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Medieval Death Trip returns with the first episode of 2015, in which we take year-end retrospectives to the extreme and sample all the year 14s for each century covered by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, followed by a look at the great Cottonian Library Fire of 1731.
This episode’s selection is from:
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Trans. E.E.C. Gomme. London: George Bell and Sons, 1909. [Available through Google Books.]
Further reading: Andrew Prescott, “‘Their Present Miserable State of Cremation’: the Restoration of the Cotton Library”
Image: “View of Ashburnham House, London, 1880” by Henry Dixon [via Wikimedia Commons]
I much prefer the stories to the small excerpts, but your telling of the library fire more than made up for it! I am new to studying Medieval History, so maybe when I know more the excerpts would mean more. I know I am commenting probably long after you’ve thought about these, but I did want to offer a bit of a suggestion if you ever do something like the excerpts again – maybe instead of using a radio sound in between, the scratching of writing would be more appropriate and keep us in the time era.
What a fun way to celebrate the new year! I’m sad to be a decade late haha
The story of the fire is devastating, but it’s heartening that modern science has revived some of these texts. What’s also heartening is that, to the naked eye centuries ago, most people would have thought those texts were beyond saving, but they kept them anyways in the hopes that one day, someone would be able to heal them.
You called the fire a wound in the heart of medievalists. It must have been a wound back then to all the people involved. Maybe that’s why they saved the charred texts