The Cheeky Scholar
Listen as smart – and cheeky – scholars share their knowledge about culture, art, and history... and bust a whole lot of myths along the way.
The Cheeky Scholar
From Cheery Camelot to the Dark Ages: Why We Can't Make Up Our Minds about Medieval History
Unlock the mysteries of the Middle Ages with us as we welcome Paul B. Sturtevant, a distinguished public medievalist, to challenge prevailing myths and unveil the vibrant truths of this era. Often misrepresented in pop culture as a fairy-tale epoch or a dark, brutal time, we explore how these stereotypes emerged over time and why they persist.
Travel back to childhood inspirations, where David Macaulay’s works sparked a fascination with medieval architecture and life, and trace the evolution of medieval portrayals in Hollywood. From the adventurous charm of "Camelot" to the gritty realism of post-1970s cinema, we examine how these depictions reflect contemporary societal issues. The influence of J.R.R. Tolkien’s medievalist background on modern fantasy literature becomes clear, and Paul reveals how binary images of the Middle Ages might reflect more about our modern predicaments than they do about medieval history.
Some questions we tackle together include: Were the Middle Ages truly "Dark"? Are today's visions of medieval chivalry and masculinity accurate? And how have some modern extremist groups in Europe and the U.S. characterized race in the Middle Ages?
Finally, Paul shares about his role as Chief of Experiences at Stories Abroad Tours in Europe. Together with his wife and business partner, Arielle Gingold, he crafts narratives that challenge simplistic historical interpretations, offering a richer, more nuanced understanding of the past. Join us for an episode that promises to reshape your understanding of the Middle Ages in profound ways.
Show Notes
Medieval Marginalia examples – knights fighting snails, nun harvesting penises from tree, cat licking its butt
https://www.thegreatcat.org/the-history-of-the-cat-in-the-middle-ages-part-5/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalia
https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-snail.html
Part One of Pearl – a late 14th century Middle English poem written by a father who lost his young daughter. This version has been adapted to Modern English by an Anonymous author:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50055/pearl-section-i-modern-version
Full version of Pearl with an alternate modern translation, pages 1-27, here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/dreaminginthemiddleages/pearl_ms_prose_translation.pdf
Paul’s books
The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination: Memory, Film and Medievalism
The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past, co-written with Amy Kaufman
https://paulsturtevant.com/books/
The Public Medievalist
https://publicmedievalist.com
Stories Abroad Tours
https://storiesabroadtours.com
Paul Sturtevant on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/medievalistabouttown/
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Hello everyone, welcome to the Cheeky Scholar. This is the podcast where smart and cheeky scholars share their knowledge about history, art and culture and bust a whole lot of myths along the way. I'm your host, dr Lara Ayad. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today, and if you've listened before, welcome back. For today's episode I sat down with Paul B Sturdvant, a public medievalist. Paul knows a thing or two about the Middle Ages in Europe and he's written books about the Middle Ages in today's popular imagination,
Lara Ayad:Some questions we tackle together include what were the Middle Ages really like? How does pop culture portray the medieval period? When did cheery images of a magical Camelot transform into the gritty, dark ages we see so often in mainstream movies and shows today? And why have some right-wing extremist groups in Europe and the United States fixated on the Middle Ages in recent years? What Paul reveals is that modern society has a dual image of the Middle Ages, as either a fairy tale-like land protected by chivalrous knights, or as a dark period filled with war, brutality and suffering. And this binary image we see so often doesn't totally get it right. As Paul shows us in this episode, the Middle Ages we see in Hollywood, video games and literature might say more about us and our modern predicaments than they do about the real people and places of a long, multicultural and dynamic historical period that we call medieval. So stay tuned. I think you're going to like this one.
Lara Ayad:Paul B. Sturtevant is an historian, an author and a public medievalist. He got his PhD from the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds in the UK. Paul has written and co-authored a number of articles, essays and books, his latest books being the Middle Ages and Popular Imagination, memory, film and Medievalism and the Devil's Historians how Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. In his free time, paul loves taking dance classes and has a competition-grade karaoke set. He is currently Co-Founder and Chief of Experiences at Stories Abroad Tours. Paul, welcome to the Cheeky Scholar. How are you doing?
Paul Sturtevant:I'm doing. Great thanks. How are you?
Lara Ayad:I'm good. Thank you. I know you're all the way over in Lisbon, so I know it's the evening for you. How are things going in Lisbon?
Paul Sturtevant:Oh, things are lovely. I mean, the weather is just kind of starting to turn, and so it's gone from being in the like 80s and 90s to being in the 60s and 70s, which is definitely my personal preference. So a big fan of the weather over here at the moment and everything's, yeah, everything's great, that's awesome.
Lara Ayad:I'm kind of jealous, even though I'm in Los Angeles, like I'm actually jealous because Lisbon is such a beautiful city.
Paul Sturtevant:No, you should be. It's great. Be jealous please.
Lara Ayad:I love that. I love that response. Yeah, no well, and we're going to get into what you're doing there in Lisbon, Portugal, in a minute. But you know, Paul, you're a public medievalist. What exactly is a public medievalist?
Paul Sturtevant:That's a great question and one that I get anytime I introduce myself as a public medievalist, I always have to sort of immediately follow it up with you know what? What actually is that? Okay? So, so your listeners probably know what a medievalist is. But just to give a round idea of that word, first there's we all know what historians are. You know what say literature scholars are art historians, stuff like that, right? You know what say literature scholars are art historians, stuff like that, right?
Paul Sturtevant:Um, but one of the quirky things about, um academics who study the middle ages is that, in general, um, there tends to be cross-disciplinary groupings of people, um, based on this time period I'll I'll rephrase that, so it makes sense um, so effectively, the art historians and the literature people and the historians and the archaeologists and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, of the people who study the Middle Ages, broadly understood to be between 500 AD and 1500 AD. We, generally speaking, like to hang out with one another, um, and so collectively we call ourselves medievalists, um, as a way of indicating not necessarily a particular specialty in in one of those academic strains, but a specialty in this field. Um, a public medievalist. Um, a public medievalist is a relatively new phenomenon, based on a discipline that really started in the United States but has begun to spread around the world, and that is the discipline of public history. What on earth is public history?
Paul Sturtevant:Well, public history is history for the public, essentially, essentially, um, it is the study of the ways in which people learn about history, um, the ways in which it is used to form our understanding of ourselves and the world, uh, around us, effectively our worldview.
Paul Sturtevant:Um, it is the study of the best ways to teach history, uh, in the public sphere and in the public sphere generally, meaning like outside the classroom kind of stuff. So, museums, you know, pop culture, stuff like that, you know all of that is good grist for the mill for the public historian. The traditional disciplines of a public historian are things like museums or archives or galleries, things like that, things like museums or archives or galleries, things like that. But I'm kind of a radical public historian in that I like to incorporate any situation in which people are learning about the Middle Ages and using them, and so put all those things together. Um, I am sort of a general studier of the middle ages, um, but specifically I am very interested in how that intersects with the contemporary public today. So public medievalist, there you go wow, that's.
Lara Ayad:That's amazing, and I know you've also referred to yourself as a weird medievalist in our prior conversations, prior to recording, and I would love to know more details about what do you mean? Because, okay, I'm going to tell you right now and I have. I have like a little bit of an example of this.
