'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages
Talking about popular conceptions of the Middle Ages and their historical realities. Join Richard Abels to learn about Vikings, knights and chivalry, movies set in the Middle Ages, and much more about the medieval world.
The Crusades and the Wars for the Wars for the Middle East (with Prof. Nicholas Morton)
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In this episode Dr. Nicholas Morton returns to discuss his newest book, The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars of the Middle East (Basic Books, 2026). With some rare exceptions, histories of the Crusades and the Crusader States have been viewed from a Western perspective. What is missing is the Middle Eastern context of the Crusades to the East, how the crusades and the establishment of these Latin states in the Levant interacted with and impacted the multiple rival power centers of the region. For many, the story of the Crusades is th...
A Model Pre-Gregorian Reform Bishop: St. Ulrich of Augsburg
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Back in September Ellen and I did an episode on Popes Leo IX and Gregory VII and their promotion of the Gregorian Reform of the Church. Because my hosting platform informed me that I have 21 minutes left to post a new episode this month, I decided to use that time to do a short episode on the "Church" before it was reformed. Rather than focus on a "bad" bishop like Gaudry of Laon, I chose to examine the career of a saintly bishop, Ulrich of Augsburg (890 – 4 July 973), sometimes called Udalrich. Ulrich was Prince-Bishop of...
Offa of Mercia: Laying the Foundations of a Kingdom of England (with Prof. Rory Naismith)
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Offa, king of Mercia from 757 to 796, was the most powerful and successful Anglo-Saxon ruler of pre-Viking England. Today Offa is probably best remembered for Offa's Dyke, a massive 150 mile long earthwork that runs along the border of England and Wales. But Offa's contribution to the creation of the kingdom of England goes far beyond that. Offa was the heir to more than a century of Mercian military success that established a Mercian hegemony over England between the Humber River to the north and the river Thames to the south. In this episode, Professor R...
Sieges, Chivalry, and Medieval Warfare: Dr. Larissa Tracy's podcast, "Medieval Mischief and Mayhem" (with Dr. Richard Abels) (E23 2026))
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As I did with the episode I scripted for the podcast BEEF about the conflict between King Philip the Fair of France and Pope Boniface VIII, today I am posting an episode from another podcast, "Medieval Mayhem and Mischief with Dr. Larissa Tracy". You probably remember Dr. Tracy (Kat to her friends) from this podcast's episodes on Chretien de Troyes' "Yvain, the Knight with the Lion," and the four part series we did about medieval adultery in history, literature, and modern popular culture. I was really excited when she told me t...
The Knights Templar, Part 3: From History to Legend (with Steve Tibble)
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This is our third and final episode on the crusading order of the Knights Templar. In today's episode, my cohost Dr. Steve Tibble and I talk about the "afterlife" of the Templars, and how and why a military order suppressed in the early fourteenth century has become the go-to for so many conspiracy theorists. Among the topics discussed in this episode are: Templars and Freemasonry; Sir Walter Scott's shaping of their image in his novels, Ivanhoe and The Talisman; the (mis)use of the Templar legend by late nineteenth century French Occultists, racist N...
The Knights Templar: The Trial and Suppression of the Order (with Steve Tibble)
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Today’s episode is the second in a three part series on the Crusading military order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, more commonly known as the Templars. My cohost for this series is Dr. Steve Tibble, one of the foremost military historians of the crusades, whose most recent book is Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale University Press, 2025).
In our previous episode Steve and I talked about the origin, mission, and activities of the Templars. Today we discuss the most notorious even...
The Knights Templar, Part 1: the Templars in History (with Steve Tibble)
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Today’s episode is the first of a two-part series on the notorious Christian military order, The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, more commonly known as the Knights Templar. This first episode deals with the historical Templars; the second, with the Templar legend My cohost for both is a veteran of this podcast, Dr. Steve Tibble whose newest book is Assassins and Templars, A Battle in Myth and Blood (Yale University Press, 2025).
In this episode, Steve and I talk about the evolution of Christian ideas about warfa...
Knights, Samurai, and the Myth of Japanese Feudalism: A Conversation with Professor Stephen Morillo
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Until now, "'Tis But A Scratch: Fact & Fiction About the Middle Ages" has dealt with medieval Europe and the Middle East. In this episode, we branch out to a more global perspective by comparing medieval European knights with the samurai of "feudal Japan." And, yes, we will once again be talking about the medievalist's F-word.
