From the Gallows to the Holy Land: Medieval Pilgrimage

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2018

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From a hanged man who came back to life to walk from Swansea to Hereford, to a woman who travelled from London to Evesham in a wheelbarrow, studying pilgrimage opens up a unique window on the world of the middle ages. Catherine Clarke, Anthony Bale, and Sophie Ambler explain to Shahidha Bari how research into pilgrimage helps us understand how medieval people thought about themselves and their lives, the kinds of things they worried about, how they spent their disposable income, and interacted with the politics of their day. Catherine Clarke is Professor of English at the University of Southampton and leads a project to reconstruct the medieval pilgrimage route from Swansea to Hereford. Anthony Bale is Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck University of London. Sophie Therese Ambler is Lecturer in Later Medieval British and European History at Lancaster University.

This podcast was made with the assistance of the AHRC - the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which funds research at universities and museums, galleries and archives across the UK into the arts and humanities. The AHRC works in partnership with BBC Radio 3 on the New Generation Thinkers scheme to make academic research available to a wider audience.

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.
0:28.9	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.0	Hello, thanks for downloading this episode of BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas podcast,
0:37.3	in which we find out about the latest
0:39.8	in academic research. This week we're looking at the idea of pilgrimage in the medieval
0:45.3	period and we're joined in the studio by Professor Catherine Clark from the University of South
0:50.0	Hampton, Professor Anthony Bale from Birkbeck College University of London. Hello both.
0:55.0	Hello.
0:55.2	Hello. And Sophie Ambler from Lancashy University down the line. Hello, Sophie. Hello. Sophie, we've
1:02.0	had a bit of a mix up. We thought you were called Sophie Rambler, but now we're sure it's
1:05.5	Sophie Ambler. But both of those names seem to apply to this topic of pilgrimage. First
1:10.2	things first, I want to
1:11.9	cut to the religious chase. Are any of you keen Pokemon Go players? I saw something about this
1:18.1	on Twitter. Yesterday collecting saints on Pokemon Go. Did anyone, anyone else see this?
1:22.3	Oh, I've missed this. What's this? Ah, so this is a great story. Pokemon Goof, you don't
1:26.5	already know it. Anthony, you're looking a bit puzzled.
1:29.7	No, no, I know about this.
1:31.3	And actually I saw an academic lecture last year about doing Pokemon Go in Jerusalem.
1:36.1	Okay.
1:37.3	This is our next podcast, a Pokemon Academic Research podcast on Pokemon Go.
1:42.9	But if you don't know what Pokemon Go, it's a mobile phone-based augmented reality game in which a cartoon character pops up on your mobile phone and you chase it down the street and try and catch it. And the Vatican, I think yesterday, have said that they've released a version of the game in which players can roam around the streets looking for saints.
	...

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