This is the third 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 Western Roman Empire’s successor states.  I talk some about the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in England and how their cultural heritage mixed with the Roman influences brought with Augustine of Canterbury.  The second half of the lecture gives the general story of the rise of the Franks and the transfer of power from the Merovingians to the first real attempt to revive an “imperial” power under the Carolingians and their most famous king, Charlemagne.

Poster Image Credit

Maps Source

This is the second 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 a bit about the structures of the Eastern empire after Constantine – the political entity that we now call the Byzantine empire after the old name of the great city of Istanbul/Constantinople, originally called “Byzantium” by the greeks.  I also talk about the rise of Islam – I don’t discuss a lot about the Islamic empire after this point, as the course focuses, perhaps overly much on Western Europe.  At any rate, here’s something about these two incredibly important players in the Mediterranean throughout the history of medieval Europe.

Poster Image Credit

Maps Source

This is the first 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 covers a little bit about late Roman politics, and focuses on the reigns of the emperors Diocletian and Constantine.  I also discuss something of the barbarian groups to the north, although this comes up more completely in a subsequent lecture.

Poster Image Credit

Maps Source

So we missed January, but we’re going to make it up for it by having an extra large dose this February.  What I am presenting here is a series of thoughts about teaching and some specifics about how I organize my Introduction to Medieval Studies course.  Starting in 2011, I created a handful of lectures for students in podcast form (some with a little bit of video, some with only still images, but all with at least slides that I occassionally mention in the lectures themselves.)  Even when we had in class presentations, people liked the ability to go back and listen to the lectures when they wanted.  I will be putting up all the lectures I have yet produced here.  There will be a couple of them missing, but for the most part, it will be a complete set running from the end of Rome up through the end of the Medieval Period (whenever that exactly means.)  The tone of the lectures is somewhat different than the usual history cafe podcast and as such the listening will be somewhat different.  For February, I will start with the political history, but then in March I will return to a regular old podcast.

Since this is a multi-course item, I won’t have specific dishes to go with each podcast.  The introduction is probably something like a salad plate, so here’s the Marlboro College salad bar.  Obviously you get to choose exactly what goes on the plate.

Thanks,

Adam Franklin-Lyons

For December, I have a discussion with one of my recent graduates.  At Marlboro, every students does fairly extensive research and prepares a collection of materials in a senior portfolio referred to as a “Plan.”  Elliot Samuel-Lamb did his work on brewing and beer and together we researched the character, flavor, and brewing practices of England in the Early Modern period (we looked some at the late medieval period, also, but focused on the 17th-19th centuries.) In the podcast, we talk about some of our findings that the English continued to like beer sweet long after continental brewers (particularly in Germany and the Netherlands) had introduced hops and begun to switch to a more bitter beverage.  English brewers all the way to the 19th century continue to sometimes caution against the inclusion of too much hops specifically so as to not overly bitter their brew.  Elliot continues to brew beer and be interested in all things brewing, making beer from locally grown ingredients and reading about beer’s quirky history.

The dish for this podcast is probably obvious…a beer is clearly in order.  There are tons of either large barley-wines or even some commercial examples of Gruit.  I won’t purport to influence anyone’s taste, so pick your own (hopped heavy or hopped light as you prefer) and sit down for a drink – ok, if you’re curious, I kind of like Froach’s Heather Ale, but there are lots of good beers out there.  Obviously this precludes most podcast listening while driving…sorry about that.

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This will be the first of two months of discussions about student projects, so stay tuned for next month’s discussion of women’s education in Victorian England.

For the bibliography mentioned in the podcast, here’s the list:

Bennett, Judith.  Ale, Beer, and Brewsters: Women’s Work in a Changing World.

Unger, Richard.  A History of Brewing in Holland, 900-1900.  Brill publishing, 2001.

——.  Beer in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  U of Penn Press, 2007.

And if you want to read Samuel Pepys’ Diary, it’s all online HERE.  For other primary sources (brewing manuals, etc.) feel free to e-mail.

This month on the History Cafe, we are talking about the notorious emperor Nero.  Perhaps most famous for “fiddling while Rome burned,” (and to be fair, when everything was pretty much burned down, Nero built one of the largest palaces ever constructed in Rome, complete with gardens, courtyards, and all the gold one might imagine necessary to such an enterprise), Nero’s actual legacy was cemented by successors who often wanted to portray a more negative image of their predecessors.  Within Nero’s life, there is some evidence that he took reasonable steps as emperor, returning to Rome to help fight the fire, supporting the rights of some of the provinces (he might have been particularly popular in the Eastern provinces), and generally working to consolidate power as any of his more famous predecessors (Julius Caesar, Claudius, and others) would have done equally.  Our guest is Will Guast who served as classics fellow at Marlboro from 2010-2012.  He is now back in England teaching Latin and Greece.