I am fortunate to have as my cohost my good friend Stephen Morillo. Stephen is professor emeritus of History at Wabash College, where he taught medieval, world, and military history. His first book, Warfare Under the An...
1066 And All That: The Significance of the Norman Conquest (with Dr. Jennifer Paxton), part 2
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It has been several months since I posted the first half of a two part series on the significance and consequences of the Norman Conquest with my good friend and colleague Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America. Despite a number of challenges--not the least being a snow storm--we finally got together to record the second episode. In that first episode, Jenny and I reviewed how historians have interpreted the Norman Conquest through the ages, and broadly outlined some of the changes wrought by the Conquest. In this one we explain h...
Episode 70: What we can learn about medieval people from their bones and teeth. A conversation with Professor Alison Beach
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And now for something completely different! In this episode, we are not going to be talking about kings or popes, crusades, wars, or political events. Instead, we will be examining the life experiences of ordinary medieval people uncovered through analysis of their skeletal remains.
This field of historical research is known as osteobiography. Osteobiography is the reconstruction of an individual's life story from his or her skeletal remains. It treats bones and teeth as a text that sheds light on an individual's health, diet, disease, trauma, occupation, migrations, and social status. T...
The First King of England: Æthelstan (with David Woodman)
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Ironically, the most famous date in Anglo-Saxon history is that of its demise, 1066, which is why when in 1930 W. C. Sellar, a former schoolmaster, and his classmate at Oxford, the humorist R. J. Yeatman, decided to send up English history as taught in schools with a parody survey, they called it 1066 and All That. In a previous episode Dr. Jenny Paxton and I discussed why 1066 is such a significant date in English history. My very special guest, David Woodman, Professor of History at Robinson College, Cambridge, contends that the year 927 should be as m...
A Florentine Pilgrimage to Bethlehem and Jerusalem in 1384
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This is an addendum to my previous episode with Peter Konieczny. One of my listeners sent me an email asking why we never covered Frescobaldi's, Gucci's, and Sigoli's accounts of their experiences in Jerusalem. As she pointed out, when asked by the Sultan's representative in Alexandria the purpose of their trip, they said that it was to visit the Holy Sepulcher. And she is absolutely right. We ought to have talked about the culmination of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Given that we are three days into the twelve days of Christmas...
Three Accounts of A Pilgrimage To Egypt and the Holy Land in 1384-5
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In the year 1384 a company of six wealthy merchants from Florence, each accompanied by a servant, went on a ten-month long pilgrimage to Mameluke Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Upon returning to Florence, three of them--Leonardo Frescobaldi, Giorgio Gucci, and Simone Sigoli--wrote narratives of the journey. Although there are hundreds of accounts of pilgrimages to the East during the Middle Ages, this is the only pilgrimage that produced three independent narratives. What makes these narratives fascinating is that they are as much travelogues as itineraries of visits to churches and holy places. They are a...
Halloween special: Three Medieval Ghost Stories and My One Encounter with a Ghost
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To celebrate my birthday—yes I was a Halloween baby—I decided to do a short episode recounting my one up-close and personal experience with a ghost. No, it was not a ghost of some one who died in the Middle Ages. In fact, I don’t know who it was. But since ‘Tis But A Scratch” is a medieval podcast, I start with three ghost stories from the Middle Ages.
It probably comes as no surprise that medieval people believed in ghosts, and ghost stories are scattered through medieval monastic chronicles, h...
From Bishop of Rome to the Papal Monarchy: Pope Innocent III, Crusade, Church Reform, and the Apex of the Medieval Papacy
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Yes, we have finally come to the end of our series "From Bishop of Rome to the Papal Monarchy." In this episode, Ellen and I talk about the pontificate of Innocent III, which historians see as the apex of the papal monarchy. Among the topics we cover are Innocent III's ideology of Caesaropapism, his contribution to the crusading movement, his combat against heresy, his defense of the papal states, and his dedication to Church Reform. Innocent III was the most powerful and effective pope of the Middle Ages. His control over the Roman C...
