'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages

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In this episode I talk with the distinguished historian of the crusades Dr. Steven Tibble about the motivations of crusaders and of those Europeans who settled in the Crusader states of Outremer. Steve is the author of five books dealing with the crusades, the most recent of which is Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land  (Yale University Press, 2024).  We examine the roles played by religious zeal, the promise of remission of sin, feudal obligation, the hope of material gain, and the benefit of temporal privileges in motivating those who took the cross. In considering the relationship between crusaders and settlers, Steve explains why the rulers and European residents of Outremer developed a culture of religious and ethnic toleration that surprised and appalled Crusaders just off the boat. And because I couldn't resist, I have Steve explain why the Crusader States became hotbeds of crime and violence. I hope you will join us.

Audio clips in this episode:
The movie trailer for the 1948 re-release of Cecil B. DeMille's 1935 epic, The Crusades.
A snippet from "The Crusades" episode of the 1989 PBS series "Timeline."

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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On 3-4 July 1187 the Sultan of Egypt and Syria Saladin enjoyed the greatest military victory of his career. The Battle of Hattin, a two-day battle fought along the road leading to the town of Tiberias and, on the following day, on the Horns of Hattin, an iron-age hillfort above that road, is one of the few decisive battles of the Middle Ages. (In this episode, Richard explains why there were so few battles.) The battle pitted a Muslim force of about 30,000, comprised largely of Turkish cavalry, against the largest military force ever raised by the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, an army of about 1,200 cavalry and 18,000 foot soldiers.  The outcome of the battle was the capture of King Guy and the virtual annihilation of the field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.  In the months following the battle, Saladin systematically took all the major coastal cities of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, except for Tyre, and then turned inland to take Jerusalem. King Guy of Lusignan's ultimately disastrous decision to leave the safety of its camp at the springs of Sepphoris (Saffurya) and march 30 kilometers across waterless farmland in the July heat to relieve Saladin's siege of Tiberias remains controversial.  In this episode, Professor Nicholas Morton, author of Crusader States and Their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187 and veteran of this podcast, explains Guy's military thinking by placing the Battle of Hattin in the larger context of warfare as practiced by the rulers of the Crusader States of the Middle East.  In doing so, Nick persuasively argues against a reigning academic and popular consensus that regards Guy's decision as defying military logic. 

(Sorry, no movie reviews in this episode--though the prelude to and aftermath of the Battle of Hattin is depicted in Ridley Scott's The Kingdom of Heaven, and the full battle is shown in Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's 1963 movie Saladin the Victorious.)

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Yes, Kristin Lavransdatter is the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time. That isn't as impressive as it might sound, as the movie only brought in $3.7 million in box office receipts, but virtually all of that came from domestic sales. Pretty much unknown outside Scandinavia, the movie was a sensation when released in Norway in 1995.   An estimated two-thirds of the country's population have viewed it.   The movie is based on the first volume of Sigrid Undset's trilogy about the life of an ordinary woman in fourteenth century Norway, which won her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928.  Directed and written by the celebrated Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, the film is a very faithful adaptation. The production strove for historical accuracy in costume and settings, and most of the dialogue is taken directly from the novel. (Sigrid Undset is credited as co-screenplay writer.) 

The reason I decided to devote a short episode to this movie and to its source novel is they both are worthy attempts to examine an aspect of the Middle Ages virtually ignored in popular culture, the life of ordinary people.   Kristin Lavransdatter is the coming of age story of young woman from a prosperous family in rural fourteenth-century Norway who is seduced by and falls in love with a knight with a (justifiably) scandalous reputation. Whether Kristin's mentalité in the novel and film is really "medieval" is a matter of academic debate. But the care with which Undset in her novel and Ullmann in the film recreate the religious rituals, customs, and everyday life in early fourteenth-century Norway is impressive and worth a reading and a viewing.

