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Few English kings have had a worse popular reputation than Æthelred the Unready (r.978-1016), the king who lost England (at least temporarily) to viking invaders. But does he deserve that reputation?  Was King Æthelred really "unready"?  My co-host for this episode is the person most qualified to answer that question, Dr. Levy Roach of the University of Exeter in the U.K, author of Æthelred the Unready (Yale University Press, 2016).  Please join Levy and me as we explore the troubled reign of a much maligned king.

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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In this episode Ellen and I discuss three "wicked" medieval women and the monastic authors who loathed them.  We begin with the Anglo-Saxon Queen Ælfthryth, a champion of the Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform movement in England,  who appears in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis as a lascivious witch responsible for the murders of her stepson King Edward the Martyr and Byrhtnoth, the first abbot of Ely.  We then turn to an early twelfth-century French countess, Sibyl of Porcien, a lascivious beauty whose adultery, according to Abbot Guibert of Nogent, caused a war between her first and second husbands, and who plotted the ruin and death of her stepson. We conclude with a late eleventh-century Norman female robber baron, Mabel of Belleme as she appears in Orderic Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History.  In each case, Ellen and I discuss whether these women deserve their notoriety, and consider why the monks who told their stories portrayed them as wicked.  The larger issue in this episode is, of course, medieval misogyny. 

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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Today’s episode concludes our three part series about King Arthur in history, legend, and popular culture.   Our jumping off point for this episode is Sir Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century Le Morte D’Arthur, the work most responsible for the popular conception of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.  We then trace how the legend has been repeatedly reinterpreted down to the present day in literature, films, comics, and even video games. 

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In this episode Ellen and I with the help of my longtime friend and colleague Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America trace the development of the Arthurian legend during the Middle Ages, as Arthur was transformed from the chieftain of Welsh stories into the exemplar of medieval French and English chivalry.

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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This episode features a guest co-host, my old friend and colleague Dr. Jennifer Paxton, director of the Honors Program at The Catholic University of America and one of the best historians of medieval Britain. Jenny, Ellen, and I examine the evidence for a historical Arthur in the aftermath of the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the fifth century. We begin with the historical context, the "Fall of Roman Britain" and the coming of Germanic mercenaries and migrants to the British Isles. If Arthur existed, he would have been a military leader in the Romano-British resistance to the conquest of England by these newcomers from northern Germany and Jutland. The big question here is "if he existed."

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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In this episode Ellen and I compare medieval Inquisitions with the Spanish Inquisition, and both with the popular conception of the Inquisition.  Among other subjects, we discuss what an inquisition was--and is--, how inquisitions served as a tool in the formation of a persecuting society, and why it is not quite accurate to see either the medieval or the Spanish Inquisition as targeting Jews--or, at least, Jews as Jews.  

Please join us!

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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In this episode Ellen and I talk about a dualist heresy that was widespread in twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France and northern Italy.  This heresy is generally known as Catharism.  Its central tenet was that there are two gods, a good god who created the spiritual world and an evil god who created the visible world. The soul of man is good, but the flesh in which it is imprisoned is evil.  Pope Innocent III regarded the heresy as a sufficient threat to Christendom to warrant a crusade. This was the so-called Albigensian Crusade that began in 1209 and did not end until 1229.  A Dominican friar writing around 1250 observed that “if the heresy had not been cut back by the swords of the faithful … it would have corrupted the whole of Christendom.”  The Albigensian Crusade was exceptionally brutal even by medieval standards. It began with a massacre that gave birth to the saying, "kill them all. God will know his own." The failure of this crusade to eradicate the heresy was the impetus for the creation of the medieval inquisition.
     This subject is also a stroll down memory lane for Ellen and me, as we reflect upon our collaboration many, many years ago on an article about women's participation in Catharism.  When we wrote that article no one questioned whether there really was a Cathar heresy. That is no longer the case. 
     Please join us as we examine the historiography and history of the Cathars.

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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In this episode Ellen and I talk about one of the more puzzling events in the history of England’s Viking Wars, the St. Brice's Davy Massacre. In the year 1002, King Æthelred "the Unready" issued an order that on St. Brice's Day all the Danes dwelling in England were to be killed in a "most just extermination."  Writers from the late eleventh century to the present day--including the script writers for the recent Netflix series, "Vikings: Valhalla"--have depicted what occurred on 13 November 1002 as an indiscriminate slaughter of innocent men, women, and children. In their accounts the St. Brice's Day Massacre was a medieval attempt at ethnic cleansing.   But was it?  Archaeologists and academic historians have their doubts.  Please join Ellen and me in our exploration of the blackest mark on the reputation of one of England’s unluckiest kings.  (If you are interested, I made a YouTube video on the St. Brice's Day Massacre for The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages with Nick Barksdale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vms6_DboG8c. It is one of several YouTube lectures I did on King Æthelred  and the Viking Wars.)

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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In this episode Ellen and I examine how Saint Francis became a saint and Waldo a heretic while following the same call to apostolic poverty, and why in the mid-thirteenth century it was heretical to deny that a consecrated communion wafer contains the actual body of Christ but not to venerate a dog as a saint with healing powers. Please join us!

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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On April 28, 1192 the newly elected king of Jerusalem Conrad of Montferrat was assassinated in the streets of the city of Tyre by two Assassins, the name by which the Crusaders knew the Nizari Isma'ili Shi'a sect in Syria.  The killers had acted in obedience to the leader of the Assassins, the Old Man of the Mountain Rashid al-Din Sinan.  That much is known.  On whose behalf the Old Man of the Mountain acted, however, was and remains an open question. In this episode Richard and Ellen discuss the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, the Assassins as revealed in history and videogames, and the turbulent politics that nearly destroyed the Kingdom of Jerusalem and threatened to fragment the Third Crusade. Please join us!

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Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

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