Somehow, I imagine Nero as a big pastrami sandwich on rye…I really have absolutely no reason for this.  Of course the Romans did have both beef and rye flour, and they certainly pickled their fair share of things (Garum – a sauce actually made of pickled fish – was extremely popular…it was probably something like the Thai fish sauce that is fairly well known today).  So theoretically, all the ingredients existed for Rome to make a pastrami sandwich…but I’m pretty sure they didn’t.  Despite the image of debauched banquets amongst Roman leaders, epicurean and stoic philosophy (both popular in Nero’s time) both espoused dietary restrictions, sometimes including vegetarianism, but at least moderation.  Not what I think of when I think of pastrami on rye.  Anyway, I like my pastrami sandwiches with coleslaw on top and lots of mustard and pickles on the side.

Photo Credit

Suggested Bibliography:

Griffin, Miriam T.  Nero: The End of a Dynasty. Routledge, 2000.

Roller, Matthew.  Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome.  Princeton University Press, 2001.

Bauman, Richard.  Women and Politics in Rome.  Routledge, 2002.

This month’s podcast is a double story.  The first narrative is about my recent research into high-speed couriers in the late-medieval period.  It turns out that the city of Valencia (as well as, probably, the king of Aragon and the king of Mallorca) had a group of runners specifically dedicated to transporting their official communication who could travel on foot at crazy speeds.  The fastest trip seemed to be from Valencia to Barcelona and back where the runners could move just shy of seventy miles per day for up to a week.  Imagine that – you could run from Boston to New York City and back in just under a week!  See if you know any friends that want to try that with you.  The second narrative is about how people “do” history.  What does it mean to do research, and how do we sometimes make new discoveries.  This topic is something I discovered quite by accident recently, so it provides a great example of how that happens – and hopefully why it’s kind of awesome.

In the podcast, I mention a couple of external items, the first of which is an image of the runners, taken from the Leges Palatinae used first by Jaume III of Mallorca and then adopted by Pere the Ceremonious of Aragon.  This is an image from the Cod. Lat. 9169 from the Biblioteque Royale de Belgique, folio 45v.  The image is on the lower right column.  You’ll notice that it says “de cursoribus” in red just above and to the right of the miniature (this is the section “on runners”).  It shows the group of runners with the royal crest on their little mail pouches.  They are dressed in what I imagine must be fourteenth century “runners garb.”  I wonder if those tights are linen or wool…

The second thing I mention is how the text actually looks in fourteenth century documents of this type.  Most city or church notaries at this time in the Crown of Aragon wrote in Catalan rather than Latin, although many more official documents (like the Leges above) are still prepared in Latin – it’s mostly these day to day business materials that are in Catalan.  This is what the handwriting generally looked like – see what you think.

The last item I mention in the podcast is an interactive map I’ve started that shows some of the routes, how long people took to run those routes, how much they get paid, and a few other interesting details.  Since this is an ongoing research project, the map might expand in the future, but for the moment, it’s a good way to get a sense of how this work progresses.

Recommended food pairing: If you want to feel like a runner, I’m pretty sure they were eating mostly candied fruit and nuts while out on the road, so get a big bag of gorp or the equivalent.  But since this is a sandwich, if you want something more substantial, fix a nice turkey sandwich with some dried apple and cranberry compote or something to go with it – that’s a great sandwich.  The image, appropriately enough, is a big thanksgiving leftover sandwich (turkey, stuffing, cranberry-walnut sauce, also) but made on a giant slab of Pa de pages, a big loaf of Catalan “rustic” bread (de pages literally means “farmer’s bread”).  So yeah, both hefty and dried fruit and nuts.

Bibliography (There’s more in Spanish if anyone is interested):

Ohler, Norbert. The Medieval Traveller. 2nd ed. Boydell & Brewer, 2010.

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 1. Univ of California Press, 1995.

Last time we discussed Charles de Gaulle’s life from his birth through to the beginning of World War II.  This time, we cover de Gaulle’s participation in World War II and his political actions in the post-war period.  For more information, see Part I.

In Part I, we began with a nice plate of cheese.  For this section, I recommend for the second plate of the meal a dish popular in de Gaulle’s hometown of Lille in northern France: Carbonade Flamande – a kind of hearty beef stew with carrots or other vegetables.  Also popular in Belgium, where it is made with beer (it can be made with beer or wine depending on taste.)

Photo Credit

And lastly, a little bibliography on Charles de Gaulle and French History:

Sowerwine, Charles. France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Gaulle, Charles de. The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1998.