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This is the final episode--sort of*--of a multi-part series about medieval adultery in literature, history, and popular culture. My co-host Professor Larissa 'Kat' Tracey and I review how adultery has been dealt with in movies about the Middle Ages. We begin with three Hollywood medieval epics, "The Kingdom of Heaven," "Braveheart," and "The Last Duel," and then turn to the focus of our previous episodes, movies about Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Iseult.

*I will be posting a short episode on the film adaptation of Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize winning novel Kristin Lavransdatter. That really will be our last word on medieval adultery.


This episode includes sound clips  from the following movies:

"Kingdom of Heaven" (2006), dir. Ridley Scott: Baldwin IV offers Balian command of the armies of Jerusalem and marriage to his sister (unfortunately the recording is not the best quality)

"The Last Duel" (2021), dir. Ridley Scott: musical score (comp: Harry Gregson Williams)

"Knights of the Round Table" (1953), dir. Richard Thorpe: musical score (comp: Miklós Rózsa)

"Excalibur" (1982), dir. John Boorman: musical score (Predlude to the Liebestod, from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde)

"Lovespell (1981), dir. Tom Donovon: musical score (comp. Paddy Moloney)


Works consulted:
Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia . Palgrave, 2005.

Virginia Blanton, Martha M. Johnson-Olin, and Charlene Miller Avrich, eds., Medieval Women in Film: An Annotated Handlist and Reference Guide. Medieval Feminist Forum
Subsidia Series, 2014.

Kevin J. Harty, ed., Cinema Arthuriana.  McFarland, 2002.

Kevin J. Harty, ed., Medieval Women on Film. McFarland, 2020.

Bert Olton, Arthurian Legends on Film and Television. McFarland, 2000.

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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This is the third of a multi-episode series in which I chat with Dr. Larissa ‘Kat’ Tracey about literary representations of medieval adultery and its reality. In this episode Kat and I survey and discuss the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary treatments of medieval adultery, focusing on the stories of La(u)ncelot and Guinevere and of Tristan/Tristram and Isolde/Isolt/Iseult  The episode begins with an opera, Richard Wagner’s extremely influential retelling of the tale, Tristan und Isolde. Although composed between 1857 and 1859, the opera did not premiere until 1865, because it was deemed too expensive to stage and its complex, innovative music was thought to be unperformable. We consider how Wagner reconceived his medieval source, Gottfried of Strassburg's thirteenth-century romance, through the lens of Schopenhauer's life-denying philosophy, and how in its composition art imitated life, as Wagner engaged in what was the very least an emotional affair with his wealthy Swiss patron's wife.  Kat and I then discuss the very different treatments of these Arthurian stories about adultery by three leading Victorian poets and one early twentieth-century American: the poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, the decadent aesthete Algernon Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelite artist and author William Morris, and the popular American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose now all-but-forgotten best-selling poem Tristram won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. We then turn to how twentieth-century novelists have handled the moral issues arising from medieval adultery in their renditions of the Arthurian legend. The episode concludes with an analysis of adultery in a non-Arthurian medieval novel, Sigrid Undset’s historical trilogy about fourteenth-century Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-1923), which earned the author the Noble Prize for Literature in 1928, the same year that Robinson’s very different Tristram won the Pulitzer.

Kat and I began this episode with the intention of covering both modern literature and movies dealing with medieval adultery. But it became clear as we were recording that a single episode would be very long. So we decided to talk about medieval adultery on film in a final, fourth episode, which I will be releasing in about a week’s time. And that will be it for medieval adultery, although I plan to have Kat return in future to talk about a subject on which she has written extensively, torture and cruelty in medieval literature. As I have jokingly told her, she is my go to person for medieval perversities. 

