We're Not So Different

folks, you've been asking when we're doing a review of Ridley Scott's 2023 film, Napoleon, and it's finally here but with a twist! instead of just doing an entire review episode for a movie that came out a few months ago and isn't even Medieval, we decided to make it a bit more on brand. so we spend the first half talking about Scott's frankly baffling film and then spend the second half talking about what it actually meant in practice for Napoleon to "smash feudalism" and to do away with all those pesky Medieval holdover institutions like serfdom and the Holy Roman Empire. and we brought on Everett Rummage of the amazing Age of Napoleon podcast to discuss it all with us.

folks, we're always thinking about falling civilizations, aren't we? whether it's the old civilizations that fell long ago or fretting over when our current empires will fall, it's often on our minds. and that's why we brought on Dr. Paul M.M. Cooper, host of the Fall of Civilizations podcast and the author of the recently-released book, Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline. we talk with Paul about why ruins are so fascinating, what we can learn from the fall civs of the past, what misconceptions people have about them, and what they mean for the future falls of our own civilizations. it's great, check it out!

folks, we're closing out our series on Weird Medieval shit with a few quick hitters of weirdness that we haven't gotten to yet. so we bounce around to a few of them before ending it where the Middle Ages probably ended: the Fall of Constantinople. we talk about Joan of Arc, our beloved Holy Roman Empire, Angkor Wat, the rise of Islam as a world religion, and, finally, the broken Theodosian Walls and the end of an era.

folks, we're back with part 6 of our series on Weird Medieval shit and we start out in the Americas where the late Medieval Incan Empire was the most land of contrasts empire in all of history in order to survive across three separate biomes: the western slopes of the Andes Mountains, the Atacama Desert, and the Pacific Ocean. then we head back to Europe for two utterly bizarre happenings involving dancing. the first, the Bal des Ardents sees the king of France and five nobles perform a dance number for the court only to have an accidental fire break out and kill the nobles, the king's brother, and nearly the king himself. then we finish up with the dancing mania that occasionally swept Central and Western Europe over a 900-year period where spontaneous groups of people would just dance... like for hours and travel many miles while doing it and one monk danced so hard he died in one incident. you get the idea, it's weird.

folks, we're back with more weird, interesting, neat, and wild shit from the Middle Ages. this time, we explore the numerous Medieval inventions of Imperial China such as the compass, gunpowder, printing, and much more. we discuss why Imperial China was able to foster such innovation and why it fell off in the 15th century. then we briefly discuss the fascinating Ming Treasure Voyages of 1405-1433 and the meteoric rise of the Mongol Empire, which went from disunited steppe horse archers to the rulers of the largest contiguous land empire in world history in just under 100 years. check it out

folks, we're back on our weird Medieval shit with part 4 in our series. this time, we focus on the amazing fact that Medieval Norse and Polynesian peoples crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to reach the Americas hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus was even born and how modern science has confirmed these events that were once thought to be outright fabrications. these are truly some of the greatest accomplishments in human history and they happened in the Middle Ages. then, we talk about the amazing story of Mansa Musa, a Medieval emperor of the Malian Empire and one of the richest men to ever live, who went on Hajj to Mecca, gave away so much gold that he cratered the gold markets on 3 continents, but had his generosity repaid and got home safely despite losing all his money on the trip.

as we said on the last episode, there's no new show this week due to travel and timing and all that, so we're unlocking a bonus episode from the Patreon for all listeners. if you're interested, this is the perfect excuse to subscribe at patreon.com/wnsdpod. normally we don't do episodes based on a short series of tweets but sometimes you find a guy who believes that the clitoris was invented by feminists in the 1960's and that no one before that time ever went down on a woman and you just have to do a bonus episode. so, we riff on these awful tweets, talk about why they're obviously wrong, and then get into ideas about Medieval gynecology and their views on the female anatomy. it's a lot of fun, we promise!here's a link to Eleanor's blog post on the subject: https://going-medieval.com/2024/03/05/on-womens-anatomy-and-the-power-of-paying-attention/#more-6448

folks, we couldn't do a series on weird Medieval shit without talking about our favorite weird Medieval little guys who show up in marginalia of illuminated manuscripts from the era. and to do so, we brought on Olivia Swarthout, aka at Weird Medieval on twitter, to help us out. we discuss why humans love to think up and draw weird little guys, what it means, and why they're still so fascinating to us today. then, in the last half of the episode, we each do a tier list, ranking 25 weird little guys from Medieval marginalia, it's a whole lot of fun! enjoy! there is some slight reverb on the tracks occasionally but we have done our best to edit as much out as possible.if you want to do your own tier list of these weird Medieval guys, then you can do so at this link: https://tiermaker.com/create/rank-the-weird-medieval-guys-16945815if you want to see the tier we each made, you can find them posted on our twitter account: https://x.com/wnsdpod/status/1773369399665144155?s=20

we're back with the second episode of our Weird Medieval series and this time we're talking about space. in recorded history, only eight possible supernovae within the Milky Way have ever been witnessed by direct observation, and three of them occurred during the Middle Ages. we talk about those supernovae, what made them special, and how one was finally confirmed as a supernova just three years ago! then we turn to the Roman Catholic Church and remark on how weird it is that the Church not only stayed united but that it became hegemonic over an entire continent and intertwined with existing governments to help prop it all up. even weirder still is the fact that this hegemony lasted for hundreds of years and couldn't lasted even longer if they could've just stopped with the indulgences. also, the Hussites, because they're weird too. check it out!

