This month on the History Cafe, we’re trying something new.  This is a relatively short podcast (10 minutes) that asks a question with a handful of examples.  It is in no way exhaustive, but hopefully sparks a fair amount of thought.  It is also an example (to me, anyway) of how history often plays out in its roll as an explainer of the world today.  The podcast is about historical violence – I ask the question: how do we argue that a certain ideology, religion, or group is violent?

We often describe ideologies or groups as “violent” and by this we mean more violent than we are (or our ideologies are).  But such a designation relies implicitly and sometimes explicitly on a set of historical factors that we use as comparison points to make such a judgement.  In the contemporary US, Islam is the chief example of a potentially “violent ideology,” but thirty years ago Communism (and its godlessness) would have been the chief suspect.  I give a number of examples and mention their history, but nothing is complete or even remotely thorough.  I would encourage you to do any background reading you think would be interesting in this regard and hopefully this will spark lots of conversations.

Since it’s a short podcast, there’s only time to have your good shot of espresso (and perhaps a biscotti as I mention in the podcast).  But if you haven’t made your own biscotti, I definitely recommend it.  Here’s a recipe for a nutty version I find delicious.

3 C all purpose flour

1 C sugar

1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp baking powder

2 eggs

1/4 cup almond, walnut or pistachio oil (depending on desired flavor)

2 Tbs. melted butter

1/2 tsp. each almond extract and vanilla extract

1 C nuts (again, Pistachios or Almonds would be my preference

Mix the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder.  Then blend in the eggs, oil, butter and extracts and kneed it to create a smooth dough.  (You can also mix it all in a mixer with a dough hook until well combined)

Divide the batter into two equal portions and create a log about 6 inches wide and no more than 2 inches thick (one inch is plenty).  Each log will probably be  a little over a foot long.

Bake at 350 for around 30 minutes (until firm and light brown.)  Then remove and set on a rack until cool enough to touch.  Slice the loaf diagonally (around 1/2 inch slices) to create the biscotti shaped pieces.  Return to the oven at around 300 degrees and brown on both sides (another 10-15 minutes.)  Remove and allow to cool completely.

And obviously, dip in your coffee.

I don’t have particular bibliography for the shot – there are too many books about any of the examples I give to recommend a particular.  If you want a suggestion on a particular topic, feel free to ask in the comments or send me an e-mail.

This is part two of our History Cafe Visits the Met series and Lauren Mancia is back to talk about how objects and images interacted with Medieval ideas of mystical experience.  This is the podcast where we talk about the little bed (see the image below).  We were down in the main museum, not in the cloisters, and we looked at a seemingly random set of images connected by their very close connection to the spiritual practices of mysticism.

In medieval mysticism, the goal was a close union with the divine.  Most people who considered themselves mystics were aware that divine union often involves disolution of physical and bodily experience.  Some writers articulate that the physical world can only get in the way of union with the divine.  However, the images and objects we look at proved useful for a variety of spiritual practice that some found useful in advancing their goal of a closer union with the divine.  All of the images we discuss are listen below with links to their official pages from the Metropolitan Museum.  Also, I’ve listed the room numbers here so you can look at them yourself if you happen to be at the museum.

We started in Gallery 601 looking at a painting of St. Francis with the stigmata.

 

After that, we walked around the corner to Gallery 625 to find a multi-panel Nativity scene from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden.

After these two, we took a longer walk down the great stairs, through the big altar screen in Gallery 305:

And into Gallery 306 for a look at three different art works.  First we talk about a pair of much larger sculptures, one of a Pietá, and one of the Entombment of Christ.  In both of them, donors and regular people are portrayed touching and interacting with the divine body.

After the two larger sculptures, we looked at a very intimate and quirky little object: a bed of the infant Jesus literally meant for playing with Jesus dolls.

And finally, we went back through Gallery 305 and tucked ourselves around the corner in Gallery 304 to look at a sculpture of the Visitation (with Mary and Elizabeth) where both women have rock crystal representations of their wombs.