From Bishop of Rome to the Papal Monarchy: the Rise of the Papal Monarchy
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In this, the fourth--and penultimate--episode of our continuing series on the medieval papacy, my wife Ellen and I examine the establishment of the papal monarchy in the twelfth century. We discuss how the Investiture Controversy transformed the papacy and the Church; how the growth of papal governance and business along with its need for increased revenues made it a target for the same Church reformers who had formerly been its most fervent supporters; and how those developments brought the papacy into conflict with the Holy Roman Emperors Frederick I Barbarossa and his son...
"1066 and All That": The Significance of the Norman Conquest, Part 1 (with Dr. Jennifer Paxton)
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About eight months ago, Jenny and I released a couple of episodes dealing with the historical context of the Norman Conquest. I am delighted to have Jenny back to talk with me about the significance of the Norman Conquest and the Norman Settlement in English history. In this, the first of two episodes, Jenny and I look at the events following the Battle of Hastings and examine how the Norman Conquest has been interpreted over the centuries. I hope you will join us.
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com ...
From Bishop of Rome to the Papal Monarchy: Pope Gregory VII and the Investiture Controversy
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The subject of today’s episode, the pontificate of Pope Gregory VII and the Investiture Controversy, is a staple of undergraduate medieval surveys. The first episode I posted after our summer hiatus was actually one that I wrote for a different podcast, “BEEF With Bridget Todd.” It told of the feud between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip the Fair of France that culminated in that pope’s humiliation at the hands of agents of the king. The so-called Outrage of Anagni in 1302 marked the effective end to the medieval papacy’s claims to suprema...
From Bishop of Rome to the Papal Monarchy: Pope Leo IX and the Gregorian Reform
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After a summer hiatus, we are finally back with a new episode, the third in our series on the medieval papacy, “From Bishop of Rome to the Papal Monarchy.” The previous covered the tenth-century nadir of the papacy, when it was dominated by powerful Roman families and used to enhance their power and control over the city and the papal states. In this episode, my favorite co-host Ellen Harrison Abels and I explain how the foundations of the papal monarchy were laid in the mid eleventh century by a super pious German king, Henr...
Pope Boniface VIII vs King Philip the Fair: Catholicism's Medieval Meltdown (an episode from the podcast "BEEF with Bridget Todd")
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After a summer hiatus “’Tis But A Scratch: Fact & Fiction About the Middle Ages” is back—well, not actually quite yet. I am busily working on the final two episodes of our series on the medieval papacy, “From Bishop of Rome to the Papal Monarchy.” I should have episode three on the Gregorian Reform and the Investiture Controversy out in a week or so. But to tide you over, here is an episode on a related subject from a different podcast, “BEEF with Bridget Todd.” In it, Bridget Todd tells the story of the feud between...
Mysterious Medieval Manuscripts: Interview with Garry J. Shaw
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Now for something completely different from tracing the development of the papacy from bishop of Rome to the papal monarchy--but, don't worry, I will be completing that series soon. In this episode, I chat with author Garry J. Shaw about his fascinating new book from Yale University Press, Cryptic: From Voynich to the Angel Diaries, the Story of the World's Mysterious Manuscripts. The book tells the stories behind nine puzzling medieval and early Modern European texts. In our interview Garry talks about the three that fall within the chronological confines of the Middle A...
The medieval papal conclave: starving cardinals into consensus
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I finally saw the movie "Conclave," and really enjoyed it. As you probably know, it is about the contentious election of a pope in a conclave of the college of cardinals. The movie, however, never explains what the word conclave actually means or how and why that papal electoral procedure began. This episode will remedy that omission.
The intro music is from the Academy Award nominated overture to the movie "Conclave" by the composer Volker Bertelmann
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
From Bishop of Rome to the Papal Monarchy, Part 2: The Early Middle Ages
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In this second episode of a three part series, my favorite cohost Ellen and I survey the development of the papacy from the eighth through the early eleventh century. Among the topics we discuss are who and what the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties of Francia were; Pope Zacharias' legitimization of Pepin the Short's deposition of a puppet Merovingian king and his elevation to the throne; the "donation of Pepin" that created the papal states; the "Donation of Constantine," forged in the papal chancery to justify the donation of Pepin; the partnership between Charlemagne...