Lara Ayad:I have a little journal notebook with some medieval marginality on it, which is basically drawings and animations that scribes, monks, people who could write and draw, made in the margins of these manuscripts. Um, so they're just, and this is one of a cat licking its butt yeah,
Paul Sturtevant:Oh, that's the famous cat licking its butthole! That's lovely.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, the famous cat licking it's butthole! And apparently there's many examples of this, Paul
Paul Sturtevant:Oh, the dick tree is the best. You need to look up the dick tree.
Lara Ayad:Oh yeah, it's like a nun?
Paul Sturtevant:Yeah! It has been. It has been a great harvest this year. Let me harvest. Let me harvest the penises for my dick tree, for uses we can only possibly imagine.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, better this year than last, yeah. So what's the deal with this, Paul? Because it seems like the middle ages are kind of weird to begin with. So how could you be a weird medievalist? Tell us about that.
Paul Sturtevant:I mean, let's be real, I think that all medievalists are kind of weird medievalists. We all I don't know a medievalist that doesn't like low key or high key love this stuff. The Middle Ages you know what is it? There's a, there's an old quote that the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Right, the Middle Ages is a long past and they do things quite differently there in a lot of ways, and that's really a lot of the fun of studying the middle ages in in any concerted way is understanding like two simultaneously true, contradictory truths, and those are that, on the one hand, their culture was so different from our own that it means that there are a wide number of things that we will encounter that just don't make sense to us. That just seems straight up weird. That are, you know, to go with the marginalia example, you've got the non-harvesting dicks.
Lara Ayad:You get, um, you get oh, and, by the way, sorry, I'll just put a link to that in the show notes, so that listeners and viewers on youtube can see examples of this marginalia, because it's amazing, they need to. Yeah, yeah.
Paul Sturtevant:It's really good fun. You've got knights jousting against snails, you've got foxes beating up one another in large battles. You've got just any kind of silly thing that you could imagine. They've got it there. It is effectively it's Monty Python the Quest for the Holy Grail, but it's it's monty by the request for the holy grail, but it, but it's actually a medieval. Um, and so there's these, and this is best.
Paul Sturtevant:We can tell in a lot of cases, um, this is comedy for them um, that there have been tried to be very serious understandings of some of the analyses of these. Oh, this might be critical of this particular pope in this particular and and my general read of a lot of this is no, this is, this is bored people amusing themselves. Um, there is no greater force on the planet than bored people amusing themselves. Um, and so and so, on the one hand, yeah, getting deep into the Middle Ages is getting deep into a foreign country, which is getting deep into a worldview that you are going to have difficulty understanding, and that's what makes it exciting. But and I said that this was starting with two contradictory ideas, both of which are true.
Paul Sturtevant:So, on the one hand, foreign country, but, on the other hand, people are people and that history and all of these not sublet, all of these parallel disciplines that I was talking about, are all humanities, no matter how the social scientists amongst us might like to think of it, that they are all humanities. And I don't know what human nature is, but one of the wonderful things about looking at people in the past is that you can see similarities in their humanity, similarities in their emotional lives, similarities in the ways in which they move through the world, in the ways in which they care for each other and their children and their communities, the way that they try to build something and are concerned about what the world is going to be like when they die. And even though, and even though things are kind of strange and terrible, looking back at them in a way that would be strange and terrible for them, looking at us now that we can look and we can see that sort of little bit of ourselves, and that..
Lara Ayad:What's a good example of that, Paul?
Lara Ayad:That really strikes you as like wow, I can really relate to this when I look at people in the past. This is really. This is human right.
Paul Sturtevant:It's a human experience up with a wide range of strange theories, and one of those strange theories I think it was something that really was invented in the 18th and 19th century that has seeped into the popular consciousness for strange reasons is that medieval people didn't particularly care about their children. Because, well, they had so many children and because child mortality was so high, they couldn't sort of, you know, emotionally bear to actually care about their children, and that is plainly untrue, absolutely untrue. That is part of a very weird idea that medieval people were just like, just kind of low-key, awful. And in reality you find really meaningful, really beautiful examples of people mourning their children when they die. For example, there's a.
Paul Sturtevant:There's a very famous poem simply called pearl um that was written in the oh, I was about to say 14th century, but my brain is now saying it wasn't the 15th century, it's either the 14th or 15th century in england, um, and it is reading it. It is very hard not to have your heart break, um, because it is probably a man um mourning his young you know toddler aged daughter who has died, uh, in a way that is heart-wrenchingly beautiful, even to this very day, and it immediately puts paid to that myth that people didn't care about their children. Um, and we have, you know, lots of evidence besides um, but that that's one of those things that where literature, though it is strange, and though the worldview even of the poet who wrote pearl is odd to us, um, especially if you're not, you know someone who's really really, really into, uh, you know very old-fashioned christianity, um that, uh, even if you're not part of that worldview, you can still feel the emotionality deep within that piece of writing. It's really quite something.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, yeah, and I'll share a link to that, to part of that poem in the show notes as well, because I think that's important to see and I think it's translated to for at least for modern readers to somewhat understand if I am oh, there are several editions of it that are available.
Paul Sturtevant:You can yeah you might be able to fight your way through the, uh, the middle English if you are so inclined, but if you're not and let's be real, most people aren't um that there are many, uh, modern editions that are out yeah.
Lara Ayad:So it sounds like you have seen different types of myths crop up about the middle ages, and these myths are like part of the modern consciousness, as you called it. Can you tell me firstly we'll get back to some of these other myths in just a minute but how did you get so interested in the middle ages to begin with? You describe how people who like this is they're kind of weird on some level. I think all art historians are weird, right, like I don't even do the.
Lara Ayad:Middle Ages. I think I'm kind of weird, so how did you get into this?
Lara Ayad:How did you I get into ?
Paul Sturtevant:is one of those things. I don't have a Rosetta Stone for this for myself, looking back, I've been a nerdy, weird kid my whole life. I was, you know, I think if I had to point at a few things in childhood that definitely had an impact, I think they were. I don't know if you are of a similar age to me to have encountered these, but there were books by david mccauley. Um, it was a famous, uh, author and illustrator of kids books and he had a couple of books, he uh, he. His most famous book is the way things work, but he also did books called Castle and Cathedral and these were lavishly illustrated but also kind of highly technical drawings of these sort of architectural wonders and kind of exploring through art, a way of explaining and teaching kids like how this architecture shows how these people lived and how the architecture worked and things like that.
Paul Sturtevant:And so I'm sure that there were other things besides this. You know I started reading fantasy novels very early and things like that. You know there was a lot of that, but that's that's, I think, the earliest thing that I can remember and I also remember from there probably not at all unrelated to that that I was trying to build model castles out of balsa wood and crystal light containers when I was a kid. Um, just because I we had crystal light containers around and that was the closest thing I could get to, like a cylindrical tower kind of thing, um, and would save my pocket money and buy like at the whatever the predecessor to the Hallmark store was, buy little knight figurines and like populate that. You know, this is the kind of kid that I was. I was doing like, effectively, model trains when I was like five and six.
Lara Ayad:It was crazy yeah, just goes to show you too, like people throughout the ages get bored and then they do amazing creative things with it too. Right, it wasn't?
Paul Sturtevant:just like monks and scribes and say the 12th century, it's also modern never underestimate yeah, never underestimate the power of a, of a bored kid, um, I mean destructive or constructive power. I'll for all the parents out there.