Those aren’t quite all the images we mentioned through the course of the podcast…we also commented on the wooden Virgin and Child sculptures and on a Mary where the front opens up, but both of those comments are pretty short and you can look them up on the Met website if you want.  This should give you a good sense of what we’re describing.

Now for the food – in the last really spiritual podcast, we suggested just plain bread and water…and certainly that would make for a good mystical diet.  However, this is a dinner-length podcast, so I recommend a solid plate of fish and chips with coleslaw.  Filling, but appropriate for Catholic fast days.  Better yet, a big fried-fish sandwich with the coleslaw right on the sandwich (I love that.)  For a good piece of fried cod, the simplest way to do it is make a breading (flower, cornmeal, spices) and a liquid (eggs or milk or both).  Coat the fish in the breading, roll it in the liquid, then press it in the breading again so it’s more thickly coated.  Fry in a good high-temperature oil.  And for the slaw, I low coleslaw with about half an apple grated in with the cabbage and carrot and also a strong dose of celery seed in the dressing (mayo, cider vinegar, oregano, salt, pepper, celery seed…perhaps a little mustard if you like that sort of thing.)  Tartar sauce, potatoes in whatever form you want,

Lauren Mancia is back and for a whole series we are calling The History Cafe Visits the Met!  We recorded several podcasts live at the Met Museum looking at specific items in the collections ranging from the Gothic Chapel to the Temple of Dendur to a little tiny doll’s bed used for mystical contemplation (this will be coming up soon!)  For today, we have our discussion of several objects in the Gothic Chapel at the Cloisters Museum.

The Gothic Chapel provides a great space for considering what Lauren refers to in the podcast as “The Gothic Moment;” a point in time when a great deal of Medieval culture began to shift – theological understandings, political power, artistic culture, economics, trade, and law just to name a few.  In the podcast, we at least touch on many of these aspects and how they interact with one another.  To do this, we focus on a series of specific objects on display at the chapel, starting with the tomb of Ermengol VIII, count of Urgell.  If you happen to be at the Cloisters, we’ll indicate where we’re standing and you can walk around with us, but if not, the images are here below in order of their mention.  All of the images are from the Cloisters website and clicking on the image brings you directly to the original site where they have more detailed information about each object (and where you can totally zoom in for excellent detail.)

For this podcast, I would recommend a good plate of bolets and canelons (perhaps canelons filled with bolets.)  They aren’t exactly a “Gothic Moment” of food – and really there isn’t such a thing since we have almost no recipes from that century, although we know something about what they ate generally.  Canelons are a Catalan version of Cannelloni…tube shaped pastas stuffed with any number of things including ground chicken, beef, fish, spinach, or my favorite, wild mushrooms (called Bolets in Catalan).  This might seem an odd choice for such a wide reaching tale as we have about the twelfth century, but for me pasta, spinach, and ground meat call to mind both Jewish and Islamic influences in Spanish food, while the particularly Pirennean bolets invoke the small mountain kingdoms maintaining their own sense of identity (as any mushroom collector can tell you…this has been going on for centuries…)  They’re served with bechamel sauce and cheese on top.  Delicious.

IMAGES:

Tomb of Ermengol VIII, Count of Urgell

 

Tomb Effigy of Jean d’Alluye, Crusader

 

A Couple of Examples of the Stained Glass –

Adoration of the Magi and Saint Nicholas

For a bunch more images of the Stained Glass, look at the Full Gallery

This is another live-in-Spain podcast, this time from the famous monumental mosque-cathedral in Cordoba.  Cordoba was an important Roman provincial town, a military outpost of the Visigoths, and for centuries one of the most important seats of Islamic culture in Spain until it was conquered by Ferdinand III of Castile in 1236.  The main Christian administration of Andalusia, the southern province on the Spanish peninsula, came to be in Sevilla, especially after Sevilla became the main port for communication with Spain’s colonial endeavors in the Americas.  This left Cordoba a smaller regional capital for the subsequent centuries until today, when its population is scarcely larger than it was during its heyday under the Umayyad Caliph in the eigth and ninth centuries.  Visiting Cordoba, there are significant structures around the city from almost every one of these historical periods, making it incredibly dense with monuments despite its small size.

