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forward slash history. Just how far does our understanding of the medieval past rely on written sources?

And what happens when these precious fragments of knowledge are destroyed?

Taking in shocking cases of destruction and disaster, Robert Bartlett, author of the new book

History in Flames, speaks to Emily Briffett to consider the material that has been lost through

the centuries and the heroic efforts made by scholars and activists to preserve these fragile

slivers of information about a past that would be forgotten without them.

Hi Robert, thank you so much for joining us on the History Extra podcast.

Hello, I'm very pleased to be here.

Your new book, History and Flames, explores cases in which large volumes of written material were destroyed

in a single day, but not by accident or fire or flood, but by human forces. Now, I wanted to

ask you, why are these cases so interesting? What differentiates them and makes them worth study

individually? Well, I'm a medieval historian, so I'm very, very aware of how we know what we know about

the Middle Ages. And it was, as you know, it was a period when all the written material was

done by hand. It was manuscript. There was no printing. So very often there's only one copy of

something. Sometimes even very famous documents like the poem Beowulf, for example, there's only one medieval manuscript of that. And if it had been destroyed in a fire, which happened in the library where it was located in 1751, we would have no knowledge of the poem Beowulf, which is probably the most

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