Paul Sturtevant:I don't want to say that it's necessarily always constructive and stuff yeah
Lara Ayad:So this is so you were like making all of these different types of of kind of constructed worlds, almost of knights and things like that, and yeah, um, yeah, and so it's it interesting because you're not the only one to be fascinated with the Middle Ages, that you know. You see the Middle Ages all over in movies like the Green Knight, joan of Arc, vikings, it's it's an all over movies and shows. So what do you think about Hollywood's portrayal of the Middle Ages?
Lara Ayad:that's a big question but do you what kind?
Lara Ayad:of what are other. In other words, what kind of picture do these movies and shows paint of the medieval times in general, I mean?
Paul Sturtevant:bad low-key bad picture like, okay, so I.
Paul Sturtevant:So, on the one hand, I think it's very easy to kind of like, pick apart the historical inaccuracies that are in these movies and like, people can and have done this for ages. You could spend just just your entire life effectively picking apart the? Um historical inaccuracies. But I think the the really interesting next step that you can take is to say, okay, so what do these historical inaccuracies mean? Like, why do we tell this story in this particular way? Because you know, movies are, they're not. These aren't documentaries. And even when they are documentaries, they're not necessarily like particularly uh, they're not usually particularly um accurate, specific, they're not. You know, they aren't perfect. There's no such thing as perfect. There's no such thing as perfect. There's no such thing as perfect in an artistic medium at all.
Paul Sturtevant:Um, and so what do these depictions of this past time say about our own society? Um, there are, there are kind of two, broadly speaking, like two visions of the middle ages that exist in sort of uh, contemporary films. There's the dark side of the middle ages and there's the light side of the middle ages. I'll start with the light side, actually, because that's a little bit more fun and actually these days a lot less common. Um, that's the sort of light and bright, cheery middle ages. It's the like robin hood trumping through the forest. Everything's very, um, very primary color, unsurprising. A lot of times this is what you get in animated films, stuff for kids, things like that.
Paul Sturtevant:Uh, disney middle ages uh, often really uh relies on this idea of, like, cheery adventures and heroic nights going out into the world and and and saving the day, and princesses and towers and things like that. Um, so that was really in vogue in children's entertainment and adult entertainment. If you think about, um, say, the musical camelot, um, and how it really became iconic for a time period in American history and like an American presidency, even the presidency of JFK that this light and bright, cheery Middle Ages was very much in vogue until about the 1970s. And then there's a switch to the dark, the dark ages, the dark version of the middle ages, the dark and brooding and blood soaked. And I'm gonna stop doing all that vocal fry, otherwise I'm not gonna be able to continue this uh interview. Um, but the sort of dark and brooding there's, you know everything is blood and if it's not blood it's mud, and then it's not mud, it's shit. You know that. It's like everyone is covered in some kind of foreign substance. Um that?
Paul Sturtevant:usually murdering oh, undoubtedly horrible foreign substance. Um, and even if it's a good substance, it's horrible, um and that and uh, everyone is doing terrible things to one another, uh, and and that the there's kind of a one-upsmanship that we are seeing in in in movies, in literature. I mean, these are these artistic forms are all cyclical, um and and interrelated with one another, because, of course, you know, uh, game of thrones takes its influence from a lot of these earlier really dark depictions of uh of the middle ages, both in film and in literature, and then game of thrones itself has turned into a tv show that now is continuing to influence people's uh imaginations, both in literature and in, you know, in every artistic medium as well. And so this dark and doom, soaked uh and the light and merry middle ages, like neither of them are especially accurate really, um, or kind of both of them can be accurate to different places in different periods. There were bad times and there were good times and there were bad, and some people's good times were other people's bad times, um, and the interesting thing is what happened in the 1970s that shifted our understanding of the past, of this past that we so often fantasize about, that we so often use as fodder for escapism. Why did it turn dark?
Paul Sturtevant:And you see that in a lot of popular culture, not just in medieval stuff, you know this film of the 1970s is very famously quite gritty, quite, you know. It's the turn towards realism and away from fantasy and things like that, and the middle ages tries to follow suit, but the but it sort of tries and then gets full, goes full grimdark, where, whereas dramatic cinema goes in a somewhat different direction, um, and I think that there's, you know there's a lot of things that are happening, at least in american popular culture. You know there's, I don't know, political upheavals with the nixon administration, but there's also social upheavals with, um, you know, the, the oil crises and crises around the world. The 1980s has its own kind of semi-heroic return in some ways, and you can see that a little bit in depictions of the middle ages, like with, uh, excalibur, the, the movie, if you ever saw that in the 80s movies or the like big 80s movies where everyone in the middle ages kind of suddenly has big hair.
Lara Ayad:But even like Robin Hood. They did a Robin Hood around, I think was. Was it the late 80s and early 90s sort of Kevin Costner the Kevin Costner one? Right, yeah, prince of Thieves that that was, that was. Was it the late 80s and early 90s sort of Kevin Costner the Kevin Costner one? Right, yeah, prince of Thieves that that was.
Paul Sturtevant:That was when I grew up with.
Paul Sturtevant:Um, but Prince of Thieves it's, it's adventuresome and it's heroic, but there's a real dark undertone.
Paul Sturtevant:I mean, the, the Sheriff of Nottingham is like a violent psychopath, obviously the best character in the film by far because it's the late, great Alan Rickman, but still, um, you know, carve your heart out with a spoon, cousin. Um, that the darkness was the fun, was the fun of the thing, um, which in and of itself is kind of this interesting, uh, this interesting thing that we've kind of became so inured to this idea that the middle ages is this dark thing, that we, that we almost that, that we're not just going there to feel bad about things or to feel moral superiority, but because it's a dark place. That's why we go there, um, for, for reasons, and that is even continued into the like epic turn that we've seen in films ever since, say, lord of the rings. Um, the lord of the rings trilogy was, I mean, massive in terms of, uh, fantasy films, but had a huge impact even on films that are ostensibly depicting, you know, uh, things that were supposed supposedly actually happened. Um, right, people do associate.
Lara Ayad:People do associate the Lord of the Rings trilogy very much with the middle ages, even though technically it's not supposed to be set in that time, Right, which is really fascinating. And then there's of course this whole mythical place of the middle earth, right.
Paul Sturtevant:Which kind?
Lara Ayad:of evokes that idea and the idea of the middle ages, and you know, shires and pastures and all that absolutely.
Paul Sturtevant:I mean jr r tolkien was a famous medievalist. I mean he was. He was deeply entrenched in medieval culture and so the lord of the rings is as as kind of our prototypical um fantasy literature. He imbued it with as much medieval culture, particularly early medieval culture, um, as he could, because that's something that he was, you know, deeply interested in and excited by. I mean that are here are speaking old english, basically they're quoting beowulf effectively, so like same same, more or less, and so you they're. They're, unsurprisingly, after this, the gangbusters success of the lord of the rings films, there was this sort of revitalization of the middle ages as seen through this epic lens. But that epic lens still is within that very dark, uh, very kind of gritty, mud-covercovered, blood-soaked, not quite as grimdark as Game of Thrones ultimately took it. But you can see the path, you can create the dotted line on the pathway from Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones through all of these very dark and foreboding thickets.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, you know it's interesting that you're pointing out almost a duality about how contemporary or modern culture views the Middle Ages. You've got the bright, shiny Camelot, you know knights and princesses side, and then you've got the really dark, gritty, everyone's covered in poop and killing each other thing. So this is interesting because it's it's I'm trying to figure out. Where did this idea cause we could talk about, like where the really romanticized over, yet overly idealized view of the middle ages comes from in a second.