Through this entire time, one of the religious centers of the city remained in almost constant use – first as a temple to Janus, then as a significant Visigothic church to the martyr St. Vincent, then as an increasingly large Caliphal mosque, eventually becoming one of the larger mosques in the Muslim world, and finally rebuilt in the sixteenth century as the Christian cathedral of its diocese.  My podcast is concerned both with this persistent history and with how that narrative has been used by Spanish historians to try to tell different narratives about how Christians and Muslims have gotten along, what roll that violence played in Christian and Muslims conquests, and even what it means to be “Spanish” today.  So there’s some description of the building itself and a fair amount of discussion of historiography.  I’ve embedded a few images in the mp3 if your player can detect that, but really if you want to look at the mosque-cathedral, you should check out their new virtual tour site.  It’s totally amazing.

This is a lunch-sized podcast and if you’re in cordoba, I totally recommend trying Salmorejo.  The thick tomato soup is a more substantial version of its lighter cousin, gazpacho, which in Cordoba is something you drink.  Salmorejo is thickened with bread crumbs and has chopped hard-boiled egg and bits of ham sprinkled on top.  With some pepper and olive oil and a slice of bread, it’s surprisingly filling and really delicious.  It has plenty of what I’ve seen described as Spains three main spices: salt, garlic, and pork.  If you want an appetizer, try the fried eggplant with honey, a distinctly Islamic influence dish still served everywhere to compliment your distinctly christian bowl of ham, egg, and tomatoes.

Bibliography:

Maria Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Bay Back Books Reprint, 2003).

Maria Menocal and Jerrilynn Dodds, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the making of Castilian Culture (Yale University Press, 2009).

Americo Castro, The Structures of Spanish History, translated by Edmund. King (Princeton University Press, 1954).

Claudio Sanchez Albornoz, España: Una Enigma Histórico (1956).

Maya Soifer, “Beyond Convivencia: critical reflections on the historiography of interfaith relations in Christian Spain,” in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1:1, 19-35.

This episode is an interview with a friend of mine who also studies famines, although he specializes in England.  The Great Famine hit most of Northern Europe – from England to Poland, Central France and parts of Northern Italy to Sweden – in 1315.  The bad harvests lasted for at least two years and included such heavy rain and wet weather that salt made meat, fish, and milk preservation more difficult at the same time.  A few years later, a major cattle epidemic hit, wiping out large numbers of animals across the same region.  The result was either acute food shortage or general malnutrition for years.  We detail some specifics of how a single family would deal with a major food shortage like the great famine, while thinking about what that one experience tells us about the wider implications of this famine for England.

It seems odd to suggest a food accompaniment for a famine podcast, but I was talking to someone the other day about supposedly “bad” British food.  When I lived in Spain a few years ago, it was quite noticable to me when we visited England how many of my favorite pastries and especially breakfast foods came from England.  So here’s to really excellent British food as represented by a meal somewhat misleadingly (to Americans) referred to as “Tea.”  I recommend starting with a scone and clotted cream and then having a few finger sandwiches of cheese and watercress perhaps with a pickle on the side, and, of course, a good cup of tea (I myself really like what is called “Afternoon” tea).  If we were talking about famines in India, this would feel hopelessly imperialist to suggest such a snack, but this is still a famine in England itself.  Does that make it better?  Not sure.

Photo Credit

Bibliography:

William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton UP, 1996).

John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, Plague, War and Death In the Later Middle Ages (Taylor and Francis, 2000).

Philip Slavin, “Market Failure during the Great Famine in England and Wales,” Past and Present (2013), online.

