History Cafe visits the Met with Lauren Mancia – Archeological Reconstruction

August 11, 2015 Adam Leave a comment

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Here is the last installment of the History Cafe visits the Metropolitan museum in New York. If you didn’t hear the first two, they are all separate topics. The first two cover the twelfth century, and late-medieval mysticism. This time, we’re talking about archeological reconstructions. Most of the archeological sites and many of the ruins we look at are in part repaired or reconstructed and it isn’t always obvious how. Continue reading History Cafe visits the Met with Lauren Mancia — Archeological Reconstruction →

Soup and Sandwiches

Medieval Bells in Valencia Spain

June 3, 2015 Adam Leave a comment

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This month I have another “live” cast recorded in the city of Valencia. Over the course of the podcast, I walk up the main bell tower of the Cathedral of Valencia to listen to the huge bell at the top, nicknamed the “micalet,” strike noon. Along the way, with a few other bells woven in for good measure, I talk about how large cast bells first came to be used in late Medieval Europe and what they symbolized for the Christians who rang them. Continue reading Medieval Bells in Valencia Spain →

Full Dinner

Anti-Jewish Riots in Valencia, Spain, 1391 with Abigail Agresta

March 23, 2015 Adam Leave a comment

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As a follow-up to last month’s shot about violence, this month I have an interview with Abigail Agresta talking about a series of anti-Jewish riots that hit numerous cities in Spain in 1391, starting with Seville and spreading across most of Spain. We focused mostly on the interpretations of one of the worst riots in the city of Valencia. On the way, we talk quite a bit about how scholars think about anti-Jewish violence in the medieval period, what relationship that violence has to modern anti-semitism, and the changing character of Christianity’s relationship to Judaism. Continue reading Anti-Jewish Riots in Valencia, Spain, 1391 with Abigail Agresta →

Coffee and Pastries

History Cafe Shot – What do we mean by Violence in history?

February 9, 2015 Adam 2 Comments

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This month on the History Cafe, we’re trying something new. This is a relatively short podcast (10 minutes) that asks a question with a handful of examples. It is in no way exhaustive, but hopefully sparks a fair amount of thought. It is also an example (to me, anyway) of how history often plays out in its roll as an explainer of the world today. The podcast is about historical violence – I ask the question: how do we argue that a certain ideology, religion, or group is violent?
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Full Dinner

History Cafe visits the Met with Lauren Mancia – Medieval Mysticism

January 8, 2015 Adam 1 Comment

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This is part two of our History Cafe Visits the Met series and Lauren Mancia is back to talk about how objects and images interacted with Medieval ideas of mystical experience. This is the podcast where we talk about the little bed (see the image below). We were down in the main museum, not in the cloisters, and we looked at a seemingly random set of images connected by their very close connection to the spiritual practices of mysticism.

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Full Dinner

History Cafe visits the Met with Lauren Mancia – The Cloisters Gothic Chapel

November 4, 2014 Adam 1 Comment

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Lauren Mancia is back and for a whole series we are calling The History Cafe Visits the Met! We recorded several podcasts live at the Met Museum looking at specific items in the collections ranging from the Gothic Chapel to the Temple of Dendur to a little tiny doll’s bed used for mystical contemplation (this will be coming up soon!) For today, we have our discussion of several objects in the Gothic Chapel at the Cloisters Museum.

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Soup and Sandwiches

The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba Spain

October 3, 2014 Adam Leave a comment

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This is another live-in-Spain podcast, this time from the famous monumental mosque-cathedral in Cordoba. Cordoba was an important Roman provincial town, a military outpost of the Visigoths, and for centuries one of the most important seats of Islamic culture in Spain until it was conquered by Ferdinand III of Castile in 1236. The main Christian administration of Andalusia, the southern province on the Spanish peninsula, came to be in Sevilla, especially after Sevilla became the main port for communication Continue reading The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba Spain →

Soup and Sandwiches

The Great Famine in England with Philip Slavin

August 1, 2014 Adam Leave a comment

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This episode is an interview with a friend of mine who also studies famines, although he specializes in England. The Great Famine hit most of Northern Europe – from England to Poland, Central France and parts of Northern Italy to Sweden – in 1315. The bad harvests lasted for at least two years and included such heavy rain and wet weather that salt made meat, fish, and milk preservation more difficult at the same time. A few years later, a major cattle epidemic hit, wiping out large numbers of animals across the same region. The result was either acute food shortage or general malnutrition for years. Continue reading The Great Famine in England with Philip Slavin →

Coffee and Pastries

Church and State in Early Modern Spain

July 17, 2014 Adam Leave a comment

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It has been a while now, but I’m back with hopefully a string of new podcasts. First off, I have a small, on-location, observation about the relationship between church and state power in Spain. This is a topic that has lots of depth to it, and this little intro only scratches the surface, but standing between the Cathedral of Madrid and the Royal Palace seemed like a good place to at least contemplate the symbolic relationship between those two institutions, something that Spain has dealt with in several ways over the last few hundred years. Much of Spanish history over the last five hundred years has been competition between centralizing forces and centripetal forces pulling away from centralized power. Continue reading Church and State in Early Modern Spain →

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The Royal Botanical Gardens – Madrid Spain

May 6, 2014 Adam Leave a comment

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This time on the History Cafe, I have an experiment in field recording. About a month ago, I went to Spain for a couple of weeks and while there I recorded a few sets of thoughts about Spain’s history in a couple of locations. I’ll be editing a few of them as History Cafe broadcasts over the coming couple of months. These recordings attempt to capture some sense of the sound of the place I’m talking about, while discussing a broader historical idea. I’ve tried to describe the location as well as the historical significance so that you can imagine both. The locations are all quite different, but to look forward to them, I have three good ones from the Valley of the Fallen, the Royal Palace, and the Mezquita-Cathedral in Cordoba. For a couple of these, it was my first experiment with recording outside, and sometimes the wind got the better of me, but generally they sound alright and the background noise worked out nicely. Continue reading The Royal Botanical Gardens — Madrid Spain →