them, including the fairly famous work on nationalism by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.  But one point I found odd was how little people used the explicit ideas of nationalism when describing especially Donald Trump’s campaign (those deeply opposed to him often use fascist, when I think nationalist is more appropriate…and possibly just as worrying) but also when talking about Brexit, although England for the English was definitely a rallying cry for that vote.  So this is my meditation on those questions.  I also talk about the relative decline in nationalism and even the nation state itself in the last 50 years (although as these debates prove, it sure isn’t gone yet!)

And for this nationalist discourse, of course you need a good nationalist dish: fish, chips, and mushy peas…where the best cod has come from Canada, the potatoes originated in South America (although you can surely grow potatoes in England these days), and the method of frying was purportedly brought by Jews fleeing Spain in the 15th century (although, frankly, I doubt that, because dipping something in batter and frying it?  Almost everyone has thought of that in the culinary traditions of the world…it is just so delicious.)  But don’t worry!  Peas are a long, long (millennia, really…) staple in England.  Served with a very Mediterranean lemon, of course.  So enjoy!

Bibliography:

In addition to the book above, there is a lot of material on multiple topics – too long to list in short form here and I don’t even quite know what books to start with.  So if you want anything in particular, e-mail me!

This month (bi-month?  Something like that – I wish these happened

a little more frequently) I’m again talking with my friend, medievalist and journalist Clare Gillis.  In part in response to the topic popping up in the news from time to time, I figured we should have a conversation about Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace titled The Hedgehog and the Fox.  

Initially, the Hedgehog and the Fox were meant to distinguish between writers or historians that look at the world through a single, over-arching lens in formulating their explanations and their work (the hedgehogs who know “one big thing”).  Versus the foxes that are constantly adapting or changing how they approach problems and the solutions they rely on (the Foxes who “know many things”).  The concept applies fairly directly to history and is something that many historians are familiar with, but the appearance in politics and other contemporary areas of discussion amuses me and it seemed worth talking about.

In the podcast, we explain how Isaiah Berlin formulated the original essay and how it applies to War and Peace and then we branch off from there.  Along the way, Clare and I talk about a wide variety of topics that come out of the conceit of the Hedgehog and the Fox ranging from our dissertation topics, the methodology of doing history, the relation of the past to the present, high medieval political violence, and Newt Gingrich’s tweets about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (fair warning…for that you actually have to wait almost to the very end, but it is in there – I promise!)

It is tempting, in light of the reliance on War and Peace for the origins of this topic, to present a great banquet dish that Tolstoy would have enjoyed as the meal for this hefty podcast.  However, it turns out that Tolstoy was a fairly moralistic eater – a vegetarian and generally opposed to extravagant food.  He advocated eating a combination of bread, oats, and rice for the majority of one’s life – not an entirely inspiring menu for our conversation.  So instead of a full meal as the length clearly implies, I’m going with what was purportedly Tolstoy’s favorite pie – often called “Anke Pie.”  It’s really more of a lemon tart with a sweet pound-cake like crust covered or filled with an sweetened lemon custard thickened with eggs.  There are Several Recipes available on the internet and if you try one, I’d love to hear how it turned out!

 

Bibliography (in rough order of podcast mention):

Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).

Philip Tetlock and D. Gardiner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (New York: Crown, 2015).

Thomas Bisson, Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140-1200 (Harvard University Press, 1998).

Bisson, Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe (U. Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power Lordship and the Origins of European Government (Princeton University Press, 2015).

Michael McCormick,

This month (bi-month?  I’ve not been the most regular about getting something out even every other month!) I talk about one of my visits to the Cathedral archive in Spain.  Archives form the core of most (though not all) historical work.  Every major city or town has some form of archive with the documents and records produced in that place and for Europe, that means documents about the place often going back centuries.

 

Because they hold the records of a place, they are also sometimes the site of debates or struggles about the past.  In the podcast, I bring up a couple of examples – Memorial Archive in Russia and the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo – that have been points of serious conflict in the recent past.  There are a few examples towards the end of how we all now engage in archiving activities and some of the questions involved in the preservation of information.

This is one of the more rarefied topics in this series, so for a small lunch, I would recommend a Spanish style sandwich (usually called a Bocadillo) which I frequently ate during breaks from archival work.  In their simplest form, they are usually just meat or cheese on a thin baguette (often enough only Spanish jamon).  They appear even in airports and train stations, but in Barcelona there are some shops that sell upgraded bocadillos including olives, avocado, diverse sauces and other accoutrements.  I personally always leaned towards the sandwiches with tortilla (egg and potato) in them plus roasted peppers or tomatoes (or like the image – tomato and bacon!)