Lara Ayad:But I've more often than not heard people or even I've even read histories as a kid where they refer to the middle ages as the Dark Ages. So where does this idea of the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages come from, and is that accurate? I mean, I thought there was the Crusades, you know, kind of earlier on in antiquity, and then there's like I mean there were battles being fought, but to what extent is it? To what extent is that true, and was it actually the Dark Ages?
Paul Sturtevant:Oh, man, you have asked the question that medievalists love, slash, hate to answer all the time. Okay, so where did this come from? So I'm going to apologize because I don't have chapter and verse queued up, but if you look, in my first book I talk about this extensively but, effectively, what happened was in the 15th and 16th centuries, in Italy in particular, there was a group of effectively philosophers. They called themselves humanists and they were very devoted to the idea that they were doing something fundamentally new, that their way of thinking, their way of moving through the world and that their ideas were something new because they they effectively divided history up, uh, in two, three parts. They were the first people to define the world of the classical world. So, with the greeks, the romans, what you would call antiquity, the ancient world, all that stuff, um, that that was sort of the bright, uh, glory era of civilization, and that was something that they themselves wanted to emulate. That they were looking back to the great philosophers of the greeks and the romans for their inspiration, for their art, for their architecture, for their philosophies, for their art, for their architecture, for their philosophies, for their you name it. That they thought that, yeah, that's the stuff, and that there was this intervening period, these middle of darkness, that was effectively best swept under the rug.
Paul Sturtevant:I, a medievalist, find all of this really funny, because this is very much like a kid who is a kid, who is writing all about how their grandparents were like the coolest people in the world and how awesome they were, and wearing all of their grandfather's inherited clothes while living in their parents basement. Because the only reason why any of the classical art literature anything survived at all is because medieval people were constantly copying on it and copying it, expanding on it, expounding on it, creating new things, creating the technology that would then allow them to create, technologies that would allow them to do the architectural things that they wanted to do. So it's like, yeah, sure, you're doing some new things, but like, calm down a bit, man, just calm down a bit. And and also, as a medievalist, I really have to point out that a lot of the you know that we tend to think of the middle ages as like this garbage pit of history and where everything that was bad, that happened in the past, really happened in the middle ages.
Paul Sturtevant:Um, and it's got such a, it's such a potent idea that it's kind of like. It's like a black hole. It's got this gravity well where it's actually pulling bad things from the periods around it into itself. So, for example, you know medieval torture, let's talk about medieval torture oh my goodness, sure, yeah, like they.
Paul Sturtevant:Okay, let's be real, like they did torture people during the middle ages. But there was this, there's this idea. I mean, you go across Europe and there's, you know, torture museums everywhere that will have all of these torture devices that they ostensibly used in the Middle Ages. But almost all of those torture devices are actually inventions of weird 19th century people who were creating things entirely out of like whole cloth, effectively, and that torture really became a thing. That torture was far more I'm loathe to call it sophisticated, but maybe advanced is a way of putting it and much more commonly used as a method of punishment in the so-called age of enlightenment. Um, not least because that is when they got a more and more accurate understanding of human physiology, which allowed them to do things to human physiology that's incredible.
Lara Ayad:It's because you'd think that, like, learning more about human physiology would result in us being able to do things to help people and make them healthier, but we which we do. But then there's this other side of it, this flip side, that's coming up in the supposed enlightenment age, like 1700, like 1600, 1700, so on, where they're using this new knowledge to do terrible things to people, but they're projecting that darkness that they've created onto people in the past, onto, like the parents. Right, it's like the angsty teenager in the basement you were describing, and they're like pissed off at their parents like yeah, and let's not even talk about slavery and colonialism.
Paul Sturtevant:I mean, the inventions of the so-called renaissance, so-called Age of Enlightenment, are truly horrifying. You know things that have been let out of Pandora's box by these so-called enlightened humanists that simply weren't present in the same way in the Middle Ages at all, present in the same way in the middle ages at all. Um, and so it's this funny thing where we today look back on the middle ages and very commonly, we've come up with this understanding that the middle ages is kind of where everything good in history goes to die, when in reality, every age has its atrocities and every age has its good and bad. And if you have someone in the past or present talking about how theirs is the greatest age that ever happened and they themselves are the smartest person that ever lived, maybe don't believe them.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's a really that's a really interesting observation and it's making me wonder, because it looks like a lot of like kind of going back to Hollywood. It kind of looks like these films are almost playing on the broken story, the sort of misleading narrative, if you will, that 18th and 19th century scholars made about the Middle Ages. And I'm wondering are there any shows or movies that you think are particularly off the mark when it comes to portraying the Middle Ages and, if so, like what's your, what's your beef with them?
Paul Sturtevant:Yeah, oh, let's see I am which ones I? I think all of them are off the mark in different ways. I think the ones that really annoy me are the ones that are off the mark in boring ways. You know, like, you know, I, I, I like, I hated the end of game of thrones just as much as anybody, um, and in no small part because there were so many interesting ways and you know, with with historical parallels perhaps, that they could have gone, that they ultimately sort of chose, that they seem to have chosen the most conventional and and uninteresting way to end it possible, um, and that the I don't know the depiction, the depiction of a medieval-esque land, because I mean, people are going to quibble with me, and then it's like oh, people, always, when I, whenever I, as a medievalist, want to talk about something like lord of the rings or came to thrones, they're like oh it's not.
Paul Sturtevant:It's not history. It's like, yeah, I know it's not history, but it's very clearly based in history and the authors. You know. George rr martin has talked extensively about how, um, the the atrocious things that he's depicting in his books were drawn from actual historical events, which, yeah, yeah, fair People got up to some nasty stuff, but at the end of the day, it's a question of like, what does a normal day look like, you know, and a normal day in Westeros is not a day that I would like to encounter very much why so?
Paul Sturtevant:well, oh, why? So? Yeah, because it seems like it's a place where empathy has gone to die. You know, it's a seems like a place where where people, where people are so interested in power that they have forgotten about community, and where it is a place that is so and a show that is so solely focused on these people who are participating in kind of the worst. It's. It's like succession, right, you know that they're depicting these really terrible people at the upper echelons of society and not and and not seeming to understand that they're terrible people and also not seeming to, in a way that succession, I think, does pretty well. Succession seems to understand that these people are terrible, should be, should be mocked, and that they are kind of the exception. I mean, they're they're. They're not the exception, but they are the exception um, that these are really really awful people, whereas in game of thrones you never get the sense that these are the exception. You get the sense that this is just like, this is just how the world is and everybody's kind of terrible.
Lara Ayad:It's like yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned this, paul, because I was just on instagram a few days ago and I'm sorry there was some type of I do like. I do, I love my followers on Instagram, but I do. I try to find accounts that share something historically interesting about the past, and I found one I account I won't name it, but they were they. It was something about like trying to pique people's interest in the middle ages and it was maybe, but the way that they did it was sort of like they played into a lot of the stereotypes about the middle ages and one person in the comments said you know, um, I get some information. Then they were being totally deadpan, serious, paul.
Lara Ayad:They're like I get some information about the middle ages, you know, playing video games and watching shows, and then I'll fill in some of the gaps, occasionally visiting museums and that's a way to fill in the gaps. And I thought that was really interesting, because it seems like some people are understanding these fictional, you know, creations and stories, like video games and movies, as a fantasy, but they're also treating it as like historical reality too and as a way to actually understand the middle ages. So there seems is this is what do you think of that like? How would you as a, as a public medievalist, how do you manage that type of um world view that I think some people have when they're playing with video games and they're watching movies and shows?
