Gone Medieval - A Guide to Living in Dark Times with Weird Medieval Guys

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

Olivia Swarthout prowls the web for little-seen snippets of medieval art and life, sharing it via the Weird Medieval Guys Twitter and instagram accounts, and podcast.Her new book, Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times is a handy guide offering time-tested solutions for all of life's biggest problems, from becoming an irresistible suitor even though you can't joust to surviving encounters with rabbits and dragons In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets Olivia on how she brings people today closer to the distant past.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. There's some weird medieval guys out there. No, I'm not being rude. There really are weird medieval guys. And I'm delighted to be joined today by one of them. Olivia Swarthak is the person behind the weird medieval guys that you can find on social media with a huge following. You'll find naked snail fighting, rabbits riding dogs with a hunting snail on their glove, and hedgehogs collecting apples amongst thousands of brilliant and frankly weird images from medieval art. Olivia has a brand new book out entitled Weird Medieval Guys,

How to Live, Laugh, Love and Die in the Dark Times. Welcome to God Medieval, Olivia. Thank you so much, Matt. It's great to have you here. We're looking forward to working my way through this book. I really, really enjoyed it. I guess my first question would be, what inspired you to write this book?

It's all about what life would throw at you in the Middle Ages. Why was that something you wanted to focus on? I started writing the book during quite a transient time in my life when I was finishing my degree. And I think the topic of what life might throw at you and what direction you're going to go often was definitely weighing heavily on my mind, I would say. So I like this idea of creating this kind of microcosm worlds in which you can have a different life, a medieval life. And you can learn about the medieval worlds. And you can step through it and step through all these different life stages.

I think also because weird medieval guy started as a Twitter account. It started on social media and it began gaining traction there. And social media is just so transient. And so it felt like it would be really nice to create something that was a bit more permanent, something with all these lovely images that people really like. But you can hold it in your hands and cradle it and flip through it yourself. And it focuses, as you say, on the kind of stages of life. I suppose it looks mostly at what the differences were in the medieval period.

compared to how we would work our way through life today. But the stages are largely the same. Yeah, exactly. And so I think people feel such, especially people who don't study the medieval world, feel such, I think, an immense sense of disconnect from the world and that it was this different place that was really foreign and often in people's minds, really regressive. And so because part of my goal was also to dispel that mindset a little bit,

it felt like using these three universally human ideas of life, love, and death to link people today. to the Middle Ages felt like a really good way in. And it's structured a little bit like a choose-your-own-adventure book. So you can work your way through it and you can work out what life in the medieval period would have in store for you. I love the way that the images feature so prominently in the book, and I guess that's the heart of where weird medieval guys was coming from originally on social media. Were there plenty of options for you to draw on with those images?

There just seems to be a wealth of medieval manuscript illustrations and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. So there are so many web, I think the British Library and the National Library of France, to name a few, and many other libraries have these incredibly massive digital collections where they have thousands and thousands of medieval manuscripts that have all been scanned page by page and uploaded to their websites. So you can actually flip through them the way you would flip through a book. So often I found that the issue wasn't so much finding images as it was actually trying to sort through these massive repositories of images because you think, oh, I need a great. image of an eel. Most of these scans haven't actually been described or tagged. There's not very much metadata associated with them. And a lot of it became a kind of treasure hunt trying to narrow down or deduce which types of books and where in certain books I might be able to

find images that interested me. And I suppose sometimes as well the issue is which one of these 47 jousting snail images do I want to use this time? Yeah, absolutely. I was looking for fighting images in a fencing manual and all of the pictures from one chapter were so funny. It was the chapter where they tell you how a man and a woman should fight each other. And the principle behind this is that a man can't fight a woman on equal footing because they're physically different. So the way you set up this kind of duel is you have the man stand in a waist height hole and the woman can just run around him freely. And so there were probably 12 or 13 pictures of this fight between this men and showing all of the different tactics. All the woman can get behind

the man and strangle him, but the man can suplex the woman down into the hole with him. And so that was fun but difficult having to choose which of those images jumped out the most. And were any of the things like that that you found sort of a surprise to you? I've seen those images and they are just weird for us to look at today, you know, how a woman might go about killing a man in a hole and how a man in a hole might try and kill a woman who isn't in a hole. Were there many of those that you found that were kind of surprising or unusual or particularly interested you? I would say to start with, I think one thing that surprised me as someone who is interested in and engaged with medieval history, but isn't what people would call a codicologist, someone who studies manuscripts.

