Medieval Mythmaking w/ Professor Matthew Gabriele
/If you’ve ever wondered how myths were made, especially during the Medieval period, we’ve got you covered! We’re joined by Professor Matthew Gabriele, host of American Medieval, to talk about Medieval mythmaking, Castlecore vs Crusadecore, and Romantasy as a way of reflecting on the Medieval period!
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of fascism, white supremacy, islamaphobia, misogyny, death, sex, and genitals.
Guest
Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech. The co-author of "The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe" and "Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers that Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe," he'll talk your ear off about the Middle Ages. This is why he started the Multitude podcast, "American Medieval." See more at profgabriele.com and americanmedieval.com
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Cast & Crew
- Co-Hosts: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin
- Editor: Bren Frederick
- Music: Brandon Grugle, based on "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod
- Artwork: Allyson Wakeman
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About Us
Spirits is a boozy podcast about mythology, legends, and folklore. Every episode, co-hosts Julia and Amanda mix a drink and discuss a new story or character from a wide range of places, eras, and cultures. Learn brand-new stories and enjoy retellings of your favorite myths, served over ice every week, on Spirits.
Transcript
[theme]
AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world and throughout time.
JULIA: Ooh.
AMANDA: I'm Amanda.
JULIA: And I'm Julia.
AMANDA: And we are joined today by our newest sibling at Multitude, Dr. Matt Gabriele. He's a professor of Medieval Studies in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech and the host of American Medieval, the newest Multitude member show. Welcome, Matt.
MATTHEW: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so pleased to be here.
JULIA: Oh, we are so delighted to have you. I get to enjoy the dulcet tones of your voice every week when I edit your podcast. But I'm so glad that we get an opportunity for our audience to hear a little bit more about you, medieval folklore, and a lot of, like, hagiography and stuff like that. I'm very excited to talk to you today about all of that. I've, like, tentatively titled in my head this episode as Medieval Mythmaking, so I'm very excited to sort of dive deeper into that. But before we do, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, your work, and American Medieval?
MATTHEW: This is really exciting to be here because it combines two of my most favorite things in the world, which are cool stories about the Middle Ages and alcohol, which is probably revealing a little bit too much about myself and my personal life, but that's okay. That's [1:44]
JULIA: Hey, we have a decade of episodes about us drinking and telling stories, so you're in the right place.
MATTHEW: I feel like that's what podcasts are for anyway, so revealing a little bit too much about yourself, so—
AMANDA: I don't know what you're talking about, having grown up on podcasts over the last 10 years.
MATTHEW: Ah. No qualitative or quantitative evidence for that matter. Anyway, yeah, no, I'm really excited to be here. I am a professor, as you mentioned at Virginia Tech. I teach on the long history of the Middle Ages, which means that I am kind of one of the very few people who teach on anything related to this chronological period here at the university, so I kind of am a Matt of all trades, if you will. So thank you for that polite chuckle. So yeah, so I do kind of—
AMANDA: Genuinely really great. Matt, as someone who will never be a parent, I need to get my dad jokes and just overall pun-based humor from the outside world.
MATTHEW: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Like a lizard soaking up heat, so you're really helping me.
MATTHEW: Okay. Well, that's good. Well, I will share at some point, my very favorite dad joke ever, which I share with all of my students at the beginning of my classes. And that really is really important because, you know, for my students to understand it for, you know, people on the podcast, you listen to American Medieval to understand is that I am mostly made up of dad jokes. Like, I am six-foot-four and it's almost all dad jokes within there.
AMANDA: Dad jokes all the way down.
MATTHEW: Yeah. Most, mostly to the chagrin of my poor, wife and son, but, you know— so I take it out on my students as much as possible. But anyway, I'm mostly interested in— when I— in my research on the Middle Ages is I'm interested in kind of how people think about time kind of generally. So how people in the Middle Ages and also in the modern world kind of thought about or think about the past, but also how they think about the future. So issues of kind of apocalypticism and kind of thoughts about the end of the world. And within that is how people construct stories, whether they be true or false, kind of how they understood themselves and their relationship, to sometimes what we would call today kind of mythical figures, but to them were incredibly important. They might be supernatural, they might not be supernatural. They might have just been kind of created out of legend. We're recording this on a day in which A24 has just dropped a new trailer about Hugh Jackman film called The Death of Robin Hood.
JULIA: I was hoping you were gonna bring this up, so—
MATTHEW: Oh, I am very ready to talk about kind of— because it's all about— like that's all about— that movie seems to be kind of all about mythmaking, like how does the legend of Robin Hood kind of created? And so those are the types of stories, because they meant something to people both in the medieval past, of course, and the modern world as well. And so for the podcast American Evil, which I have just launched in November with Multitude and I am so excited to be a part of the network. But just trying to talk about kind of how Americans specifically think about the Middle Ages, because Americans have a weird relation in that they feel connected to these things that happened kind of across an ocean and a thousand years ago, but they don't feel that it's like— they feel that— well, they do feel that it's kind of part of their history, but they don't necessarily understand kind of why and that has a lot to do about the history of scholarship, but also the history of colonization and kind of an erasure of Native Americans and things of that nature. So we try to tell stories and bring experts on to talk about kind of what actually happened in that period and why we kind of care about it, why we know the things that we know. And I'm really excited, like some of our future guests are actually going to be broadening that lens out to talk about kind of Native American populations, kind of how fantasy kind of plays into fantasy and science fiction to some degree, kind of play into our understandings of the medieval period and all sorts of other things like that. You do have to unfortunately listen to the sound of my voice and I'm very fortunate to have Julia to kind of make me sound good, which is really the hardest thing about podcasting is starting to listen to yourself, like, all the time.
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: It is hard.
JULIA: Matt, it doesn't get easier 10 years in. I'm going to tell you right now.
MATTHEW: Fantastic. That's so great. I'm so excited about that. So I guess other people— I mean, people are apparently listening to it, so they don't mind it as much. So anyway—
AMANDA: I will share that by now the sound of my own voice in a recorded medium feels more like my voice than the voice that I hear resonating in my skull and sinus cavities when I just talk out loud. So that's just a weird thing that happens after 10 years.
