Monday, September 29, 2008

ATM Episode #8

Spring in Australia, Autumn in the northern hemisphere.

Books I am reading? Nothing!

Jobs I am doing – a novel? Injury in my line of work, Gold Falcon Enterprises Pty Ltd, busy busy busy, no time to edit.

New Segments? Today in History, the battlefield, the courts...Viking episode. Viking podcast. Podfading sux!

Art Competition?

Coming up in the show, listener feedback, promos for other pc, listner report on the Cressing Temple event.

Email issues!
Get in touch with me here at ATM on the forums at www.sirjustyn.com or by email at podcast@sirjustyn.com and tell me what has been happening in your medieval world. Tell me you like the podcast. Tell how to improve it. Tell me what you want on the podcast. Tell me what you need to tell me.

Heralds Call News


Medieval city of Coln found in Berlin!


An odd theory about the Mary Rose

Medieval Garden Intrigues British Archaeologists

The medieval hot and dry

Buy an Irish Castle!

Medieval villages. Camlaan, Cosmeton, Denmark Middlealter,

The viking Inn in Minnesota


Leaveth Anne Boyelen Alone



Events

Abbey Museum

Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the V&A at the Museum of High Art, Atlanta, Georgia September 2008 -Janurary 2009

Medieval Towns of Monmouthshire Conference will take place at the Memorial Hall, Usk, from 10am to 4.30pm on Saturday, October 11.

Fiore Medieval School of Defence to host a Bob Charron seminar in Australia. This is an awesome opportunity to learn from a master about a late c14th sword master’s works! The estimated cost will be between $120- $160 dollars depending on numbers and cost of venues.


Feature
We attack some more of those incessant myths. We also have an explanation from Jim Mowatt from over at www.historyzine.com as to why the myths came about in Victorian England. Sir Justyn proves that Conan the Barbarian really did exist!


The Market Place



www.yorkshiretemplars.co.uk A book about templars, templar sites, life in the middle ages and more.

www.historyzine.com

www.celticmythpodshow.com


Right Click here to Download an MP3 of ATM#8


Click on play to stream the Episode





3 comments:

Al said...

Another great show Justyn. I really enjoy your podcasts. I subscribe to all the history related podcasts on iTunes and yours is one of the most entertaining. The "variety show" format really livens up the show. I am really looking forward to the show on the vikings.

One thing I'd like to hear on your show would be reviews of good historical fiction dealing with the middle ages (and before or after the middle ages). I'm a big fan of the ancient Greeks and Romans and I have read most of the great authors of historical fiction in this era and am now branching into the middle ages but I'm not familiar with good authors who wrote about this period. A review of one or two books/authors would be of great interest to me.

Thanks and keep up the good work.

Sean Murray
Temecula, CA
USA

Unknown said...

To Sean - There are lots of wonderful medieval historical fiction books but one author for whom I hold a special place in my heart is G.A. Henty. He writes stories for children and fired my imagination when I was a child with a book called 'St George for England'. I've gone back and read some of his books now I'm all growed up an' stuff and he's still very entertaining indeed. They're rip roaring adventure tales of a style that seems sadly to have faded away.

Unknown said...

Hi Justin

Just had a chance to listen to your latest podcast, very cool indeed. A couple of points you raised had me intrigued and I thought worthy of my two cents worth.
The Mary Rose story I would like to see more on, especially on how they determined who was a sailor or a soldier and where they were from. Certainly archeology and its associated disciplines via the analysis of minerals tooth enamel and possibly bones (?) can pin point where a person lived at various stages in their development. But how out of the 220 or so sets of remains have they been able to determine who was a sailor as half if not more of the men on board were soldiers. They have postulated that some of the remains were archers, based on muscular wear on the skeletal structure; such as flattening of the radius and ulna and fusing of upper vertebrae – but out of the rest of them how did they determine who was a sailor and who was a soldier or gunner? Also from what I can find they examined only 18 skulls, and found 60% were from southern Europe. That is 18 out of around 400 men aboard that day and from the over 10 000 human bones recovered from the wreck. I suspect if you were going to the trouble to hire foreign sailors you don’t just take anyone wandering down the street- I personally would opt for the ones with some maritime experience. It also does not mean automatically that they could not speak English. Though it does put paid to the outrageous theory that, God forbid, the Brits may simply have stuffed up! After all they had just placed a cavalry officer in charge of a highly complex modern battleship, what more could they have done to ensure victory. Of course it was bloody foreigners at fault!

The second point is on the nature of medieval warfare as viewed through modern eyes.
I think it is a modern conceit to view ourselves as somehow more civilized because we can kill masses more people with less effort. I would suggest that we have managed to kill more people through war in the last century than in all of history. A single modern soldier has the firepower of a battalion only two centuries ago and 20th century wars were fought with millions of combatants and with millions of casualties. Even Genghis Khan pales in comparison to the Germans or the Japanese in WWII where they managed to kill tens of millions of civilians in a few short years. Even the good guys are not immune, how many million non combatant civilians were killed in allied bombing raids? Even our war on terror may have cost the lives of up to a million, mostly non combatants. That does not even count the carnage in places like Africa in the so called brush wars. And that is only the human cost let alone the economic and cultural damage. I don’t think the medieval mindset would allow men to submit themselves to what our governments have inflicted on us. At Crecy the French charged 17 times, and then conceded that it was lost, they didn’t dig in and try again and again over the next four years like they did in WWI. Yes medieval warfare was brutal, but it had rules, sometimes ignored but rules none the less. It was predominately hand to hand combat, something which is anathema to modern society, witness the hero cult of the modern sniper who kills from a distance unseen. Could you imagine that person becoming the stuff of chansons in medieval culture?

Enough of my rant, good work on the podcast!
Montjoie
Florian