What interested me was how few actually of the medieval manuscripts that I looked at had any illustrations to begin with. And it really gave me a sense. I don't know if you could narrow it down to a percentage, but definitely less than 5%, probably more like one or two or three percent. And it really gave me a sense for how much of a luxury it was to have these illustrations back in the day and how each of these books was created by hand over a series of months, if not years. And I think with that mindset going back and looking at just how incredibly detailed and complex some of the images were, that really blew my mind that you'd have these detailed,

photo realistic images on every single page is absolutely mind-boggling. Yeah. As part of the choose-your-own-adventure process in the book, there are questions that help you narrow down what your job might be. So I came out as a scribe, which might be reasonable, given what I do for a living. I was also very nearly a swineherd. Are those jobs based around the kind of medieval separation of those who fight, those who pray and those who work? Is it a way of dividing people up into one of those three main funnels of medieval life? Maybe not directly, but perhaps insofar as the idea, I think, of people who fight, pray, and work, it almost extends beyond the Middle Ages a bit. And even though we don't have quite such a rigid class

structure these days, I think it's still a divide that's reflected a little bit in our society. I think in my mind, it was a little bit of jocks versus nerds type thing. Everyone casts themselves, I think, in their minds as someone who falls broadly, maybe into one of these categories or into a defined category for a life path. And so I think that was another way where I tried to bring the medieval world and the modern world together a bit. Yeah. My patron saint actually came out as Swithin as well, the patron saint of weather, which is pretty fitting because all I do is whinge about the weather all of the time. That was a pretty good fit for me as well. I also enjoyed the story of how to fall in love in the book. So how to woo a woman who you might want to marry.

And there's a flow chart in there that helps you decide whether you should woo the woman that you're after. I mean, that flow chart is great. It's brilliant fun. How did you come up with that kind of process of should you chase after this woman that you think you're falling in love with? It was quite complex. There's a few float charts in there. I wanted to do more and I was a bit limited in the number I could actually put in partially because of my own ability to make flow charts, which is not massive. And also because after looking at two or three of them, the designers who put together the book were like,

please, no more. I think they certainly didn't enjoy designing those. So the flowchart itself, the how to woo a lady one, or should you woo the lady one, it's a massive oversimplification. Of course, what the process would be like for wooing a woman. And so I certainly hope that no one who reads the book actually takes this and goes out and treats it as actual guide for today's life or for medieval life. But the main thing that I wanted to show with this flowchart was how different sort of customs and ideas surrounding romance were in the Middle Ages. And so there were certain things that really jumped out to me as things that might interest people about what you would need to be thinking about when deciding whether to engage in a romance

in the Middle Ages. And so I started with a few fundamental things. For instance, I thought it would be really fun to bring in ideas of the fact that you can actually woo someone if they're married or you can woo if you are married, and that people weren't always constrained by these sort of boundaries of monogamy and bringing in as well the ideas of how important things like chivalry and valor were in medieval ideals of courtly love and love among the upper classes. I started with those kind of core concepts, and then I built it out from there. Yeah, it's interesting that it deals with how to woo a woman if you are already married

because that plays into that core medieval idea of courtly love in which it's not necessarily about, a physical relationship and ending up married to a woman, but you can kind of romantically pursue anyone, the queen, if you want to, because it isn't necessarily a sexual act of pursuit. It's more to do with this idea of chivalry and courtly love. So it's interesting that they had that separation that we almost definitely don't have today. Yeah, absolutely. I think sometimes I do wonder to what extent it was a separation because courtly love was the thing that was written about in the literary ideal and of course it made its way into actual day-to-day medieval life over time more and more but i do wonder sometimes if this was also used perhaps as a means of excusing dalliances i suppose you could

say i suppose it's a good cover for having an affair or something isn't it? It's just courtly. I know we're just doing a chivalry courtly love thing yeah i just holds her hand and slay dragons for her it's not serious. And in the book you outline kind of five stages of wooing. And I think sometimes we view medieval courtship as this kind of really rigid, strictly regulated thing, or we view it as all kind of bodice ripping and everyone was at it all of the time. Where does the truth lie on that scale? Yeah, that's a good question. And I think it's obviously something that you can't answer broadly for all of the Middle Ages with one answer. So I think, of course, it's always going to be somewhere in

between. I think that there was definitely a disparity between a lot of the time what people were willing to write about versus what they actually did. And so we have a lot of records of things like courtly love in that this is what's portrayed in the literary genre of this sort of highly ritualized, idealized form of love. And so people maybe found things like the bodice ripping and the more carnal side of it, I guess you could say, maybe more difficult or less appealing to write about, especially in things that were meant for the upper classes. And so that's not necessarily to say the courtly love was a lie. And it was all out bodice ripping. But I think the courtly love was an ideal that found its way into people's behavior over time, especially by the high middle