MATTHEW: I guess, I mean, know, kind of acculturation works, right? Like you just get used to things after a while, so—
AMANDA: Uh-huh.
JULIA: Yeah.
MATTHEW: —I'm sure I'll get there.
JULIA: One of my favorite things that often comes up when you are interviewing historians and the guests on American Medieval, you always tend to ask them the sort of pipeline in which they got into medieval history.
MATTHEW: Hmm.
JULIA: It's a lot of like Lego sets. It's a lot of—
MATTHEW: Yep.
JULIA: —Ren Faire folks who grew up—
MATTHEW: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —going to the Ren Faire as children and now are Ren Faire people as adults. And I think that definitely would resonate with our audience because I think a lot of our audience were people who grew up, you know, reading the Lord of the Rings books or reading those sort of high fantasy books from, like, the '70s, '80s and '90s. I would love to, I suppose, start there because I do want to eventually get into the conversation of Castlecore versus Crusadercore, which is unfortunately a thing that is beginning to pop up in the world right now, or at least become more prominent in culture and society.
MATTHEW: Oh, yeah.
JULIA: But—
MATTHEW: Oh, yeah.
JULIA: —for you, Matt, when someone tells you, "Oh, I got into medieval history because of Game of Thrones or because of a fantasy novel series like Lord of the Rings," or something like that. What is your first thought?
AMANDA: Monty Python's Spamalot, just pulling from my own experience.
JULIA: Oh, yeah, of course, of course.
MATTHEW: Sure, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm. Holy grail still comes up a lot. Yes, absolutely. So this is a question that I think about kind of quite a lot because, again, like I'm a classroom teacher. You know, I teach usually, you know, a hundred or so students every semester, so a few hundred students a year on, you know— that can vary, of course. But I always ask them on the first day whenever I'm teaching about the Middle Ages is kind of, how did you come to this class? And for a lot of them, it's like, "Well, it fits a breadth requirement or a gen ed requirement," which is fine. But, like, I kind of want to know what they know about the Middle Ages and kind of where they got it. Because one of the things that myself and my friend and co-author on our recent books, David Perry have done a lot about is thinking about K-12 curriculum. Because a lot of our students who get into the college classroom, they haven't learned about— they know something about the Middle Ages, but they haven't learned it in the classroom. And so it's often coming, like you said, through these kind of alternate venues. Still a lot of Tolkien readers out there or kind of high fantasy kind of generally so Tolkien-inspired modern series. Dungeons & Dragons still pretty common. Video games increasingly, of course, common set in— you know, like a D&D world or something kind of akin to that.
JULIA: I'm sure The Witcher is a big one for a lot of people.
MATTHEW: The Witcher is a huge one, yep. So it was bigger and I'm sure once the new— they're doing, I think they're working on Witcher 4 right now.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
MATTHEW: So I'm sure that will, again, be a huge kind of thing there, too. But then again, like— and then as Amanda said, like Monty Python, Monty Python's still kind of a staple. Really interesting kind of generationally when I asked them about Monty Python. It's like, "Oh, my parents showed it to me and, you know, we watched it together and now I love it." And because everybody loves Monty Python. So what that kind of means— or this is all kind of a long way of saying is that I'm really agnostic. I'm interested, but I'm like agnostic about how people come to the actual medieval period because there's not a good pipeline. It's not like everybody is kind of forced through the public schooling system to take a course in US history. So they know something about the civil war or about the civil rights movement or something like that. Like people just don't know about the medieval period, but they're interested. And so I see it as my role, especially in a classroom and in lot of the writing that I do and the podcast and things like that, is just to show them like, yeah, you can know something about this. We can know something about this and we can kind of explore this period together. And so you don't have to rely on these crappy AI oftentimes generated YouTube videos or these kind of business school graduates who start other, not ours, terrible podcasts out there, who think they know something about history because they've, you know, read something on the internet or on Wikipedia or something like that. That is a great way to kind of get interested, but in order to actually understand the period, you have to understand that it was a different time and a different place, and we can kind of do that together. So if you're thinking kind of imaginatively, like through video games or high fantasy, in some ways that's actually a benefit because you're used to that mode of thinking in order to try to get into somebody else's head. So fiction literature, I think is really a wonderful or, you know, video games or film or whatever, like any sort of art form. If that's your entryway, that's actually really kind of great. I'm not interested in kind of— well, that's not historically accurate or anything like that. I mean, there were dragons, man. There's no actual dragons in the Middle Ages. We can move beyond that.
JULIA: If only.
MATTHEW: I know, I know.
JULIA: If only there had been real dragons.
AMANDA: When those kinds of students find you in your classroom or maybe thinking about yourself as a young man interested in these books and in this period, what do people think they're going to study when they study the medieval period and what do they actually study?
MATTHEW: A great example of this is that it's not what they expect. Let's put it that way, not in my classroom. And so I always— I kind of apologize on the first day is like, "Listen, you might think you're going to get this, but you're not going to get that. You're going to get [10:55]"
AMANDA: Dad joke, apology, healing a lot of dad issues for people, I would imagine.
MATTHEW: Absolutely. So strangely enough that comes up in my teacher evaluations sometimes. My favorite, I think, was one who was very explicit, is like, "This dude reminds me of my father and not necessarily in a good way."
AMANDA: Oh.
MATTHEW: A lot to unpack there, so anyway—
JULIA: Uh-oh.
AMANDA: Sounds like a personal— yeah, yeah.
MATTHEW: Exactly. That's like—
JULIA: That's for that person and their therapist, not for you.