Paul Sturtevant:yeah, about the middle ages yeah, I mean, that's, that's the medieval, that's the big thing that a lot of medievalists wring their hands around, uh, especially whenever they're engaging with popular culture in any way. It's like, oh, you know, will someone think of the children? Um, that kind of thing, and I, yeah, uh, it is a concern. I'm really impressed by that commenter. Actually, whether they uh, whether they realized it or not, they were being way more astute than most people are about the sources of their information.
Paul Sturtevant:Most people, if you ask them like, how do you learn about history, they would say, oh well, you know, I I'll, I oh, I read and I remember, you know I or they'll either say like I don't know anything, or they say I read, I listen to podcasts, I go to you know, I go to museums and then maybe occasionally I'll film a video game, whereas in reality it's, I think that's actually inverted.
Paul Sturtevant:I think that most people are um, engaging most and most often with popular culture. The trick's in the name it's popular, you know, and then they are supplementing it with somewhat more formal, you know, more academically sanctioned, if you will, versions of history. But this was really one of the core questions at the heart of my first book, the Middle Ages and Popular Imagination. So, effectively, what I did was I put on my social scientist hat for once, not just a humanist but also a social scientist and I got together groups of young British people and and I talked with them first of all about their ideas about the middle ages and I asked them, you know what, what? For example? I asked them like, what does the term middle ages bring to mind? Like, when I say middle ages, what are the things? Just start rattling, you know, uh, stream of consciousness is like what are the things that it brings to mind? Doing the same also with the word medieval, because interestingly, they are different words, they are different terms even though they point to the same thing. They actually have different implications. And then I would talk with them for a long focus group interviews about what they thought the Middle Ages were what they felt, what they feel. The middle ages were what they, what they felt, what they feel. The word medieval means, you know, and in and in any direction that they wanted to go.
Paul Sturtevant:And then, uh, I sat them down and I showed them a series of three films, um, three movies over on on three separate occasions. Um, and after each uh movie I would sit down with him and talk with him about. I said, okay, so, like, first of all, what do you remember from the movie? Um, what and how does this relate to the things that we talked about before? Like, did this show you something that you um, that you expect? This? Did this show you something new? Do you feel you learned anything? Do you feel like there were things that, what parts of it did you think were accurate, what parts of it did you think weren't accurate, stuff like that you know a whole gamut can I ask which movies did you show them?
Lara Ayad:can you share that?
Paul Sturtevant:I, yeah, I think that's, I think that's not, I think that's not too much of a spoiler, yeah, so I I chose the movies based on, based on their popularity.
Paul Sturtevant:So this, this study, was originally done in 2010. And it was the movies that had come out over the past 10 years that had done the best in the British box office. And so those movies were uh, beowulf, the robert zemeckis animated beowulf. Um, kingdom of heaven, the epic film by ridley scott. Uh, depicting the crusades. Um, and again, controversial choice, but I felt like it was too popular to ignore. Um was lord of the rings. I didn't show them the whole lord, it wasn't like a nine hour like lord of the rings fest, and so, assuming that people had some exposure to the lord of the rings, I just I showed them the return of the king, because that was the most um, that was the conclusion of them and that was the one that I think, in a lot of ways, has some of the most medieval elements to it, because I feel like and this is a tangent but I feel like the Lord of the Rings can kind of be looked at as actually traveling not just through space, but also kind of back in time as they go. But that's a whole different side. And so that also is the choosing those three films, though it was using a different way of choosing, choosing those three films, though it was using a different way of choosing.
Paul Sturtevant:That also allowed me to find three films along a kind of spectrum, because on the one hand you've got Ridley Scott's film Kingdom of Heaven, which is ostensibly trying to depict events that actually happened with people who actually existed. You have Lord of the Rings, which is entirely fantastical, written by a contemporary author that is basing a lot of his work in the Middle Ages, but that it is in a world entirely separate from our own. And then you have Beowulf, which is the product of a medieval imagination. It is a fantasy movie and it is someone who almost certainly didn't exist and definitely didn't fight the monsters and dragons that he is supposed to in the movie, um, but so it is undeniably medieval, but it is also work or fantasy. And so you've got this sort of three points along the spectrum, from fantasy to reality, um, and there were some interesting conclusions that kind of came up along there.
Paul Sturtevant:But to to return to your original question, which was like should we be worried about people consuming all this popular culture and learning their history from it? Um, and the answer is yeah, but not as much as you think and probably not in the way that you think. Um that, by and large, not in the way that you think. Um, that, by and large, most of the people that I studied, I found that the things that they believed at the end of the movie the things that they believed and that they were able to most easily, uh, retain, and when they were describing the movie that they would describe most accurately, so it was something that clearly stuck in their memory past were the things that most closely aligned with the things that they already thought, the things they already believed, so something that gave new details or new, you know, new life to a previously existing idea is there an example that comes to mind for you of how that played out?
Paul Sturtevant:Well, I can easily give you a counterexample for one Sure, because if it was something that didn't fit, if they saw something, on screen that didn't fit into their prior understandings, they would either just forget it or they would misremember the film to be more like fascinating.
Paul Sturtevant:Yeah, the misrememberings were weird. Um, like I had someone describing in great detail the watching kingdom of heaven, which is about the crusades, and so there are templars and hospitallers and things like that. But there was one person who described in great detail the round table that they were all swearing allegiance around. There's no round table in that movie, there's no round table at all. Um, and that they were all sort of, and she was describing them very much in an arthurian, chivalric, knightly kind of manner when in reality, like in this movie, the knights, templars, are like murdering psychopaths.
Paul Sturtevant:They're awful I mean the hospitalers are depicted as being, you know, better, better than, but the, the templars are like, just the worst.
Paul Sturtevant:They're the antagonists, um, and this person had really misremembered in a very heroic, very arthurian, even with the imagery of the round table being kind of inserted into her memory, um, in a way that's really interesting and a little worrying, um, and so to some degree, I think that we do, we, we definitely should be worried about pop culture, but more holistically than individually. We shouldn't be worried as much about the next thing that comes out, you know, down the pike, because people are, oh, you know, people are sponges and they're just going to believe everything that you see. Um, I don't think that's true, but I do think that there are, that it's a long evolution, starting probably in childhood, um, and that children might be more inclined to believe a little more holistically some of the things that they are seeing. And that is the genesis point of a lot of these, a lot of these core ideas that ultimately get built out and built out and built out over the course of our lives.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, yeah, and you know it's it's. First of all, I think it's so great that you used your first book to start tackling this big core issue in public medievalist studies about, like, how does the modern public perceive the Middle Ages and what kinds of stories have we told about it. But you have this new book that you've co-written called the Devil's Historians. So tell us a bit about the book and, in particular, what are some? What are some things you reveal in the book regarding race in medieval times? Because I know, before we started recording, you've told me that modern depictions of medieval times have some racial undertones. So can you elaborate on that a bit within the context of your new book?
Paul Sturtevant:yeah, yeah, okay, so the devil's historians. Uh, as the name would imply, um, it's a. It's about some difficult stuff. It is specifically about the ways in which the middle ages have been used by extremists, particularly, particularly right-wing extremists, to prop up their ideologies. This is something that has been happening for a very long time, but really focusing on the 19th century to the present day, or at least the present day upon publishing, was published in 2020 so that gives you a sense of what we're talking about, and in it we try to be even-handed.
