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 grandson of Charlemagne ruled a kingdom sandwiched between the land that would become France under Charles the Bald, and the land that would become Germany under Louis the German. Dan chats to Simon Winder about his tour of the region's eccentricities and how it served as the site of many bloody, protracted battles, from the War of the Spanish Succession to World War 1. Producer: Peter Curry
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...
Dr Cat Jarman has made a significant set of discoveries about a Viking graveyard in Derbyshire, and Dan talks to her to find out if they might have found the skeleton of Ivar the Boneless. Producer: Peter Curry