MATTHEW: So good luck to them. So anyway— so when I teach a course on— because I'm interested in kind of how people tell stories about the past, but also about kind of how religion and violence kind of work together. I teach a course on the Crusades, which is one of those things that everybody kind of knows something about but they don't necessarily know something about. And what they think they're gonna get is military history. Because it's not just kind of the assumptions that they have about the medieval period, but it's the assumptions that they have about how history is often taught, again, in a K-12 classroom. And this is not universally true, and I know this is not teachers' fault when I say this, is that there's so much standardized testing within the history curriculum. A lot of it is just kind of memorization of names and dates. And so students oftentimes come to a classroom like mine and think like, "Well, we're just going to get that recitation of kind of what are the important battles, what are the— you know, who are the important figures, you know, when do they live, what do they do, that kind of stuff." What's more interesting to me are kind of the how and why questions. So that's my first day basically in the Crusades classroom and say like, "Listen, we're going to do some of that. Like this is what happened and what we know about it and stuff like that." I'm more interested in like, how did people remember this? How did people write that history? And how can we dig through that to order— in order to figure out why they thought it was important enough to write down and talk about? Because the Crusades were more than just a military phenomenon. They were huge cultural and religious phenomenon. And we should pay attention to that because that gives us— looking at it kind of more holistically, gives us a better sense of kind of how people in the Middle Ages actually lived and what they kind of cared about.
JULIA: Hmm. Totally. And I think— well, now that we're talking about the Crusades, we can talk a little bit about the Crusadescore versus Castlecore. I feel like you would be better at explaining the exact definition, I suppose, of Crusadecore, which is a alt-right phenomenon that seems to be happening on the internet and in society and culture lately.
MATTHEW: You know, I'm sure most of your listeners kind of know this, but there's this kind of aesthetic, kind of cultural, kind of image-based, kind of vibes-based, kind of movement, all these kind of cores, right? Like, so there was cottagecore for a while, and then actually a couple years ago, it started this thing called Castlecore, which, you know, I'm sure you would— it, like— yeah, exactly. It's kind of like gothic-y, lots of candles, kind of stone maybe, but like kind of faux fur, or I guess real fur is actually coming back right now, which is kind of surprising. I guess cigarettes might be next, but that's another kind of cultural thing.
JULIA: Honestly—
MATTHEW: Yeah.
JULIA: —probably.
AMANDA: Cigarettes are back with queers, so I think it'll hit the mainstream in the next few years.
MATTHEW: Exactly. Yeah. And then it'll reach Appalachia where I live in, like, 20 years or something like that [13:57]
JULIA: Sounds right.
AMANDA: Listen, the Appalachian queers might already be on to the next thing. We don't know. They outpace the rest of Appalachia.
MATTHEW: It might be that. So the term Crusadercore is relatively new, and I mean, like super new, like it's been coined, I think, just within the last month or couple of months or something like that. But I think it's tapping into a longer phenomenon of— kind of— as you mentioned, kind of alt-right kind of far-right appropriation, or kind of valorization, or nostalgia for maybe is a better term for the Crusades about kind of a violent, patriarchal, kind of white Christian masculinity against all outsiders. You're seeing this in the— and again, kind of the memes that are used on X, for example, among kind of far-right accounts, but also on other discussion boards and other kinds of visual media and stuff like that. And then kind of translated into, you know, kind of more physical form. Oftentimes like— there was a guy in Texas who was harassing a mosque, who was literally dressed as a Crusader as he was shouting Islamophobic epithets.
JULIA: Come on, guy.
MATTHEW: Yeah, the— our secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has Crusade-based tattoos on himself, which—
AMANDA: Yikes.
JULIA: Insane.
MATTHEW: —I've talked to several reporters about and tried to explain like, "No, this is real bad. This is real, real bad."
JULIA: No, no, that's actually bad.
MATTHEW: Yeah. That's like super bad. It's not—
AMANDA: I have a PhD in why this is bad.
MATTHEW: Yeah. Exactly, yeah.
JULIA: It's always good to have a PhD in why, what's happening right now is bad.
MATTHEW: I gotta say, like, I didn't think having a Medieval History PhD would make me want— like be able to comment on this stuff. I remember making some sort of dumb joke to my wife, like, when I started my PhD. I was like, "Well, you know, if the Vikings or the Crusaders ever invade, ha, ha, ha, ha, then I'll have something to say." And like—
JULIA: No.
MATTHEW: —talk about a monkey's paw kind of statement. Like—
JULIA: I was about to say the one finger curled in, Matt.
MATTHEW: Exactly, yeah. The finger curls, yeah.
AMANDA: Surely no one abducts other nations' leaders anymore.
JULIA: Yeah.
MATTHEW: That's— so it's all my fault, basically, is—
AMANDA: We, perhaps, never had a more timely episode of Spirits.
MATTHEW: Yeah. So anyway, so— but one of the interesting things is about although Crusadercore, this kind of aesthetic, this kind of visual kind of representation of the Crusades, the term is kind of new. It stretches back much further, really, to after, I think— I would start it kind of right after 9/11, the attacks on September 11th and the attacks on— or the retaliation against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and then the war, the second war in Iraq. A lot of visual and kind of writing representations about the Crusades and how the Crusades kind of need to "come back." The West is carrying out a brand-new crusade, which was then mirrored by kind of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda saying like, "These new Crusaders, they're attacking us." And a lot of the right wing were saying like, "Yes, we're the new Crusaders. We're going to liberate these people kind of once and for all after we failed in the past."
AMANDA: I'm just a girly from Long Island, but that's not what happened during the Crusades, right?
MATTHEW: It is, in fact, not what happened during the Crusades, yes. So the Crusades themselves are a long complicated— have long complicated history, but the big thing to know about them, you know, kind of the TLDR is that they were complete failures. There was one out of— maybe one and a half or two that were kind of successful. They were religiously motivated in order to reestablish Christian control in the Holy land, at least initially. And then they were kind of expanded against non-Christians in the Baltics and Iberia, you know, North Africa, et cetera, places like that. Although Christians oftentimes settled there, that was not the primary goal, nor was it conversion in any way, shape or form. These are all things that were kind of replaced, retconned, if you will, kind of on it in the 19th and 20th century during the age of actual European colonization in which they needed kind of a historical justification. And so they looked to the Crusades as that justification.
JULIA: Like, "Look, we did this before and now we can do it again."