Welcome to 2016!

I’ve been a bit delinquent with podcasts for a couple of months, but here, finally, is a new one.  This one was inspired a few months back by the youtube comment stream (crazy but true!) on a John Oliver Last Week Tonight clip: the “How is this still a thing?” on Columbus Day.  Don’t ask how I ended up reading that far into the comment stream…in general I’m a fan of John Oliver, but not an avid reader of youtube comments.

But back to this podcast.  Basically, someone took the discussion about Columbus and turned it towards the general idea of the pros and cons of “Western Civilization” (one of those great internet almost unanswerable threads that invites plenty of trolling.)  In and amongst the discussion someone brought up Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne as evidence (in a discussion with otherwise about zero evidence.)  In the podcast, I talk with an early medieval expert – Clare Gillis, who is great to talk to – about how Pirenne ended up in that sort of discussion as well as the origins of Pirenne’s ideas and his place in contemporary medieval scholarship.

Lastly, I just want to note that my dad gave me a copy of Pirenne’s Economic and social history of Medieval Europe, before I had even really become a Medievalist.  He enjoyed reading Pirenne in college, before a lot of the revision we talk about in this podcast had taken place, so this podcast is dedicated to him for having introduced me to Pirenne in the first place.  Thanks!

And for the food, clearly a full dinner that crosses the “Pirenne Line” mentioned in the podcast is in order.  So I recommend Duck a l’Orange.  Sautéed or roasted duck with a deglazed brown sauce sweetened with orange juice and sugar and served with orange slices.  Humans in Europe have been eating duck for a very long time.  However, citrus fruits probably originated in central Asia (perhaps northern India).  Lemons appeared in Rome, but more as decorative plants than as food.  The use of oranges and lemons in cooking entered Europe as a direct influence of Islam in Sicily, Italy, and Spain.  Lemons and Oranges are now almost ubiquitous fruits, but even in the 16th or 17th century, they would have felt foreign or somewhat exotic in European cooking.  But today there are several European “classic” dishes that involve citrus as a core component – hence Duck a l’Orange.

Bibliography:

There are tons of books on any of these topics as I mention in the podcast, so e-mail if you want to read more, but for the main references from the podcast itself, here they are.

 

Here is the last installment of the History Cafe visits the Metropolitan museum in New York.  If you didn’t hear the first two, they are all separate topics.  The first two cover the twelfth century, and late-medieval mysticism.  This time, we’re talking about archeological reconstructions.  Most of the archeological sites and many of the ruins we look at are in part repaired or reconstructed and it isn’t always obvious how. In this podcast, we talk about some of the problems and choices that people make and how we as scholars and as the public view ancient artifacts in a museum (and in New York.)

The focal points for the first half of the podcast are the well known Temple of Dendur in the Met and the building itself of the Cloisters Museum – both of which were originally ancient buildings from across the Atlantic that have been reconstructed in New York City.  We talk about how they got there as well as the choices made in their current location and presentation.  Then we discuss

And for food, since in many ways this is a podcast about NYC, what could be more New York than a big plate of smoked fish with some bagels and cream cheese…when I was there, I was fortunate enough to have time for an extended breakfast of a bagel absolutely stuffed with amazing king salmon lox made by Shelsky‘s in Brooklyn.  I also bought a big piece of hot smoked bluefish caught on the Atlantic coast to bring home for the next day’s breakfast.  Amazing.

(And if you’re not sure of the difference between hot smoked and lox, you should look it up – there’s a big difference…and here Lauren Mancia and I part ways.  She, as a New Yorker, sweared up and down that lox is required at all bagel and salmon occassions and that hot-smoked salmon is tough, greasy, and generally unpalatable.  As an original northwesterner myself, I find lox often flavorless and stringy and hot-smoked salmon richer, denser and generally more delicious.  Shelsky’s lox, though, is amazing even to a heretic such as myself.  So yeah, get yourself some smoked fish…)

And finally, here are the images and links mentioned in the podcast basically in order of appearance:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LINKS:

The Athens Charter

The Venice Charter

Current UNESCO conventions and agreements

Music Credit:

The two musical interludes are both excertps from Steve Reich’s “City Life” performed by Ensemble Diagonale, directed by Rene Bosc.

