Lord Jonathan Sumption is coming to the end of his magisterial multi-volume history of the Hundred Year's War. He believes it was essentially a French civil war into which the English and other external powers jumped into. In this podcast Jonathan talks Dan through the entire conflict, its causes, its course and its decisive conclusion.
Simon Winder's eclectic histories have ranged all over the Germanic countries, and he has concluded his Germania trilogy with Lotharingia, a book about the kingdom of Lothair, which was located mainly in the modern low countries, and stretched all the way to the Roman borderlands. Lothair I, a gr...
I was thrilled to have Jóhanna KatrÃn Friðriksdóttir on the pod. We talked about Viking women, old Norse-Icelandic sagas, mythology and poetry. Who were these Viking women who were champions on the battlefield, did they really exist, and is there much historic evidence? Jóhanna answered all these...
Seb Falk joined me to discuss the science in the Middle Ages, or, according to his new book, 'The Light Ages'. They gave us the first universities, the first eyeglasses and the first mechanical clocks as medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons...
