Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchKathryn Taylor, "Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice" (U Delaware Press, 2023)
Episode 65
Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice (University of Delaware Press, 2023) explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make …
1 year, 8 months ago
Ruby Lowe on John Milton’s Definition of Free Speech
Episode 137
British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous…
1 year, 8 months ago
Shane Bobrycki, "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Episode 85
By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as …
1 year, 8 months ago
Marcel Elias, "English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291-1453" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Episode 88
The period from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus o…
1 year, 8 months ago
Jacqueline M. Burek, "Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century" (York Medieval Press, 2023)
Episode 87
Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore,…
1 year, 8 months ago
Adam Pennington, "Henry VIII and the Plantagenet Poles: The Rise and Fall of a Dynasty" (Pen and Sword History, 2024)
Episode 154
The story of King Henry VIII, a man who married six times only to execute two of those wives, is part of Great Britain’s national and international i…
1 year, 8 months ago
Trevor Wilson, "Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
Episode 294
In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Trevor Wilson about his new book, Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy (Northwestern Univers…
1 year, 8 months ago
Pamela Allen Brown, "The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage: Agency, Theatricality, and the Innamorata" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Episode 93
Pamela Allen Brown joins Jana Byars to talk about The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford University Press, 2022), which traces the transn…
1 year, 8 months ago
Erika Graham-Goering et al., "Lordship and the Decentralised State in Late Medieval Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Episode 87
Jana Byars talks to Erika Graham-Goering of the University of Oslo about Lordship and the Decentralized State in Late Medieval Europe (Oxford Univers…
1 year, 8 months ago
Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Episode 92
Ada Palmer joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Inventing the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2025) and the ways history is written and used.
F…
1 year, 8 months ago