Gone Medieval - Early Medieval Ireland

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

The dynamics in everyday life in the Medieval period may seem drastically different compared to how we live today. From traditions, gender, power, and religion, advancements in the present seem rapid. But do we have more in common with those of the past than we realise? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Cat is joined by Elizebeth Boyle. Elizebeth is a historian and author who specialises in the intellectual, literary, and religious culture of Britain and Ireland, with a particular focus on Ireland from the seventh to twelfth centuries. We study the past, comparing experiences, individual and personal stories, to see if we can learn from those who have resided before us.Elizebeth Boyle is author of ‘Fierce Appetites: Loving, losing and living to excess in my present and in the writings of the past’, published by Sandycove.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Gone Medieval newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. 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. Hello and welcome to today's episode of Golden Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. There are many things that we might think are unique to our particular lives as we've lived them out now in the 21st century. But so many other parts of our existence transcend time entirely. Things like love, family relationships, grief, warfare and disease have existed. probably for as long as they have been humans, including, obviously, the Middle Ages.

So what happens if we try to relate our own present lives to those of people in the past, comparing our experiences to see if we can learn something from those who have gone through those same things before us? Today, I'm talking to someone who's done exactly that, relating her own life from a 21st century perspective, to her in-depth and detailed knowledge of early medieval Irish literature and the cultural and intellectual history of medieval Ireland more broadly. Dr Elizabeth Boyle is a lecturer in early Irish at the University of Maine News and her remarkable new book is out now.

It's called Fierce Apatites, Loving, Loosing and Living to Excess in My Present and in the writings of the past. So Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining us on Gone Medieval Today. Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure. And congratulations on the book. It's so brilliant to see this and I zoomed through it and I really enjoyed it and absolutely do recommend it. And it's very unusual because it sits somewhere between a biography, a memoir and actually an early medieval history introduction to early medieval Irish literature. I mean, how would you describe it yourself? I think I'd describe it as a kind of

experiment in perspective in the sense of what perspective, if any, do I have? have on my own life at the same time as wondering what perspective I have on the early medieval world. And so is that idea that we all bring ourselves to the study of the past. And I guess I was just exploring that, perhaps to a slightly extreme degree, in the attempt to sort of interweave what perspective I have on the past with what perspective I have on my own present. I think you've done a great job and it's very successful. But I just wanted to go back to how this all started really, because actually this started

during the pandemic, during the early lockdown, the first lockdown. So you teach at university your lecture. And it started with a blog post or a sort of letter that you wrote to your students, didn't it right at the beginning of that? And actually where you were telling them about how you missed teaching them and being in the room with them, but also relating some of those early medieval Irish sort of texts and references to a plague to what they were living through.

And that was noticed by someone in the publishing world, and that led to the book. So what was it that you wrote to your students? Well, I wrote, I mean, first and foremost, I wrote that I missed them. I really missed them. I missed being in the room with them. You know, when we first went into the lockdown, we were all sort of scrambling to learn how to do online teaching.

And at that point, still hadn't even got to grips with Zoom yet or anything. And I was trying to sort of put things online for my students, putting voice clips on PowerPoint presentations and stuff. And I just one day, about, I guess, a month in, to it all, I just sat and wrote them a letter, as it were, just telling them that I really missed them. And we had just the previous semester studied a couple of plagues or pestilences that had affected Britain and Ireland in the 7th century and then again in the late 11th century. And so they just sort of came to my mind as well. And I wrote to the students about those and said that I hoped

that what they'd learned about those plagues had maybe also given them the capacity to have some perspective on what was happening now and also that I hoped they would use their critical skills to evaluate the information and disinformation that might be circulating about the pandemic. So, yeah, I just sort of put my thoughts down, posted it on my blog and it just by chance came across the desk of a woman named Patricia Devy, who's the Penguin Ireland office, and she got in touch with me and asked if I was interested in writing something longer, a book-length piece that interwove my present and the medieval past. Fantastic.

And one of the things you mentioned there was this idea that you wanted to encourage your students to think about the information that they are getting. And of course, this is a big topic now. Even more so, as we're interviewing this and there's a war going on and the access to information and people are being sort of asked to question the information online,

and of course that was a big topic. So if we think then about those early sources and what you have been teaching your students in a sort of purely medieval context, The sources that we have of the early medieval Ireland especially, so the things you're using, the literature and historical sources, do we have a good sense of how reliable those sources are? Is that something we can actually really judge today?

