Podcasts about Black Death

#WeirdDarknessRadio WEEK OF JUNE 15, 2025: During the Black Death, medieval Europeans bathed in vinegar, slept on rotting straw, dumped waste in the streets — and still couldn't figure out why everyone was dying.==========HOUR ONE: During the bubonic plague in the early Middle-Ages, those who became sick and were even suspected of having the plague, were forced to relocate to a quarantined island – Poveglia Island. The gruesomeness that took place there still continues today, with the island being illegal to visit – and reportedly, very haunted. (Inside Black Plague Island) *** We look at some of the bathing – and lack thereof – that took place during the bubonic plague, as well as some of the beliefs they had about diet and how it might protect from contagion. Some of the ideas of what people thought could protect them from the disease are nothing short of shocking. (Living With The Black Death)==========HOUR TWO: About 80 years after the black plague began, a different plague came upon England – a fatal one that would cause you to almost instantly perspire to death. (Death By Sweat) *** Most everyone is familiar with the plague in Europe in the early 1400s – but in the early 1900s it struck again. This time in San Francisco. If you've not heard that before, it could be because the U.S. government tried to cover it up. (The Plague of San Francisco) *** Of all the imagery that comes to mind when hearing the words “bubonic plague” the most prevalent is most certainly that of the doctors – and the odd, bird-like masks they would wear. Why they dressed that way is interesting – but what the doctors did while wearing those suits and in their labs as they tried to battle the illness is absolutely horrifying. (Plague Doctors) *** And it probably comes as no surprise that something so deadly and horrific as the black plague would leave behind some residual paranormal energy – and boy is there a lot of it. (A Plague of Ghosts)==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: We look at some of the bathing – and lack thereof – that took place during the bubonic plague, as well as some of the beliefs they had about diet and how it might protect from contagion. Some of the ideas of what people thought could protect them from the disease are nothing short of shocking. (Living With The Black Death – CONTINUED) *** Europe just could not escape plagues of any kind – for example, the plague that made you, against your will, keep dancing until you dropped dead. (The Dance of Death)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:“Inside Black Plague Island” by Cheryl Adams Richkoff for Graveyard Shift: https://tinyurl.com/v85y7k6“Plague Doctors” by Melissa Sartore for Ranker's Weird History: https://tinyurl.com/rmap5d8“Death By Sweat” by Melissa Sartore for Ranker's Weird History: https://tinyurl.com/vqpvgrz“The Dance of Death” by Melissa Satore for Ranker's Weird History: https://tinyurl.com/u6kdwgp“The Plague of San Francisco” by Melissa Brinks for Ranker's Weird History: https://tinyurl.com/sbaht69“Living With The Black Death” by Genevieve Carlton for Ranker's Weird History: https://tinyurl.com/tcbo9af,https://tinyurl.com/sfkjhrg; and Kellen Perry for Ranker: https://tinyurl.com/u4bxkuf“A Plague of Ghosts” by Erin Wisti for Graveyard Shift: https://tinyurl.com/tm2cxzr==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)=========="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46==========WeirdDarkness®, WeirdDarkness© 2025==========To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at affiliates@radioamerica.com, or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).

This 2020 episode covers one of the transitional events between the Black Death and the Renaissance. Wat Tyler’s Rebellion was also known as the Uprising of 1381 or the Great Rising.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Explore the Black Death's terrifying spread, its devastating impact on medieval Europe, and its surprising long-term legacies. Plus, boost your English vocabulary, speaking, and writing skills with practical language lessons. Full Episode Description: Join Danny on English Plus Podcast for a gripping journey into one of history's most catastrophic events: The Black Death. In this episode, we'll tell the harrowing story of how a tiny terror decimated medieval Europe, wiping out millions and forever changing the course of civilization. What you'll learn in this episode: The Unseen Enemy: Discover the origins and rapid, horrifying spread of the Yersinia pestis bacterium across continents, and the different forms of the plague. A World Turned Upside Down: Explore the profound societal, economic, and cultural consequences of the Black Death, from the decline of feudalism to the questioning of religious authority. Resilience & Rebirth: Uncover the surprising long-term legacies of the plague, including shifts in labor dynamics, early public health measures, and its indirect role in paving the way for the Renaissance. Practical Lessons for Today: We'll relate the Black Death to real-life challenges, examining case studies on information, power dynamics, and human resilience in the face of crisis. Language Focus: Elevate your English with our dedicated language sections! We'll break down essential vocabulary used in the episode (like 'harrowing,' 'pivotal,' 'decimate,' 'catalyst,' and 'resilience') and provide a speaking lesson on how to discuss complex historical and societal topics. Plus, get practical writing tips and a challenge focusing on the past perfect and conditional tenses to help you craft compelling narratives. Engaging Discussion: Participate in our thought-provoking discussion questions to delve deeper into the topic and share your perspectives. This episode is more than just a history lesson; it's a deep dive into human endurance, societal transformation, and a powerful opportunity to take your English and knowledge to the next level. Tune in, learn, and engage! To unlock full access to all our episodes, consider becoming a premium subscriber on Apple Podcasts or Patreon. And don't forget to visit englishpluspodcast.com for even more content, including articles, in-depth studies, and our brand-new audio series now available in our English Plus Podcast's shop!

In this episode we sit down with historian and author Helen Carr to discuss her new book 'Sceptred Isle: A New History of the Fourteenth Century' . In this episode Helen Carr talks to us about the Black Death, the emotional impact of the century's turmoil, and the power of its monarchs! Grab a copy of Sceptred IsleKeep up to date with Helen through her Website, or InstagramIf you want to get in touch with History with Jackson email: jackson@historywithjackson.co.ukTo support History with Jackson to carry on creating content subscribe to History with Jackson+ on Apple Podcasts or support us on our Patreon!To catch up on everything to do with History with Jackson head to www.HistorywithJackson.co.ukFollow us on Facebook at @HistorywithJacksonFollow us on Instagram at @HistorywithJacksonFollow us on X/Twitter at @HistorywJacksonFollow us on TikTok at @HistorywithJackson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matt Lewis dives into the dramatic and transformative 14th century with historian Helen Carr, from the drama of the Peasants' Revolt, where commoners breached the mighty Tower of London and terrified a young King Richard II to the chaos of the Black Death and its surprising aftermath—an age of opportunity and change. From Edward II's controversial reign to Richard II's downfall, Matt and Helen uncover the gripping stories and seismic shifts of the 14th century to discover how resilience and upheaval forged modern Britain.MOREPeasants' Revolthttps://open.spotify.com/episode/793WPDhg8myDcHJLk2jw2tThe Black Deathhttps://open.spotify.com/episode/0rfU8b4CEDUQZ9YOpH8X4oGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK

The most significant rebellion of the Medieval era, the so-called Peasant's Revolt, kicked off in Brentwood, Essex on 30th May, 1381, when tax collector John Bampton attempted to collect unpaid poll tax. The protest triggered a violent confrontation, rapidly spreading across the south-east of the country. Within a month, the rebels were marching towards London, massacring merchants and razing the palace of the king's uncle, John of Gaunt. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly consider whether the protestors really were ‘peasants' at all; appraise 14 year-old king Richard II's handling of their appeasement; and explain how, despite the horrific hardship of the Black Death, the working classes had, for once, something of an advantage… Further Reading: • ‘The Peasants' Revolt Of 1381: A Guide' (HistoryExtra, 2021): https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/your-guide-peasants-revolt-facts-timeline/ • ‘Peasants' Revolt' (British Library): https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item132518.html • ‘The Untold Story Of The 1381 Peasants Revolt' (Timeline, 2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kq9sbtFCR8&t=2s Love the show? Support us!  Join 

Send us a text Vocalist Henrik Nuland and Guitarist Aleksander Torjesen of Norway's Death/Thrash/Black Metal band Nithe visit the Morgue to talk about the band's history and their latest E.P. “Funeral Death”. See you at the Morgue!original air date: 5/29/2025music by:Nithe-Funeral Death Nithe-Chains of the Abyss  Nithe-Night of the Ghoul Nithe-Primordial Ooze (Mother of Woe)  contact: thetampamorgue@gmail.com  The Tampa Morgue Podcast can be found on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and most places you listen to your podcasts. See you at the Morgue!  

It's an exciting day here on the Cryptid Creator Corner as Jimmy chats with legendary writer Peter Milligan! Peter has a new series out through Mad Cave Studios with artist Val Rodrigues. The Pale Knight #1 is out May 28th. It's a fantastic first issue. Peter chats about the series, his fascination with the time period, working with Val and Mad Cave, taking inspiration from Bergman's The Seventh Seal, and creating Sir Hugh de Grey so that he feels like a man of his time but is still relatable. This is a wonderful conversation that leads into some interesting territory and you don't want to miss it.  Peter's website The Pale Knight From the publisher England, 1349. Sir Hugh de Grey, the Pale Knight, returns from war to find a land ravaged by the Black Death, and his son dying of the plague. When he prays to God to save his son's life, it is not God who answers—but Death himself. And Death is willing to cut a deal. PATREON We have a new Patreon, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CryptidCreatorCornerpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. If you like what we do, please consider supporting us. We got two simple tiers, $1 and $3. Want to know more, you know what to do. ARKENFORGE Play TTRPG games? Make sure to check out our partner ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Arkenforge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Use the discount code YETI5 to get $5 off your order. THE LANTERN CATALOG Created on the premise of creating light in the dark, this is the the go to resource to keep you up to date on the indy projects and the creators you love. You can find them at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.thelanterncatalog.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Make sure to check out our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠2000AD⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We look back at the original Huck series from Mark Millar and Rafael Albuquerque this week on the Major Spoilers Podcast. We also review Family Force V from Skybound Comet, Archie is Mr. Justice #4 from Archie Comics, and The Pale Knight #1 from Mad Cave Studios. Subscribe to the Major Spoilers Podcast Network Master Feed! Major Spoilers Podcast Network Master Feed RSS Feed Show your thanks to Major Spoilers for this episode by becoming a Major Spoilers Patron at http://patreon.com/MajorSpoilers. It will help ensure the Major Spoilers Podcast continues far into the future! Join our Discord server and chat with fellow Spoilerites! (https://discord.gg/jWF9BbF) REVIEWS STEPHEN FAMILY FORCE V Writer: Matt Braly Artist: Ainsworth Lin Publisher: Skybound Comet Cover Price: $16.99 Release Date: May 28, 2025 Fighting alien kaiju with your family on a Friday night is a totally normal part of being a teenager...right? Well, it is for Maise who, despite her protests, continues the family legacy of keeping the world safe, all while trying to get good grades, impress her crush, and balance extracurriculars. But growing up in this family means Maise must live up to the expectations of those she's destined to protect while not losing herself in the process. Matt Braly (Disney's Amphibia) and Ainsworth Lin team up for the YA graphic novel of the year full of action and charm in FAMILY FORCE V! [rating:4/5] You can purchase this issue via our Amazon affiliate link - https://amzn.to/435Zebx MATTHEW ARCHIE IS MR JUSTICE #4 Writer: Blake Howard Artist: Federico Sabbatini Publisher: Archie Comics Cover Price: $4.99 Release Date: May 21, 2025 BRAND NEW 4-PART ARCHIE PREMIUM EVENT LIMITED SERIES! This is it-the heart-wrenching conclusion to the epic four-part series is here. We finally get the perspective of Archie's lifelong friend-turned-enemy Reggie Mantle. What went wrong that sent these two young men on such different paths? And can the power of jealousy, resentment, and fear be the most destructive of all? [rating:3/5] You can purchase this issue via our Amazon affiliate link - https://amzn.to/3H2HDJ7 RODRIGO THE PALE KNIGHT #1 Writer: Peter Miligan Artist: Valdeci Rodrigues Nogueira Publisher: Mad Cave Studios Cover Price: $4.99 Release Date: May 28, 2025 England, 1349. Sir Hugh de Grey, the Pale Knight, returns from war to find a land ravaged by the Black Death, and his son dying of the plague. When he prays to God to save his son's life, it is not God who answers—but Death himself. And Death is willing to cut a deal [rating: 3.5/5] You can purchase this issue via our Amazon affiliate link - https://amzn.to/3Zp9NUO DISCUSSION HUCK Writer: Mark Millar Artist: Rafael Albuquerque Publisher: Dark Horse Comics Cover Price: $15.46 In a quiet seaside town, a gas station clerk named Huck secretly uses his special gifts to do a good deed each day. But when his story leaks, a media firestorm erupts, bringing him uninvited fame. As pieces of Huck's past begin to resurface, it's no longer clear who his friends are - or whose lives may be in danger. This series from writer MARK MILLAR and artist RAFAEL ALBUQUERQUE presents a comic book unlike anything you've read before. You can purchase this issue via our Amazon affiliate link - https://amzn.to/4jakvW8 CLOSE Contact us at podcast@majorspoilers.com A big Thank You goes out to everyone who downloads, subscribes, listens, and supports this show. We really appreciate you taking the time to listen to our ramblings each week. Tell your friends!