Paul Sturtevant:but also we don't stay out of politics and so we talk about the ways in which, say, for example, the extreme right in Europe that is still haunting us today, imagery and ideas, or at least their misrepresentation of the Middle Ages and medieval ideas as a way of justifying, you know, racism, particularly Islamophobia, but also sexism and misogyny, which you can only imagine the ways in which that has been used, and even just this idea of sort of heroic purpose of a people and of a nation, the idea of nationalism being projected back onto the Middle Ages in a way that, you know, even someone like Adolf Hitler would be very, very familiar with, since he used the same exact thing.
Lara Ayad:Right, he used that as a projection onto, I think even like ancient Rome and ancient antiquity, right he kind? Of tried to say oh, we're the new aryan people and we are descendants of you know, say the great ancient romans that he projected this idea of like a sort of race onto an ancient history, but did he also use the middle ages as well? Is this something that you see?
Paul Sturtevant:yeah, mussolini was far more into the roman uh, into the romans, and it's my understanding that hitler was less into the romans and was much more about this.
Paul Sturtevant:Um, germanic, quote-unquote barbarian uh cast of the quote-unquote aryan people, and I'm putting there's a lot of air quotes to go around with all this, because all of this is crap, all of this historic like in case there was any question, and there shouldn't be, this is all historical bunk. Um, but you know his, he, he, he fashioned his regime as the third reich. Well, the first reich was the holy roman empire of the middle ages. Um, and there and a number of people within his orbit were incredibly enamored of this idea of a unitary Germanic people. That can be projected back into the Middle Ages and even beyond that, and it even gets silly Believing in these esoteric things. Like you know, indiana Jones wasn't completely fictional in that Hitler actually sent archaeological teams out to find the Holy Grail, which we believe to be like, patently ridiculous now, but that they were looking for these medieval sources of power and things like that. But in a racial way, talking about Hitler is actually kind of a good place to start because in a lot of ways, in a lot of ways, hitler?
Paul Sturtevant:how to put this exactly? So I'm not. This isn't one of my ideas and I can't remember who came up with it, so, my apologies, I'll have to uh, I will have to find a source inside it, but the idea of that racism is older than race. Is that our ways of creating racial hierarchies and our ways of inflicting discrimination upon other people predate our invention of a system that justified those actions that racism was? A was, first and foremost, a system that allowed us to feel okay with the horrible things that we as a society were already doing, right, um, and one of the first racialized people, if not the first racialized people, um, were actually jewish people. Um, that and that is one of the really, oh, one of the really challenging but interesting parts of living in portugal, because it was here, the Iberian Peninsula, where that really first started to take shape, that in 1492, columbus sailed the ocean blue. But, additionally, one of the other things that happened was that the Jews were evicted, were banished from Spain, along with the Muslims too, if I understand correctly.
Lara Ayad:Right, so both Muslims and Jews?
Paul Sturtevant:Yeah, yes both the Muslims and Jews right, that many of those Jewish people then went to Portugal and four years later, portugal followed suit and Portugal expelled their Jewish population in 1496 and for it declared in 1496, happened in 1497 and but that it was not really an expulsion per se, especially in Portugal, but also in Spain was that it was an attempt at a forced conversion because they it was many of the people, particularly the crown didn't actually want these Jewish people to leave, that they were, you know, successful people, that they were very well-educated people and that in general, they had actually, up until that point, they had held, some of them, very high positions within the court. That it was an attempt at forced conversion and many of them did convert, but that there was a widespread understanding among the Christian population that, oh well, these people didn't really convert, that there was a conspiratorial tone that came about whereby these Jewish quote-unquote new Christians continued to be discriminated against within society and looked on with suspicion and in many and in some cases, uh killed um, and it was actually because of this that the inquisition was started in uh, spain and portugal as well, to root out these so-called um new christians. Um. Now, why do I say this is has to do with race.
Paul Sturtevant:Well, um, especially in spain, but also in portugal, that this, that there is a keen understanding around this issue of conversion, that changes fundamentally for these christians, this idea of judaism being a religion that a person can freely convert away from, to be something that is in the blood and that is a key cornerstone to racial thinking, to racialized thinking. Um, and it was in spain that we got the first, it was in spain that we got the first, the literally called it limpies of the sangria, purity of blood laws that stated the exact number of, the exact sort of percentage of jewish ancestry. You were allowed to have to be considered, effectively, a full citizen, to be, uh, to be considered a person who could reach certain heights within a society, and that if you had more Jewish blood than that, then you were not allowed because you were considered suspect or lesser than.
Lara Ayad:And that started around the 1600s. You said.
Paul Sturtevant:Yep During that great age of enlightenment.
Paul Sturtevant:Right's a good, there it is again you know exactly, and so this is where the prejudice that had been leveled against the jewish people for um, for centuries, um, had became systematized into this I these racial ideas that were then transferred and reappropriated in the colonies, in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and then later in the American colonies, as a way of discriminating against Native people and Black people as well, discriminating against, uh, native people and black people as well, um, and as a way of understanding, you know, as a way of them justifying why it was a right and moral and correct thing for them to do so is it then?
Lara Ayad:so, so kind of like going back to like how modern culture depicts the middle ages racially, and we've talked a little bit about like the rise of the stirring fascism in the 1930s with Mussolini and Hitler, and we talked about like kind of like, how did race, how did like race even become a thing emerging from almost religious discrimination in the, really in the enlightenment period? But, like when you see a lot of movies and shows, video games that portray the middle ages, everyone looks, um, not just white, but specifically like kind of blonde, blue eyed whites right because white itself is.
Lara Ayad:It's a very modern idea, the idea of race. So it's like this was this actually accurate? Like what did the? Because I mean I know also the middle ages spanned the entire globe, right, so that in and of itself trumps something of the myth. But could you, could you say a little more about that type of depiction of the middle ages on a racial level?
Paul Sturtevant:Yeah, yeah, or at least on a level that is very hard for us to talk about without talking, without using the word race, even though it's kind of a historical like that's the thing, thing like we have to like there has to be a big asterisk, terminologically, around all of this, because it's so difficult for us to talk about people of different origins without using the term race, even though the term race doesn't mean what we want it to mean.
Paul Sturtevant:So that caveat, like right up front, the Middle Ages was definitely more diverse than we tend to imagine it being. It's the challenge that I always get when I talk about this sort of thing, especially among certain groups of extremely online people, is they say, oh well, exactly like what percentage and exactly how many? It's like we don't have censuses. We what percentage and exactly how many? It's like like we don't have censuses. We don't know exactly how many, but we do know that people were very present.
Paul Sturtevant:We know that there was, that there were african embassies in rome in the 13th and 14th centuries. Like we know that there was movement all around the mediter. I mean, until you know, from ancient Rome and before then, we know that there were people, especially people who were traders and travelers, who were going to any city of any size during the Middle Ages, particularly as a way of you know, the commerce and mercantile, the mercantile world continues apace and so, especially if you were to go to a large city, and especially if you were to go to the mercantile centers and the docks, that you would absolutely find people of a wide range of shades, so to speak. But even before that, even into the so-called early Middle Ages, what people still occasionally refer to as the Dark Ages that there is a lot more movement around the continent of Europe even than we tend to think, in no small part because of the reach of the Catholic Church and the way that the Catholic Church was trying to unify the continent.