ages. But I think people had the same desires and the same human impulses that they do now. And so even though they had this ritualized form of love, I think people would still seek out affairs and love for the same reasons that they do today because they're lonely or they just want the human contact. So I don't think you can give everyone the same intention, but it was definitely somewhere in the middle. Yeah. And as you say, courtly love is the stuff that is written about. And I guess that's the sanitized version of love and sex that people were willing to actually write down and discuss and talk about. And it's sort of a way of separating the more carnal elements that certainly the church wouldn't like. You know, a lot of manuscripts are created by churchmen,

in the early Middle Ages, and they're not going to be writing about the bodice ripping if they can avoid it, I guess. It's a way to separate the physical act from the emotional act of love, I guess, but that doesn't mean that they weren't talking about both at the same time sometimes. Even in, for instance, the Romance of the Rose, which is the most famous, probably medieval love epic, even though it's written in these really metaphorical terms that you could say are a way of distancing the writing from the actual act of love and the more physical side of it, it ends with a pretty clear description of the protagonist seducing and engaging in a sexual relationship with the woman who's the object of the poem. And so I think maybe it could be said that to an extent these courtly love ideals and this style of love poetry was also a way of approaching the physical side of love in a way that felt a bit more palatable.

And to some extent, the ideas of chivalry around knighthood and stuff, we recognise weren't what actually governed most fighting men's day-to-day life. You know, on the battlefield, chivalry went out the window. And so I wondered to what extent the chivalric ideals of courtly love and wooing a woman were also these kind of structures that were there as an ideal, but weren't maybe used in everyday life quite so much, like the ideas of chivalry around fighting. Yes, absolutely.

I think chivalry is another great example of this. And there's so much medieval discourse that's been written down on things like chivalry and on courtly love. And I think that in a sense you can take that as a way of showing that there wasn't always one unified idea of it, and there wasn't always complete adherence to it, because no one's writing about the importance of tying your shoes, the importance of taking a bath today. So these weren't just basic things that everyone adhered to without thinking. And yeah, chivalry as well. There were lots of different ideas of. chivalry. There were people who wrote down their own chivalric codes, and some of them included things like being honest in business, and some of them included things like going to church,

and it was really more a reflection of how people perceived an ideal society than how they actually thought people were behaving in their present society. And somehow for a scribe, I'm destined to die in battle in my medieval life. How important was dying with some kind of dignity or honour, however it happened, whatever method you reached your demise. It seemed from the book quite important that it should be done kind of properly. Yeah, there were different ways to die in the Middle Ages, not just different causes of death, but there were different conceptions of honourable death as opposed to something that was dishonourable. And I think people were also a lot closer to death than maybe we ourselves today are. It was something that people witnessed and were

aware of as a material reality, I think, much more so than a lot of us are. I think in some cases, death was seen as a constant, and it was seen as something that you could, for instance, choose to meet with a degree of dignity, whether you were dying in battle or dying of sickness or dying otherwise. But then I think there was, of course, the idea of a heroic death, which could be a death on the battlefields, or in particular it could be a martyr's death. as well. And because so many medieval wars were religiously motivated, the idea of a heroic death and the idea of a religious death in a lot of cases were really closely interlinked. And so because dying for a cause often meant dying for a religious cause, then by doing so, even though I don't think people went out thinking, gosh, I hope I sure die a martyr today on the battlefield, you were, in a sense, aligning yourself with martyr saints and other people whose martyrdom was upheld as this ideal behavior. And are there examples of how we see that concern to die properly demonstrated in medieval life? Yeah, that's a good question.

I think, for instance, medieval burial practices were very Christianized and very ritualized around giving people a good death. And there was the idea of having a Christian ceremony to bring someone into life, having their baptism, and then also having a Christian funeral and Christian funeral rights to send someone off out of this world. and often how people were buried and how their funeral rights were given was a reflection of how they had been seen in life. And after you've reached your death in the book, it continues to give us a list of animals from a medieval worldview. And I love that you can kind of play top trumps with all of their scores

of virtue and beauty and danger and all of that kind of thing. Why did medieval writers compile these besties? The origin of the bestiary starts way earlier than the Middle Ages, in fact. So a lot of the knowledge and the information that's in them is actually ancient Greek, or perhaps even is drawn from folklore that's older than that, but some of our earliest records of it are ancient Greek. And so a lot of it was grounded in this ancient Greek natural science that tried to categorize animals.