We look back at the original Huck series from Mark Millar and Rafael Albuquerque this week on the Major Spoilers Podcast. We also review Family Force V from Skybound Comet, Archie is Mr. Justice #4 from Archie Comics, and The Pale Knight #1 from Mad Cave Studios. Subscribe to the Major Spoilers Podcast Network Master Feed! Major Spoilers Podcast Network Master Feed RSS Feed Show your thanks to Major Spoilers for this episode by becoming a Major Spoilers Patron at http://patreon.com/MajorSpoilers. It will help ensure the Major Spoilers Podcast continues far into the future! Join our Discord server and chat with fellow Spoilerites! (https://discord.gg/jWF9BbF) REVIEWS STEPHEN FAMILY FORCE V Writer: Matt Braly Artist: Ainsworth Lin Publisher: Skybound Comet Cover Price: $16.99 Release Date: May 28, 2025 Fighting alien kaiju with your family on a Friday night is a totally normal part of being a teenager...right? Well, it is for Maise who, despite her protests, continues the family legacy of keeping the world safe, all while trying to get good grades, impress her crush, and balance extracurriculars. But growing up in this family means Maise must live up to the expectations of those she's destined to protect while not losing herself in the process. Matt Braly (Disney's Amphibia) and Ainsworth Lin team up for the YA graphic novel of the year full of action and charm in FAMILY FORCE V! [rating:4/5] You can purchase this issue via our Amazon affiliate link - https://amzn.to/435Zebx MATTHEW ARCHIE IS MR JUSTICE #4 Writer: Blake Howard Artist: Federico Sabbatini Publisher: Archie Comics Cover Price: $4.99 Release Date: May 21, 2025 BRAND NEW 4-PART ARCHIE PREMIUM EVENT LIMITED SERIES! This is it-the heart-wrenching conclusion to the epic four-part series is here. We finally get the perspective of Archie's lifelong friend-turned-enemy Reggie Mantle. What went wrong that sent these two young men on such different paths? And can the power of jealousy, resentment, and fear be the most destructive of all? [rating:3/5] You can purchase this issue via our Amazon affiliate link - https://amzn.to/3H2HDJ7 RODRIGO THE PALE KNIGHT #1 Writer: Peter Miligan Artist: Valdeci Rodrigues Nogueira Publisher: Mad Cave Studios Cover Price: $4.99 Release Date: May 28, 2025 England, 1349. Sir Hugh de Grey, the Pale Knight, returns from war to find a land ravaged by the Black Death, and his son dying of the plague. When he prays to God to save his son's life, it is not God who answers—but Death himself. And Death is willing to cut a deal [rating: 3.5/5] You can purchase this issue via our Amazon affiliate link - https://amzn.to/3Zp9NUO DISCUSSION HUCK Writer: Mark Millar Artist: Rafael Albuquerque Publisher: Dark Horse Comics Cover Price: $15.46 In a quiet seaside town, a gas station clerk named Huck secretly uses his special gifts to do a good deed each day. But when his story leaks, a media firestorm erupts, bringing him uninvited fame. As pieces of Huck's past begin to resurface, it's no longer clear who his friends are - or whose lives may be in danger. This series from writer MARK MILLAR and artist RAFAEL ALBUQUERQUE presents a comic book unlike anything you've read before. You can purchase this issue via our Amazon affiliate link - https://amzn.to/4jakvW8 CLOSE Contact us at podcast@majorspoilers.com A big Thank You goes out to everyone who downloads, subscribes, listens, and supports this show. We really appreciate you taking the time to listen to our ramblings each week. Tell your friends!

Send us a textVocalist/Guitarist Eduardo De Nardi aka Dysangelium of Italian Black/Death Metal Band Necromorbid visits the Morgue and talks about history of Necromorbid. We also discuss touring and his other projects past and present and the upcoming Necromorbid record. See you at the Morgue!origianal air date 5/21/2025music by:Necromorbid- Immortal Rites Of Satanic DevotionNecromorbid-Cathedral Of The Black GoatNecromorbid-Manifestation Of Demonic RevengeNecromorbid-Triumphant Luciferian SplendorNecromorbid-The Profane Majesty of Barbaric Onslaughtcontact: thetampamorgue@gmail.com  The Tampa Morgue Podcast can be found on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and most places you listen to your podcasts. See you at the Morgue!  

Send us a textWhat if apocalypse doesn't mean the end of everything, but rather a revelation of new possibilities? Archaeologist Lizzie Wade turns our understanding of catastrophe upside down in this eye-opening conversation about how ancient societies transformed through crisis.Speaking from Mexico City, Wade takes us on a global journey through civilizations that faced devastating challenges yet emerged transformed. She dismantles our preconceptions about Neanderthals, revealing not brutish cave-dwellers but communities capable of care and connection—even interbreeding with our ancestors during climate instability. The DNA evidence speaks volumes: almost all modern humans carry about 2% Neanderthal ancestry, suggesting cooperation rather than conquest.The pattern continues across time and space. When Egypt's Old Kingdom collapsed amid severe drought around 4,200 years ago, elite texts described apocalyptic horror. Yet archaeological evidence from ordinary villages shows increased creativity, religious innovation, and more broadly distributed resources. Similarly, the Black Death decimated Europe's population but ultimately improved living conditions for survivors despite elites' desperate attempts to preserve feudal hierarchies. These historical patterns have striking parallels to our experience with COVID-19, suggesting we're still just beginning to understand the pandemic's long-term social effects.Wade's most powerful insight may be about who gets to tell these stories. Written records typically come from those with power and privilege, while archaeology reveals a more complete picture by examining the lived experience of ordinary people. This perspective shift is especially crucial when considering colonial narratives like the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, which wasn't the inevitable triumph of "superior" civilization that European accounts depicted.As we face climate change and other global challenges, Wade's research offers profound hope. Throughout human history, apocalypse has never meant extinction but transformation. The question isn't whether we'll survive, but what kind of society we'll create in response to crisis. What holds us back isn't technological limitations but fear of change—particularly from those benefiting most from existing systems. Are we brave enough to imagine entirely new possibilities?

Send us a textThe “Golden Age” during the seventeenth century was a period of unparalleled power, wealth, and splendour in the Netherlands. It was made possible by the maritime trade with Asia and the economic growth the East India Company brought to the country. But it carried the seed of its downfall. As the rich grew richer they not only speculated with tulips, but they increasingly bought themselves political power and became an oligarchy. Bas van Babel is an economic historian and researcher who looks at the fascinating relationship between markets and societies. We speak about how the Black Death shaped Europe, how important Church Law was for the development of a middle class, the different development of eastern and western Europe, and about the beginnings of capitalism. In fact, we have so much to talk about that we will have to speak about Bas's present work in a part two!Support the show

