Anne Brannen

41. The Assassination of Queen Joanna of Naples, Muro Lucano, Italy 1382

Maybe you loved her, maybe you hated her, but everybody agreed that Joanna of Naples was quite lovely. In this fresco she is being both lovely and pious. And well she might be; the fresco, by Niccolò di Tommaso, is in the Carthusisan monastery of San Giacomo — and she had donated the land for it.

Joanna of Naples had a hell of a life. There were unhappy marriages, there were murders, there were invasions, there was the Black Death, there was the Papal Schism, and there was a tangled ball of plots and tussles over the inheritance of the Neapolitan throne. At the end of it all, she was murdered and thrown into a well. And then she enjoyed hundreds of years of a Very Bad Reputation. But recently, scholarship has turned the tide! She was an excellent leader, who was beleaguered by a whole lot of men across Europe, though mostly in her bedchamber, who thought that really, women shouldn’t be rulers! Michelle gets quite passionate about this. And manages to convince Anne as well, though for Anne the jury is still out on whether or not she was in on the plot to throw her first husband through a window.

Link to Podcast

Link to Show Notes

Link to Transcript

40. University of Paris Strike, Paris, France 1229

Here we have a quiet little moment; undergraduates at the University of Paris are studiously paying close attention to their philosophy teacher, whilst following along in the text books that they have copied out from rented texts. Right now, this minute, they are behaving. Later, when they are drunkenly demolishing the local tavern, the townspeople will know they are university students, because of their tonsures, their clerical robes, all that Latin, and the fact that they are about 15 years old. This illustration is from the late 14th century (Castres, bibliothèque municipale, ms. 3, f. 277r), but things were pretty much the same 200 years earlier.

First some undergraduates got drunk over in a tavern, and then they didn’t pay, and so the townspeople beat them up. That was Shrove Tuesday. Fair enough. On Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, when they were supposed to be repenting and thinking about their sinful lives, the students got some buddies together and went and trashed the pub, beat up the taverner, and looted and trashed the nearby businesses. But the townspeople couldn’t do anything about it, cause the local law couldn’t do anything to the students, and the church wouldn’t. So the townspeople went to the Queen, who said the students should be punished. Which the town guards interpreted as a command to kill whatever random students they came across. Which they then did. And then the whole university got very mad and disbanded and everybody left town, and the townspeople had lots fewer customers than they had earlier. Well! That was Lent, 1229, Paris. A very holy time, as you can see. Oh, and by the way. The strike wasn’t the crime. All that Lenten hoohah was.

Link to Podcast

Link to Show Notes

Link to Transcript

39. April Fool’s Episode: Ferdinand II of Aragon Abolishes the Droit de Seigneur, Extremadura, Spain 1486

Boy oh boy, was the 19th century obsessed with imagining scenes of lords exercising their right to the bride on the night of her wedding! Obesessed, I tell you. Here, in an interpretation of the myth from 1872 by Jules Arsene Garnier, we have the reluctant bride, the obedient but mournful groom, the monks from some nearby abbey, come to enforce the rules, a bunch of overdressed nobles hanging out and watching the fun, the obligatory medieval beggar — is he actually asking the bride for a handout? cause I think that’s not happening — and the lord himself. Note the feather on the lord’s cap, which, unlike feathers of this sort usually, is standing up. Note also his shoes, the absolute worst example of an interpretation of medieval footwear that your hosts have ever seen. Anyway. You’ll be glad to know this never happened.

Everybody knows that the Droit de Seigneur (the right of a feudal lord to sleep with a bride on her wedding night) existed. Except it didn’t. Why, then, did Ferdinand II of Aragon abolish it in 1486? Why indeed. We discuss this. Also we discuss the history of the first night myth. And Michelle explains why you should buy books when you see them, instead of waiting till later.

Link to the Podcast

Link to the Show Notes

Link to the Transcription

38. The Death of William Rufus, New Forest, England, August 2, 1100

One day the King of England went out hunting, and did not come back, on account of having been shot by one of his hunting companions. Henry, his younger brother, became King in just a few days, and there was no inquest. Nobody at the time thought anything of this, really, because dying whilst hunting in the New Forest was pretty common, but later, lots of people Got Suspicious. We discuss this. Also the fact that the Face of Lucca doesn’t really have anything to do with the Face of Bo.

Link to the Podcast

Link to the Show Notes

Link to the Transcript

37. St. Patrick Gets Kidnapped, Roman Britain, late 5th C.

Paul Henry -- Launching the Currach — “Launching the Currach” (Paul Henry, c1911, National Gallery of Ireland) shows us why, when the Irish pirates captured the young man who would become St. Patrick, they were not using currachs. Later, some currachs would have masts and sails and be somewhat bigger. But in the late 5ch century, really, you needed ships, if you were going to go kidnap hundreds of people from Roman Britain and take them back to Ireland.

In honor of St. Patrick’s day, we have no snakes, no druids. We talk about Irish pirates capturing young Patricius, which was a crime, and then St. Patrick being all remorseful about something which was some sort of crime but nobody knows what it was, and then, having done all that, we talk a whole lot about St. Patrick movies, including a silent film from 1920 with which we are totally impressed, and another from 2000, which involves David Tennant and has us bemused. Also there is information about currachs, which have nothing to do with St. Patrick being kidnapped. Happy St. Patrick day!

