Podcast Episode

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Medieval Halloween: Signs in the Sky, Strange Children, etc

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Depiction of the sky over Nuremberg on April 14th, 1561.

From William of Newburgh's 12th-century chronicle, "History of English Affairs," these stories aren't really about Halloween, but they do feel a little Halloween-ish. There's no Michael Myers, zombies, or vampires, but there are strange portents in the sky, toads locked in stone, faerie banquets, green children, and a good number of demons.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

3 Things:

Sources:

  • The Church Historians of England, translated by Joseph Stevenson. Seeley's, 1856.

  • Watkins, C.S.. History and the Supernatural in Medieval England. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Fernao Mendes Pinto 3: Melaka and the Embarrassed Envoy

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16-century Malacca as drawn by Gaspar Correia

Our 16th-century traveller, among so many other things, arrives in Malacca (Melaka). From there he is sent out as envoy, leading to misadventure, near death, and criticism of the Portuguese Empire.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

Sources:

  • The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.

  • The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India, translated by Walter de Gray Birch. Hakluyt, 1875.

  • Boxer, C.R. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825. Carcanet, 1991.

  • Diffie, Bailey Wallys. Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580. University of Minnesota Press, 1977.

  • Newitt, Malyn. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400–1668. Routledge, 2004.

  • Paine, Lincoln. The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World. Knopf Doubleday, 2015.

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Fernao Mendes Pinto 2: The Red Sea and the Siege of Diu

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16th-Century Painting of an Ottoman Fleet - (Wikimedia)

Pinto visits the "Land of Prester John," faces trouble on the Red Sea, and brushes up against the 1538 Siege of Diu. He takes part in combat on the waters and along the Indian coast, grumbles as to his lot in life, and is whisked about by boat to Massawa, Mokha, Qeshm, Chaul, Goa, Honnavar, and Diu, before heading further east.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

3 Things:

  1. Article on ambergris, a substance which makes fairly frequent appearances on this podcast.

  2. Podcast episode on “The Ottoman Red Sea.”

  3. Article on the Ottoman coffee crackdown.

Sources:

  • The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.

  • Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford University Press, 2010.

  • Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Fernao Mendes Pinto 1: From Lisbon, Poverty, and Pirates

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Detail from Duarte de Armas’ Livro das Fortalezas - (Wiki)

Fernão Mendes Pinto, respected by many of his contemporaries for the expertise knowledge which he'd gained through his travels, absolutely synonymous for others with lies and exaggerations. 

From humble beginnings and vaguely unfortunate events in his early life, Pinto would find a place for himself in the 16th-century world of colonial Portugal, would write himself into it if necessary.

He was, he said, “13 times a prisoner and 17 a slave.” As Rebecca Catz writes, he served as a “soldier, merchant, pirate, ambassador, missionary, doctor—the list is not complete.” He ran afoul of pirates, was shipwrecked, and robbed royal tombs. The characters in his story included a saint, an Indonesian ruler, the mother of Prester John, a Japanese lord, and someone who may or may not have been the Dalai Lama. He claimed to be among the very first Europeans to set foot in Japan, but then he claimed to be a lot of things.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

3 Things:

  1. Article on the history of the mango and a Portuguese connection.

  2. Article about the discovery of a shipwreck, thought to have come from Vasco da Gama’s armada.

  3. The story of the rhino of Lisbon.

Sources:

  • The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.

  • The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History, edited by Malyn Newitt. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

  • Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006. 

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Medieval Lives 7: Long Distance Relationships

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Detail from Piri Ries’ 16th-century map of Cairo - (Wikimedia)

With all the medieval travel featured on the podcast—the trips across the Mediterranean, the Asian Steppe, and the Indian Ocean—of course we focus on the travellers themselves, the people actually making those trips, but whether they were merchants, envoys, or otherwise, they often left people behind, family that they were separated from for years at a time.

This episode is about those separations, the difficulties they caused, and what people did (or did not do) about them. We start with a letter from a merchant in Palermo, Sicily, move to one from an India trader in Aden, and finish with a pair of Rabbinic responses regarding a married couple in Egypt.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

3 Things:

  1. Article by Heather Dalton on the travels of a cockatoo to 13th-century Sicily.

  2. Article by Minjie Su about four medieval love stories.

  3. Blog post about the correspondence of a "happy family" in 2nd-century Egypt.

Sources:

  • Goitein, S.D. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Princeton University Press, 1973.

  • Hofmeester, Karin. “Jewish Ethics and Women’s Work in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Arab-Islamic World.” International Review of Social History 56 (2011): 141–64.

  • Melammed, Reneé Levine. “He Said, She Said: A Woman Teacher in Twelfth-Century Cairo.” AJS Review 22, no. 1 (1997): 19–35.

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The Cairo Geniza

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Interior of the Ben Ezra Synagogue

Today’s episode is not the story of an individual but rather of a collected body of sacred and secular writings, or rather bodies of writings. It’s a story of scripture, court records, correspondence, literature, scholarly studies, and more, of human life as it has left its echoes in writing.