I was delighted to talk to the historian Helen Castor (who writes The H Files by Helen Castor) about her new book The Eagle and the Hart. I found that book compulsive, and this is one of my favourite interviews so far. We covered so much: Dickens, Melville, Diana Wynne Jones, Hilary Mantel, whether Edward III is to blame for the Wars of the Roses, why Bolingbroke did the right thing, the Paston Letters, whether we should dig up old tombs for research, leaving academia, Elizabeth I, and, of course, lots of Shakespeare. There is a full transcript below.Henry: Is there anything that we fundamentally know about this episode in history that Shakespeare didn't know?Helen: That's an extremely good question, and I'm tempted now to say no.Helen told me what is hardest to imagine about life in the fourteenth century.I think it's relatively easy to imagine a small community or even a city, because we can imagine lots of human beings together, but how relationships between human beings happen at a distance, not just in terms of writing a letter to someone you know, but how a very effective power structure happens across hundreds of miles in the absence of those things is the thing that has always absolutely fascinated me about the late Middle Ages. I think that's because it's hard, for me at least, to imagine.Good news to any publishers reading this. Helen is ready and willing to produce a complete edition of the Paston Letters. They were a bestseller when they were published a hundred years ago, but we are crying out for a complete edition in modern English.Henry: If someone wants to read the Paston Letters, but they don't want to read Middle English, weird spelling, et cetera, is there a good edition that they can use?Helen: Yes, there is an Oxford World's Classic. They're all selected. There isn't a complete edition in modern spelling. If any publishers are listening, I would love to do one. Henry: Yes, let's have it.Helen: Let's have it. I would really, really love to do that.Full TranscriptHenry: Today I am talking to the historian, Helen Castor. Helen is a former fellow of Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge. She has written several books of history. She is now a public historian, and of course, she has a Substack. The H Files by Helen CastorWe are going to talk mostly about her book, The Eagle and the Hart, which is all about Richard II and Henry IV. I found this book compulsive, so I hope you will read it too. Helen, welcome.Helen: Thank you very much for having me, Henry.Henry: You recently read Bleak House.Helen: I did.Henry: What did you think?Helen: I absolutely loved it. It was a long time since I'd read any Dickens. I read quite a lot when I was young. I read quite a lot of everything when I was young and have fallen off that reader's perch, much to my shame. The first page, that description of the London fog, the London courts, and I thought, "Why have I not been doing it for all these years?"Then I remembered, as so often with Dickens, the bits I love and the bits I'm less fond of, the sentimentality, the grotesquerie I'm less fond of, but the humour and the writing. There was one bit that I have not been able to read then or any of the times I've tried since without physically sobbing. It's a long time since a book has done that to me. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it, but--Henry: I'm sure I know what you mean. That's quite a sentimental passage.Helen: It is, but not sentimental in the way that I find myself objecting to. I think I really respond viscerally to this sentimentalising of some of his young women characters. I find that really off-putting, but I think now I'm a parent, and particularly I'm a parent of a boy [laughter]. I think it's that sense of a child being completely alone with no one to look after them, and then finding some people, but too late for a happy ending.Henry: Too late.Helen: Yes.Henry: You've been reading other classic novels, I think, Moby Dick?Helen: I'm in the middle of Moby Dick as we speak. I'm going very slowly, partly because I'm trying to savour every sentence. I love the sentence so much as a form. Melville is just astonishing, and also very, very funny in a way I hadn't expected to keep laughing out loud, sometimes because there is such humour in a sentence.Sometimes I'm just laughing because the sentence itself seems to have such audacity and that willingness to go places with sentences that sometimes I feel we've lost in the sort of sense of rules-based sentences instead of just sticking a semicolon and keep going. Why not, because it's so gorgeous and full of the joy of language at that point? Anyway, I'm ranting now, but--Henry: No, I think a lot of rules were instituted in the early 20th century that said you can and cannot do all these things, and writers before that point had not often followed those rules. I think what it has led to is that writers now, they can't really control a long sentence, in the sense that Melville and Dickens will do a long sentence, and it is a syntactically coherent thing, even though it's 60, 70 longer words. It's not just lots of stuff, and then, and then. The whole thing has got a beautiful structure that makes sense as a unit. That's just not obvious in a lot of writing now.Helen: I think that's exactly right. Partly, I've been reading some of the Melville out loud, and having just got onto the classification of whales, you can see I'm going very slowly. Those sentences, which are so long, but it's exactly that. If you read them out loud, and you follow the sense, and the punctuation, however irregular it might be in modern terms, gives you the breathing, you just flow on it, and the excitement of that, even or perhaps especially when one is talking about the classification of whales. Just joyful.Henry: Will we be seeing more very long sentences in your next book?Helen: I think I have to get a bit better at it. The habit that I was conscious of anyway, but became acutely so when I had to read my own audiobook for the first time is that I think I write in a very visual way. That is how I read because mostly it's silent.I discovered or rediscovered that often what I do when I want to write a very long sentence is I start the sentence and then I put a diversion or extra information within em dashes in the middle of the sentence. That works on the page because you can see spatially. I love that way of reading, I love seeing words in space.A lot of different kinds of text, both prose and poetry, I read in space like that. If you're reading to be heard, then the difficulty of breaking into a sentence with, whether it's brackets or em dashes or whatever, and then rejoining the sentence further down has its own challenges. Perhaps I ought to try and do less of that and experiment more with a Melvillian Dickensian onward flow. I don't know what my editor will think.Henry: What has brought you back to reading novels like this?Helen: I was wondering that this morning, actually, because I'm very aware having joined Substack, and of course, your Substack is one of the ones that is leading me further in this direction, very inspiringly, is discovering that lots of other people are reading and reading long novels now too. It reminded me of that thing that anyone with children will know that you have a baby and you call it something that you think only you have thought of, and then four years later, you call and you discover half the class is called that name. You wonder what was in the water that led everybody in that direction.I've just seen someone tweet this morning about how inspired they are by the builder next door who, on the scaffolding, is blasting the audiobook Middlemarch to the whole neighborhood.Henry: Oh my god. Amazing.Helen: It's really happening. Insofar as I can work out what led me as opposed to following a group, which clearly I am in some sense, I think the world at the moment is so disquieting, and depressing, and unnerving, that I think for me, there was a wish to escape into another world and another world that would be very immersive, not removed from this world completely. One that is very recognizably human.I think when I was younger, when I was in my teens and 20s, I loved reading science fiction and fantasy before it was such a genre as it is now. I'm a huge fan of Diana Wynne Jones and people like that.Henry: Oh, my god, same. Which one is your favorite?Helen: Oh, that is an impossible question to answer, partly because I want to go back and read a lot of them. Actually, I've got something next to me, just to get some obscurity points. I want to go back to Everard's Ride because there is a story in here that is based on the King's square. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but early 15th century, the story of the imprisoned King of Scotland when he was in prison in England. That one's in my head.The Dalemark Quartet I love because of the sort of medieval, but then I love the ones that are pure, more science fantasy. Which is your favorite? Which should I go back to first?Henry: I haven't read them all because I only started a couple of years ago. I just read Deep Secret, and I thought that was really excellent. I was in Bristol when I read it quite unwittingly. That was wonderful.Helen: Surrounded by Diana Wynne Jones' land. I only discovered many years into an obsession that just meant that I would read every new one while there were still new ones coming out. I sat next to Colin Burrow at a dinner in--Henry: Oh my god.Helen: I did sort of know that he was her son, but monstered him for the whole time, the whole course of sitting together, because I couldn't quite imagine her in a domestic setting, if you like, because she came up with all these extraordinary worlds. I think in days gone by, I went into more obviously imaginary worlds. I think coming back to it now, I wanted something big and something that I really could disappear into. I've been told to read Bleak House for so many decades and felt so ashamed I hadn't. Having done that, I thought, "Well, the whale."Henry: Have you read Diana Wynne Jones' husband's books, John Burrow? Because that's more in your field.Helen: It is, although I'm ashamed to say how badly read I am in medieval literary scholarship. It's weird how these academic silos can operate, shouldn't, probably don't for many, many people. I always feel I'm on horribly thin ground, thin ice when I start talking about medieval literature because I know how much scholarship is out there, and I know how much I haven't read. I must put John Burrow on my list as well.Henry: He's very readable. He's excellent.Helen: I think I can imagine, but I must go into it.Henry: Also, his books are refreshingly short. Your husband is a poet, so there's a lot of literature in your life at the moment.Helen: There is. When we met, which was 10 years ago-- Again, I don't think of myself as knowledgeable about poetry in general, but what was wonderful was discovering how much we had in common in the writing process and how much I could learn from him. To me, one of the things that has always been extremely important in my writing is the sentence, the sound of a sentence, the rhythm of a sentence folded into a paragraph.I find it extremely hard to move on from a paragraph if it's not sitting right yet. The sitting right is as much to do with sound and rhythm as it is to do with content. The content has to be right. It means I'm a nightmare to edit because once I do move on from a paragraph, I think it's finished. Obviously, my editor might beg to differ.I'm very grateful to Thomas Penn, who's also a wonderful historian, who's my editor on this last book, for being so patient with my recalcitrance as an editee. Talking to my husband about words in space on the page, about the rhythm, about the sound, about how he goes about writing has been so valuable and illuminating.I hope that the reading I've been doing, the other thing I should say about going back to big 19th-century novels is that, of course, I had the enormous privilege and learning curve of being part of a Booker jury panel three years ago. That too was an enormous kick in terms of reading and thinking about reading because my co-judges were such phenomenal reading company, and I learned such a lot that year.I feel not only I hope growing as a historian, but I am really, really focusing on writing, reading, being forced out of my bunker where writing is all on the page, starting to think about sound more, think about hearing more, because I think more and more, we are reading that way as a culture, it seems to me, the growth of audiobooks. My mother is adjusting to audiobooks now, and it's so interesting to listen to her as a lifelong, voracious reader, adjusting to what it is to experience a book through sound rather than on the page. I just think it's all fascinating, and I'm trying to learn as I write.Henry: I've been experimenting with audiobooks, because I felt like I had to, and I sort of typically hate audio anything. Jonathan Swift is very good, and so is Diana Wynne Jones.Helen: Interesting. Those two specifically. Is there something that connects the two of them, or are they separately good?Henry: I think they both wrote in a plain, colloquial style. It was very capable of being quite intellectual and had capacity for ideas. Diana Wynne Jones certainly took care about the way it sounded because she read so much to her own children, and that was really when she first read all the children's classics. She had developed for many years an understanding of what would sound good when it was read to a child, I think.Helen: And so that's the voice in her head.Henry: Indeed. As you read her essays, she talks about living with her Welsh grandfather for a year. He was intoning in the chapel, and she sort of comes out of this culture as well.Helen: Then Swift, a much more oral culture.Henry: Swift, of course, is in a very print-heavy culture because he's in London in 1710. We've got coffee houses and all the examiner, and the spectator, and all these people scribbling about each other. I think he was very insistent on what he called proper words in proper places. He became famous for that plain style. It's very carefully done, and you can't go wrong reading that out loud. He's very considerate of the reader that you won't suddenly go, "Oh, I'm in the middle of this huge parenthesis. I don't know how--" As you were saying, Swift-- he would be very deliberate about the placement of everything.Helen: A lot of that has to do with rhythm.Henry: Yes.Helen: Doesn't it? I suppose what I'm wondering, being very ignorant about the 18th century is, in a print-saturated culture, but still one where literacy was less universal than now, are we to assume that that print-saturated culture also incorporated reading out loud —Henry: Yes, exactly so. Exactly so. If you are at home, letters are read out loud. This obviously gives the novelists great opportunities to write letters that have to sort of work both ways. Novels are read out loud. This goes on into the 19th century. Dickens had many illiterate fans who knew his work through it being read to them. Charles Darwin's wife read him novels. When he says, "I love novels," what he means is, "I love it when my wife reads me a novel." [laughs]You're absolutely right. A good part of your audience would come from those listening as well as those reading it.Helen: Maybe we're getting back towards a new version of that with audiobooks expanding in their reach.Henry: I don't know. I saw some interesting stuff. I can't remember who was saying this. Someone was saying, "It's not an oral culture if you're watching short videos. That's a different sort of culture." I think, for us, we can say, "Oh yes, we're like Jonathan Swift," but for the culture at large, I don't know. It is an interesting mixed picture at the moment.Helen: Yes, history never repeats, but we should be wary of writing off any part of culture to do with words.Henry: I think so. If people are reporting builders irritating the neighbourhood with George Eliot, then it's a very mixed picture, right?Helen: It is.Henry: Last literary question. Hilary Mantel has been a big influence on you. What have you taken from her?Helen: That's quite a hard question to answer because I feel I just sit at her feet in awe. If I could point to anything in my writing that could live up to her, I would be very happy. The word that's coming into my head when you phrase the question in that way, I suppose, might be an absolute commitment to precision. Precision in language matters to me so much. Her thought and her writing of whatever kind seems to me to be so precise.Listening to interviews with her is such an outrageous experience because these beautifully, entirely formed sentences come out of her mouth as though that's how thought and language work. They don't for me. [chuckles] I'm talking about her in the present tense because I didn't know her, but I find it hard to imagine that she's not out there somewhere.Henry: She liked ghosts. She might be with us.Helen: She might. I would like to think that. Her writing of whatever genre always seems to me to have that precision, and it's precision of language that mirrors precision of thought, including the ability to imagine herself into somebody else's mind. That's, I suppose, my project as a historian. I'm always trying to experience a lost world through the eyes of a lost person or people, which, of course, when you put it like that, is an impossible task, but she makes it seem possible for her anyway and that's the road I'm attempting to travel one way or another.Henry: What is it about the 14th and 15th centuries that is hardest for us to imagine?Helen: I think this speaks to something else that Hilary Mantel does so extraordinarily well, which is to show us entire human beings who live and breathe and think and feel just as we do in as complex and contradictory and three-dimensional a way as we do, and yet who live in a world that is stripped of so many of the things that we take so much for granted that we find it, I think, hard to imagine how one could function without them.What I've always loved about the late Middle Ages, as a political historian, which is what I think of myself as, is that it has in England such a complex and sophisticated system of government, but one that operates so overwhelmingly through human beings, rather than impersonal, institutionalized, technological structures.You have a king who is the fount of all authority, exercising an extraordinary degree of control over a whole country, but without telephones, without motorized transport, without a professional police service, without a standing army. If we strip away from our understanding of government, all those things, then how on earth does society happen, does rule happen, does government happen?I think it's relatively easy to imagine a small community or even a city, because we can imagine lots of human beings together, but how relationships between human beings happen at a distance, not just in terms of writing a