Well, the 7th century plague is a good example, actually, a case in point, really, because we have a whole bunch of different kinds of sources that talk about it. And one of the reasons why I was using that example in the first place with the students was getting them to assess different kinds of sources and their reliability. So on the one hand, you have, for example, Adon's Life of St. Columba, where he talks about the plague only affecting kind of England and Ireland and Wales and not affecting Scotland. And he attributes that to people venerating St. Columba in Scotland

and St. Columba's power, protecting them from the plague. Well, obviously that has an agenda and it has a belief in sort of miraculous intervention. but you can put it alongside, say, the kind of analytic entries for the same year, which also do talk about the plague, devastating Ireland and so on. So it's a good example. Bede mentions it as well, actually, in his ecclesiastical history. So, yeah, it's a good example to weigh up different kinds of information and see, okay, what is the author's agenda?

What are they trying to say? But can we pull out some essential facts? One has to be that, yes, Ireland was clearly devastated by a plague in the 660s. And the book is a very personal story. And so it goes through a lot of your personal life. And we're going to focus a little bit more on the medieval aspects in this particular episode. But one of the things it starts with is that your father died just before this year. And you talk about your own personal grief and how that was to deal with.

And then you're going to talk about this in medieval literature as well and representations of grief. And I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit about some of those representation. How is grief and loss represented in this early medieval Irish literature? Well, we have, I think, one fundamental thing that we have to keep in mind, which is that writing in the early Middle Ages is a fundamentally public act. This isn't sort of necessarily always a private window on grief. The literature isn't always necessarily personal or confessional. So we're looking at public statements of mourning and grief.

but I was looking in that chapter. For example, there's this long poem by Bluffox, son of Kuvratan, that is lamenting the death of Christ. It's lamenting the crucifixion. But it's doing so in a way that it's addressed to Mary and is addressing her as a grieving mother. And it's about, you know, sort of let me join you in your maternal grief for the loss of your son.

And so I think there's a way that the poem is framed that sort of speaks to a personal kind of type of grief And another thing that I look at is saga narratives, which again, you know, you're looking at a sort of fictional story world. And yet the way that different characters respond to grief within the stories, again, sort of speak to perhaps something that we can recognize as a common human response to grief. Some people internalize it very deeply and profoundly. Other people sort of externalize their grief and respond sometimes with anger even or with sort of need for vengeance if someone has died in. in unjust circumstances. And so I think, yeah, the whole variety of responses to death

are something that we can sort of share, even with the gap of a thousand or more years between us and them. But as I say, we just have to keep in mind that these are all kind of writings by a very elite part of society and they're writing for a sort of public purpose rather than necessarily giving us a sort of window into their heart, as it were. So does that mean we are getting the sense that these parts of society, and how they feel people should behave and react as well, both in terms of grief and other things.

Do we get things about how you should be feeling or how you should be controlling your feelings and emotions? Does that sort of thing come across as well? Absolutely. Yeah. Again, we have such a range of writings from early medieval Ireland. On the one hand, you have the sort of very monastic sort of idea that you should regulate your emotions, that you shouldn't feel an excess of emotion of any kind, either positive or negative, because you should be trying to sort of focus your attention on more transcendent things and not kind of earthly emotions. But on the other hand, you have medieval Irish saga literature seems to be a sort of fictional story world where the authors can lay out what they feel is exemplary behaviour or they can condemn what they perceive as negative behaviour. And so there are very definitely, you know, sort of appropriate responses to things that happen to you and inappropriate responses.

responses and those main character in quite a few medieval Irish sagas, Kuhlund, he has a tendency to, you know, be portrayed as always reacting with excessive violence, with unrestrained vengeance, you know, in a way that is clearly being shown to the audience as being, this is an inappropriate response and excessive response to grief. So on this topic then, and the idea of right and wrong and what he shouldn't be doing, You also write a bit about heaven and hell and about what we can expect to happen after life and this is something that you've researched as well in your career

and for your PhD. And can you talk us through some of those things? I think they're quite informative really of these early medieval minds, especially what happens when you go to hell what can you expect as punishment for certain things? Certainly one of the things you bring up is fornicators and the punishments that those can expect.