Paul Sturtevant:And so you find famous early medieval English archbishops coming from Turkey and being widely accepted within you know English aristocratic society as the archbishop in england at the time that there wasn't a, a keen understanding of this person being, you know, being fundamentally different from us and being being othered in the same way that you'd even find uh today.
Paul Sturtevant:Um, and and also, it's very important to note that during much of what we call the Middle Ages, the center of the world, so to speak, wasn't in Europe. Europe wasn't the leader in commerce, technology, any kind of metric that you want. In many ways, asia was the world during the Middle Ages, whether that be the Islamic empires that sort of stretched from the Atlantic, in many cases half the way across towards India, india itself, which was incredibly innovative and and interesting at the time, and also china, which was developing incredible, uh, incredibly interesting technological things and sociological things. But the, the trade that was, um, the trade of ideas, not just, you know, not just spices. This trade of ideas, of technology, of philosophy, of music, of, of all kinds of things that were ping-ponging across the hemisphere, um, at the time, is really astounding, uh, as astounding to understand. And all of those trades involves movements of different peoples encountering other different peoples and not just doing so under a banner of war. And if you need a final piece of evidence for it, for this sort of hemispherical world, for this world in which people and things can travel so freely.
Paul Sturtevant:The one thing that really kind of nails it for me is something that I think that we can all fundamentally understand, uh, based on our own personal experience recently, and that is plague because, um, the black death ravaged the world, or at least the hemisphere, in the 14th century, and people tend to imagine the Black Death as being a European thing.
Paul Sturtevant:It was not a European thing that it originated, we think, somewhere around Mongolia, but it affected China very deeply.
Paul Sturtevant:It spread across the Middle East and depopulated entire cities across the Middle East, across North Africa, before finally, finally finally spreading to the farthest of far-flung reaches of somewhere like England, which was a backwater of a backwater at the time, and then ping-ponged different variants, as we're experiencing with COVID now. Different variants emerged and would ping pong back and forth across the hemisphere. There have been epidemiological studies, historical epidemiological studies, that have shown the ways in which these variants sort of backed and forth and backed and forth, you know, every decade or so across the hemisphere, and so that is a very dark example, but it shows something really important and that is the way in which this world was connected, not just in a occasional and tangential kind of way, but in a fundamental way, in a way whereby seeing people from other places and seeing people from other cultures was something that you would only not experience if you were someone who made very much an effort to live in a rural community by yourself and never go on pilgrimage and never leave.
Lara Ayad:I see, I see, yeah, it's like you're revealing a middle ages that's global and you're also revealing that, like people in the middle ages, for the most part, unless they're making an effort, really were through pilgrimage, through all these different things A lot of it seems like religion plays such a big role here really coming in contact with each other. I want to go back for a minute, cause you mentioned gender. Quickly, I want to talk about masculinity in the middle ages, because I can't help but yeah, I know.
Lara Ayad:I know we've had such a rich, like longer, conversation, but I can't, like I can't not let this go. So I can't help but notice the amount of the focus on knights and men and stuff like that, and movies about the middle ages and video games, let's talk. And movies about the middle ages and video games, let's talk about masculinity. In the middle ages, was chivalry a thing? What, how, what were men like? I know that's such a big question, but what was? What were men like in the middle ages?
Paul Sturtevant:yeah, oh boy, oh man, I, I, chivalry is this item. There are a lot of things that we misunderstand about the middle ages, and I think chivalry is definitely like one in line with what the gentry of the 19th century thought it meant than what a medieval person would have would have thought it meant. You know, the gentry of the 19th century resuscitated the idea of chivalry, um, as a way of trying to, you know, to to have a very class-oriented, performative sort of politeness, uh, that allowed them to uh expect sexual favors in return for opening doors effectively. Um, it's not that. That is, uh, that is overbroad and probably unfair, but I'm, I'm gonna stick with that one for now. Whereas in the middle ages, um, chivalry was very much a warrior culture, um, it was a warrior culture and there were definitely gendered elements to it. But the people who were writing about chivalry we're writing about it as a way of effectively earning reputation, earning reputation particularly within the, the warrior elite of the middle ages, and the way that you win reputation, first and foremost, is by winning battles is by winning battles, often by whatever means necessary. That it's not about I will disarm you and then allow you to no, no, no, no, no like, if you have to kick somebody in the nuts in order to win, you do that um that some of the most successful knights of the period uh were were people who, by you know, 19th century standards, were absolute scoundrels.
Paul Sturtevant:Um william marshall, uh was a very famous um knight. Uh was considered one of the most uh chivalric knights of his age. He rose from uh, you know he was. He was an aristocrat but a very like lesser, born son of a lesser uh no, lesser house in england, and he rose to be effectively the right hand of several english monarchs um, not least because of his success uh in tournaments. But he got up to all manner of shenanigans not up up to, and including one example in which he was not even participating in the tournament because he had broken his leg. So he was sitting in the stands watching all of you know watching the chaos play out.
Paul Sturtevant:And one of the fundamental things about tournaments was that it was organized around the grand melee. So the great melee, which is not a joust, it is effectively well, you and your retinue, you and your group of knights, so five or six guys, would go up against other groups of five or six guys and you would beat the absolute crap out of one another and try to effectively take one another hostage. And if you could take someone hostage, then that meant that you could maybe take their armor, maybe take their horse, maybe, you know, find some way to get them to buy their freedom from you. So this is a way both to earn prestige but also to earn money.
Paul Sturtevant:Let's be real, so. So he's watching all of this play out. I'm watching this like intense chaos happen and a knight falls off his horse in front of the stands onto his back, and at which point William Marshall not even in the tournament whatsoever leaps over the stands, stands on the guy's neck effectively and says I'm taking you hostage. So this is as if someone like ran in from the sidelines of a football game, grabbed the football and ran it outside for a touchdown at his own car, effectively.
Paul Sturtevant:And said you need to pay me in order to get the football back.
Paul Sturtevant:Like yeah it's wild like and he then this is just one example like william marshall, got up to all kinds of shenanigans, and this really gives you a sense of that there were rules, but that the rules, that the first and foremost rule to all of this was be good at what you do and be a badass and everything else is secondary um, that there are definitely rules about, like who you should and shouldn't fight, who you, what you should and shouldn't do in certain social circumstances, and also who you should and shouldn't shag, and who you should and shouldn't marry if you are a knight, because if you are a knight, for example, it is very important for you to marry someone, but not someone that you are particularly in love with, or not someone who you know.
Paul Sturtevant:No, no, no, no. This is about money. This is about money and land and power and prestige, and so it's a question of like don't be messing with anybody lower than you in in station. If you, if it's someone who is marriageable, who is of an appropriate station, okay, this is how you behave around them. If it is someone who is your superior, this is how you behave around them. If it is someone who is your superior, this is how you behave around them as a way of trying to, you know, retain your prospects and things like that. It has very little to say about someone who is not a marriage prospect.
Paul Sturtevant:You know, there's no helping old ladies across the street. Nobody cares about old ladies trying to cross the street, it's just whatever, and if they're of a lower social status than you, they are. The the only time in which some of these manuals talk about the lower classes is about saying don't fall in love with them. If you're interested, just like have sex with them. You even rape them if you want, and it's fine, and just like leave them because they're not worth dealing with. So don't even even bother. It's really, it's really despicable stuff Like I want to be absolutely clear on that.