letter to someone you know, but how a very effective power structure happens across hundreds of miles in the absence of those things is the thing that has always absolutely fascinated me about the late Middle Ages. I think that's because it's hard, for me at least, to imagine.Henry: Good. You went to the RSC to watch The Henriad in 2013.Helen: I did.Henry: Is Shakespeare a big influence on this book? How did that affect you?Helen: I suppose this is a long story because Richard II and The Henriad have been-- there is Richard II. Richard II is part of The Henriad, isn't it?Henry: Yes.Helen: Richard II. Henry, see, this is-Henry: The two Henry IVs.Helen: -I'm not Shakespearean. I am. [laughs]Henry: No, it's Richard II, the two Henry IVs, and Henry V. Because, of course, Henry Bolingbroke is in Richard II, and it--Helen: Yes, although I never think of him as really the same person as Henry IV in the Henry IV plays, because he changes so dramatically between the two.Henry: Very often, they have a young actor and an old actor, and of course, in real life, that's insane, right?Helen: It's absolutely insane. I always separate Henry IV, parts I and II, and Henry V off from Richard II because it feels to me as though they operate in rather different worlds, which they do in lots of ways. My story with the Henry ad, now that we've established that I actually know what we're talking about, goes back to when I was in my teens and Kenneth Branagh was playing Henry V in Stratford. I grew up very near Stratford.At 15, 16, watching the young Branagh play Henry V was mind-blowing. I went a whole number of times because, in those days, I don't know how it is now, but you could go and get standing tickets for a fiver on the day. More often than not, if there were spare seats, you would get moved into some extraordinary stall seats at-- I was about to say halftime, I'm a football fan, at the interval.Henry V was the play I knew best for a long time, but at the same time, I'd studied Richard II at school. The Henry IV plays are the ones I know least well. I'm interested now to reflect on the fact that they are the ones that depart most from history. I wonder whether that's why I find them hardest to love, because I'm always coming to the plays from the history. Richard II and Henry V actually have a lot to show us about those kings. They bear very close relationships with a lot of the contemporary chronicles, whereas the Henry IV ones is Shakespeare doing his own thing much more.Particularly, as you've just said, making Henry IV way too old, and/or depending which angle we're looking at it from, making Hotspur way too young, the real Hotspur was three years older than Henry IV. If you want to make Hotspur and how-- your young Turks, you have to make Henry IV old and grey and weary with Northumberland.Back in 2013, the really intense experience I had was being asked to go for a day to join the RSC company on a school trip to Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey at the beginning of their rehearsal process, so when David Tennant was playing Richard II and Greg Doran was directing. That was absolutely fascinating. I'd been thinking about Richard and Henry for a very long time. Obviously, I was a long way away from writing the book I've just written.Talking to actors is an extraordinary thing for a historian because, of course, to them, these are living characters. They want to know what's in their character's mind. They want to know, quite rightly, the chronological progression of their character's thought. That is something that's become more and more and more and more important to me.The longer I go on writing history, the more intensely attached I am to the need for chronology because if it hasn't happened to your protagonist yet, what are you doing with it? Your protagonist doesn't yet know. We don't know. It's very dramatically clear to us at the moment that we don't know what's happening tomorrow. Any number of outrageous and unpredictable things might happen tomorrow.The same certainly was true in Richard II's reign, goes on being true in Henry IV's reign. That experience, in the wake of which I then went to see Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 in Stratford, was really thought-provoking. The extent to which, even though I'd been working on this period for a long time, and had taught this period, I still was struggling to answer some of those questions.Then I'd just had the similarly amazing experience of having a meeting with the Richard II cast and director at the Bridge Theatre before the Nicholas Heitner production with Jonathan Bailey as Richard went on stage. That was actually towards the end of their rehearsal process. I was so struck that the actor playing Bolingbroke in this production and the actor playing Bolingbroke in the production back in 2013 both asked the same excellent first question, which is so hard for a historian to answer, which is at what point does Bolingbroke decide that he's coming back to claim the crown, not just the Duchy of Lancaster?That is a key question for Bolingbroke in Richard II. Does he already know when he decides he's going to break his exile and come back? Is he challenging for the crown straight away, or is he just coming back for his rightful inheritance with the Duchy of Lancaster? That is the million-dollar question when you're writing about Bolingbroke in 1399.It's not possible to answer with a smoking gun. We don't have a letter or a diary entry from Henry Bolingbroke as he's about to step on board ship in Boulogne saying, "I'm saying I'm coming back for the Duchy of Lancaster." The unfolding logic of his situation is that if he's going to come back at all, he's going to have to claim the crown. When he admits that to himself, and when he admits that to anybody else, are questions we can argue about.It was so interesting to me that that's the question that Shakespeare's Richard II throws up for his Bolingbroke just as much as it does for the historical one.Henry: Is there anything that we fundamentally know about this episode in history that Shakespeare didn't know?Helen: That's an extremely good question, and I'm tempted now to say no.Henry: When I left your book, the one thing I thought was that in Shakespeare, the nobles turn against Richard because of his excesses. Obviously, he really dramatizes that around the death of Gaunt. From your book, you may disagree with this, I came away thinking, well, the nobles wanted more power all the time. They may not have wanted the king's power, but there was this constant thing of the nobles feeling like they were owed more authority.Helen: I think the nobles always want more power because they are ambitious, competitive men within a political structure that rewards ambition and competition. The crucial thing for them is that they can only safely pursue ambition and competition if they know that the structure they're competing within will hold.The thing that keeps that structure rooted and solidly in place is the crown and the things that the crown is there to uphold, namely, particularly, the rule of law because if the rule of law starts to crumble, then the risk is that the whole structure collapses into anarchy. Within anarchy, then a powerful man cannot safely compete for more power because an even more powerful man might be about to roll into his estates and take them over. There have to be rules. There has to be fair competition. The referee is there on a football pitch for a reason.The king, in some senses, whether you want to see him as the keystone in an arch that supports a building or whether he's a referee on a football pitch, there are reasons why powerful men need rules because rules uphold their power. What goes wrong with Richard is that instead of seeing that he and the nobles have a common interest in keeping this structure standing, and that actually he can become more powerful if he works with and through the nobles, he sees them as a threat to him.He's attempting to establish a power structure that will not be beholden to them. In so doing, he becomes a threat to them. This structure that is supposed to stand as one mutually supportive thing is beginning to tear itself apart. That is why Richard's treatment of Bolingbroke becomes such a crucial catalyst, because what Richard does to Bolingbroke is unlawful in a very real and very technical sense. Bolingbroke has not been convicted of any crime. He's not been properly tried. There's been this trial by combat, the duel with Mowbray, but it hasn't stopped arbitrarily, and an arbitrary punishment visited upon both of them. They're both being exiled without having been found guilty, without the judgment of God speaking through this duel.Richard then promises that Bolingbroke can have his inheritance, even though he's in exile. As soon as Gaunt dies, Richard says, "No, I'm having it." Now, all of that is unlawful treatment of Bolingbroke, but because Bolingbroke is the most powerful nobleman in the country, it is also a warning and a threat to every other member of the political classes that if the king takes against you, then his arbitrary will can override the law.That diagnosis is there in Shakespeare. It's the Duke of York, who in reality was just a completely hopeless, wet figure, but he says, and I've got it written down, keep it beside me.Henry: Very nice.Helen: Kind of ridiculous, but here it is. York says to Richard, "Take Herford's rights away and take from time his charters and his customary rights. Let not tomorrow then ensue today. Be not thyself, for how art thou a king, but by fair sequence and succession?" In other words, if you interfere with, and I know you've written about time in these plays, it's absolutely crucial.Part of the process of time in these plays is that the rules play out over time. Any one individual king must not break those rules so that the expected process of succession over time can take place. York's warning comes true, that Richard is unseating himself by seeking to unseat Bolingbroke from his inheritance.Henry: We give Shakespeare good marks as a historian.Helen: In this play, yes, absolutely. The things he tinkers with in Richard II are minor plot points. He compresses time in order to get it all on stage in a plausible sequence of events. He compresses two queens into one, given that Richard was married to, by the time he fell, a nine-year-old who he'd married when he was six. It's harder to have a six-year-old making speeches on stage, so he puts the two queens into one.Henry: You don't want to pay another actor.Helen: Exactly.Henry: It's expensive.Helen: You don't want children and animals on stage. Although there is a wonderful account of a production of Richard II on stage in the West End in 1901, with the Australian actor Oscar Asche in it, playing Bolingbroke. The duel scene, he had full armour and a horse, opening night. It was a different horse from the one he rehearsed with. He gives an account in his autobiography of this horse rearing and him somersaulting heroically off the horse.Henry: Oh my god.Helen: The curtain having to come down and then it going back up again to tumultuous applause. You think, "Oscar, I'm wondering whether you're over-egging this pudding." Anyway, I give Shakespeare very good marks in Richard II, not really in the Henry IV plays, but gets back on track.Henry: The Henry IV plays are so good, we're forgiven. Was Richard II a prototype Henry VIII?Helen: Yes. Although, of course, history doesn't work forwards like that. I always worry about being a historian, talking about prototypes, if you see what I mean, but--Henry: No, this is just some podcast, so we don't have to be too strict. He's over-mighty, his sense of his relationship to God. There are issues in parliament about, "How much can the Pope tell us what to do?" There are certain things that seem to be inherent in the way the British state conceives of itself at this point that become problematic in another way.Helen: Is this pushing it too far to say Richard is a second son who ends up being the lone precious heir to the throne who must be wrapped in cotton wool to ensure that his unique God-given authority is protected? Also describes Henry VIII.Henry: They both like fancy clothes.Helen: Both like fancy clothes. Charles I is also a second son who has to step up.Henry: With wonderful cuffs and collars. He's another big dresser.Helen: And great patrons of art. I think we're developing new historical--Henry: No, I think there's a whole thing here.Helen: I think there is. What Henry does, of course, in rather different, because a lot has changed thanks to the Wars of the Roses, the power of the nobility to stand up independently of the crown is significantly lessened by the political effects of the Wars of the Roses, not at least that a lot of them have had their heads cut off, or died in battle, and the Tudors are busy making sure that they remain in the newly subjected place that they find themselves in.Henry then finds to go back to Hilary Mantel, a very, very able political servant who works out how to use parliament for him in rejecting those extra English powers that might restrain him. I do always wonder what Richard thought he was going to do if he'd succeeded in becoming Holy Roman Emperor, which I take very seriously as a proposition from Richard.Most other historians, because it's so patently ridiculous, if you look at it from a European perspective, have just said, "Oh, he got this idea that he wanted to become Holy Roman Emperor," but, of course, it was never going to happen. In Richard's mind, I think it was extremely real. Whether he really would have tried to give the English crown to Rutland, his favorite by the end of the reign, while he went off in glory to be crowned by the Pope, I don't know what was in his head. The difference with Henry is that the ambitions he eventually conceives are very England-focused, and so he can make them happen.Henry: Is there some sort of argument that, if the king hadn't won the Wars of the Roses, and the nobility had flourished, and their sons hadn't been killed, the reformation would have just been much harder to pull off here?[silence]Helen: I wonder what that would have looked like, because in a sense, the king was always going to win the Wars of the Roses, in the sense that you have to have a king. The minute you had someone left standing after that mess, that protracted mess, if he knew what he was doing, and there are arguments about the extent to which Henry VII knew what he was doing, or was doing something very different, whether or not he knew it was different, but there was always going to be an opportunity for a king to assert himself after that.Particularly, the extent to which the lesser landowners, the gentry had realized they couldn't just rely on the nobility to protect them anymore. They couldn't just follow their lord into battle and abdicate responsibility.Henry: Okay.Helen: That's an interesting--Henry: How much should we blame Edward III for all of this?Helen: For living too long and having too many sons?Henry: My argument against Edward is the Hundred Years' War, it doesn't actually go that well by the end of his reign, and it's cost too much money. Too many dukes with too much power. It's not that he had too many sons, he elevates them all and creates this insane situation. The war itself starts to tip the balance between the king and parliament, and so now you've got it from the dukes, and from the other side, and he just didn't manage the succession at all.Even though his son has died, and it really needs some kind of-- He allowed. He should have known that he was allowing a vacuum to open up where there's competition from the nobles, and from parliament, and the finances are a mess, and this war isn't there. It's just… he just leaves a disaster, doesn't he?Helen: I think I'd want to reframe that a little bit. Perhaps, I'm too much the king's friend. I think the political, and in some senses, existential dilemma for a medieval king is that the best of all possible worlds is what Edward achieves in the 1340s and the 1350s, which is, fight a war for reasons that your subjects recognize as in the common interest, in the national interest. Fight it over there so that the lands that are being devastated and the villages and towns that are being burned are not yours. Bring back lots of plunder. Everybody's getting richer and feeling very victorious.You can harness parliament. When things are going well, a medieval king and a parliament are not rivals for power. An English king working with parliament is more powerful than an English king trying to work without parliament. If things are going well, he gets more money, he can pass laws, he can enforce his will more effectively. It's win-win-win if you're ticking all those boxes.As you're pointing out, the worst of all possible worlds is to be fighting a war that's going badly. To fight a war is a big risk because either you're going to end up winning and everything's great, or if it's going badly, then you'd rather be at peace. Of course, you're not necessarily in a position to negotiate peace, depending on the terms of the war you've established.Similarly, with sons, you want heirs. You want to know the succession is safe. I think Edward's younger sons would argue with you about setting up very powerful dukes because the younger ones really-- York and Gloucester, Edmund of Langley and Thomas of Woodstock, really didn't have much in the way of an estate given to them at all, and always felt very hard done by about that. John of Gaunt is set up very well because he's married off to the heir of the Duke of Lancaster who's handily died, leaving only daughters.Henry: That's the problem, isn't it, creating that sort of impact? John of Gaunt is far too rich and powerful.Helen: You say that, except he's unfeasibly loyal. Without Gaunt, disaster happens much, much, much earlier. Gaunt is putting all those resources into the project of propping up the English state and the English crown for way longer than Richard deserves, given that Richard's trying to murder him half the time in the 1380s.Henry: [laughs] For sure. No, I agree with you there, but from Edward III's point of view, it's a mistake to make one very powerful son another quite powerful son next to-- We still see this playing out in royal family dynamics.Helen: This is the problem. What is the perfect scenario in a hereditary system where you need an heir and a spare, but even there, the spare, if he doesn't get to be the heir, is often very disgruntled. [laughs] If he does get to be the heir, as we've just said, turns out to be overconvinced of his own-Henry: Oh, indeed, yes.Helen: -specialness. Then, if you have too many spares, you run into a different kind of problem. Equally, if you don't have a hereditary system, then you have an almighty battle, as the Anglo-Saxons often did, about who's actually going to get the crown in the next generation. It's a very tricky--Henry: Is England just inherently unstable? We've got the Black Death, France is