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PODCAST

New Books in Medieval History

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow

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All Episodes

52:05

Melissa Vise, "The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/03/12

The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. Melissa Vise, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, Dr. Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe’s monarchies but rather in Italy’s republics. Exploring the cultural process through which

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37:55

Martha Bayless, "Entertainment, Pleasure, and Meaning...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/03/11

The people of early England (c. 450–1100 CE) enjoyed numerous kinds of entertainment, recreation and pleasure, but the scattered records of such things have made the larger picture challenging to assemble. Entertainment, Pleasure, and Meaning in Early England (Cambridge University Press, 2025) by Dr. Martha Bayless illuminates the merrier aspects of early English life, extending our understanding of the full range of early medieval English culture. It shows why entertainment and festivity were not

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51:22

Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Doucette, "The Catholic...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/03/08

Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power - across and within polities - was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500 (Oxford UP, 2022) inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism,

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43:49

Ibn Butlan, "The Doctors' Dinner Party: A Satirical...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/03/08

In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, Raja Aderdor, the host, delves deeper into this fascinating work with Jeremy Farrell, a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Leiden University, who co-authored a translation of this novella. Jeremy shares his insights into the satire, the medical practices described, and how Ibn Buṭlān's critique resonates with today's debates on medicine and misinformation.The Doctors' Dinner Party: A Satirical Novella by Ibn Buṭlān (NYU Press, 2023) is an eleventh-century

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55:00

Exploring Muslim Sicily with Nuha Alshaar and...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/03/07

In this episode Saeed Khan and Hizer Mir take a trip to Muslim Sicily, via a new book edited by Nuha Alshaar. They are also joined for this conversation by Shainool Jiwa, one of the authors whose work is featured in this edited volume. They discuss the period from around 800 CE to the mid-13th century, one characterised by a large Muslim presence which still exerts an important, though sometimes forgotten, influence on the present. This episode is one of our Forgotten Ummah episodes, where we

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36:05

Robert Houghton, "The Middle Ages in Computer Games:...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/03/03

Games with a medieval setting are commercially lucrative and reach a truly massive audience. Moreover, they can engage their players in a manner that is not only different, but in certain aspects, more profound than traditional literary or cinematic forms of medievalism. However, although it is important to understand the versions of the Middle Ages presented by these games, how players engage with these medievalist worlds, and why particular representational trends emerge in this most modern

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65:32

Isabel Moreira, "Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/03/03

This book tells the remarkable life of Balthild of Francia (c. 633-80), a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon slave who became a queen of France. Described in contemporary sources as beautiful and intelligent, she rose to power through her marriage to the short-lived King Clovis II. As regent for her young son, she promoted social and political reforms in Francia that included the rescue and rehousing of Christian slaves who, like Balthild herself, had been caught up in the human-trafficking practices of

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42:23

Caroline Dunn, "Ladies-in-waiting in Medieval...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/03/02

Caroline Dunn joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England (Cambridge UP, 2025), which examines female attendants who served queens and aristocratic women during the late medieval period. Using a unique set of primary source–based statistics, Caroline Dunn reveals that the lady-in-waiting was far more than a pretty girl sewing in the queen’s chamber while seeking to catch the eye of an eligible bachelor. Ladies-in-waiting witnessed major historical events of the

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53:35

Ellen Fenzel Arnold, "Medieval Riverscapes:...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/03/01

Jana Byars talks to Ellen Arnold about Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, 300 - 1100 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Fishermen, monks, saints, and dragons met in medieval riverscapes; their interactions reveal a rich and complex world. Using religious narrative sources to evaluate the environmental mentalities of medieval communities, Ellen F. Arnold explores the cultural meanings applied to rivers over a broad span of time, ca. 300-1100 CE. Hagiographical material, poetry,

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71:14

Wan-Chuan Kao, "White before Whiteness in the Late...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/28