Paul Sturtevant:And so this idea of chivalry that we have in our mind and all of these things, you know, helping people and and performative politeness and stuff like that like absolutely not part of this culture and that there are some admirable qualities to the medieval, you know, to the medieval culture of chivalry, particularly in terms of, like, being the best you could possibly be at what you do and there being an honor in that. That. That core of it, yeah, like that core of it is kind of great, but that there's a lot of it that plays out in medieval societies in ways that would be that were incredibly toxic and hurtful and harmful then and would be insanely so now.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, that we would really look down on now. So it's like we have this idealized image of chivalry and even like masculinity in the middle ages, but it was a little more complicated than that.
Lara Ayad:And could sometimes result in some really, some really terrible consequences too for people. So let's, let's kind of move forward. Now you're in Portugal, and so tell me what you're doing in Portugal and how are you are you? Are you sharing things about the history of the middle ages with people there? What are you up to? I'm drinking a the history of the middle ages with people there. What are you up to?
Paul Sturtevant:I'm drinking a lot of wine.
Lara Ayad:Wine is good here that's another reason I should be jealous of you being in portugal, I mean you know it's.
Paul Sturtevant:It's not bad, it's not bad it's not bad um yeah.
Paul Sturtevant:so what I am doing here is that I've decided, after a career working for the Smithsonian I worked for the Smithsonian for about 10 years but the Smithsonian doesn't really have anything that's particularly medieval in its collections, or at least it doesn't focus on the Middle Ages very much, and so I'd always had this idea going back quite a ways since I did my PhD, um, of wanting to start a tour company, a tour company that is focused on presenting history in a better way, in a new way, with all of its complexities and contradictions, with all of, in a way that is different from the ways that I've encountered history being presented by uh, by tours in the past. Um, I'll be honest, I've certainly gone on history tours when I've been to other countries and a lot of times, a lot of myths or like silly, facile stories, that that you, that you sort of look at especially if you're someone who's really studied history seriously and you go that can't be right, that that, just that doesn't, that doesn't have the whiff of truth or it doesn't feel like the whole story, it doesn't, it just doesn't feel right. You know it's a little too easy. And then you know I've done the work in in some occasions and I've looked it up and I said, yeah, that's not right. It's not right and first, and infuriatingly, in a lot of cases, the actual history is not particularly more difficult to tell, and I think it's actually a lot more interesting work with and give feedback to the people who are offering the tours there of ways to redesign their tours to incorporate more good history and find ways of making that real history more compelling and exciting, such that it wasn't necessarily just repeating some of these very facile myths.
Paul Sturtevant:And so, uh, my wife and I have come to portugal and we're in the process of starting up our tour company, which we are calling Stories Abroad Tours. You can look us up on Google, we have a website and thus far we are offering well, we offer a variety of things, but particularly focusing at the moment on private tours. So, whether that just be a half day or a full day of walking around the city of Lisbon or something more involved, like we've got our first big clients where we're doing a fully guided nine-day tour experience of the country that's coming up, but and everything in between. And so, yeah, that's what we're trying to offer. We're trying to offer a little bit of kind of a more, more of a study abroad kind of experience, but something that would be accessible for people of any age.
Lara Ayad:so what's what's? I know you. I know you don't want to reveal everything, of course, because you should take the tour if you want to learn all the stories abroad. But could you, could you give like a little snippet of something like maybe something from medieval history in portugal that you show people on your stories abroad tours? You think is really fun?
Paul Sturtevant:okay. So one of the things that I find that's really interesting, um, one of the things that I find really interesting about historic buildings and, of course, tours are a lot about buildings right, the way that buildings are often presented to look as if they're one thing, but in a lot of cases, if you look just below the surface, you can understand that they are actually kind of a negotiation and a rebuilding over many, many, many centuries and you can sometimes see the seams or the scars where those things have been done. So the most famous historical building, the most visited historical building, at least in Lisbon and I think in Portugal, is the castle, the castle that dominates the city skyline Castelo de São Jorge, the Castle of Saint George, the Castelo de São Jorge, this very famous monument, this castle on the hill. But the really interesting thing about the castle is, if you look at it and if you've looked at other medieval castles, it doesn't quite look right. It's some of the things poking out at. You say, like that's concrete, that door that doesn't have an archway, that doesn't have a keystone or anything like that. What does that do? Well, the castle has many stories to tell, but I think one of the stories that is really important to understand and it really says a lot about contemporary portugal is the fact that this building was rebuilt in the late 1930s. The reason why that's important is in the late 1930s was the rise of salazar.
Paul Sturtevant:Salazar was the portuguese dictator and and the Portuguese fascist dictator, and he, as one of his first actions, put out a massive rebuilding regime to the heroic idea of the Middle Ages, that light and bright and cheery middle ages. Well, it's also got a heroic element to it too. And so Salazar was trying to connect himself particularly to the first king of Portugal, don Alfonso Henrique. Don Alfonso Henrique ostensibly founded the kingdom of Portugal. Uh, ostensibly founded the kingdom of portugal.
Paul Sturtevant:Salazar was saying in 1140 it was actually more like 1137, but never mind, never, never let a good narrative uh get in the way of historical facts.
Paul Sturtevant:And so he said that the 800th anniversary of the founding of the kingdom of portugal was going to be happening in 1940, which happened to be just around the corner. And so he set out all of these people to rebuild these monuments. But he gave them this very hard deadline, and for the Castellanos, sao Joros, it was a two-year deadline to rebuild the entire castle before 1940. And so you can see, if you look for it, that it's actually kind of a botched job, that you look at it and there are parts of the castle that don't quite work and don't quite fit, and there's no, there's a keystone missing and that's concrete, that's brick and what's going on over there. And that's because this is all kind of a fascist rebuild botched job. And the one thing above everything else that you absolutely can tell looks perfect is the statue erected in 1940, don Alphonse Henrique, who is lording over Lisbon's skyline as a way of trying to connect himself to Salazar and the new fascist regime.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. I mean I honestly I want to go on a tour like this right now.
Lara Ayad:I can only imagine how fantastic that is Well, I think it's so great that you've started the stories abroad, because it's such a great way for people who are actually traveling and somewhere else to really get an in-depth look at the history of a place, in particular medieval history. That really gives like rich stories based on actual facts and told in a compelling way, and once you have those three ingredients together, it's just this beautiful, delicious cocktail of history public history.
Lara Ayad:I really hope so yeah, yeah, paul, thank you so much for being on the Cheeky Scholar. I thought this was such a fantastic conversation. I had so much fun with you learning about the Middle Ages.
Paul Sturtevant:My pleasure, absolutely. Thanks, and feel free to invite me anytime you want.
Lara Ayad:Yeah, and just quickly. How can people follow you on social media? Are you on there? Is there a good way for people to contact you?
Paul Sturtevant:Absolutely so. Our website is storiesabroadtourscom. Please do check us out there. I am on Instagram these days for the most part, I have fully left Twitter, for the obvious reason that people have left Twitter these days. But I am medievalistabouttown on Instagram and feel free to check me out there.
Lara Ayad:Cool, and I'll put some links, too, for your Instagram account and for stories abroad as well, for people to check out. All right, great. Well, thank you so much, paul, and take care, and we'll talk again soon.
Paul Sturtevant:Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks so much.
Lara Ayad:All right Bye. Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks so much. All right Bye. Want to laugh and grow your brain at the same time? Put that monkey paw to work and hit the subscribe button. You'll get the newest episodes delivered right to your favorite podcast app. Thanks for joining us on the Cheeky Scholar and until next time, keep it real and keep it cheeky.