MATTHEW: Exactly, exactly. And there— I mean, if you look at 19th, 20th century histories written about the Crusades, they oftentimes are very explicit about that. There's a couple of kind of French ones that literally say like, "Look, the Crusaders left the island of Rouen just outside of Cyprus, you know, in 1312. And then the Crusade expeditionary— the new Crusade expeditionary force in 1917 reestablished itself when we, you know, fought the Ottomans and reconquered the Holy Land and—" so, yeah, so I think they're kind of— this is what the far-right is pulling on right now, is it— it's a medievalism remembrance of the Middle Ages, which is more about a remembrance of a 19th century colonial mindset, white colonial mindset, than anything to do with the actual Middle Ages themselves.
JULIA: And this is in contrast to what you spoke about before, which is sort of the Castlecore movement, which I think predates the Crusadecore. But you wrote a fantastic article about this, about like the fashions of Chappell Roan. I don't know if you mentioned this, but like Zendaya's look at the Met Gala as Joan of Arc several years ago.
MATTHEW: Oh, yeah.
JULIA: The rise of books like A Court of Thorns and Roses, like—
MATTHEW: Romantasy.
JULIA: Yeah, the romantasy genre as a whole is a huge—. I don't want to call it a bubble yet, because I don't know how expansive the romantasy genre is going to be now and in the future. have a feeling that it's going to be kind of similar to the post-apocalyptic YA novels of The Hunger Games era, but that's still a good, like, 10 years' worth of content probably for us, so we're here for it.
MATTHEW: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we're just at the, kind of, beginning of it. So the one thing— you know, Castlecore I think is so interesting because it's almost a resistance to this kind of Crusadercore aesthetic and it's so heavily gendered.
JULIA: I was about to say it's so feminist in its tellings and also very queer-coded in a lot of ways.
MATTHEW: Absolutely. A hundred percent. And it's a total resistance to kind of this tech bro, right-wing kind of tech— which is not just kind of Crusadercore, but the other kind of big buzzword is technofeudalism—
JULIA: Hmm.
MATTHEW: —of— kind of the supremacy, the hierarchy of a new feudalism that's created by our tech overlords and blah, blah, blah, blah. And romantasy is a pushback against that. Absolutely. It's not a— it's not an attempt to kind of recreate the past in any way, but to pull kind of interesting kind of things out of it in order to creatively play with the present and the future. Whereas Crusadercore and I think technofeudalism is like, "Let's recreate the past as a male space."
AMANDA: I just want a, like— what— I don't know what the right meme format is, but I need to see a drag queen as Joan of Arc against a Cybertruck. And, like, that is just— that is my visual representation of these two movements.
MATTHEW: Absolutely, a hundred percent.
JULIA: That's a great image.
MATTHEW: Yeah. There could be jousting involved or something like that. So—
AMANDA: Two drag queens jousting versus the Cybertruck. Or a drag queen jousting a Cybertruck. Okay, okay.
JULIA: Oh, yeah. Okay, you got it. You got there.
MATTHEW: I don't have the Photoshop skills, so don't look at me.
JULIA: Someone out there make that for us. Don't use AI, though.
MATTHEW: No GenAI. Yeah.
JULIA: I— sorry, now I'm thinking of drag queens jousting and how, like, my medieval pipeline was A Knight's Tale with Heath Ledger. Oh, God, just so—
MATTHEW: Oh, yeah.
JULIA: Fantastic movie.
MATTHEW: Fantastic movie. Yeah.
JULIA: Extreme— everyone in that movie is hot, so it's a real bisexual awakening movie as well. And then when Amanda and I were in high school, our— probably, I would say, most popular history teacher in high school. He taught the AP European history class. He also, during summers, would work for the Ren Faire as a knight who did medieval reenactment battles. And so every year for the freshmen, he would do an assembly in which he would teach us about, like, medieval armor and how combat would be done and, like, what a battlefield would look like during the medieval period. And I always— I mean, he's the reason I took AP European history because he was the coolest teacher there. So God, I wish more K-12 people had teachers like him so that the medieval pipeline was bigger in a lot of ways.
AMANDA: Rest in Ren Faire power, Mr. Smustad. [21:45] We love you.
JULIA: Love that man. R.I.P.
AMANDA: So I think a lot of us, whether it is the kind of, like, flashiness of armor or the, you know, romance with a small R of these stories, are fascinated by the medieval period almost as, like, a myth we ourselves can escape to. It feels to me like when I picture history and I think of a time different from my own, those images are to me medieval because, you know, life feels, I don't know, far back enough that people are, like, living and doing things, but just in a different daily way than I can imagine my own existence versus something like, you know, during human development or even something like ancient Greece or Egypt where I can't really picture daily life. And I wonder what role mythology, storytelling, self-mythologizing had in that time, because, of course, people have always told ourselves stories. Like you mentioned in the Crusades, we're always reaching back to the recent past to justify actions we want to take in the near future. So huge question, the one that you've written on very often, but where do you like to start when it comes to thinking about the role of mythologizing in medieval times?
