2022-09-09
42 分钟This is medieval death trip for Friday, September 9, 2022.
Episode 95 concerning princely heads and the bishops monkeys.
Hello and welcome to medieval Death Trip, the show where we explore the wit and weirdness of medieval texts.
I'm your host, Patrick Lane.
For quite a while now, we've been tied up in special topics with our medieval true crime miniseries and then its three part spinoff into the literary highwayman hijinks of Helmbrecht.
So it's high time we got back to basics with a medieval chronicle, and where better to start with that than our favorite grab bag of historiographical tidbits, the 14th century laner cost chronicle.
The last time we dipped into this source was right before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, back in our 2019 Halloween episode.
Episode 77, concerning some demons of the Lanar cost Chronicle today were not going to get material quite as supernatural.
Instead, we'll get that classic laner cost whiplash of going from big history into a small, odd, and seemingly trivial anecdote.
The anecdote we'll come to in the text itself and really requires no introduction.
The big history component of this excerpt has me a little bit worried.
I'm not sure I can quite do it justice, but it's also an event covered in a number of other interesting sources, so we may well get another chance to go deep on it in the future.
This event is the failed rebellion that brought about the end, at least for the time being, of welsh independence from the english monarchy.
I don't really know, but I imagine this could be a topic that still touches some patriotic sensitivities, and which our source is just giving us the english perspective on.
And I haven't been able to get my hands on a good welsh source to balance that out with this episode.
So for now we'll just have to hear the english perspective and take it with the understanding that when the winners write the history books, they don't always portray events with a rigorous accuracy.
Of course, neither do the losers, and thereby hangs the tale of the subjectivity of all historiography.
The other point of sensitivity that I feel somewhat ill equipped to navigate is one of language.
This account features welsh names, and there has been a long tradition of bluntly anglicizing those names, which has been countered by a more recent movement towards pronouncing welsh names in welsh fashion.
But some of those pronunciations feature phonemes that are not used in English and are unfamiliar to native english speakers like myself.