So categories like beast and serpent and fish and bird, often come from the writers like Aristotle. And these writings were passed on into the Middle Ages and were slowly given a little bit of a religious bent as well. And I think the bestiary as a purely medieval book, even though a lot of the information in it could be said to be drawn from pre-medieval and folkloric sources, are these kind of Christian parables about each animal

that are telling stories of its behavior, not as a sort of genuine endeavor to study these animals in a scientific sense the way we'd understand it today, but rather to build an image of each animal. So for instance, the lion is built up as a noble animal and is very Christ-like in how it's described. And then the lion is then ascribed a set of behaviors that are also emphasized that image of it being a very noble and a very Christ-like animal. For instance, it's said in the beastery that lion-cust. are born dead and then they sleep for or they're dead for three days and then their father roars over them on the third day and brings them to life. And so that's obviously quite a clear

Christ allegory. And there's other ones that the lion sleeps with its eyes open to represent vigilance and things like that. And so these stories were told in the bestiary as kind of moral allegories and as messages and lessons to the reader about what they could learn from each animal to be a good Christian. So it wasn't thought that these books would actually teach you how to interact with or study animals, but I think you could consider them to be a little bit like Aesop fables in that they were these very condensed stories describing behavior and moralizing behavior. I'm never quite sure whether to think medieval people believed in some of the more fantastical beasts that we see cropping up in manuscripts and bestiaries, whether they actually thought that

somewhere out there there were monopods with one foot or. genuine werewolves in existence. But I also wonder whether some of those more fantastical beings were kind of a way to talk about Christianity and the soul. If someone is not a human like me and you, do they still have a soul? Should we seek these people out and Christianize them? Or are they just monsters who are separate from our world? So I think sometimes all those animals are a way to talk about all sorts of different parts of life, particularly Christian life. Yeah, absolutely. We had an episode recently on the Weird Medieval Guys podcast where we talked about spice and the spice trade and about how Christian travelers who went to the Middle East to collect spices and to write down stories of their travels

kept repeating the same myth about pepper trees being guarded by either dragons or crocodiles or other big scaly beasts, even though presumably at least a few of these people had seen how pepper was grown and had collected pepper themselves and hadn't seen any dragons or crocodiles guarding these pepper trees themselves, even though they were attesting to this. They'd seen it personally. And we explored a bit on the podcast how this was an allegorical way of dealing with the fact that the spice trade was heavily guarded by a number of different city states and a number of different political forces in the Middle East and in Asia,

who were these sort of foreign predatory forces to medieval people who were keeping them from fully developing their interest in the spice trade and their stake in this global trade. Yeah, I think the animal as metaphor, it wasn't just confined to the beastry. It was a way of engaging with the outside worlds and the world beyond Europe. I guess if you claim what you're bringing back is guarded by dragons, it also helps to inflate the price a little bit. You know, there's danger money that's got to be built in there. Yeah, absolutely.

But I think the question of whether medieval people actually believed in dragons and monopods and stuff, I think it's something that comes up a lot and we'll never know for sure, but I don't think they really believed it. I think it's asking too much, I think. Yeah, I think it's kind of falling into the temptation of thinking medieval people were more stupid than we are. They just had a different way of talking about things than we do.

Yeah, definitely. And I think what I said on the podcast as well is if you're a farmer in 13th century, England, you've never seen a dragon before and you probably don't have to confront the idea of a dragon on a daily basis. It probably doesn't actually matter to you that much. whether dragons are real or not, because you probably know they're not coming to your house, and that's usually enough. For me, that's enough.

So it's separated into three sections. So there's birds, there's fish, and there's serpents. And I was just curious to know, what was your favorite in each section? So what was your favorite bird? I think my favorite bird is the pelican. So the medieval beastry sets the pelican up as this really noble, again, Christ-like bird, that is depicted as a really caring, really loving mother. And the legend or the allegory of the pelican is that as its children begin to grow up in the nest, they start to basically bother the mother pelican, and she gets upset with them and kills them.

And then feeling upset about the fact that she's killed them, she then pierces her own chest with her beak and sheds her blood upon them. And this brings the children back to life. I really like this allegory. I really like that she just goes all scorched earth on them in the first place. And then she's got to bring them back. So I think that's a really funny way of introducing this idea of bringing the babies back to life. You wouldn't have to bring them back in the first place, would you?