MATTHEW: Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. And I think there's kind of two related things, I think, in your question there is that— one, is that I think there— there's something about the medieval period that inspires that, as we were talking about earlier, kind of that flight of imagination, right? Of— we can tell stories in this period because it's a space that is available to us, because we think we don't know a whole lot about it. And there's lots of kind of reasons for that. And that goes back to, kind of, the myth, the modern myth of the Dark Ages, right? And that there aren't sources— we know a lot about ancient Greece or Rome, and mostly about kind of, as you said, not like kind of daily life, but kind of like elites. We think of Plato and Aristotle and Cicero and Augustus and all the other great— basically great white guys that we've been kind of taught about. And then modern history seems more accessible, right? Like there's lots of written documents, but the Middle Ages is a period in which the literacy has declined, which it absolutely did decline during that period. But there were people there who lived full human lives. And so they themselves, I think it does a little bit of kind of violence to the past and to our own kind of violence to our own kind of modern imaginations in order to pretend that these people didn't have those stories that they told about themselves. One of the interesting things, and I will say kind of the only interesting thing right now about that, Death of Robin Hood trailer that I've seen, and I'm only going off the trailer. It's like a minute and a half long. I don't know what the movie is going to be like. Is that it talks about the formation of a myth within someone's own lifetime, is that how— you know, what we can tell kind of from the trailer itself and what it seems from an interview with the director is that he's basing it on kind of a Robin Hood ballad, which is a very late medieval creation about the death of Robin Hood. Is about how Robin is reflecting back in his life at the end, and did he actually do good? Was he an outlaw who actually was, you know, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor? Or was he just an outlaw, you know, who stole stuff? And how stories are created at that time by people witnessing events, writing things down, but also kind of orally reciting them to other people along their way. And I think in the Middle Ages is absolutely kind of full of moments like this, because we have a certain way of understanding how— A, how the past is recorded in the modern world, is that we want kind of objective fact about the past. Whereas the Middle Ages thought very differently about how they thought about the past in which they were interested in truth with, like, kind of a capital T. In which the facts didn't matter so much as getting across kind of, for lack of a better term, kind of the vibes of what was actually kind of real about that. My dissertation when I wrote my PhD, my first book, and then a lot of— you know, a fair amount of my scholarship kind of after that is on the legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages. And Charlemagne himself was a real person who lived in the ninth century, a real great emperor who united kind of most of Europe under his banner, often mostly by conquest. Revived the Roman Empire, was crowned Roman Emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III in the year 800. And then he died in 814. And then very shortly after that— not very shortly, but within kind of a century, all these legends start to spring up about him, about how he went to Jerusalem, how he led a crusade, how he conquered the Saracens in Spain, how he did kind of all these things that he never did in his lifetime. And for a long time, scholars were— would like to talk about kind of the— this was kind of like fictions, that these were fictions, and to our mind they are fictions. But what I like to think or, like, what I like to— how I like to conceptualize it is that they're not fictions in the way that we think about them. Like, yes, they're not true and we should say that that didn't actually happen, but they were thought of as true because they represented something about the man that they were trying to tell stories about. And I think we have lots of evidence in the Middle Ages, not just about Charlemagne, but about King Arthur, for example, another kind of figure that everybody kind of knows about, Robin Hood, is that, you know, the details of the actual events don't matter within the telling so much as the moral or kind of— sometimes theological, but sometimes just kind of moral or ethical vision that the storyteller is trying to convey in this period, if that kind of makes sense.
JULIA: Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. And you see that a lot, too, with like hagiographies of saints—
MATTHEW: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —in this time period as well, where you'll get like these little details and you're like, "Where did that story come from? Why are they even, like, telling stories about that?" And I think that brings up a really interesting question about how those stories spread. And I would love to ask you more about that, Matt, but first, before we do that, we have to go grab a refill.
AMANDA: Let's do it.
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JULIA: We are back. And Matt, one of the things we love to ask folks about is what you've been drinking lately, whether that is cocktail, mocktails, coffee creations. What has been your drink of choice? And I know because you specifically requested it, we have to talk about some cocktails.
MATTHEW: We're gonna— oh, thank God, we're going to talk about cocktails. I— yes, I love making, drinking cocktails. Whenever my wife and I travel, I mean, we try to look up different kind of bars that are doing interesting kind of creations and try things out and stuff like that. And I will say too, I have to give a shout out to my favorite— one of my favorite drinks is coffee. Love coffee. Love lots of different coffees.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Shout out.
MATTHEW: But let's talk about cocktails. So the thing that I've been drinking kind of recently, and I will say that on my podcast, American Medieval, which you can subscribe to, course, if you want to, is that one of the Patreon tiers is based on a show, a webcast that I did kind of during the pandemic with a colleague and a friend, called Drinking with Historians, in which it was basically kind of a happy hour, in which we would have guests on and we'd talk about kind of history. Very similar to kind of the vibe of American medieval. And so one of the tiers is Drinking with Historians, in which I share my favorite cocktail recipes with you and then give a little kind of history of the cocktail and stuff like that.
AMANDA: Love it.
MATTHEW: A little bit of a spoiler, but my favorite cocktail, the first one that I shared is my favorite cocktail in the whole wide world and it's La Louisiane.
JULIA: Ooh.
MATTHEW: If you're unfamiliar, it comes from New Orleans. There's kind of a contested history about kind of where it comes from, which hotel in the 19th or early 20th century it came from.
JULIA: True of most cocktails, I will say. If you're looking up the history of a cocktail.
MATTHEW: Exactly, like somebody claims it—
AMANDA: Someone hired a chef who was trained in France and at some point, out came a Caesar salad and also, you know, a cocktail.
MATTHEW: That's right. And America was introduced to different types of kind of aperitives that they decided, "Oh, this goes with hard drinking bourbon or gin or something like that. Sounds great. Let's do it." Some of those, not big hits. Some of those other cocktails are very delicious. Anyway, the La Louisiane, because it has kind of that French influence. So it has a spirit called Benedictine, bourbon or rye or some sort of, you know, whiskey, usually bourbon, I think is— what it's often made with. And then a little bit of absinthe as well.
JULIA: Classic French.
MATTHEW: So it's kind of variation on kind of a Manhattan and stuff like that, but it has that kind of anise-y flavor of the absinthe too, and it just— it's incredibly smooth and delightful. And I love it and I drink it. It's also one of the drinks that, like, I can't make really—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
MATTHEW: —well at home and I don't know why, though I keep trying. So I always order it. It's kind of my test of a bar whenever I go there, is like, "Can you— can I order off menu? Can you make this?" And if it's good, then that bartender is my friend forever.
JULIA: Yeah, no, I feel that, For me, that's a last word cocktail.
MATTHEW: Oh.
JULIA: One of my favorites.
MATTHEW: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
JULIA: It also tells me if the cocktail bar or the restaurant has green chartreuse on hand.
MATTHEW: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: And that's an important question.
MATTHEW: It is, yes, yes. So, also has to do with medieval monks, of course.
JULIA: Yes, of course.
MATTHEW: Green chartreuse. Yes. Still made by the monks at Grande Chartreuse. Yeah.
JULIA: Still made, only two monks can know the recipe at a given time.
MATTHEW: That's right. Yeah.
JULIA: And I love that. That is so fucking spooky and mysterious.
MATTHEW: I know.
JULIA: And that's I want out of my liquors.