going to be a problem, whatever happens. Who is really going to come to a good fiscal position in this situation? It's no one's fault. It's just there wasn't another way out.Helen: You could say that England's remarkably-- See, I'm just playing devil's advocate the whole time.Henry: No, good.Helen: You could say England is remarkably stable in the sense that England is very unusually centralized for a medieval state at this point. It's centralized in a way that works because it's small enough to govern. It's, broadly speaking, an island. You've got to deal with the Scotts border, but it's a relatively short border. Yes, you have powerful nobles, but they are powerful nobles who, by this stage, are locked into the state. They're locked into a unified system of law. The common law rules everyone. Everyone looks to Westminster.It's very different from what the King of France has been having to face, which has been having to push his authority outward from the Île-de-France, reconquer bits of France that the English have had for a long time, impose his authority over other princes of the realm in a context where there are different laws, there are different customs, there are different languages. You could say that France is in a much more difficult and unstable situation.Of course, what we see as the tide of the war turns again in the early 15th century is precisely that France collapses into civil war, and the English can make hay again in that situation. If Henry V had not died too young with not enough sons in 1423, and particularly, if he'd left a son who grew up to be any use at all, as opposed to absolutely none-- what am I saying? I'm saying that the structure of government in England could work astonishingly well given the luck of the right man at the helm. The right man at the helm had to understand his responsibilities at home, and he had to be capable of prosecuting a successful war abroad because that is how this state works best.As you've just pointed out, prosecuting a successful war abroad is an inherently unstable scenario because no war is ever going to go in your direction the entire time. That's what Richard, who has no interest in war at all is discovering, because once the tide of war is lapping at your own shores, instead of all happening over there, it's a very, very different prospect in terms of persuading parliament to pay for it, quite understandably.You talk about the Black Death. One of the extraordinary things is looking at England in 1348, 1349, when the Black Death hits. Probably, something approaching half the population dies in 18 months. If you're looking at the progress of the war, you barely notice it happened at all. What does the government do? It snaps into action and implements a maximum wage immediately, in case [chuckles] these uppity laborers start noticing there are fewer of them, and they can ask for more money.The amount of control, at that stage at least, that the government has over a country going through an extraordinary set of challenges is quite remarkable, really.Henry: Did Bolingbroke do the right thing?Helen: I think Bolingbroke did the only possible thing, which, in some senses, equates to the right thing. If he had not come back, he would not only have been abandoning his own family, his dynasty, his inheritance, everything he'd been brought up to believe was his responsibility, but also abandoning England to what was pretty much by that stage, clearly, a situation of tyranny.The big argument is always, well, we can identify a tyrant, we have a definition of tyranny. That is, if a legitimate king rules in the common interest and according to the law, then a tyrant rules not in the common interest, and not according to the law. But then the thing that the political theorists argue about is whether or not you can actively resist a tyrant, or whether you have to wait for God to act.Then, the question is, "Might God be acting through me if I'm Bolingbroke?" That's what Bolingbroke has to hope, because if he doesn't do what he does in 1399, he is abandoning everything his whole life has been devoted to maintaining and taking responsibility for. It's quite hard to see where England would then end up, other than with somebody else trying to challenge Richard in the way that Henry does.Henry: Why was he anointed with Thomas Becket's oil?Helen: Because Richard had found it in the tower, [chuckles] and was making great play of the claims that were made for Thomas. This is one of the interesting things about Richard. He is simultaneously very interested in history, and interested in his place in history, his place in the lineage of English kings, going all the way back, particularly to the confessor to whom he looks as not only a patron saint, but as in some sense, a point of identification.He's also seeking to stop time at himself. He doesn't like to think about the future beyond himself. He doesn't show any interest in fathering an heir. His will is all about how to make permanent the judgments that he's made on his nobles. It's not about realistically what's going to happen after his death.In the course of his interest in history, he has found this vial of oil in the tower somewhere in a locked drawer with a note that says, "The Virgin gave this to Thomas Becket, and whoever is anointed with this oil shall win all his battles and shall lead England to greatness," et cetera. Richard has tried to have himself re-anointed, and even his patsy Archbishop of Canterbury that he's put in place after exiling the original one who'd stood up to him a bit.Even the new Archbishop of Canterbury says, "Sire, anointing doesn't really work like that. I'm afraid we can't do it twice." Richard has been wearing this vial round his neck in an attempt to claim that he is not only the successor to the confessor, but he is now the inheritor of this holy oil. The French king has had a holy oil for a very long time in the Cathedral of Reims, which was supposedly given to Clovis, the first king of France, by an angel, et cetera.Richard, who is always very keen on emulating, or paralleling the crown of France, is very, very keen on this. If you were Henry coming in 1399 saying, "No, God has spoken through me. The country has rallied to me. I am now the rightful king of England. We won't look too closely at my justifications for that," and you are appropriating the ceremonial of the crown, you are having yourself crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 13th of October, which is the feast day of the confessor, you are handed that opportunity to use the symbolism of this oil that Richard has just unearthed, and was trying to claim for himself. You can then say, "No, I am the first king crowned with this oil," and you're showing it to the French ambassadors and so on.If we are to believe the chroniclers, it starts making his hair fall out, which might be a contrary sign from God. It's a situation where you are usurping the throne, and what is questionable is your right to be there. Then, any symbolic prop you can get, you're going to lean on as hard as you can.Henry: A few general questions to close. Should we be more willing to open up old tombs?Helen: Yes. [laughs]Henry: Good. [laughs]Helen: I'm afraid, for me, historical curiosity is-- Our forebears in the 18th and 19th century had very few qualms at all. One of the things I love about the endless series of scholarly antiquarian articles that are-- or not so scholarly, in some cases, that are written about all the various tomb openings that went on in the 18th and 19th century, I do love the moments, where just occasionally, they end up saying, "Do you know what, lads? Maybe we shouldn't do this bit." [chuckles]They get right to the brink with a couple of tombs and say, "Oh, do you know what? This one hasn't been disturbed since 1260, whatever. Maybe we won't. We'll put it back." Mostly, they just crowbar the lid off and see what they can find, which one might regret in terms of what we might now find with greater scientific know-how, and et cetera. Equally, we don't do that kind of thing anymore unless we're digging up a car park. We're not finding things out anyway. I just love the information that comes out, so yes, for me.Henry: Dig up more tombs.Helen: Yes.Henry: What is it that you love about the Paston Letters?Helen: More or less everything. I love the language. I love the way that, even though most of them are dictated to scribes, but you can hear the dictation. You can hear individual voices. Everything we were saying about sentences. You can hear the rhythm. You can hear the speech patterns. I'm no linguistic expert, but I love seeing the different forms of spelling and how that plays out on the page.I love how recognizable they are as a family. I love the fact that we hear women's voices in a way that we very rarely do in the public records. The government which is mainly what we have to work with. I love Margaret Paston, who arrives at 18 as a new bride, and becomes the matriarch of the family. I love her relationship with her two eldest boys, John and John, and their father, John.I do wish they hadn't done that because it doesn't help those of us who are trying to write about them. I love the view you get of late medieval of 15th-century politics from the point of view of a family trying to survive it. The fact that you get tiny drops in letters that are also about shopping, or also about your sisters fall in love with someone unsuitable. Unsuitable only, I hasten to add, because he's the family bailiff, not because he isn't a wonderful and extremely able man. They all know those two things. It's just that he's a family bailiff, and therefore, not socially acceptable.I love that experience of being immersed in the world of a 15th-century gentry family, so politically involved, but not powerful enough to protect themselves, who can protect themselves in the Wars of the Roses in any case.Henry: If someone wants to read the Paston Letters, but they don't want to read Middle English, weird spelling, et cetera, is there a good edition that they can use?Helen: Yes, there is an Oxford World's Classic. They're all selected. There isn't a complete edition in modern spelling. If any publishers are listening, I would love to do one. [chuckles]Henry: Yes, let's have it.Helen: Let's have it. I would really, really love to do that. There are some very good selections. Richard Barber did one many years ago, and, of course, self-advertising. There is also my book, now more than 20 years old, about the Paston family, where I was trying to put in as much of the letters as I could. I wanted to weave the voices through. Yes, please go and read the Paston Letters in selections, in whatever form you can get them, and let's start lobbying for a complete modernized Paston.Henry: That's right. Why did you leave academia? Because you did it before it was cool.Helen: [laughs] That's very kind of you to say. My academic life was, and is very important to me, and I hate saying this now, because the academic world is so difficult now. I ended up in it almost by accident, which is a terrible thing to say now, people having to-- I never intended to be an academic. My parents were academics, and I felt I'd seen enough and wasn't sure I wanted to do that.I couldn't bear to give up history, and put in a PhD application to work with Christine Carpenter, who'd been the most inspiring supervisor when I was an undergraduate, got the place, thought, "Right, I'm just going to do a PhD." Of course, once you're doing a PhD, and everyone you know is starting to apply for early career jobs, which weren't even called early career jobs in those days, because it was a million years ago.I applied for a research fellowship, was lucky enough to get it, and then applied for a teaching job, utterly convinced, and being told by the people around me that I stood no chance of getting it, because I was way too junior, and breezed through the whole process, because I knew I wasn't going to get it, and then turned up looking for someone very junior.I got this wonderful teaching job at Sidney Sussex in Cambridge and spent eight years there, learned so much, loved working with the students. I was working very closely with the students in various ways, but I wasn't-- I'm such a slow writer, and a writer that needs to be immersed in what I was doing, and I just wasn't managing to write, and also not managing to write in the way I wanted to write, because I was becoming clearer and clearer about the fact that I wanted to write narrative history.Certainly, at that point, it felt as though writing narrative history for a general audience and being an early career academic didn't go so easily together. I think lots of people are now showing how possible it is, but I wasn't convinced I could do it. Then, sorry, this is a very long answer to what's [crosstalk] your question.Henry: That's good.Helen: I also had my son, and my then partner was teaching at a very different university, I mean, geographically different, and we were living in a third place, and trying to put a baby into that geographical [chuckles] setup was not going to work. I thought, "Well, now or never, I'll write a proposal for a book, a narrative, a book for a general readership, a narrative book about the Paxton family, because that's what I really want to write, and I'll see if I can find an agent, and I'll see if I," and I did.I found the most wonderful agent, with whose help I wrote a huge proposal, and got a deal for it two weeks before my son was due. At that point, I thought, "Okay, if I don't jump now, now or never, the stars are aligned." I've been a freelance medieval historian ever since then, touching every wood I can find as it continues to be possible. I am very grateful for those years in Cambridge. They were the making of me in terms of training and in terms of teaching.I certainly think without teaching for those years, I wouldn't be anywhere near as good a writer, because you learn such a lot from talking to, and reading what students produce.Henry: How do you choose your subjects now? How do you choose what to write about?Helen: I follow my nose, really. It's not very scientific.Henry: Why should it be?Helen: Thank you. The book, bizarrely, the book that felt most contingent, was the one I wrote after the Paston book, because I knew I'd written about the Pastons in my PhD, and then again more of it in the monograph that was based on my PhD. I knew having written about the Pastons in a very academic, analytical way, contributing to my analysis of 15th-century politics. I knew I wanted to put them at the center and write about them. That was my beginning point.The big question was what to do next, and I was a bit bamboozled for a while. The next book I ended up writing was She-Wolves, which is probably, until now, my best-known book. It was the one that felt most uncertain to me, while I was putting it together, and that really started from having one scene in my head, and it's the scene with which the book opens. It's the scene of the young Edward VI in 1553, Henry VIII's only son, dying at the age of 15.Suddenly, me suddenly realizing that wherever you looked on the Tudor family tree at that point, there were only women left. The whole question of whether a woman could rule was going to have to be answered in some way at that point, and because I'm a medievalist, that made me start thinking backwards, and so I ended up choosing some medieval queens to write about, because they've got their hands on power one way or another.Until very close to finishing it, I was worried that it wouldn't hang together as a book, and the irony is that it's the one that people seem to have taken to most. The next book after that grew out of that one, because I found myself going around talking about She-Wolves, and saying repeatedly, "The problem these queens faced was that they couldn't lead an army on the battlefield."Women couldn't do that. The only medieval woman who did that was Joan of Arc, and look what happened to her. Gradually, I realized that I didn't really know what had happened to her. I mean, I did know what--Henry: Yes, indeed.Helen: I decided that I really wanted to write about her, so I did that. Then, having done that, and having then written a very short book about Elizabeth I, that I was asked to write for Penguin Monarchs, I realized I'd been haunted all this time by Richard and Henry, who I'd been thinking about and working on since the very beginning of my PhD, but I finally felt, perhaps, ready to have a go at them properly.It's all been pretty organic apart from She-Wolves, which was the big, "What am I writing about next?" That took shape slowly and gradually. Now, I'm going to write about Elizabeth I properly in a-Henry: Oh, exciting.Helen: -full-scale book, and I decided that, anyway, before I wrote this last one, but I-- It feels even righter now, because I Am Richard II, Know Ye Not That, feels even more intensely relevant having now written about Richard and Henry, and I'm quite intimidated because Elizabeth is quite intimidating, but I think it's good, related by your subjects.[laughter]Henry: Have you read the Elizabeth Jenkins biography?Helen: Many, many years ago. It's on my shelf here.Henry: Oh, good.Helen: In fact, so it's one of the things I will be going back to. Why do you ask particularly? I need--Henry: I'm a big Elizabeth Jenkins fan, and I like that book particularly.Helen: Wonderful. Well, I will be redoubled in my enthusiasm.Henry: I look forward to seeing what you say about it. What did you learn from Christine Carpenter?Helen: Ooh. Just as precision was the word that came into my head when you asked me about Hilary Mantel, the word that comes into my head when you ask about Christine is rigor. I think she is the most rigorous historical thinker that I have ever had the privilege of working with and talking to. I am never not on my toes when I am writing for, talking to, reading Christine. That was an experience that started from the first day I walked into her room for my first supervision in 1987.It was really that rigor that started opening up the medieval world to me, asking questions that at that stage I couldn't answer at all, but suddenly, made everything go into technicolor. Really, from the perspective that I had been failing to ask the most basic questions. I would sometimes have students say to me, "Oh, I didn't say that, because I thought it was too basic."I have always said, "No, there is no question that is too basic." Because what Christine started opening up for me was how does medieval government work? What are you talking about? There is the king at Westminster. There is that family there in Northumberland. What relates the two of them? How does this work? Think about it structurally. Think about it in human terms, but also in political structural terms, and then convince me that you understand how this all goes together. I try never to lose that.Henry: Helen Castor, thank you very much.Helen: Thank you so much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