From Bishop of Rome to the Papal Monarchy: the early centuries
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In this first episode of a three part series, my favorite cohost Ellen and I survey the development of the papacy over its first seven centuries. I have to confess that along the way I got somewhat off topic talking about the Roman persecution of the Christians. But it is an interesting subject in itself and worth exploring, and as 31 of the first 32 popes are venerated as martyrs--some with more reason than others--it seems relevant to a discussion of the first centuries of the papacy. In this episode Ellen and I also talk...
El Cid, From History to Legend
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In this episode I interview Professor Nora Berend of the University of Cambridge about her new book El Cid; The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary (Pegasus Books, 2025). We discuss how the historical Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, a ruthless and ambitious mercenary who served both Christian and Muslim rulers in the violent and chaotic political world of late eleventh-century Iberia was transformed into the national hero of Francoist Spain and the hero of the 1961 movie starring Charlton Heston.
This episode includes the audio track from the theatrical trailer to the 1961...
Tne Norman Conquest (with Dr. Jennifer Paxton), part 2
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This is the second of our two part series on the Norman Conquest. In it Jenny and I discuss the military challenges faced by King Harold Godwinson and Duke William of Normandy and the battles of Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge, before turning to look closely at the Battle of Hastings (which did not actually take place at Hastings). I hope you will join us.
There is a host of books on the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest, both academic and popular. I would glad to recommend some. Feel...
The Norman Conquest, part one: From Cnut to the Death of Edward the Confessor
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This is the first half of a two part series on the Norman Conquest of England. My cohost for both parts is a veteran of this podcast, Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America. Jenny is one of the very best historians of Anglo-Norman England, so this is a subject right up her alley. In this episode we explore the historical background leading up to the Norman Conquest and the claims of the three rivals who fought for the English throne in 1066: Earl Harold Godwinson, King Harald Hardrada of Norway, and...
Fall of the Roman Republic, part 3: From Octavian to Augustus
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Yes, I know that Octavian IS Augustus, but this episode is about how Gaius Octavius became Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, and in doing so replaced the old Roman Republic with a military autocracy masquerading as a republic. This is the conclusion of our three part series on the fall of the Roman Republic. My cohost for all three episodes has been my good friend Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America.
This episode includes two audio snippets:
Mark Antony's funeral oration for Caesar, from the 1953 film version...
Fall of the Roman Republic: From Sulla's March on Rome to Caesar's Assassination
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This is the second of a three part series about the fall of the Roman Republic. My cohost for all three episodes is Dr. Jennifer Paxton of the Catholic University of America. We actually had been planning only two episodes, but the story is long and detailed, so we thought that three would be best. In episode one, Jenny and I explained the workings of the Roman Republic and the military, economic, and cultural factors that undermined its stability in the late second and first century B.C.. In it we examined how...
The Fall of the Roman Republic, Part 1: The Late Roman Republic in Theory and Practice
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For the fiftieth (!) episode of this podcast, I'm taking a few centuries detour from the Middle Ages to talk about the fall of the Roman Republic. In this episode, the first of a two part series, my cohost Dr. Jenny Paxton and I talk about the political and cultural institutions of the Roman Republic in the late second and first centuries B.C.E.*. We explain how and why a republic designed to govern an Italian city-state fell victim to its own success as Rome rose to empire, despite all of its built i...
A medieval election
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I know. Just what everyone needed, an episode about an election. To take a break from reading and watching election postmortems, I decided to return to one of my favorite teaching texts, the monk Jocelin of Brakelond’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. This is more of a personal memoir of what Jocelin saw and experienced as a monk than it is the standard monastic chronicle. It contains the fullest account of the process by which English monasteries in the High Middle Ages elected an abbot, and I thought that wo...
Con games, scams, and deceits of the medieval Near East exposed: "The Book of Charlatans"
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This episode is devoted to a truly unique and pretty weird Arabic text, The Book of Charlatans by an obscure early thirteenth-century Arabic scholar, Jamal al-Din 'Abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari, commonly known simply as al-Jawbari. At the behest of a Turkman sultan, al-Jawbari composed an encyclopedic guide to the scams, con games, and trickery practiced in the cities of the medieval Middle East. Al-Jawbari not only catalogues the various scams and trickery but also explains how they were pulled off. The book warns its readers to be vigilant against these scams, but it also r...