AMANDA: One of my very best friends is becoming a nun. She's taking her profession to vows in just about a month. And, I mean, her order of nuns doesn't make any liquors that I know of, or liqueurs, but I'm going to see. We're going to stay tuned and see if after you profess your vows, does somebody just like give you the little, like, the red briefcase, you know, of recipes of some kind?
JULIA: Isn't her order like the social media nuns?
AMANDA: They're media nuns, yeah.
JULIA: Yeah, it's so cool. It's truly so cool. I've [37:06]
AMANDA: They, like, run printing presses.
MATTHEW: What is a—
AMANDA: They were like early adopters—
MATTHEW: No way.
AMANDA: —of blogging and social media to, like, you know, not just evangelize, but also to just sort of spread information and, like, take care of their communities. Yeah, it's very cool.
MATTHEW: That's fantastic. Yeah.
JULIA: We really do need Catherine [37:19] on at some point so that we could talk about the newest saint, the social media saint.
AMANDA: Yes, the millennial saint. We'll have her back.
JULIA: Hey, sometimes you know some nuns, and that's pretty cool, and that feels very medieval to me.
AMANDA: It's a beautiful wrinkle in my life. I love it.
JULIA: Yes. And I'm gonna transition us to media nuns to how medieval mythmaking spread throughout Europe and throughout the world during that time period.
MATTHEW: I thought you were going to go media nuns to medieval nuns, but this works as well. Yeah.
JULIA: Kind of both, kind of both.
MATTHEW: Yeah, you were mentioning kind of, before the break, I think about hagiography, which is kind of biography— like holy biography is basically—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
MATTHEW: —the easy way to kind of understand hagiography, if people are unfamiliar with what that term means.
AMANDA: Wow, that's so helpful. Damn.
MATTHEW: This is what I'm here for, so I'm a walking glossary of terms. So how ideas spread? It's a great question. It's one that I don't have a super great answer for. It's a super important question. And the reason for that is because we rely so much, as scholars, on oftentimes written sources. And a lot of times the written sources don't tell us why they know the things they do. Sometimes they do. Hagiographies are kind of a unique type of source, genre of source in the medieval period because they oftentimes care a lot about validating the stories that they're telling. I heard this from this guy who told me this guy who was actually there, for example. Like that is very common in a hagiography. Or I heard this story from the actual person who was cured by this miracle or some— or witnessed the thing or something like that.
JULIA: That is very similar, if I may, to Amanda's theory about urban legends, which we call the network of cousins, which is basically like every urban legend is spread because your cousin tells you a story about their friend who goes to a different high school's cousin where that thing happened to them, re Bloody Mary or, you know, Mothman or something like that.
AMANDA: It's personal enough to be plausible but not quite enough to cite, and so that's like the removal that we need.
MATTHEW: Exactly.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
MATTHEW: Yeah, but— again, but if you're working in a, you know, in a period in which kind of capital T, truth matters more than that kind of, like, citable kind of objectivity, then that makes a lot of sense, that this is kind of how things kind of spread, is that they spread orally because written records were relatively rare. Oral transmission was a trusted transmission in a way that actually oftentimes written transmission was not. Like, 'cause you could write any old thing on a piece of paper, but like if your best friend told you or your cousin or something like that told you, you're going to trust that guy. Like that— that's a person you trust. And so I think that those are the— those kinds of networks that are super important. And there has been some really interesting research about kind of literally using network analysis pulled from kind of algorithmic or kind of, you know, other kinds of STEM fields, and then applied to things about figuring out like, okay, we know this guy wrote this text. How is he connected back here to where we think this story might— and then people have been able to trace it, like, through generations or through connections between monasteries or noble families that traveled or something like that. And that stuff is really, super interesting. And then there's kind of a second layer on that, right? Is that because we're dealing in a world before the printing press, before kind of written transmission becomes very, very easy, everything's handwritten and not on paper, but on vellum, right? So stretched kind of leather, which is extraordinarily expensive, very difficult, and time-consuming to make. And so, like, the things you write down really need to be very important for you to do that. And so copies of manuscripts become kind of recitations of things, and sometimes it's very easy to trace those lineages and sometimes it's not. This is one of the things that I think historians, really, in the last 50 years have really started to grapple with, is like, "Okay, we have this 19th century printed edition, but like, can we trust that? Like, what do the manuscripts actually say?" And oftentimes the manuscripts are very different. And then what are the manuscripts saying about their own sources? And, like, it can lead you into kind of— this kind of recursive black hole of God knows how we know anything, you know, so we'll just sit on the left bank and smoke our cigarettes and wear our berets and sip coffee and stuff like that. But it's attractive.
AMANDA: Have sex [41:26] Hemingway, you know, skinny dip in the sand, why not?
MATTHEW: As attractive as that is, we can't do that all the time. So—
JULIA: No, but I think that's wonderful. I think that there is a sort of mystery to how this storytelling spreads. And I think that almost lends itself to the appeal of the medieval period. You know, being able to dive in deep and get your hands a little dirty and try and scope out where the connections are and where the through lines are, I think is something that makes the Middle Ages really appealing to people who are studying it, or who want to study it.
MATTHEW: Yeah, and the attraction too of it, all the sources being in kind of these old-timey languages, right? In the Europe— in the case of Europe, mostly Latin, but then of course, like Greek and Arabic, and old French and old German and things like that. You know, a lot more stuff has been translated into modern French, English, German and stuff like that, but there's still that barrier to entry which makes it seem esoteric and kind of magical in these ways. Like going back to the fantasy thing, like it's not a— like whenever somebody in a fantasy, like, movie, right, needs to know something, they pull out a book and it usually looks like a medieval manuscript because that's where arcane knowledge is kind of contained. So— and I think we kind of carry that assumption with us oftentimes when we encounter it.
JULIA: There is something really fun about, being like, "Oh, and here's the ancient tome of knowledge." And it being a medieval book is pretty cool, actually, pretty fun.
AMANDA: No, you're totally right. And I don't picture, like, a— one of my favorite books is Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard, and it details a, like, young girl like myself walking into a library and finding a book of magic that teaches her magic. I don't think of that book as looking like, you know, the, like, Fabio romance paperbacks that I see at the grocery store.
