Medieval Death Trip

A Podcast Exploring the Wit and Weirdness of Medieval Texts

Page 3 of 19

MDT Ep. 094: "Helmbrecht v. Sheriff: Eve of Justice"

Manuscript illustration of crows eating the eyes from a corpse (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 1951)

This episode we conclude the story of the peasant lad who spurned a humble farming life to go off live the high life with a robber knight and, as we shall see, did not ultimately get the life he expected. Here is the final part of Meier Helmbrecht.

You can get a sense of the landscape surrounding the location identified (by some scholars) as the site of the Helmbrecht Farm through this Google Street View link: https://goo.gl/maps/XrweFAqfGQEAMxxdA

Today’s Text

  • Wernher der Gartenaere. Meier Helmbrecht. In Peasant Life in Old German Epics, translated by Clair Hayden Bell, Columbia UP, 1931.

References

  • Bastow, A. “Peasant Customs and Superstitions in Thirteenth Century Germany.” Folklore, vol. 47, no. 3, Sept. 1936, pp. 313-328. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1256867.
  • Dobozy, Maria. The Saxon Mirror: A Sachsenspiegel of the Fourteenth Century. U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. Archive.org.
  • Jones, George Fenwick. Honor in German Literature. U of North Carolina P, 1959. JSTORwww.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469657608_jones.9.
  • Lewis, Charlton T. A History of Germany from the Earliest Times. Harper & Brothers, 1874. Google Books.
  • Nordmeyer, George. “The Judge in the Meier Helmbrecht.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 63, no. 2, Feb. 1948, pp. 95-104. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/2909515.
  • Price, Arnold H. “Early Places Ending in -heim as Warrior Club Settlements and the Role of Soc in the Germanic Administration of Justice.” Central European History, vol. 14, no. 3, Sept. 1981, pp. 187-199. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4545929.

Audio Credit: A Clockwork Orange. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros., 1972.

Image Credit: Manuscript illustration detail of crows eating the eyes of a corpse (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 1951). From The Medieval Bestiary: https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastgallery252.htm.

Chapters

  • 00:00:00: Introduction
  • 00:23:04: Text: Meier Helmbrecht, ll. 1463-1934
  • 00:43:06: Commentary
  • 01:05:00: Riddle
  • 01:05:46: Outro

MDT Ep. 093: "Helmbrecht Returns, or The Dark Robber Knight"

We continue with Part 2 (of 3) of the 13th-century peasant epic Meier Helmbrecht, in which Helmbrecht returns to his family after a year as squire to a robber knight, and cultures clash accordingly.

Today’s Text

  • Wernher der Gartenaere. Meier Helmbrecht. In Peasant Life in Old German Epics, translated by Clair Hayden Bell, Columbia UP, 1931. Archive.org.

References

Image credit: detail of cabbage harvesting from a 15th-century manuscript of Ibn Butlan’s Tacuinum sanitatis, Paris, BnF, Département des manuscrits, Latin 9333 fol. 20.

MDT Ep. 092: "Helmbrecht Begins, or How to Become a Robber Knight"

Detail from the Luttrell Psalter. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-luttrell-psalter

In this episode we learn how important good hair is to becoming a medieval cattle rustler with part one of the 13th-century poem Meier Helmbrecht.

Today’s Text

  • Wernher der Gartenaere. Meier Helmbrecht. In Peasant Life in Old German Epics, translated by Clair Hayden Bell, Columbia UP, 1931. Archive.org.

References

Audio Credit: A Charlie Brown Christmas, United Feature Syndicate, 1965.

Image Credit: Detail from the Luttrell Psalter.

MDT Ep. 091: "Concerning Wage Warfare after the Plague"

Detail of fieldworkers from BL Royal MS 2 B VII f.78v.
Detail of fieldworkers from BL Royal MS 2 B VII f.78v.

This episode, we follow up on a question from Ep. 90 about why the wandering worker Thomas Fuller might have fallen in with a criminal shepherd by looking at a pair of vagrancy and labor laws from the economically disrupted decades following the Black Death: the Statute of Laborers of 1351 and the Commons’ Petition against Vagrants of 1376. We also learn a bit about late medieval prisons.

Today’s Texts:

  • Henderson, Ernest F., editor and translator. Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages. George Bell and Sons, 1892, pp. 165-168. Google Books.
  • “Commons’ Petition Against Vagrants” of 1376,” reprinted in R.B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. MacMillan, 1970, pp. 72-74. Google Books.

References:

  • Clark, Elaine. “Institutional and Legal Responses to Begging in Medieval England.” Social Science History, vol. 26, no. 3, Fall 2002, pp. 447-473. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40267786.
  • Geltner, Guy. “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory.” History Compass, vol. 4, 2006, pp. 1-14, doi: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00319.x. Available at guygeltner.net.

MDT Ep. 090: "Medieval True Crime IV: In the Shadow of the Gallows Pole"

Image Credit: detail from British Library MS Royal 20 C VII, f. 15

We finish off our Medieval True Crime miniseries with a look at two hangings from the year 1484 and explore some of the practices surrounding and meanings of hanging as a mode of execution in medieval Europe.

Today’s Text

  • Knox, Ronald, and Shane Leslie, editors and translators. The Miracles of King Henry VI. Cambridge UP, 1923.

References

  • Merback, Mitchell B. The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. U of Chicago P, 1999.

MDT Ep. 089: "Interview with a Devil"

Detail from British Library, Add MS 42130, f. 54v.

In this (belated) episode marking our seventh anniversary, we learn about the infernal realms, straight from the devil’s mouth, going from a 11th-century Old English text to the 16th-century stage. We also learn why you shouldn’t attack your father with an ax and what demonic possession has in common with e. Coli.

Today’s Texts

  • Kemble, John M., editor and translator. The Dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus, with an Historical Introduction. The Ælfric Society, 1848, pp. 86-88. Google Books.
  • Faust Book. In Early English Prose Romances, edited by William John Thoms. Nattali and Bond, 1858. Digital text available at the Perseus Project.
  • Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus from the Quarto of 1604. Edited by Alexander Dyce. Project Gutenberg, 2009.
  • de Vitry, Jacques. Exempla of Jacques de Vitry. Edited by Thomas Frederick Crane, David Nutt, 1890. Google Books.
  • Gregory the Great. The Dialogues of Saint Gregory, Surnamed the Great: Pope of Rome & the First of That Name. Translated by P.W., edited by Edmund G. Gardner, Philip Lee Warner, 1911. Digital text edited by Roger Pearce, 2004, https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/gregory_00_dialogues_intro.htm.  

References

  • Andrew, Malcom. “Grendel in Hell.” English Studies, vol. 62, no. 5, 1981, pp. 401–410.
  • Robinson, Fred C. “The Devil’s Account of the Next World: An Anecdote from Old English Homiletic Literature.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 73, no., 1/3, 1972, pp. 363-371. JSTORwww.jstor.org/stable/43345366.

Image credit: Detail from British Library, Add MS 42130, f. 54v.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Medieval Death Trip

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