folks, we've started a new series and this one is all about Weird Medieval shit. the Middle Ages were an incredibly fascinating time and we want to celebrate and emphasize that by looking at the events, people, and things that make you go, "damn that's wild." we're going to cover stuff from all across the entire one-thousand-year Medieval era and on every continent save Antarctica. in this first part, we take a look at the following three events: that time Justinian I sent two monks to China to steal the secrets of silk for the Byzantines, the Erfurt Latrine Disaster that killed sixty nobles in a lake of shit, and the Fourth Crusade that permanently split Christendom forever.

we finish up our intermittent series on proto-nationalism and nationalism by discussing the modern concept of tradwives, or women who endorse a so-called traditionalist perspective and aesthetic online, either out of pure belief or as a grift. and to do so, we interview Dr. Lauren Hill Griffin, a religious studies, nationalism, technology, and politics professor at Louisiana State University. we discuss whether the tradwife "movement" is authentic or just a cash grab, how it ties into broader religious and white nationalist movements, the continuing breakdown of religious ideals in the modern world, and speaking in tongues at the gym. enjoy!

we have had a lot of great interviews lately and that means we haven't had much time to answer the backlog of patron questions we have, so we decided to do a mailbag. we answer questions ranging from Robin Hood's death to Silk Road safety to experimental archaeology to a counterfactual about capitalism and the Reformation and much more. enjoy!

folks, things are getting worse everywhere but especially on the internet and so we decided to go to an expert to discuss how modern things are getting shittier all the time: author, blogger, and creator of the neologism "enshittification" joins the show to talk about why the modern world seems to be getting worse with every passing day, whether people in the Middle Ages felt the same way about their situation, whether this is like the Fall of the Roman Empire, and bad French translations. check it out! Luke's audio is a little wonky but it all works out in the end.

this time, Luke and Eleanor welcome special guest November, co-host of the Trashfuture, Well There's Your Problem, and Kill James Bond podcasts to the show to talk about the German Peasants War, which turns 500 this year. we talk about the attempted radical Reformation, the magisterial reaction, Martin Luther's horrified response, and why the lords and nobles can partake in extreme forms of violence and war crimes while their peasant underlings are forbidden from doing so. check it out

this week, we're continuing our series on proto-nationalism and nationalism by talking to Dr. Rachel Moss about the ways nostalgia is used for evil and, specifically, how false nostalgia for a Middle Ages that didn't exist fuels modern nationalism. we talk about how rose-tinted glasses are used to paint a false picture of the Medieval era, how the same feelings of both good and bad nostalgia similarly affected Medieval people, and modern reactionaries who are really just looking for a new liege lord to oppress them. check it out!Dr. Rachel Moss is a Sr Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton. Rachel is a Medievalist specializing in Late Medieval English history and literature as well as social and economic history of the Middle Ages, and is holding an upcoming workshop on politicizing nostalgia this summer.

This week, we welcome Dr. Bradley Onishi, co-host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, onto the show as part of our series on proto-nationalism in the Middle Ages. As we promised earlier this month, we had some guests lined up to discuss other aspects of proto-nationalism and nationalism with us and this is the first of those interviews. Brad joins us to discuss the problem of Christian nationalism, which is on the rise in the world right now but has its roots in the Middle Ages. We discuss how the past instances of Christian nationalism are fueling what we see today, the modern contradictions that have arisen within that movement, and much more.check it out and also check out Brad's podcast, Straight White American Jesus, and his 2023 book, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of Christian Nationalism–and What Comes Next

this time, we return to our occasional series on Medieval women, where we look at the lives and times of ladies who were able to rise to positions of power and esteem despite the extremely patriarchal nature of the Middle Ages. we have previously done these for the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene and for Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. but now we turn to the Mediterranean and the Early Middle Ages to find our two remarkable women: Byzantine Empress Theodora and Lombardi Queen Theodelinda. Theodora rose from humble origins to become the wife and confidant of one of Constantinople's greatest rulers, Justinian I, and was integral in saving his regime during the Nika Riots. Then there's Theodelinda, who is less famous than Theodora but was still impressive all the same. Theodelinda was queen and ruler of the Lombards for 35 years, ruling on her without a king for part of that and, legend has it, was allowed to choose her own husband after her first husband died, something that almost never happens. So let's find our what else made these women so special!

150th episode wooooo! this time, we continue our miniseries on what we're calling Proto-nationalism in the Middle Ages by talking about two very big materialist reasons why they couldn't really have nationalism back then: malleable borders and dynastic rulership. Medieval borders were porous, light-enforced at best, and changed overnight based on the confusing, overlapping rights that various rulers had over a plot of land. rulership, meanwhile, was personalized and heavily influenced by dynastic concerns and marriage alliances, meaning it could change at the drop of a hat based on a marriage going bad or a third son dying early and passing the land in question to a completely different family. these factors were so limiting that they essentially made nationalism, as we know it today, an impossibility in the Middle Ages. though we do address the special case of Medieval China here too.

nationalism is, unfortunately, once again on the rise in the modern day and while you might think that it has very little to do with the Middle Ages, you'd be wrong. because while the nationalism we see today didn't exist in the same form back then, the roots of it began to take hold even back then in the form of religious discrimination and of othering people who look or act differently. further, the nationalism that we experience today popped up in the 19th century and its loudest proponents popularized it by pointing to a very skewed, totally ahistorical version of Medieval history in order to reinforce modern ideas of racism and racial purity. so let's talk about it and see what we can do to combat it.

it's our first episode of the new year but we're just not ready to move on quite yet, so we're taking a look back at 2023 and then taking a little peak ahead into 2024. we talk about Medieval news and studies from last year, review a little of what happened on the podcast, and talk about some of our favorite movies, TV shows, books, etc. then, we set our sights on the year ahead and close our with some predictions for 2024 and even our New Year's resolutions. enjoy!