This month I have another “live” cast recorded in the city of Valencia.  Over the course of the podcast, I walk up the main bell tower of the Cathedral of Valencia to listen to the huge bell at the top, nicknamed the “micalet,” strike noon.  Along the way, with a few other bells woven in for good measure, I talk about how large cast bells first came to be used in late Medieval Europe and what they symbolized for the Christians who rang them.  Bells in medieval Europe took on distinct personalities often with inscriptions speaking in the first person talking about all of the good that a bell could achieve.  In their most general sense, they made the smaller and local rituals of the mass and the liturgy within a church building legible and audible for a much wider space, defining a sonic community of all those who could hear the bell and recognize what its ringing represented.

In the podcast, I mention a few differen bells, a film, and one bell recast as a chandelier (yes, really!)  So here are their images and links for reference:

 

Since we’re in Valencia, some sort of dish with rice is obvious required.  Paella is ridiculously common – even though this would often be a dinner or full meal, but hey, in Spain they also eat the large meal in the middle of the day, so think of it as a really big lunch.  However, traditional Valencian paella is usually made with chicken, rabbit, breen beans, and snails (yeah…snails…no seafood – that’s considered a different dish.)  But I recommend if you can find it a good arròs negre.  This is a rice dish with a bunch of seafood (muscles, clams, sometimes cuttlefish) that is then flavored with garlic and squid ink, turning it pretty black and very fishy.  The image here has it served with roasted peppers and you almost always get it with a side of alioli, which is delicious.

And lastly, a bit of bibliography:

O. R. Constable, “Regulating Religious Noise: The Council of Vienne, the Mosque Call and Muslim Pilgrimage in the Late Medieval Mediterranean World,” Medieval Encounters 16 (2010) 64–95.

Michelle Garceau, “‘I call the people.’ Church bells in fourteenth-century Catalunya,” Journal of Medieval History, Volume 37, Issue 2, 2011.

Arnold and Goodson, “Resounding Community: The History and Meaning of Medieval Church Bells,” in Viator 43 No. 1 (2012) 99–130.

As a follow-up to last month’s shot about violence, this month I have an interview with Abigail Agresta talking about a series of anti-Jewish riots that hit numerous cities in Spain in 1391, starting with Seville and spreading across most of Spain.  We focused mostly on the interpretations of one of the worst riots in the city of Valencia.  On the way, we talk quite a bit about how scholars think about anti-Jewish violence in the medieval period, what relationship that violence has to modern anti-semitism, and the changing character of Christianity’s relationship to Judaism.

These riots in 1391 offer a great way to think about inter-faith relationships in part because Spanish Jews have often been seen (and not without good reason) as being quite well treated by both Catholic and Muslim majorities during the medieval period.  However, even this good treatment was never a perfect guard against the possibility of violence against minorities.  In Valencia, even as the violence broke out, the city leaders attempted to quell it first and then later attempted to explain to the king why they had been unsuccessful at protecting the Jews – something they readily acknowledged as their normal responsibility.

This is also the first podcast in this series with incidental music.  There are three selections all from the group “Cinco Siglos” and their disc Sones de Sefarad.

Excerpt 1: “La Fuente Fría”

Excerpt 2: “Ahot Ketana”

Excerpt 3: “Está Raquel lastimosa”

For food, I recommend a nice dish of Bamyas.  It’s an Arabic name but a common food in the Sephardi diaspora.  It’s a dish of Okra in tomato sauce (and the tomatoes should tip you off that this is not a medieval dish…)  Like the Sephardi themselves, okra was probably part of medieval Spain, but today it’s actually quite hard to find.  However, there are good recipes for it (and many Sephardi grandmothers surely have their own version) in several traditional Jewish cookbooks.  It’s really quite simple, though – well chosen soft ripe Okra pods, light tomato sauce, and a ton of olive oil and garlic.  Fry the pods in the oil, add the garlic and then simmer for 15 minutes or so in the tomato sauce.  If it were more Spanish, you’d pour some extra oil and salt right on top at the table before mopping it up with bread.

Bibliography:

David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (University of Chicago, 2014).

David Nirenberg, “Massacre and Miracle in Valencia 1391,” in La Corona catalanoaragonesa, l’Islam i el món mediterrani (CSIC, 1013).

Mark Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom: Society, Economy, and Politics in Morvedre, 1248-1391 (Brill, 2004).

Mark Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth Century Spain (Princeton University Press, 2010).