Crusaders and Settlers in the Holy Land: Who Went and Why
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In this episode I talk with the distinguished historian of the crusades Dr. Steven Tibble about the motivations of crusaders and of those Europeans who settled in the Crusader states of Outremer. Steve is the author of five books dealing with the crusades, the most recent of which is Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land (Yale University Press, 2024). We examine the roles played by religious zeal, the promise of remission of sin, feudal obligation, the hope of material gain, and the benefit of temporal privileges in motivating those wh...
The Battle That Destroyed the Military Forces of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: Hattin (1187)
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On 3-4 July 1187 the Sultan of Egypt and Syria Saladin enjoyed the greatest military victory of his career. The Battle of Hattin, a two-day battle fought along the road leading to the town of Tiberias and, on the following day, on the Horns of Hattin, an iron-age hillfort above that road, is one of the few decisive battles of the Middle Ages. (In this episode, Richard explains why there were so few battles.) The battle pitted a Muslim force of about 30,000, comprised largely of Turkish cavalry, against the largest military force ever raised...
Norway's highest-grossing film: Liv Ullmann's Kristin Lavransdatter (1995)
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Yes, Kristin Lavransdatter is the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time. That isn't as impressive as it might sound, as the movie only brought in $3.7 million in box office receipts, but virtually all of that came from domestic sales. Pretty much unknown outside Scandinavia, the movie was a sensation when released in Norway in 1995. An estimated two-thirds of the country's population have viewed it. The movie is based on the first volume of Sigrid Undset's trilogy about the life of an ordinary woman in fourteenth century Norway, which won her the Nobel Prize in...
Medieval Adultery in the Movies (with Kat Tracey)
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This is the final episode--sort of*--of a multi-part series about medieval adultery in literature, history, and popular culture. My co-host Professor Larissa 'Kat' Tracey and I review how adultery has been dealt with in movies about the Middle Ages. We begin with three Hollywood medieval epics, "The Kingdom of Heaven," "Braveheart," and "The Last Duel," and then turn to the focus of our previous episodes, movies about Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Iseult.
*I will be posting a short episode on the film adaptation of Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize...
Medieval Adultery in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Opera and Literature (with Kat Tracey)
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This is the third of a multi-episode series in which I chat with Dr. Larissa ‘Kat’ Tracey about literary representations of medieval adultery and its reality. In this episode Kat and I survey and discuss the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary treatments of medieval adultery, focusing on the stories of La(u)ncelot and Guinevere and of Tristan/Tristram and Isolde/Isolt/Iseult The episode begins with an opera, Richard Wagner’s extremely influential retelling of the tale, Tristan und Isolde. Although composed between 1857 and 1859, the opera did not premiere until 1865, because it was dee...
Medieval adultery, part 2 (with Kat Tracy): Tristan and Iseult and a late twelfth-century "National Enquirer" story
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This is the second of a three part series with my very special co-host, Dr. Larissa 'Kat' Tracy, about adultery in the Middle Ages. In the previous episode, Kat and I talked about the Lancelot and Guinevere story. In this episode, we tackle the other great medieval tale of adulterous love, Tristan and Iseult. We begin, however, with a possible contemporary historical analogue, a scandal involving Countess Elizabeth of Vermandois, wife of Count Philip of Flanders, and a very unfortunate household knight. If true, the adultery of the countess and the vengeance taken b...
Jerusalem in the Twelfth Century (with Dr. John Hosler)
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In this episode, my very special guest Dr. John Hosler draws upon the research he undertook for his book Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace (Yale University Press, 2022) to discuss what Jerusalem meant in the thought and imagination of Christians and Muslims in the twelfth century, and the role the city played in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As John is a professor at the Army's Command and General Staff College, we also chat a bit about teaching military history to military officers.
This episode contains a short sound b...
Crusader Jerusalem in the Twelfth Century (with Dr. John Hosler)
In this episode, my very special guest Dr. John Hosler draws upon the research he undertook for his book Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace (Yale University Press, 2022) to discuss what Jerusalem meant in the thought and imagination of Christians and Muslims in the twelfth century, and the role the city played in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As John is a professor at the Army's Command and General Staff College, we also chat a bit about teaching military history to military officers.
This episode contains a short sound bite from the movie "Kingdom of H...
