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

Send us Fan Mail My guest for this episode is Dr. Nicholas Morton, whom you may remember from our first episode about the Mongols. Today Nick and I will be talking about crusading warfare, in particul...

26 Feb 20241h 9min

Send us Fan Mail In this episode my guest host Professor Larissa 'Kat" Tracy and I discuss my favorite medieval romance, Chrétien de Troyes' late twelfth century poem, "Yvain, the Knight with the Lion...

11 Feb 20241h 39min

Send us Fan Mail Last May, I spoke with Professor Nicholas Morton about the Mongols and their impact upon the medieval Near East. This episode digs deeper into that subject, focusing on the Mongol co...

27 Jan 20241h 7min

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, the second of a two part series, Dr. Chrissy Senecal and I continue our discussion of the Old English epic poem Beowulf. In it we talk about the challenges of transl...

23 Dec 20231h 20min

Send us Fan Mail This is the first of a two-part series on the most famous monster story in pre-modern literature, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. My co-host for both is Dr. Christine Senecal of Sh...

14 Dec 202352min

Send us Fan Mail This is a revised--and a lot longer--version of our twenty-first episode ("Some thoughts about Hanukkah by a (secular) Jewish medieval historian"). That episode was just what the ti...

1 Dec 202346min

Send us Fan Mail “Feudalism” was once accepted by academic and popular historians alike as a defining, if not the defining, feature of medieval society. For military historians, the High Middle Ages, ...

17 Nov 202346min

Send us Fan Mail In our third and final episode of the series, Richard talks with Professor Ryan Lavelle of the University of Winchester in the U.K. about Alfred the Great. Dr. Lavelle is a leading ex...

14 Okt 202343min