An interview with Deborah Harkness, author of The Book of Life

Deborah Harkness, professor of history at the University of Southern California, has just published the final novel in her All Souls Trilogy. It follows the story of Diana Bishop, a historian and modern-day witch, Matthew Clairmont, a 1500-year-old vampire, and an enchanted manuscript at Oxford University's Bodleian Library.

Click here to read DuJour’s executive editor, Nancy Bilyeau, interview Deborah about The Book of Life

See also Deborah reading an excerpt from her novel:

Gutenberg, Executions, Medicis, Vikings, Hobbits and more - medieval news roundup

A medieval news roundup for the weekend...

If you are a fan of Marshall McLuhan or have an interest in the history of printing, this interview from the Columbia Journalism Review might interest you. In this post, entitled The future is medieval, they talk with Thomas Pettitt and Lars Ole Sauerberg from the University of Southern Denmark about their “Gutenberg Parenthesis” idea. It deals with how digital media will be tipping the scales between oral and print communication, the first change we have seen since Gutenberg started his printing machine. It includes some talk about the medieval period, such as:

The Middle Ages was not strong on membership of communities. They were not obsessive about inside versus outside. They didn’t emphasize, “I’m a denizen of this town, I’m a citizen of this country, I belong in this nation, behind these frontiers.” They saw themselves rather like Hobbits (Tolkien was a medievalist). Hobbits knew their relatives to the seventh degree: second cousins three times removed, and so on. In the Middle Ages people saw themselves as part of a network of connections. They knew their family trees. They knew with whom they were related. They identified themselves as a node in a network and they saw pathways, connections to other people in their extended family. They also saw themselves in terms depending on their profession. If they were in the Church, they saw themselves in the Church hierarchy as being a priest here, subject to the archdeacon here, subject to the bishop there, and the archbishop and the pope. You could have status by being the servant to a servant to someone important.

You can also listen to this talk they were part of from MIT:

Slate magazine offers this fascinating excerpt from The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, by Joel F. Harrington. It details how 16th century executioners performed their task. For example:

During his own 45-year career and 187 recorded executions with the sword, Meister Frantz required a second stroke only four times (an impressive success rate of 98 percent), yet he dutifully acknowledges each mistake in his journal with the simple annotation botched. 

The New York Times has a short article about how nine children from the wealthy and poweful Medici family have been found to have rickets, a disease caused by a lack of Vitamin D and usually associated with the poor. In this case, "the researchers said the children were probably deprived of sunlight, which spurs the body to make vitamin D. Wealthy children of that time were often tightly swaddled and kept inside, with suntans discouraged as signs of low standing."

Sticking with the Medici's, Three Pipe Problem (a great blog) has an interview with Edward Goldberg, who does extensive research on that family and on the Jewish community in Renaissance Italy.

ScienceNordic reports that a 1200 year old Carolingian coin has been discovered in Norway. Jon Anders Risvaag, from NTNU University Museum, explains “Two factors make this find stand out. Firstly, this coin is older than the Carolingian coinage reform, and so far the oldest coin from Charlemagne’s reign found in Norway. Secondly, this coin was not found in a grave, in contrast to almost all other coins from Charlemagne and his successors that have been found in Norway.”

If you are interested in the Vikings, go over to Medieval Histories, where Karen Schousboe has written several posts about the Norsemen, including an indepth review of an exhibition Vikings 2013 at the National Museum in Copenhagen.

Finally, the CBC (our public broadcaster here in Canada), has this article Film, TV tourism spikes with Game of Thrones, The Hobbit. Fans seem to be heading to Northern Ireland, Dubrovnik and New Zealand to check out the beautiful backdrops to their favourite shows/movies. New Zealand tourism is cashing on in the Hobbit (like they did with Lord of the Rings movies) with their "100% Middle-earth, 100% Pure New Zealand" campaign.

An Interview With Jeri Westerson, Author of Blood Lance and the Crispin Guest Book Series

Author Jeri Westerson has done it again: She's managed to craft another fascinating, entertaining, engaging book in a style that's been dubbed "medieval noir."


Her latest book, Blood Lance, is the fifth in her series of books about Crispin Guest, a detective of sorts during the medieval era, a man who was previously a knight.

One of the many aspects of this book and series I enjoy is how Westerson combines history with fiction, even historical figures with fictional ones, with grace and eloquence.

In our latest interview--I previously interviewed her about her book Troubled Bones--she also talks about her concerns about the state of the publishing industry and how it will affect authors including herself.

