Being Human: Love Stories

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Naomi Paxton assembles a squad of researchers to talk about dating, relationships, and what how we fall in love says about us from the National Archives to London's gay bars.

Dr Cordelia Beattie from the University of Edinburgh has unearthed two new manuscripts by the 17th-century woman Mrs Alice Thornton, which put her life, loves and relationship with God in a new light. Now they’re becoming a play in collaboration with writer and performer Debbie Cannon.

Dr João Florêncio is from the University of Exeter and his research on pornography, sex and dating in post-AIDS crisis gay culture is being transformed into a performance at The Glory in London.

Another queer performance space, London's Royal Vauxhall Tavern, is the venue for a drag show based on research into LGBTQ+ personal ads from a 1920s magazine done by Victoria Iglikowski-Broad as part of her work at the National Archives.

Professor Lucy Bland of Anglia Ruskin University has created Being Mixed Race: Stories of Britain’s Black GI Babies, an exhibition in partnership with the Black Cultural Archives, which features photography and oral histories from the children, now in their 70s.

Dr Erin Maglaque of the University of Sheffield explores the meanings of dreams in the Renaissance, and the strange erotic dreamscapes of a 1499 book written by a Dominican Friar.

A list of all the events at universities across the UK for the 2019 Being Human Festival can be found at their website: https://beinghumanfestival.org/

The festival runs from Nov 14th – 23rd but if you like hearing new ideas you can find our New Research playlist on the Free Thinking website, from death cafes to ghosts in Portsmouth to the London Transport lost luggage office: https://bbc.in/2n5dakT

Producer: Caitlin Benedict

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:36.8	This is the Arts and Ideas podcast. I'm Naomi Paxton.
0:41.2	Love Stories, Old and New, from Renaissance Erotica to Hookup Apps, coming up just after this.
0:47.6	Hi, I'm Alistair Suk, and I want to tell you about The Way I See It, a brand new podcast from BBC Radio 3. It's a 30-part series in which we're
0:56.9	throwing open the collection at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to some of the sharpest
1:02.5	creative minds of our time. We'll be speaking to comedian, Steve Martin, writer Roxanne Gay,
1:09.6	musician Steve Reich, and many, many more.
1:12.5	I'll be your guide throughout the series, so join me as I explore one of the greatest
1:17.3	collections of modern art in the world. If you'd like to hear more, just search for The Way
1:23.1	I See It on BBC Sounds. Codes, fantasies, unexpected encounters, what does who we date and how we date say about us?
1:34.1	Love is in the air, everywhere I look around.
1:41.8	Love is in the air, every sight and every sound
1:47.0	I was able to a team of researchers who are bringing their findings to this year's Being Human Festival.
1:54.6	Every November, universities around the UK put on a series of events showcasing new research
1:59.5	and the festival theme this year is
2:01.8	secrets and discoveries. In this programme, we'll be talking about both, through the stories of
2:07.4	dreams, language, love, loss and desire. Let's start with a new discovery. In June 2019, Dr Cordelia Beatty from the University of Edinburgh
2:19.5	found a manuscript in the Archives of Durham Cathedral. It turned out to be a lost volume of the
2:25.2	autobiographical writings of 17th century Yorkshire woman, Alice Thornton. Cordelia, were you looking
	...

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