This is the story of the Cairo Geniza, an incredible collection of historical documents, from medieval manuscripts to modern divorces. It's about how that collection, brought from the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Egypt, has reached us, and some of the figures involved.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

3 Things:

  1. The photography of the Scottish twins, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson

  2. A short Cambridge University Library video on the conservation of Geniza fragments and the painstaking work involved

  3. "From Cairo to Kolkata, Traces of a Vibrant Jewish Past" by Michael David Lukas

Sources:

  • Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society, Volume III: The Family. University of California Press, 1978. 

  • Hoffman, Adina & Cole, Peter. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. Shocken Books, 2011. 

  • Jefferson, Rebecca. The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt: The History and Provenance of a Jewish Archive. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

  • Jefferson, Rebecca. "Deconstructing ‘the Cairo Genizah’: A Fresh Look at Genizah Manuscript Discoveries in Cairo before 1897." The Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no. 4 (2018): 422–48.

  • Lewis, Agnes Smith. Eastern Pilgrims: The Travels of Three Ladies. Hurst and Blackett, 1870.

  • Outhwaite, Ben. "A Hoard of Hebrew MSS," Limn issue 6, The Total Archive.

  • Reif, Stefan. A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University's Genizah Collection. Routledge, 2013.

  • Princeton Geniza Project. https://geniza.princeton.edu/en/

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Medieval Lives 6: Wuhsha the Broker

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Fragment of testimony on Wuhsha’s child - (Princeton Geniza Project)

Today's episode takes us to medieval Egypt, to old Cairo in the 11th and 12th century, to Fustat, to the Fatimid Caliphate during the period of the First Crusade, and to the life of a medieval woman named Wuhsha al-dallala who stands out in her time for strength, independence, and wild financial success (through lending and investment in trading ventures, including one to Gujarat, India). Her history comes to us through the fragments of the Cairo Geniza, in legal documents, and in a will.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

Sources:

  • Abramson, Henry. "Wuhsha the Broker Jewish Women in the Medieval Economy." December 6th, 2012, lecture.

  • Frenkel, Miriam. "Charity in Jewish Society of the Medieval Mediterranean World." In Charity and Giving in Monotheistic Religions, edited by Miriam Frenkel & Yaacov Lev. Walter de Gruyter, 2009.

  • Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society, Volume III: The Family. University of California Press, 1978. 

  • Goitein, S. D. “A Jewish Business Woman of the Eleventh Century.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 57 (1967): 225–42.

  • Goitein, S. D. & Friedman, Mordechai Akiva. India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza. Brill, 2008.

  • Hoffman, Adina & Cole, Peter. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. Knopf, 2011.

  • Zinger, Oded. Women, gender and law: Marital disputes according to documents of the Cairo Geniza. Princeton University, 2014.

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Brutus of Troy

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Illuminated initial from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae - (British Library)

The story of the legendary first kings of the Britons, complete with prophecy, a divine appearance, and a number of origin myths behind the names of Tours, Cornwall, New Troy, and Britain itself.

For this episode, we go to Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicles for Britain's mythical Trojan origins, following Brutus of Troy as he receives visions from the goddess Diana and voyages to an Albion still inhabited by giants.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

Sources:

  • Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  • Geoffrey of Monmouth. History of the Kings of Britain, translated by Aaron Thompson. In parentheses Publications Medieval Latin Series, 1999.

  • Gillingham, John. The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values. Boydell Press, 2000.

  • Jeffs, Amy. Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain. riverrun, 2021.

  • Lavezzo, Kathy. Imagining a Medieval English Nation. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

  • Spence, John. Reimagining History in Anglo-Norman Prose Chronicles. York Medieval Press, 2013.

  • Valerie I. J. Flint. “The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and Its Purpose. A Suggestion.” Speculum 54, no. 3 (1979): 447–68.

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Holinshed: The Scottish Source

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Scene from the 1577 Holinshed’s Chronicles - (British Library)

Today we step outside the usual medieval travel subject matter on the podcast for a look into William Shakespeare's historical source for the story of Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and of course, King of Scotland, or at least of Alba.

That story takes us to a 16th-century man named Reginald Wolfe, to Holinshed's Chronicles, and to the 11th-century doings of some familiar figures, of Duncan, Banquo, Macduff, Malcolm, and the rest. There are some familiar scenes, such as at Dunsinane Castle, but there are also unfamiliar elements like the murder of King Duffe, from which Shakespeare did a little borrowing.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

Sources:

  • Holinshed, Raphael. Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. J. Johnson, et al., 1808.

  • The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles, edited by Felicity Heal, Ian W. Archer, & Paulina Kewes. Oxford University Press, 2013.

  • McLuskie, Kathleen. Macbeth. Northcote House, 2009.

  • Patterson, Annabel. Reading Holinshed's Chronicles. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

  • Plomer, Henry Robert. A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1900.

  • Shakespeare, William. Macbeth, edited by Sandra Clark & Pamela Mason. Bloomsbury, 2015.

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The Saga of Grettir the Strong 7: The Romance of Thorstein and Spes

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Hermit and angel in the 14th-century Queen Mary Psalter - (British Library)

The Grettir Saga concludes with his half-brother Thorstein finding freedom and romance in Constantinople.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

Sources:

  • Grettir's Saga, translated by Jesse Byock. Oxford University Press, 2009.

  • Grettir's Saga, translated by Denton Fox and Hermann Palsson. University of Toronto Press, 1974.