Episode: 1370 Anno Domini 1370: So much going on just below the surface.  Today, the story behind an arbitrary date.

Beauty fads come and go - remember super low-rise jeans in the 90s? IYKYK.What was considered cool and beautiful in the medieval period? What skincare routines were medieval people doing? And how did the Black Death affect how people dressed and presented themselves?In this new mini-series, we'll be exploring the beauty standards - and ideas of ugliness - throughout time periods in history.In this second episode Kate is joined by historian and author Dr. Eleanor Janega, co-host of our sister podcast Gone Medieval, to find out why wearing make-up was a crime.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.

The TCF trio bring tales from their travels this week while Eddie also does some light photocopying in the business centre of a Turkish hotel. Top of the agenda are Iain and Eddie's trips to the the north of Scotland and Portugal respectively, with Eddie announcing his unique method of preparation for a return to the DP World Tour. Next on the agenda is Scottie Scheffler's record-equalling victory in Texas, while Andrew muses on the short but glorious career of Byron Nelson, tells us which great golfer can thank spark plugs for a lack of pressure and wonders how history might have been different but for some fleas on rats in the 14th century.www.petermillar.co.ukhttps://biggolfrace.prostatecanceruk.orgInstagram: @chippingforecastEmail: tcf@thechippingforecast.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of AI Product Builders is a must-listen. I'm joined by Ovetta Sampson, founder of Right AI and one of the sharpest minds in the AI and design space. With a career that spans leadership roles at Google, Capital One, and IDEO, Ovetta brings a powerful, context-driven lens to the hype around generative AI.We get into:* Why she left Google to build Right AI* The risks no one's talking about in AI product development* What MoviePass, the Black Death, and Silicon Valley have in common* The real environmental and economic costs of running LLMs* What design leaders need to unlearn now* Her “Mindful AI” framework for building responsible, people-first experiences* Why systems thinking beats wireframes, and what it really takes to design for the future Ovetta breaks it all the way down, history, economics, tech, and the human cost of innovation. This one's part philosophy lesson, part design critique, part wake-up call.Timestamps02:09 Origins of Ovetta's company Right AI05:15 Moving fast and breaking things...again10:20 The risks of funding with no business models18:56 Enviornmental sustainability30:18 Principles of building a responsible experience34:01 What's top of mind for design leaders?43:24 ClosingMentions* Right AI* LinkedIn - Follow her on LinkedIn for hot takes and sharp truths* The Philosopher's Zone (Podcast) – She references a philosophy podcast about the Dark Ages* Gutenberg & the Printing Press – Used as a metaphor for today's AI hype* MoviePass – Referenced extensively as an analogy for unsustainable business models* Black Death / Plague – Referenced in historical parallel to today's societal resetFollow Harrison Wheeler and Technically Speaking* Newsletter* LinkedIn* YouTubeTechnically Speaking is where I share reflections, insights, and conversations to help you lead with confidence, clarity, and community. Are you looking to level up your design leadership and management craft? Spend an hour with me for personalized 1:1 coaching to help you thrive in your role. Get full access to Technically Speaking at technicallyspeakinghw.substack.com/subscribe