White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wan-Chuan Kao analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations.The book argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The 'before' of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation - one that simultaneously

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70:52

Gemma Hollman, "Women in the Middle Ages:...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/26

Medieval women ruled over kingdoms, abbeys, and households; produced stunning works of art and craft; and did the hard work that kept ordinary families fed and clothed. Though women’s contributions were often diminished or completely ignored in written accounts, art tells a different story: women appear everywhere, from the margins of illuminated manuscripts to grand tapestries. In Women in the Middle Ages: Illuminating the World of Peasants, Nuns, and Queens (Abbeville Press, 2024), historian Gemma

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63:22

Mary Flannery, "Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/22

For over six centuries, Chaucer has epitomized poetic greatness, though more recent treatments of The Canterbury Tales’ lively and often risqué style have made his name more synonymous with bawdy humor. But beyond his poetic achievements, Chaucer assumed various roles including those of royal attendant, soldier, customs official, justice of the peace, and more. In this book, Mary Flannery chronicles Chaucer’s life during one of the most turbulent periods of English history, illuminating how he came

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57:05

Peter Ramey, "The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/22

Beowulf is the product of a profoundly religious imagination, but the significance of the poem’s Christianity has been downplayed or denied altogether. The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation with Commentary (Angelico Press, 2023) is the first translation and popular commentary to take seriously the religious dimension of this venerable text. While generations of students know that Beowulf represents a confluence of Christianity and paganism, this version—informed by J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory of

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29:25

Andrew Jotischky, "The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/21

From the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. But who were monasteries for? What kind of people founded and maintained them? And how did monasticism change over the thousand years or so of the Middle Ages?Andrew Jotischky traces the history of monastic life from its origins in the fourth century to the sixteenth. He shows how religious houses sheltered the poor and elderly, cared for the sick, and educated the young. They were centres of

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73:47

Shane Bobrycki, "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages"...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/17

By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as Shane Bobrycki argues, the influence and importance of the crowd did not disappear in early medieval Europe. In The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton UP, 2024), Bobrycki shows that although demographic change may have dispersed the urban multitudes of Greco-Roman civilization, collective behavior retained its social importance even when crowds

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54:33

Jacqueline M. Burek, "Literary Variety and the...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/16

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing?Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's

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26:09

Marcel Elias, "English Literature and the Crusades:...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/16

The period from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus of Middle English crusade romances. In English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291–1453 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Marcel Elias places these romances in dialogue with multifarious European writings to offer a novel account of late medieval crusade culture: as ambivalent and self-critical, animated by tensions and debates,

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48:23

Adam Pennington, "Henry VIII and the Plantagenet...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/15

The story of King Henry VIII, a man who married six times only to execute two of those wives, is part of Great Britain’s national and international identity. Each year, millions of people walk around the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace and Hever Castle, plus many other historical sites, taking in and hoping to glean some sense of the man and the myth, and yet there is a period from Henry VIII’s life which remains largely overlooked, a period in which he chose not to execute wives, servants or

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48:00

Erika Graham-Goering et al., "Lordship and the...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/14

Jana Byars talks to Erika Graham-Goering of the University of Oslo about Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), which was edited by Graham-Goering, Jim van der Meulen, and Frederik Buylaert. The origins of modern European states are often traced back to the expansion of royal and princely authority in the late Middle Ages, transforming scattered power structures into centralised governments. Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval

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40:39

Josef Stern, "Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in...

New Books in Medieval History ·

2025/02/09

There is a common misconception that the Jewish religion does not believe in an afterlife. While it’s true that Judaism is focused on actions, intentions and thoughts in this life, it also believes in an afterlife, and has a variety of points of view about what happens after death. Today’s guest, Professor Joseph Stern, will discuss Maimonides’ unique understanding of the afterlife, per his recent article, "A Guide to the AfterDeath: Maimonides on olam ha-ba’", Religious Studies (2024), 60,

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