It has been a while now, but I’m back with hopefully a string of new podcasts.  First off, I have a small, on-location, observation about the relationship between church and state power in Spain.  This is a topic that has lots of depth to it, and this little intro only scratches the surface, but standing between the Cathedral of Madrid and the Royal Palace seemed like a good place to at least contemplate the symbolic relationship between those two institutions, something that Spain has dealt with in several ways over the last few hundred years.  Much of Spanish history over the last five hundred years has been competition between centralizing forces and centripetal forces pulling away from centralized power.  The church has always been part of this dynamic, but it would be wrong to see the church as one of the main centralizing force.  It has been used as a tool in that regard, certainly, but it is a tool with its own concerns and ideas that don’t always mesh with the purposes of state power (Certainly the Republicans in the Civil War wanted both a central state, and to virtually remove the church from public life.)

This is a short podcast, so I think it’s just enough time to eat a nice plate of Patatas Bravas, one of the ubiquitous dishes served in Spanish restaurants (both in separatist and nationalist provinces alike.)  Although the potato and the tomato for the sauce didn’t enter European cuisine until most of the way through the 16th century (Ferdinand and Isabella most certainly never ate a plate of Bravas), it is now foundational in the food of many European countries, from France to Ireland, Germany, England, and even Spain.  The dish is a common bar food dish and the brava sauce sometimes tastes like a slightly zippy ketchup and sometimes offers a surprisingly fiery compliment to a dollop of mayonnaise.  Personally, I prefer the spicey stuff alongside a good dose of mayonnaise for each potato.

 

Bibliography:

There are dozens and dozens of books on the inquisition, so I don’t have a specific one to start with.  Here’s a decent introduction to Ferdinand and Isabella…

John Edwards, The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474-1520 (Wiley, 2000).

And another book on new research about the position of the church and some of the complications of the story I laid out above…

Rawlings, Helen, Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

Photo Credit

This time on the History Cafe, I have an experiment in field recording.  About a month ago, I went to Spain for a couple of weeks and while there I recorded a few sets of thoughts about Spain’s history in a couple of locations.  I’ll be editing a few of them as History Cafe broadcasts over the coming couple of months.  These recordings attempt to capture some sense of the sound of the place I’m talking about, while discussing a broader historical idea.  I’ve tried to describe the location as well as the historical significance so that you can imagine both.  The locations are all quite different, but to look forward to them, I have three good ones from the Valley of the Fallen, the Royal Palace, and the Mezquita-Cathedral in Cordoba.  For a couple of these, it was my first experiment with recording outside, and sometimes the wind got the better of me, but generally they sound alright and the background noise worked out nicely.

For this first Audio History Tour, I’m walking around the Royal Botanical Gardens in Madrid.  I discuss the history of the botanical garden in Europe and the early connections between Botany and imperialism.  I was inspired for this idea by a couple of people who were with me who made comments about how the garden is still arranged in pathways with clearly laid out plant beds; they noted just how unnatural and structured it seemed, and I commented on how the history of Botany has inspired a number of different garden structures and formats and many of the assumptions of previous centuries were quite a bit more questionable than the current “unnatural” garden look.  So this is brief set of comments on the origins of Botany, the teaching garden (which the royal gardens still are today), and some questions about how we might think about what goes in our garden today.

While this podcast is technically a coffee/pastry sized item, in Madrid there are plenty of tapas which are certainly small enough to count for this size podcast.  So today I’m going to for one of my favorites that is a food import from the new world to fit the theme of botanical collectors returning with all manner of new plants: Pimientos de Padron.  They are technically a chili pepper, so although they’re usually not at all spicy, they are a variety that originated somewhere in central America.  Today, you can get them as tapas in Spain in many places, although they’re actually associated with the North West, especially Asturias and Galicia.  They take the little peppers and basically deep fry they in olive oil and salt them heavily.  You pick them up (when they’re not too hot) by the stem and eat them whole – it is a little like pulling a raspberry off its core with your teeth in terms of difficulty.  Anyway, if you’re a fan of roasted peppers, eat a little plate of these with some bread for mopping up the oil and a little wine and they’re delicious.