Link to Podcast

Link to Show Notes

Link to Transcript

36. The Piratical Victual Brothers, North and Baltic Seas, 1393-1440

Klaus Stortebeker — A reconstruction of what Klaus Störtebeker, the most famous of the Victual Brothers, might have looked like, built on the skull which is probably his. You can go see it at the Hamburg Museum, Hamburg being the place where he and several of his comrades were executed. You might think that, since he was a pirate, that he’s reviled. Nope. He’s both famous and beloved. Go figure.

After being hired to help run victuals into Stockholm through Queen Margaret of Denmark’s blockade, the Victual Brothers turned to piracy, decimating the herring trade and annoying the Hanseatic League. Anne explains all that stuff, and Michelle waxes poetic about the medieval cog, which was apparently an awesome sort of ship. And as a special treat, we append the recording we made wherein we figured out why our sound issues hadn’t been solved.

Link to the Podcast

Link to the Show Notes

Link to the Transcript

35. Mabel de Bellême is Murdered, Bures, Normandy 1079

Troarn Abbaye St. Martin — Here we see the remains of Troarn Abbaye St Martin, where Mabel de Bellême was buried after Hugh Bunel and his brothers cut her head off. The Abbey was doing pretty well until the French Revolution. Hugh and his brothers burnt the bridge over the Dives behind them, whilst escaping. After it got rebuilt, the bridge did pretty well, too, until the 3rd Parachute Squadron destroyed it on D-Day. Normandy has seen a lot of destruction over the centuries. The Abbey is now an historical site, but Mabel’s tomb is gone.

Mabel de Bellême, wealthy Norman landowner, belonged to the de Bellême family. They were infamous for cruelty and general wickedness. Mabel exercised her share of the wickedness and cruelty; eventually one of the many Normans she impoverished gathered his brothers and murdered her. We discuss the de Bellêmes, when we’re not discussing Orderic Vitalis, the monk who chronicled their history. (For those of you who have forgotten, it’s Orderic who thought that the White Ship crashed on account of sodomy, rather than the rock in the harbor and everybody being drunk in the middle of the night.)

Link to the Podcast

Link to the Show Notes

Link to the Transcript

34. Sir Thomas Malory Goes to Prison for Treason, London, England 1468

Old Newgate Prison — The Newgate Prison pictured here was both the city gate and a prison, notoriously unhealthy and noxious. Destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, it got rebuilt, much larger, and was finally torn down in 1904. Sir Thomas Malory spent the last years of his life here. Even with money, it can’t have been a good time. But there was a perk; it was next door to the Greyfriars Monastery, which had an excellent library. And that’s why we have Le Morte d’Arthur. Cause Thomas Malory had a library he could spend time in whilst imprisoned for treason.

Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel got into lots of legal trouble in 1443, 1451, 1452, and might or might not have done the things he got accused of, but he did indeed enter into a plot, along with Richard Neville, to overthrow King Edward IV, for which he ended up in prison. Too bad for him! But lucky for us, because that’s when he wrote The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of The Rounde Table, which got published, after his death, by William Caxton, which is why we know it. Caxton, by the way, made a bunch of editing decisions, one of which was to shorten the title to Le Morte d’Arthur . Your hosts explain lots of things — Malory’s legal troubles, where Le Morte d’Arthur fits into Arthurian literature, Malory’s feud with the Duke of Buckingham — and include some holy oil given to Becket by the Virgin Mary herself, and Dickens’ connection to Marshalsea prison. It’s all connected. Really.

Link to Podcast

Link to Show Notes

Link to Transcript

33. The Theft of the Book of Kells, Kells, Ireland 1006

the Canon Tables in the Book of Kells — The canon tables from the Book of Kells (Trinity College Dublin MS 58, 5v) gives a helpful guide to pretty much nothing at all, since really the book was never meant to be used as a text; it’s all about the visuals.

Happy New Year! An episode without any deaths! The “chief treasure of the western world” (as the Annals of Ulster reported) was stolen from the Abbey of Kells in 1006, surprisingly, not by Vikings. The thieves tore off the cover, which was encrusted with gold and jewels, we figure, and threw away the manuscript itself, which was found 2 months and 20 days afterwards, “under a sod.” Besides the book itself, and some other book which was like it in being thrown in a bog, and Kells, why we want to go there, Michelle also tells us about finding relatives in Meath, and a high cross in the river at Kells which might be there but if so it’s impossible to find. Fun times! And we repeat: Vikings were not at fault!

Link to the Podcast

Link to the Show Notes

Link to the Transcript

32. Special Episode! Peter Konieczny from Medievalists.net Explains Con Artists in Medieval London, England

Join us to hear Peter Konieczny tell tales about medieval frauds in London! Fake earls, fake ale inspectors! But, really, mostly, Bad Things Done To Bread. Alas. Above, a baker who has been caught at his perfidy is dragged on a hurdle, with one of his Bad Loaves hung around his neck. From Liber Albus (the White Book of the City of London) Vol 3; translation by H.T. Riley.

It’s a Special Episode! Peter Konieczny joins us, to share his knowledge and stories about frauds in medieval London. A fake Earl’s son, who needs you to help a lot, really, no kidding. Fake government inspectors who need you to hand over the ale so they can test it, bye-bye. Bakers who steal bits of your dough so as to make extra loaves and shortchange you. Merchants who put dirt in cinnamon. London’s a scary place. Many thanks to Peter and medievalists.net.

Link to Podcast

Link to Show Notes

Link to Transcript