Click here to read this interview from the Seattle Post Intelligencer

You can follow Jeri Westerson (and Crispin Guest) on Facebook

A Time of 'Incredible Violence': Historian Gives Readers Glimpse of Medieval Life

In a SPIEGEL interview, British historian Ian Mortimer discusses the often brutal reality of everyday life during the Middle Ages, the violent excesses of the time, his lively approach to writing historical tomes and his need to empathize with the subjects he is covering.


At one time, historian Ian Mortimer, 44, was an ambitious student at the University of Exeter. But, frustrated after his exams, he moved back to the remote village of Moretonhampstead in Devon, in southwestern England. He started a family, bought a house and built a bell tower.

For years, he raged against all the academics who torment their audiences with "boring and tedious" treatises. But then he started writing his own books.
Since Mortimer doesn't like to travel and hasn't boarded an airplane in years, it might seem odd that his best-known work is essentially a travel guide. In the book "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England," Mortimer explains what travelers would expect if they were catapulted back to the Middle Ages in a time machine. Instead of writing about famous battles, kings and wars, he describes how it smelled in the narrow alleyways, what kinds of meals the people cooked in their crooked houses, and how they washed their backsides.

The response has been tremendous. Readers and critics alike are enthralled by his unconventional historical prose, and universities are recommending his trip into the Middle Ages as basic reading for young history students.

Click here to read the interview with Ian Mortimer from Spiegel


Click here to read our interview with Ian Mortimer

Click here to learn more about The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

Interview with Sylvia Federico on Women in the Peasants' Revolt

The CBC Radio show As it Happens interviewed Professor Sylvia Federico of Bates College about her research on Women in the 1381 Peasant's Revolt. You can download the podcast here. The seven minute segment appears at about the 25 minute mark of the podcast.

Click here to visit the As it Happens website

Click here to read Peasants' Revolt: The time when women took up arms

Interview with Jay Rubenstein - Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse

When he began looking at the First Crusade (1095-1099 ), Jay Rubenstein was expecting to write an academic paper or two demonstrating that the European Christians who answered the call of Pope Urban II to liberate Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers were motivated by something other than an apocalyptic vision. In fact, his research led Rubenstein, an associate professor of medieval history at the University of Tennessee, to write a highly accessible history of the First Crusade arguing that the nobles and peasants who fought the Crusade intended to usher in the End of Days and the return of Jesus Christ. In Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (Basic Books; 448 pages, $30 ), Rubenstein tells the story of the blood-drenched, costly and logistically ambitious war from the point of view of those who conducted and experienced it, and the chronicles they left behind indeed suggest not only that they believed the Apocalypse was approaching, but that it had arrived.

Rubenstein, 44, grew up in Oklahoma, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His honors have included a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, and, in 2007, selection as a MacArthur Fellow, a lucrative honor that brings a grant of $500,000 over a five-year period. He spoke with Haaretz from his home in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Click here to read this interview from Haaretz

Click here to read another interview with Professor Rubenstien from Metro Plus

Interview with Mike Ryan, University of New Mexico

Associate Professor of History Mike Ryan will join UNM’s Institute of Medieval Studies after leaving a tenured position at Purdue University in Indiana.

His new UNM office is filled to the brim with books on everything from medieval sorcery to the practices of ancient Christianity.

The largest piece of art in the room is called “The Triumph of Death,” and it depicts the myriad ways a person could die in the early modern age. Ryan said he celebrated the publishing of his book, A Kingdom of Stargazers: Astrology and Authority in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon, by getting a sleeve tattoo of a 14th-century French translation of an early medieval text called “On the Properties of Things.”

Click here to read the interview with Professor Ryan from The Daily Lobo

Interview: Tom Holland on Ancient Rome

How accurate is what we think we know about the Romans? The author of Rubicon tells us about the exercise of power, the staging of ceremony and the influence of religion in ancient Rome.

When you are adapting Latin texts for use by the BBC, how do you go about bringing them to life for today’s audience?

The thing about adapting the texts is that the framework is there for you. Essentially, all that you are doing is a glorified cutting job. But you have to cut it in such a way that preserves both the structure of the narrative and those episodes within it that will give the listener, who may not be familiar with the text, some sense of the reason why it is so powerful and the reason why it has had the impact not just over the centuries but also over the millennia. Obviously it is harder to adapt a classical text than it is, say, a 19th century novel, simply because we are further removed from the Roman world.

Click here to read the rest of the interview from The Browser

Interview with Lisa Carnell

Our interview with Lisa Carnell, Coordinator of the International Congress on Medieval Studies. We discuss the 2009 congress, which just finished, and about preparations for the next congress.

You can read Lisa's post about the Weblogs and the Academy session here.