MATTHEW: Oh, no.
JULIA: But Amanda, what if it did?
Amamda: But what if it did? Like, that's really interesting.
MATTHEW: Yeah, that's right.
AMANDA: Or like an uncharged iPad generation two, you know? Like it's— there's a little more gravitas to knowing that like a monk spent 10 years writing this, you know, illustrating this manuscript.
MATTHEW: But even— I mean, like there's other options too, but we don't picture those. Like it could be like—
AMANDA: Yeah.
MATTHEW: —a papyri or like a scroll or something like that. But like it's never that. So—
AMANDA: Probably in Arabic or Mandarin or something like that, but we— you know, our imaginations as white Westerners are often restricted to our detriment.
MATTHEW: That is absolutely true. Yeah.
JULIA: Now, Matt, when you were pitching me ideas for this episode, you included a couple of different things and you did promise me cool medieval ghost stories. So I am—
MATTHEW: Yes.
JULIA: —going to have to request at least one cool medieval ghost story from you before we leave.
MATTHEW: Sure, yeah. I mean, the— that's one of the things— you know, that goes back to kind of what we were talking about earlier too, is about— yeah, you know, hagiography as well, is that one of the things that, you know, my students always kind of get hung up on is like, did the miracles actually happen? And then they oftentimes try to think about a scientific way to explain the thing that actually occurred, why this person got better or why this thing magically appeared or something like that. And so just trying to get them to think like, A, okay, you're kind of missing— like they're not telling you that story to get you to believe it necessarily, but like, why did they include that story? Like, what is the story trying to do? And I bring this up, it was because the other thing that I think hagiography allows us to do, which gets us to the ghost stories is that the world of the Middle Ages and the world of really any kind of pre-industrial society, and I would say like kind of our own society is that like, because most people in America believe in ghosts, if you look at any sort of, you know, data, right?
JULIA: Look at this podcast.
MATTHEW: Look at this podcast. There you go. Is that the world is filled with the supernatural. Like the restless spirits kind of around us. And that can take the form of saints, but it can also take the form of literal spirits who show up, like ghosts, like we would call kind of ghosts. Most of the time, these ghosts kind of appear as warnings to people. And you can— like, there's all sorts of readers out there of medieval ghost stories and stuff like that. You can very easily find them kind of online or, you know, at your local library or things like that. But oftentimes the way that these stories— and I'll get to a specific story, I promise. I'm going somewhere.
JULIA: No, I trust the process, it's fine.
MATTHEW: Don't trust me, but that's fine. Your first mistake right there. But is that the world is surrounded by spirits who will— who can easily transgress whether— wherever they are, heaven, hell, some sort of— kind of proto-purgatory or something like that, and visit the living in order to pass on warnings oftentimes. Not to torment. There were demons and that was a little bit different, right? And I'll tell you a demon— a great demon story in a minute, too. Is that there were demons all the time, but there were also kind of these people who had passed on who were returning kind of to warn people about— you know, kind of what was going on. For example, in this 12th century chronicle, I think it's— no, sorry, early 13th, early 13th century chronicle. So I'm a historian, so I'm not good with numbers, which is really problematic when I'm trying to get years down. But in early 13th century chronicle, there's a story about this— a monk's mother and he's telling a story about his mom and how his mom was visited by ghosts of his dad, her husband. He was a knight. She was a young, aristocratic woman who's— the husband had died, you know, kind of earlier on.
AMANDA: Young widower, a knight. Come on.
MATTHEW: Kid who was writing the story, like all sorts of mommy issues, like such an interesting kind of story, wrote an autobiography, one of the first autobiographies in the west. Guibert of Nogent if you want to look it up. So, like, all sorts of weird, kind of— Freud would have had a field day with this dude.
AMANDA: Maybe he did.
MATTHEW: He probably did, actually, yeah. So— but anyway, so telling the story is that— he was telling the story, his mom was visited by the ghost. The father dies, comes back as a spectral figure, can't, like, speak, but is warning. And she notices that not only is he there, but she hears the crying of a child, kind of the wailing of a young child. She thinks it's her own kid, the person telling the story, her son, Guibert, and it's not him. He's fine. He's asleep. He doesn't know what's kind of going on. And so is tormented by this wailing and that it keeps happening kind of again and again and again. And she— finally, she talks to the priest and the priest is kind of like, "Well, you know, I don't know what's going on. Like, whatever. Like, I can't see him. You know, you can see him," blah, blah, blah. So she kind of finally figures out that what had happened, and she kind of connects two things, they were cursed on their wedding day. This husband and wife, by an old woman, of course, an old woman.
JULIA: It's always an old woman.
MATTHEW: They couldn't, for a long, time consummate their marriage. He was— so he was cursed. That's what's clear. So it doesn't say that he was cursed, but it's pretty clear. Like he was the one who was cursed, so he couldn't consummate the marriage. And so a friend of his— she kind of asks around people who knew him, a friend of his told him like, "Well, is it just that you're cursed or is it you— or are you cursed with her?" So he goes off to a woman of ill repute—
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: Ah.
MATTHEW: —a sex worker, and decides to— and he's able to consummate that, no problem. And has produced a child that the mother has— that the wife has never known about.
JULIA: Oh, shit.
MATTHEW: And so after his death, she kind of figures this out and goes and rescues this child and brings the child up as her own in which— so it saved the child from a life of being a bastard, of being kind of damnation, of being unbaptized, of having to live like as, you know, the child of a sex worker or something like that, and kind of raises their own. And that releases his time and her time in purgatory— or reduces, sorry, his time kind of in suffering—
AMANDA: Huh.
MATTHEW: —and allows him to go to heaven because he's kind of redeemed.
JULIA: Which is why he was a ghost in the first place. Got it.