This episode contains two musical snippets:

Wagner’s “Prelude to the Liebestod [Love Death]” from his opera Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Arturo Toscanini (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBFcDGTzgAI)

“If Ever I Would Leave You” from the musical Camelot, lyrics and music by Lerner and Loewe and sung by Robert Goulet as Lancelot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL52hEArSfM)

In my discussion of the literary texts, I drew upon the researches of several scholars, among them:

John Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, University of California Press,  2008

R.J.A. Kilbourn, “Redemption Revalued in Tristan und Isolde: Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 67, Number 4, Fall 1998, pp. 781-788

“Tristan und Isolde,” Wikipedia (yes, I do consult Wikipedia)

“The birth

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This is the second of a three part series with my very special co-host, Dr. Larissa 'Kat' Tracy, about adultery in the Middle Ages. In the previous episode, Kat and I talked about the Lancelot and Guinevere story. In this episode, we tackle the other great medieval tale of adulterous love, Tristan and Iseult. We begin, however, with a possible contemporary historical analogue, a scandal involving Countess Elizabeth of Vermandois, wife of Count Philip of Flanders, and a very unfortunate household knight.  If true, the adultery of the countess and the vengeance taken by her husband emphasizes the difference between literature and reality--but, the "if" is very much in question. 

In the third and concluding episode, we will look at how the stories of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Iseult have been used in modern literature and movies.

If you are enjoying this podcast, please share it with friends and family who might be interested in things medieval. And if you are listening on a platform that allows ratings and reviews, such as Apple podcasts, please take the time to rate and review it. I am told that is the best way of spreading the good news.

This episode includes an orchestral snippet of Arturo Toscanini conducting the Liebestod  from Richard Wagner's opera "Tristan und Isolde" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBFcDGTzgAI)

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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In this episode, my very special guest Dr. John Hosler draws upon the research he undertook for his book Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace (Yale University Press, 2022) to discuss what Jerusalem meant in the thought and imagination of Christians and Muslims in the twelfth century, and the role the city played in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As John is a professor at the Army's Command and General Staff College, we also chat a bit about teaching military history to military officers. 

This episode contains a short sound bite from the movie "Kingdom of Heaven"

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at [email protected]

In this episode, my very special guest Dr. John Hosler draws upon the research he undertook for his book Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace (Yale University Press, 2022) to discuss what Jerusalem meant in the thought and imagination of Christians and Muslims in the twelfth century, and the role the city played in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As John is a professor at the Army's Command and General Staff College, we also chat a bit about teaching military history to military officers. 

This episode contains a short sound bite from the movie "Kingdom of Heaven"

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at [email protected]

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In this episode my co-host Dr. Jennifer Paxton and I explain the principles and personal grievances that led to the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket and the significance of that event for Church-State relations in medieval England. We also talk about T.S. Eliot’s and Jean Anouilh’s plays about Thomas’ martyrdom, and the movies based on those plays. This is the second of a two part series. If you haven’t already done so, you might want to listen to the first episode in which Jenny and I talk about Becket’s background, his career leading up to his election as archbishop of Canterbury, and his contribution to Henry II’s efforts to restore royal authority in England after a generation of civil war.

This episodes contains audio clips from: 
"Becket" (released by Paramount, directed by Peter Glenville, starring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, and adapted by Edward Anhalt from a play by Jean Anouilh)

The 12th century song lamenting the exile of Thomas Becket,  "In Rama sonat gemitus," performed by Lumina Vocal Ensemble  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c30K1rQsaiI)

The Trim Jeans Theater's adaptation of T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvz1-ThCHY)

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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This is the first of a three part series about adultery in the Middle Ages.  My co-host for both is Dr. Larissa 'Kat' Tracy. Last month Kat and I talked about my favorite medieval romance, Chretien de Troyes' late twelfth-century French poem "Yvain: The Knight with the Lion."  Unlike the more famous medieval romances of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Isolde,  "Yvain" celebrated marital love. That led me to ask Kat about attitudes toward adultery in medieval literature. In this episode we focus on the evolution of the Lancelot and Guinevere story, and how it relates to societal and clerical attitudes toward adultery. The second part will be about Tristan and Isolde, and how medieval adultery has been dealt with in movies.

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at [email protected]