Milo, Phoebe and Patrick get together to discuss 2010's medieval schlock horror 'Black Death' starring Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne, no prizes for guessing whether Sean Bean survives. Patrick gives a useful educational sermon on the plague and Phoebe gets into some more of her theories. All Milo's tour dates: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Get more like this on the Patreon for $5 per month: https://www.patreon.com/c/mastersofpod

Click to Subscribe: https://bit.ly/Youtube-Subscribe-SoapDirt Days of our Lives May sweeps bring devastation to Salem with the confirmation of John Black's (Drake Hogestyn) death and heartbreak for Sarah Horton (Linsey Godfrey). Bo Brady (Peter Reckell), suffering from sepsis, desperately needs a miracle. Kayla Brady (Mary Beth Evans) might have a solution with a new sepsis drug, but it's not yet approved for human trials on the NBC Peacock soap opera.  DOOL sweeps see Johnny DiMera (Carson Boatman) grapples with the revelation of his father EJ DiMera's (Dan Feuerriegel) actions towards Sammy (Alison Sweeney), leading to a crisis of conscience about impending fatherhood. The identity of EJ's shooter is anticipated to be revealed during May sweeps, with the possible twist that the shooter's mother ends up in prison instead.  Sweeps for Days of our Lives see it appears that Kristen DiMera (Stacy Haiduk) may confess to the shooting to protect her daughter Rachel Black (Alice Halsey). The sorrowful send-off for John Black is set for June, with many returning to Salem for an emotional farewell. Sarah's secret about her involvement with Phillip (John-Paul Lavoisier) in keeping forgery hidden from Xander Kiriakis (Paul Telfer) could be revealed, leading to potential heartbreak for Sarah.  Visit our Days of our Lives section of Soap Dirt: https://soapdirt.com/category/days-of-our-lives/ Listen to our Podcasts: https://soapdirt.podbean.com/ Check out our always up-to-date Days of our Lives Spoilers page at: https://soapdirt.com/days-of-our-lives-spoilers/ Check Out our Social Media... Twitter: https://twitter.com/SoapDirtTV Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SoapDirt Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/soapdirt/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@soapdirt Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soapdirt/

Bought this on sale years ago, decided to give it a spin.  Black Death (2010) - Blu-Ray Review ROCKFILE Podcast 786 #blackdeathmovie #moviereview #rockfile ~ You can subscribe to my podcasts on Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Amazon Music/Audible, Google Podcasts, YouTube, iHeart Radio, Pandora, TuneIn, Alexa, Player FM, Samsung, Podchaser, Stitcher, Boomplay, Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro, Castbox, Podfriend and Goodpods with more on the way.  ~ -My Group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/rockfilesroom -My Website:  https://therockfile.com/ -My YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/@rockfile -Interview Archive:  https://rockfileradio.com/Interviews/    ~ Music track: Avenue by Moavii Source: https://freetouse.com/music Free Background Music for Videos  ~

800 years before the Black Death, the very same bacteria ravaged Rome, killing 60%+ of the population in many areas.Also, back-to-back volcanic eruptions caused a mini Ice Age, leaving Rome devastated by famine and disease.I chatted with historian Kyle Harper about this and much else:* Rome as a massive slave society* Why humans are more disease-prone than other animals* How agriculture made us physically smaller (Caesar at 5'5" was considered tall)Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.----------SPONSORS* WorkOS makes it easy to become enterprise-ready. They have APIs for all the most common enterprise requirements—things like authentication, permissions, and encryption—so you can quickly plug them in and get back to building your core product. If you want to make your product enterprise-ready, join companies like Cursor, Perplexity and OpenAI, and head to workos.com.* Scale's Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you're an AI researcher or engineer, learn how Scale's Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities at scale.com/dwarkeshTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.----------KYLE'S BOOKS* The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire* Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History* Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425----------TIMESTAMPS(00:00:00) - Plague's impact on Rome's collapse(00:06:24) - Rome's little Ice Age(00:11:51) - Why did progress stall in Rome's Golden Age?(00:23:55) - Slavery in Rome(00:36:22) - Was agriculture a mistake?(00:47:42) - Disease's impact on cognitive function(00:59:46) - Plague in India and Central Asia(01:05:16) - The next pandemic(01:16:48) - How Kyle uses LLMs(01:18:51) - De-extinction of lost species Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

The Black Plague or Black Death as its also known really put it to Europe, Asia and Africa from 1346 through 1353. In just 7 years it killed off up to 60% of Europe's population. 20-50 million dead due to a little bacteria called Yersinia Pestis, the cause of the Plague. It wasn't just effective in the way it hitched a ride on fleas, which then hitched on rats, which hitched a ride on everything else. But in the way that it could attacked the body on multiple fronts. It wasn't like there hadn't been other outbreaks of Plague in the world, so why is this one so significant. Well it showed up with perfect conditions in a world completely unprepared on what to. Find out what makes the Black Death such a pivotal moment in human history this week on dun dun dun......Historically High. Support the show

Bianca Lopez (Southern Methodist University) joins the Infectious Historians to discuss her recent book on plague, piety and power in late medieval Italy. Lopez begins with a survey of the impact of the Black Death and subsequent second pandemic outbreaks on Italy and moves on to talk about the specific area she studies - Santa Maria di Loreto. She examines the indirect impacts of plague on the rural area while using some of the surviving testaments to better understand mortality in the area in the late 14th century and early 15th century. The discussion covers the physicality of the site as well as the challenges in making causal connections. Before wrapping up, Lopez also touches upon her experience writing a history of disease during Covid, and reflects on how her pandemic work might help researchers working on other pandemics.

Sheilagh Ogilvie has spent decades examining the institutional structures that shaped European economic history, challenging conventional wisdom about everything from guilds to marriage patterns. In her conversation with Tyler, she reveals how studying pandemic responses from the Black Death to COVID-19 provides a unique lens for understanding deeper truths about institutional effectiveness and social constraints. Tyler and Sheilagh discuss the economic impacts of historical pandemics, the "happy story" of the Black Death and why it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, the history of variolation and how entrepreneurs created vaccination franchises in 18th-century England, why local communities typically managed epidemics better than central authorities, the dastardly nature of medieval guilds, the European marriage pattern and its disputed contribution to economic growth, when sustained economic growth truly began in England, why the Dutch Republic stagnated despite its early success, whether she agrees with Greg Clark's social mobility hypothesis, her experience and conducting "anthropological fieldwork" on English social customs, the communitarian norms she encountered while living in Germany, her upcoming research project on European serfdom, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded February 27th, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by donating today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Sheilagh on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

***This episode contains a description of mass murder***As the Black Death moved across Europe, something darker and more insidious spread ahead of it. An antisemitic conspiracy theory that blamed European Jews for the plague. Across Europe, Jews were persecuted and often executed en masse.Maddy and Anthony are joined by Joshua Teplitsky, Professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies Jewish life in Early Modern Central Europe and is currently working on a book about plague in Prague during the early eighteenth century.Edited by Max Carrey. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.

It was a plague like no other. It provoked strange cures like no other. Anthony Delaney takes Maddy Pelling in search of the oddest cures concocted in the face of the Black Death, busting a few myth along the way (sorry Plague Doctor, but you're in the wrong century).Edited by Max Carrey. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hunting Africa's Cape Buffalo—known by hunters as "Black Death"—is one of the last great adventures readily available to hunters. Buffalo being legitimate dangerous game, it's crucial to have good gear, well sorted out, and to be prepared mentally and physically.  This episode, we sit down with Mark Haldane of Zambeze Delta Safaris and ask questions about an upcoming dangerous-game safari we'll be taking with Mark later this year. We talk rifles, cartridges, appropriate bullets, best type of scopes, what to expect during a typical day of hunting, malaria prevention, how to plan best travel arrangements, and so forth. This conversation was raw and real and incredibly helpful. ENJOY!    FRIENDS! We're at a crucial time in the growth of the show, and need all the support we can get. Please join the Backcountry Hunting Podcast tribe on www.patreon.com/backcountry where you'll get access to our bonus material, and can contribute a few dollars if you like. VISIT OUR SPONSORS HERE:  www.onxmaps.com www.silencercentral.com https://www.portersfirearms.com/ www.timneytriggers.com www.browning.com www.leupold.com www.siembidacustomknives.com https://javelinbipod.com

She lived through the worst century in human history: the Black Death, famine, war, death and despair. So it was all the more surprising when Julian of Norwich rose from her deathbed saying she'd received a vision from God: All shall be well. How could that be true when the whole world seems to be falling apart? Travel with us to 14th century England, to visit famed mystic Julian of Norwich. I know it sounds crazy, she says, but trust me: everything is love. ____________ Fancy a Julian of Norwich mug reminding you All Shall Be Well? What'sHerName SHOP is open! Or travel with us on upcoming TOURS. Music for this episode featured St. Stanislav Girl's Choir singing compositions by Hildegard of Bingen; plus additional music by Doug Maxwell; Jesse Gallagher; and Jimena Contreras. Simon Critchley's new book is Mysticism; or check out the Showings of Julian of Norwich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ‘black death' plague swept across Europe and Asia in the 14th century, believed to be caused by bacteria spread through fleas and nomadic tribes. Plus Alec Baldwin's wife putting her brat husband in his place on a red carpet event. And all of the morning's breaking news on Hour 4 of the Bob Rose Show Thursday 3-20-25

Around 50% of everyone in Europe died during the Black Death. It's very hard to make sense of that. What did it look and feel like to live through this calamity?Today Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney are joined by historian Helen Carr whose new book Sceptred Isle: A New History of the Fourteenth Century is out in May.Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Thank you so much for checking out this horror story.