MATTHEW: And so like that's the kind of genre of ghost stories that we oftentimes get in medieval chronicles, is that there's some warning, they've done something bad in the present and they need to let people know that there's some— there's unfinished business that needs to be resolved. You know, not terribly different than, you know, a lot of kind of modern ghost stories as well. And these happened like just from aristocrats, like there's stories about peasants doing this, all the way up to kings. Charlemagne, who I mentioned, one of the great stories within the legend of Charlemagne, is Charlemagne in hell, having visions of him or returning to earth and, like, appearing to his children or to high aristocrats who had known him, with his genitals being gnawed on by beasts. Because again, of his sexual sins and, you know, they need to be kind of redeemed or prayers need to be said or something needs to be kind of happened in that way.
AMANDA: And is the utility of stories like this limited to, "Don't do this yourself so you avoid this fate in the future"? Or is it also about taking care of our ignoble debt?
JULIA: Yeah, like clean up my mess now that I'm dead kind of situation.
MATTHEW: Yeah, I think it's kind of both of those, right? It's a warning to the living to kind of— to be concerned about those types of behaviors, right? Don't have sex outside of marriage, you know, a lot of them are— I would say a lot of them are kind of sexual sins because oftentimes these are written by priests and so that's the thing that kind of priests are thinking about.
JULIA: That's the big one for them, usually. Yeah.
MATTHEW: But there is also kind of— you know, like in the case of taking care of the child, like sometimes it's cleaning up the mess. It's like, you need to do something in this world in order to fix this kind of problem. And the ones about kings and aristocrats are super interesting in that way because they're often not terribly well-coded or should be, I should say, very clear political critiques—
JULIA: Hmm.
MATTHEW: —of something that's going on right now. So the critiques about Charlemagne's sin, right, sexual sin, are directed at the fruits of that sin, the current king who is in charge.
AMANDA: Hmm.
MATTHEW: Right? So you were born of sin. This is a critique of Charlemagne's son at the time, Louis the Pious and his kind of politics. You were— you need to fix yourself because you were created in this way and so you need to adjust the way that you are ruling in order to do that.
JULIA: You have to be more pious as your name suggests.
AMANDA: Very Christian message.
MATTHEW: You have to be more pious.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
MATTHEW: That's right.
AMANDA: Yeah.
MATTHEW: Yeah. That guy got off easy getting that name because he was— that— he really sucked. So maybe that'll be my next visit to our colleague, Claire's podcast is about Louis the Pious and why he sucked. So— 'cause, man, did he suck.
JULIA: I mean, with that name, you gotta let the people know.
MATTHEW: You gotta let the people know, that's right. But then again, like as I mentioned, and sorry, I'll just keep telling stories, is about demons. Because the other type of supernatural, there's— there are some angels that kind of appear, but it's mostly demons who kind of show up in a lot of these stories. Again, oftentimes as warning, but about kind of the reality of hell. That's kind of oftentimes— what they're trying to tell. And this particular story, this is from an earlier period, from the seventh century, so the 600s, about the life of saint by the name of Guthlac. So it comes from a hagiography. In which Guthlac decides he's a warrior. He can't live with himself anymore. He becomes a hermit. He lives off in The Fens of East Anglia, in England, and decides to just kind of dedicate himself to Jesus. He's tormented by demons, because demons are really worried that his holy life will be an inspiration to others and save too many souls and stuff like that. So he's kind of, you know, kind of pestered by noises in the night who don't let him sleep or, like, steal his food or something like that. So there's all sorts of kind of physical manifestations. Until one night, they get kind of fed up. And the demons show up in force, like there's a whole group of them, a small army show up and literally drag him, like physically interact with him, drag him out of his bed, carry him by his feet. There's pictures, there's illustrations later on of him being, like, carried through the air, upside down.
AMANDA: Demons are so horny for upside down stuff. Backward feet, upside down carrying, upside down sigils, so many.
MATTHEW: 100%. So carried him directly to the gates of hell in which they're about to literally drop him into a mouth, which is the kind of gates of hell. And until St. Bartholomew, who's one of the Apostles, shows up with a scourge, like a whip and attacks the demons, just like whips the demons into submission. And the demons are a cow, they drop, you know, Barthol— or they drop Guthlac and then they bring him back to his hermitage. And, like, he's covered in scars at this time, the saints and stuff like that, the reality of these demonic kind of possession. And then St, Bartholomew comes back to Guthlac afterwards and said, like, "I've saved you. You've been very dedicated and you know, I want to protect you." And he gives him the spectral whip that Guthlac will be able to keep for the rest of his days to protect himself from the demons.
JULIA: That's cool.
MATTHEW: Yeah. And the demons never trouble him because they're too afraid of what will happen to them if they come.
JULIA: To be able to be a saint and say like, "Yeah, those demons bothered me once and not anymore," is pretty cool. Pretty cool.
MATTHEW: Not anymore.
JULIA: Incredible. Oh, my gosh. Matt, these were wonderful stories. Thank you so much for not only giving us a taste of, like, how cool medieval studies can be, but also how relevant it is to our world today.
MATTHEW: This is what all the people are saying right now.
JULIA: This is what all the people are saying right now. For people who are listening, who might want to hear more about you and your work and your books and your podcasts and your cool tweets and articles, where can they find you on the internet?
MATTHEW: So the best way to find me is probably just my main website, which is profgabriele, G-A-B-R-I-E-L-E, .com, or you can find this great podcast, part of the Multitude family of podcasts, American Medieval at americanmedieval, all one word, .com as well. Or find them, you know, kind of wherever podcasts are sold, or not sold, or free or whatever, you know? Whatever.
AMANDA: Syndicated for free. And when I tell you, Matt, that Julia and I have been planning on this our whole lives because we did proofread one another's medieval role-playing profiles on Neopets back in the day. We've known how to spell medieval since we were 11.
MATTHEW: Fantastic.
JULIA: [54:25]
AMANDA: And we were truly born for this.
MATTHEW: Excellent, excellent. As I said, like all the people are talking about how cool the Middle Ages are and medieval studies, so— yeah.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: It's true. At least everyone in my circle is.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: And that's not biased at all. I don't edit two history podcasts at all.
AMANDA: Well, folks, next time you are wearing your Castlecore best to go beat up intellectually some Crusadecore bros, remember—
JULIA: Stay creepy.
AMANDA: —stay cool.
JULIA: Later, Satyrs.
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