Bibliography:

Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago University Press, 2012).

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press, 2006).

Oliver Impey and Arthur Macgregor, The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe (House of Stratus, 2001).

This month on the History Cafe we’re back to an interview, again with a recent alum of mine, Jessica Stout.  Most of Jessica’s work focused on nineteenth century British literature (some of which gets mentioned in the podcast.)  For her historical work, Jessica looked at the debate that began in the late eighteenth century but continued through all of the nineteenth concerning whether or not women should receive a university education.  Various thinkers felt that educated women would be alternately better educators for their children or worse parents if they spent too much time learning Latin; create more stable families if they could earn a living or be unwilling to marry if they could support themselves. The debate drew comments from major voices of the time, including John Stuart Mill (who was a strong supporter of quite radical levels of equal rights).  The debate carried on in editorials, newpapers, and public speeches over many years.

From this mass of information, Jessica looked for a focused historical question that could help illustrate the debate in a humanizing way.  In the end, she wrote a study focused on the single figure of Constance Maynard – an educational pioneer, one of the first women to receive a university degree in England and the founder of Westfield College (now part of Queen Mary College at the University of London).  We talk about how Constance embodied both the hopes of educational advocates as well as the fears of those who opposed educating women in the first place.  Reading her journals gives us a great deal of insights into the desires and struggles experienced by someone taking a course in life that openly defied the opinion of many in the society.

Bibliography and Resources:

Phipps, Pauline, “Faith, Desire, and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard’s Atonement for Passion,” Journal of the History of Sexuality vol. 18, No. 2., (2009): 265-286.

Maynard, Constance Louisa (1849-1935). unpublished autobiography, 1915–27.  London: Special Collections, Queen Mary and Westfield College Archives, 2013.

—. unpublished green book diaries, 1866–1935.  London: Special Collections, Queen Mary and Westfield College Archives, 2013.

While at first glance it might be appropriate to have tea over a conversation about British Education, this conversation is longer and more detailed than a single cup of tea, so I’m recommending a hearty dinner of Toad in the Hole.  In the US this sometimes means a piece of bread with a circle cut out and an egg fried in the middle, but in England it’s a bunch of sausages cooked into Yorkshire pudding (and, of course, pudding doesn’t mean a sweet pudding like we think in the US anymore than black pudding does…it’s more like a puff pastry with meat drippings cooked into it and then stuffed with vegetables and sausages.)  Served with a good stiff mustard or even horseradish, it’s delicious.  Think of it as a slightly swankier version of a pig-in-a-blanket.

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This is the fifth of the medieval history lectures – it’s long enough to need two parts.  In the run-through of politics, I cover major political and power questions from the end of Rome to the end of the fifteenth century.  This lecture begins the epic narrative of a several hundred year battle between popes in Rome and various kings and emperors over who ultimately controls the reigns of power.  The controversy begins over a specific question of who can appoint and “invest” bishops with their office.  As members of the church hierarchy, the Pope felt it was obviously them, but kings had long had a hand in choosing bishops in their realm.  Furthermore, each bishop controlled a fair amount of territory that came with the office to ensure them an income, so kings had an obvious political interest in being able to influence who the major landholders in their kingdoms would be.

Poster Image Credit – Calixtus II crowning Henry V

Maps Credit

This is the fourth of the medieval history lectures.  In the run-through of politics, I cover major political and power questions from the end of Rome to the end of the fifteenth century.  This lecture talks about the breakdown of Carolingian power, control of land in the absence of centralized states, and the Vikings (and who doesn’t love the vikings…although honestly, I don’t talk that much about them.)  I spend at least some time at the end talking about the scholarly debate surrounding “feudalism” and what the hierarchy of society looked like during the tenth century.

Poster Image Credit

Maps Credit