Berstein, Serge, and Peter Morris. The Republic of de Gaulle 1958–1969.  Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Today on the History Cafe, we have part I of an extensive survey of the life of the French statesman and soldier, Charles de Gaulle. Our guest, Tim Little, served as the professor of history at Marlboro college for thirty-five years. He retired (more or less – he still teaches an occasional class) in 2009 and is now a professor emeritus.*  Tim has been interested in de Gaulle for some time and the talk uses de Gaulle as a sort of foil for understanding what it meant to be French and experience French history from the end of the 19th century until today.  De Gaulle died in 1970, but the republic he founded continues to this day with his fingerprints remain firmly a part of French political life.  The discussion was long enough that I have broken it up into two parts.  Part I begins with a brief background of the nineteenth century, and then discusses de Gaulle’s family, the Dreyfus affair, World War I and some about the inter-war years and the early years of World War II.  Part II covers de Gaulle’s management of the French resistance, his participation in the liberation of France, and his involvement in politics in the fourth and his founding of the fifth.  Here, today, is part I – part II will be ready in a little over a week, so check back.

For today’s dish, since this is a two parter, we will start with the appetizer today and the main course with part II.  As it was de Gaulle himself who purportedly asked, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” I suggest a nice full charcuterie plate with at least a few of those many varieties for sampling…

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* And yes, just to note: it is his retirement that created my job, so I’m very grateful for that.

Today we have the assistant professor of medieval history from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Lauren Mancia.  Lauren works on monastic devotional practices and  culture in Normandy, specializing in the writings of the Abbot John of Fécamp (ca. 990-1078 A.D.)  In this podcast, she talks to us about a major shift in the understanding and relationship with Christ that began in the eleventh century.  Prior to that time, people tended to see Christ as more of a conquering hero, unafraid of death, and unsuffering on the cross.  After the shift to  what is known as “affective” piety, people began to emphasize Christ’s humanity and his sufferings and used that as a way to find emotional closeness with the divine.  This fundamental way of viewing Christ is still with us and remains the emotional core of most of western Christianity to this day.

Given the particularly penitential nature of today’s subject, I would recommend a good reverential sandwich of plain bread and water for those who lean that way.  If you are feeling ill, weak, or not entirely reverential, you can also include some cheese or a hard boiled egg.

In the podcast, we mention a few works of art and a couple of quotes.  Here are those images and quotes in the order in which they appear in the podcast for when you want to refer back to them.

Quote One:

We also mention a couple of quotes, starting with a prayer from the ninth century.  This prayer comes from a precum libelli and the translation is in Rachel Fulton’s From Judgement to Passion (see the extra bibliography below):

“Lord Jesus Christ, maker of the world, who—although shining in glory and coeternal and coequal with the Father and the Holy Spirit—deigned to assume flesh from the immaculate virgin and suffered your glorious palms to be nailed on the gibbet of the cross, that you might break asunder the gates of hell and free the human race from death, have pity on me oppressed with evil deeds and the weight of my iniquities. Do not abandon me, most pious father, but indulge me in those things which I impiously bear. Hear me, prostrate before your most glorious and worshipful cross, so that in these days I should merit to stand by you, pure and pleasing in your sight, freed from all evil things, and consoled by your help, always my lord. Through you Jesus Christ, savior of the world.”

Image One, a Spanish Crucifix:

You can see the Met’s own page about this artwork with complete descriptions Here.

Quote Two:

This quote comes from Lauren’s own research on John of Fecamp.  It appears in Fécamp’s Forma precum digna scelerum confessio plena, edited in A Durham Book of Devotions by Thomas Bestul (pg. 35) and translated by Lauren herself:

“Most merciful creator, look upon the humanity of your beloved Son, and take pity on the weakness of your frail creature. His naked breast gleamed white, his bloody side reddened, his stretched out innards dried out, the light of his eyes grew faint, his long arms stiffened, his marble legs hung down, a stream of holy blood moistened his pierced feet. Look, glorious father, at the torn limbs of your dear son, and remember with pity of what stuff I am made.”

Quote Three:

And lastly, a Prayer to Christ from the great Anselm of Canterbury himself, one of the founders of scholasticism, but also someone who clearly involved himself in the new modes of piety of his day.  The translation is by Benedicta Ward:

“Would that I with happy Joseph, might have taken down my Lord from the cross, wrapped him in spiced grave-clothes and laid him in the tomb; or even followed after so that such a burial might not have been without my mourning. Would that with the blessed band of women I might have trembled at the vision of angels and have heard the news of the Lord’s Resurrection,