2021-05-12
54 分钟This is medieval death trip for Tuesday, May 11, 2021.
Episode 87 medieval true crime death in the countryside hello, and welcome to medieval death trip, the show where we explore the wit and weirdness of medieval texts.
Im your host, Patrick Lane.
This episode, after an unintentionally long, busy pandemic semester hiatus, were at last resuming our mini series on medieval true crime with a further exploration of 13th century english coroners roles.
The coroner's roles, of course, are focused on unnatural death because that is the prescribed purview of the coroner.
And so the crime we most frequently encounter in these records is murder.
Other crimes are often incidental or antecedent to the murder, whether it's robbery or assault or even arson.
But murder remains the central concern.
As I said, there is a functional and legal reason why this is the case for the coroner's roles, but ive been wondering to what degree murder reigned as queen over crime narratives more broadly.
Today, this is certainly still the case.
A brief survey of true crime content shows that murder is the central preoccupation.
You have the occasional kidnapping or spectacular bank robbery or heist, but murder is still clearly the default subject.
That said, I will name check one great podcast, a criminal hosted by Phoebe Judge, which makes a special effort to explore a much wider range of crimes and criminal activity.
But our murder fixation goes beyond true crime, even in fiction.
Mystery might as well be synonymous with murder mystery, especially in anything remotely adjacent to detective fiction.
Sherlock Holmes has come up a few times on recent episodes of this show, and that's prompted me to listen again to the complete stories as a bedtime audiobook.
And there I was struck by how relatively rarely Holmes is called to investigate a murder.
A lot of the mysteries are a whole other range of thefts, forgeries, impostures, blackmail, or just figuring out who some mysterious figure is.
Compare that to Agatha Christie, where it is definitely the odd case out for Poirot or Miss Marple that a dead body isnt at the center of it.
Im not really well versed enough in the broader history of crime fiction to know just how much blame to put on Agatha Christie as a trendsetter here, or even credit to Arthur Conan Doyle as an outlier.