The Man of the West bids farewell to The Nerd of the Rings, as they welcome everyone's favorite ancient and military historian back to the PPP: Dr. Bret Devereaux, author of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry returns to answer an absurd number of questions that Alan and Matt have come up with from their last ten episodes. We get our 40k references out of the way early, discover Bret doesn't read Old Norse, get an expert explanation of weregild, and have our eyes opened to Helm Hammerhand's missteps. We also discuss peace through Black Death, wonder what the Quenya would be for “It's all yours, buddy”, and lament the fact that the tales, they are so unfinished. Also, the emperor's name is spelled Pupienus, just to be clear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Until the invention of DDT during World War 2 most humans expected to live with a range of lice as constant companions

The myth goes thus: the Black Death reached Christendom at the Siege of Caffa when Mongols catapulted diseased bodies over the walls. Where did we get this story? What actually happened at Caffa? And how did the Black Death really enter Europe?Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney are joined by Professor Hannah Barker, medieval historian from Arizona State University. She's the author of That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 and "Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain Embargoes and the Early Transmission of the Black Death in the Black Sea, 1346-1347".Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

In this series, Jeff & Andy dive into a mix of useless facts, myths, forgotten stories, and strange truths.This episode, Jeff shares interesting facts about the advancements in technology and Andy tells how the bubonic plague reshaped the world.This series is presented to you by the great folks over at Mallard Bay.Whenever you are looking to book your next outdoor adventure, head over to Mallard Bay and search through their list of verified outfitters to remove the guess work when booking.

News items read by Laura Kennedy include: King Thutmose II's tomb found, the first royal burial discovery in over a century (details)(details)(details) Laser technology uncovers intricate fifteenth century Zapotec city (details)(details) Plague epidemics likely started a century before the Black Death (details)(details) Excavation uncovers section of Great Wall 300 years older than previous estimates (details)

We have a random topic today due to Shan's ADHD brain, the Black Death! We have buboes, fevers, gerbils, quarantine islands and so much more. This disease caused 1/3 of the deaths of the human population between 1347-1351.https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-Deathhttps://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/bubonic-plague-first-pandemichttps://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-deathPlease send all stories to murderrt@gmail.comMake sure to leave a review!

New York City's mayor calls them “public enemy number one.” History books say they caused the Black Death — although recent scientific evidence disputes that claim. So is the rat a scapegoat? And what does our rat hatred say about us? (Part one of a three-part series.) SOURCES:Bethany Brookshire, author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains.Kathy Corradi, director of rodent mitigation for New York City.Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University.Nils Stenseth, professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Oslo. RESOURCES:"On Patrol With the Rat Czar," by Mark Chiusano (Intelligencer, 2024)."How Rats Took Over North America," by Allison Parshall (Scientific American, 2024)."Where Are the Rats in New York City," by Matt Yan (New York Times, 2024)."Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains" by Bethany Brookshire (2023)."Human ectoparasites and the spread of plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic," by Nils Stenseth, Katharine Dean, Fabienne Krauer, Lars Walløe, Ole Christian Lingjærde, Barbara Bramanti, and Boris Schmid (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018). EXTRAS:"Freakonomics Radio Live: 'Jesus Could Have Been a Pigeon.'" by Freakonomics Radio (2018).

February 7, 1900. The bubonic plague comes to America, but the man charged with defeating the disease finds his greatest challenge comes from the politicians.Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more.History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week Beau discusses the life and times of one of England's greatest kings, Edward III. From his early struggle for power, to the battles of Halidon Hill, Crecy and Poitiers, the Black Death, and much, much more.

Welcome to Paranormal Spectrum, where we illuminate the enigmatic corners of the supernatural world. I'm your host, Barnaby Jones, and today we have a very special guest joining us:Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn't killed for using her typewriter at three o'clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite.Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan's anecdotes end with things like "and then we got the anti-venom" or "but it's okay, because it turned out the water wasn't that deep." She has yet to be defeated in a game of "Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?," and can be amused for hours by almost anything. "Almost anything" includes swamps, long walks, long walks in swamps, things that live in swamps, horror movies, strange noises, musical theater, reality TV, comic books, finding pennies on the street, and venomous reptiles. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using Kenneth Muir's Horror Films of the 1980s as a checklist.Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that wasn't enough, she also writes under the pseudonym "Mira Grant." For details on her work as Mira, check out MiraGrant.com.In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music (see the Albums page for details). She is also a cartoonist, and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, "With Friends Like These...", as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie with the words "blood," "night," "terror," or "attack" in the title. Most people believe she doesn't sleep.Seanan lives in an idiosyncratically designed labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life.Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the "marginally." It probably doesn't help that she has so many hobbies.Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.WEBSITEhttps://seananmcguire.com/Click that play button, and let's unravel the mysteries of the UNTOLD! Remember to like, share, and subscribe to our channel to stay updated on all the latest discoveries and adventures. See you there!Join Barnaby Jones on the Paranormal Spectrum every Thursday on the Untold Radio Network Live at 12pm Central – 10am Pacific and 1pm Eastern. Come and Join the live discussion next week. Please subscribe.We have twelve different Professional Podcasts on all the things you like. New favorite shows drop each day only on the UNTOLD RADIO NETWORK.To find out more about Barnaby Jones and his team, (Cryptids, Anomalies, and the Paranormal Society) visit their website www.WisconsinCAPS.comMake sure you share and Subscribe to the CAPS YouTube Channel as wellhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs7ifB9Ur7x2C3VqTzVmjNQ

Black leather, Britain's Area 51, a dinosaur, a Ferrari, witch trails, the Black Death and Keith Moon. What could all these possibly have in common?Well dear listener, prepare to be baffled by The Damned. Possibly the most adventurous outing yet, but is it any good?Listen on, but beware: there be spoilers ahead!Weymouth in all it's glory: https://youtu.be/8MBxu0VAAWE?si=Z1f-aLpjFaDACdBa“The House Of Hammer Theme” and incidental music - written and produced by Cev MooreArtwork by Richard Wells

It's a storied island with a rich saga tradition. A land of ice and fire. But rarely do we hear of how Iceland went from being a stouthearted farming settlement to one of the most respected nations on Earth. This week, Danièle speaks with Sverrir Jakobsson about what life in Iceland was like in the early Middle Ages, how it became linked to the kingdom of Norway, and how Iceland's interactions with Europe changed after the Black Death.  You can support this podcast on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/medievalists

Our destination is the land of fire and ice--Iceland with Tim Cammisa, author and owner of Trout & Feather, and Matti Hákonarson, guide and owner of Iceland Fishing Guide. With its stunning scenery, friendly people, and waters teeming with plentiful Atlantic salmon, hard-fighting arctic char, and massive sea-run and resident brown trout, Iceland is among the most incredible places in the world for fly anglers. Matti and Tim give us the ultimate rundown on fly fishing in Iceland—covering the culture, the bugs, pro tips and tactics, and the best times of year to chase each species. Plus, we'll hear incredible stories of battling monster browns, dancing with Atlantic salmon, and the almost-religious art of fly selection. Tim's latest book, Tying Euro Nymphs, features top flies from some of the best anglers in the world. And stick around to the end for tales of cheap whale meat, fermented shark, haggis, and Iceland's infamous drink—Black Death. Oh, and a lesson in how not to fish with your wife. With host, Steve Haigh Be the first to know about new episodes.  Become a subscriber  Destination Angler on YouTube Contact Matti: https://icelandfishingguide.com/  |  Instagram:  @icelandfishingguide|  Facebook Contact Tim:  https://www.troutandfeather.com/  | Instagram:  @troutandfeather  |  Facebook |  YouTube @TimCammisa Please check out our Sponsors: TroutRoutes  The number one fishing app, helping trout anglers avoid the crowds and explore new public water. Download it and receive 20% off using Destination20 promo code in the app store today! Facebook @troutinsights Instagram @TroutRoutes    Adamsbuilt Fishing  THE trusted source for quality fly fishing gear, built to last at an affordable price. Waders, Nets, Outerwear.  Facebook & Instagram @Adamsbuilt Got Fishing  Crafting world-class fly-fishing adventures specially designed to your level of experience and budget.    Facebook @GotFishingAdventures Instagram @GotFishing  Destination Angler Podcast:   Website YouTube Instagram & Facebook  @DestinationAnglerPodcast  Comments & Suggestions:  host, Steve Haigh, email shaigh@DestinationAnglerPodcast.com Available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Recorded December 28, 2024

While Edward III is in Medieval lockdown, sheltering from the Black Death, he has a brainwave: a strange idea for an exclusive royal club that still exists in England today. A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Written and hosted by Dan Jones Producer - Georgia Mills Executive Producer - Louisa Field Production Manager - Eric Ryan Marketing - Kieran Lancini Sound Design - Amber Devereux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The plague came to Dublin and Gianni fell victim. Having narrowly beaten the Black Death, the guys are back to give their impressions of the TGL with two matches down. The deluge of equipment releases and impending PGA Show are also discussed as well as absolutely a surefire, guaranteed betting pick for The American Express.

The medieval world – for all its plagues, papal indulgences, castles, and inquisition trials – has much in common with ours. People living the Middle Ages dealt with deadly pandemicsmass migration, and controversial technological changes, just as we do now.Today’s guest, Dan Jones, author of POWERS AND THRONES: A New History of the Middle Ages looks at these common features through a cast of characters that includes pious monks and Byzantine emperors, chivalric knights and Renaissance artists. This sweep of the medieval world begins with the fall of the Roman empire and ends with the first contact between the Old World and the New. Along the way, Jones provides a front row seat to the forces that shaped the Western world as we know it. This is the thousand years in which our basic Western systems of law, commerce, and governance were codified; when the Christian Churches matured as both powerful institutions and the regulators of Western public morality; and when art, architecture, philosophical inquiry and scientific invention went through periods of seismic change. We discuss:• The height of the Roman empire and its influential rulers, as well as the various reasons it fell, including climate change pushing the Huns and so-called “barbarian” tribes to the empire’s borders.• The development of Christianity and Islam, as well as the power struggles and conflict ignited in the name of religion, chivalric orders such as the Knights Templar, and the rise of monasteries as major political players in the West.• The intimate stories of many influential characters of the Middle Ages, such as Constantine I, Justinian, Muhammad, Attila the Hun, Charlemagne, El Cid, Leonardo Da Vinci, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, Martin Luther, and many more.• The development of global trade routes and commerce across Europe, Asia, and Africa and the expanding map during the Age of Exploration.• The Black Death, which decimated up to sixty percent of the local population in the fourteenth century and led to widespread social unrest and the little Ice Age, the period between 1300-1850 triggered by volcanic activity that created a climate so regularly and bitterly cold that it contributed to the Great Famine of 1315-21.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

During the 14th century, the world saw one of its most traumatic episodes.  A plague spread through Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa that was unlike anything the world had ever seen.  In some locations, over half of the population died. Those who survived found themselves in a whole new world where the social and economic rules had been totally changed.  Learn more about the Black Death, how it happened, and how it changed the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Mint Mobile Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/eed MasterClass Get up to 50% off at MASTERCLASS.COM/EVERYWHERE Quince Go to quince.com/daily for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order! ButcherBox New users that sign up for ButcherBox will receive 2 lbs of grass-fed ground beef in every box for the lifetime of their subscription + $20 off your first box when you use code daily at checkout! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the gals dive into the rich and rowdy history of Europe's sauciest state. Topics include the Black Death's unlimited buffet, a ghostly girl and her a-hole dad, and some dangerous cult members with really dumb nicknames. Toast a glass of Sapore Locale Sangiovese, turn down the heavy metal, and tune in for Italian Crimes. For a full list of show sponsors, visit https://wineandcrimepodcast.com/sponsors