If you'd kept your cool. And I also really that the pelicans, as they're illustrated in medieval beastries, have these really short, sharp beaks. I don't know what medieval people thought pelicans necessarily looked like and if this was exactly it. but I think it is really funny that a actual pelican wouldn't have been able to pierce its own chest. And I wonder if in part they had to adapt how they drew pelicans to make this sort of metaphor work because I guess the pelican itself in real life is just not a particularly noble bird. It doesn't really inspire religious comparisons.

No, I mean, lions, you can understand being singled out and perhaps given these Christ-like abilities or comparisons, but a pelican probably isn't one that people would think is single. out for that kind of treatment. And what was your favourite fish? I really like the eel. Reading about the eel, not all of this made its way into the book. So if anyone sees me on the street and wants to come up to me and ask me about medieval eels, I promise I have more to give. But reading about the eels and their significance in medieval Europe was really interesting to me in that they were a really abundant and really widespread source of food. And they were seen as a delicacy. There were lots of different recipes for how to cook eel. There was a French recipe for

inside out eels, which I don't even know how you go about turning an eel inside out, but trust in the French. And there are even records of people paying rent in eels and eels being used as a sort of de facto currency. And I think it's absolutely mad because I don't think the average person really thinks about eels very much today. And so I think it's really fascinating to see how the staple food was back then and how important eels were to medieval life and culture that they were so ubiquitous. That's the word I was about to use. There's a really good eel historian who's on social media a lot talking about how eels were used as currency and food and how well they could be preserved and all of that kind of thing. So they really were a kind of solve all thing in the

Middle Ages. They performed so many different roles and so many different functions that they were everywhere and a part of everyday life in a way that as you say, we don't think about eels today. They just don't feature in our diet very much. They don't feature in our thinking at all, I don't think. Yeah, exactly. It inspired me actually to read a book. I think it's just called the book of eels. And it's a recent book about this guy and how he just developed this fascination with eels spontaneously and became really obsessed with fishing for eels and trying to unravel all these different mysteries of eel life cycles. And they are really a fascinating fish. And I think they're maybe a little bit underappreciated today. Power to the eels, I

And I guess last up, the final section in there is serpent. So what's your favourite serpent? Medieval people tended to throw a lot of things into the serpent category. So I think serpent was in some cases a catch-all for reptiles and amphibians as well as snakes. But I think to be a bit basic, I think the dragon is the quintessential medieval serpent. And the way that medieval people and medieval bestries describe dragons is just absolutely incredible. because whereas the lion is the paragon of nobility, dragons are often set up as the antithesis to this

and as being innately satanic, if not itself, an incarnation of Satan. And so the way that these dragons are described is bearing down from the skies, and sometimes they breathe fire, sometimes they breathe poison, or sometimes they just have really rancid breath. But either way, they're gross. And I think it's a really powerful,

image and I think it really complements the lion very well. And it's interesting how as a whole, they still play into that central human obsession with good and evil. You know, there's goodies and baddies, there's Jedi and Sif in medieval manuscripts. You know, all of those forces are always battling against each other. It's about how does good triumph over evil and how do you identify evil, I guess, as well. Yeah, it's amazing. I think it also definitely gives you a sense for how much of modern literature and modern storytelling draws on these medieval sources, because if you read things, as many people have pointed out, like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, these were stories that were, in large

part, drawn from medieval legends and medieval folklore, and that really laid the groundwork for a lot of our sort of modern hero stories. And Aslan in the Lion, which is the wardrobe, is that quintessential medieval lion, isn't he? He's utterly Christ-like, and he's there as a saving figure. Yeah, exactly. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Olivia. I had great fun reading the book. I had great fun doing the Choose Your Own Adventure bit, and I've had great fun chatting to you about it now. So where can people find you if they want to come and hunt you down on social media or on your podcast? Yes, so I'd love for anyone who's interested to check out the Weird Medieval Guys podcast.

It's just called Weird Medieval Guys, and it's on every podcast platform you can think of Apple, Spotify, Google, even YouTube, all the big ones. And you are also more than welcome to come follow me on Twitter. at Weird Medieval or on Instagram at Weird Medieval Guys, where I post my favorite weird medieval guys every day. And there are a lot of bare bottoms in the images, I think. I try to capture a range. You get everything, you get bare bottoms, you get knights stabbing snails, sometimes you get snails stabbing knights. There's something for everyone. Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been great fun. Olivia's new book, Weird Medieval Guys,

How to Live, Laugh, Love and Die in the Dark Times, is out now. So grab a copy and see what the medieval world has in store for you. There are a new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us out.

Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.