Yeah, well, so as you mentioned, I did my PhD actually on eschatological literature on the visions of heaven and hell and what's going to happen after people die. And medieval writers did seem to devote a large amount of attention to coming up with torments and tortures, which, you know, they're essentially trying to really terrify you into reforming your own behaviour and kind of put the fear of God into you, literally. So they tend to invent these punishments that on some level fit the crime. So with fornication, for example, you get medieval Irish visions of hell where they talk about the fornicators sort of essentially

growing these demonic iron beaked birds within their bellies that then burst forth out of their stomach and then turn their beaks back on them and start eating the bodies of the fornicators. And, you know, this is all going on in the level of hell that's reserved for the fornicators, but you have then a level of hell for the avaricious and you have a level of hell for murderers and there are all sorts of torments going on, like people's whole bodies being fried through this thing that's almost like a cosmic frying pan and the soul then melting and dripping wax and then hitting the bottom and then sort of being reconstituted and fried again, you know, and then elsewhere and how you've got people having iron spikes driven through their tongues and

so on. So authors are clearly devoting a huge amount of attention to creating this almost like torture porn, really, you know, coming up with the most graphic and terrifying descriptions that they possibly can of what might await you in hell. And by contrast, heaven is pretty boring, really. You know, any vision text has probably only about maybe a third as much about heaven as it does about hell, because it's harder to come up with something exciting when it's just perfect. Yeah, so a lot more stick than carrots than basically to get you to behave. And I mean, do we know much about who the audiences are for these texts like that? Is that going to be the everyday person, or is it much more a smaller part of society than that?

They do actually seem to be aimed at everyday people in the sense that quite a lot of them are framed as homilies. And homilies probably to be preached at Easter, which is sort of the one time where you would expect that most people would actually attend church or go to a service of some kinds. They do seem to be trying to preach to the white. a community and take that opportunity to warn them of what might await them if they don't embrace good Christian behaviour. That sounds, I suppose, quite convincing, really. So, I mean, one thing this relates to a bit for myself, which you also talk about quite a bit in the book, is the sort of the idea of how much people really knew about the natural world,

you know, so when you hear this, it's easy for us in the 21st century to think, well, they must be so ignorant about what the actual real natural world was like to be able to think that this is going to be a reality. And I mean, do we know how much these early medieval think is really knew about the natural world and, you know, how sort of well-trained were they in these people who wrote that sort of thing in knowing about the natural world? Well, some of the early medieval Irish writers were clearly thinking in incredibly sophisticated terms within their own worldview about the natural world, about humans' place within the natural world and how the natural world functions on a scientific level.

It's not science, as we would recognise it, in the modern scientific method, experimental science or what have you, but it is within their own worldview scientific, and they are trying to come up with logical explanations for how the world is working around them. And one example that I talk about in the book is this Augustus Herbernicus, or the Irish Augustine, who tries to come up with rational explanations for the miracles that happen in the Bible, because he says, you know, if you read the Bible, it tells you that God

created the universe in the first sort of six days, and then he rested. And if he rested from creation, how do you explain all the kind of miraculous things that happen after that? And he says, well, it's because they are all miracles that in some way reveal a kind of natural property that something already has. So when Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt, it's because the human body has sodium in it. It has salt in it. And so to turn into a pillar of salt is merely a kind of extreme manifestation of something that's already present in the human body, which like I say, it's within a worldview that accepts that sort of miracles happen and that the miraculous is possible. But he is trying in his own terms to find scientific explanations for these things.

That's quite remarkable, isn't it? That's quite sophisticated. I think, because you see the two sides of it then, so you know that there is a natural scientific way of thinking about it, but you also respect that there is a supernatural bit and you've got to reconcile the two, I suppose. I mean, is that quite unusual for someone to do that, or is that something we see more often? Augusta Sbernicus is quite original in his particular approach, but I think we see it quite often. There is, you know, in terms of the work that early medieval Irish thinkers and elsewhere as well, not only happening in Ireland, but the work that they're doing in relation to computus and the calendrical sciences, the calculation of time, looking at eclipses and equinoxes and so on,

that they clearly are trying to understand the world around them to the best of the knowledge that is available to them, and are sometimes coming up with quite remarkable and admirable attempts to understand the world. And of course, it's easy, you know, to sit here in the 21st century and, you know, understand what we know about planetary science or evolution or whatever. But working within the worldview of their own day, they were actually doing really sophisticated things. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon? Without the bra. You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from history hit, patented history of inventions.

Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to patented history of inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. So I wanted to get back a bit now to the book and to your content and to the way that you're sort of interweaving it with your own life as well. And one of the big topics that you talk about is family and is also motherhood, which we'll get back to in a moment. But one bit that sort of stuck with me quite a lot was about, so you talk about your own blended family with lots of different relationships and stepchildren and, you know, other people who come into your family and might be not the sort of typical biological

links, but other links. And you relate this also back to the early medieval period, and different experiences of family there. And especially talking about fosterage as a topic. And I think if we think about that in the 21st century, for us, fostering is very much a sort of emergency situation, somebody's in a crisis and they need to be looked after. But you talk about it and you have a little definition almost there where you say that the purpose of fosterage was a bit like a living apprenticeship. And so within that sort of idea, these sort of blended families, can you explain what that actually meant? What was it to sort of be fostered in the early medieval period? Okay, so fosterage is a really important institution in early medieval Ireland.

And it's regulated by law. It's something where fixed fosterage fees are arranged and the person who takes in the child is going to receive payment from the child's family for the period that they are fostered. And I think living apprenticeship is the best way that I could think of to kind of explain what the phenomenon is. I think also though it is a way of cementing bonds and alliances between families of equal social rank. So if you're a young noble or royal child and you're fostered into another family of the same rank, then you're going to spend your time being sort of trained and prepared for aristocratic life. You know, you might be trained in warfare. If you're a woman, you might

be trained in needlework, for example, you know, the kind of appropriate aristocratic pursuits. Whereas if you were sort of somewhere lower down the social scale, you might be, you know, learning a craft or a trade or what have you. And people went into fosterage at quite a young age, and sometimes the fosterage would have lasted maybe seven years, maybe longer, right into adulthood. and it creates these bonds of emotion because you have these children growing up together who aren't biologically related, but they're growing up in the house together and they have inevitably sort of strong emotional connections to each other. And he sometimes see the consequences of that then in saga narratives where foster brothers ended up facing each other on opposite sides

on a battlefield, for example, and have to go through this sort of emotional distress of killing their own foster brother or whatever. But I think one of the things I really wanted to get across is that the modern idea of the nuclear family, the sort of mum, dad and two kids or whatever, you know, it really is a product of quite recent history and that if you went back into the early middle ages, families that are blended families would be much more the norm and not just through fosterage, but also through if women died in childbirth and the man took another wife and you'd have stepchildren and you'd have biological children and within the household you might also then have servants. You might even have enslaved people working in the household. You would have, you know,

potentially visitors if you were giving hospitality. So these houses would be much more blended and messy than any kind of neat nuclear family that we might think of as being some sort of modern ideal. And related to that as well, you write a lot about motherhood as well and your own experiences of motherhood and also about our society's ideas of what makes a good mother and what makes a bad mother and what choices you might have made in your life and how that is essentially perceived in society. And what sort of representations do we see of that in the literature and do we have a lot of responses to what would make a good mother in these types of literature as well? Absolutely. Yeah, we get a full range again. The Zaga narratives are an interesting

kind of insight into human psychology and all of its variety. One of the stories that I write about in the book and it's one of my favourite pieces of literature from early medieval Ireland is the voyage of Mildoom. And before Mildoom goes off on his voyage, the whole backstory to his life is that he's a child born of rape. His mother was a nun who was raped by a marauder. And she gives the baby Maldun to her friend who is the queen to be reared. And she rears him as though he were her own child. So she's an adoptive mother, really, in the modern sense. And when he's later in childhood, Maldun discovers that the woman that he thought was his mother is not, in fact, his biological mother. And there's this just beautiful scene where he's silent and you can sort of feel his shock

at discovering that people who thought were his parents and not, in fact, his biological parents. And he then goes and confronts his mother. And she says, mesha de vah, I am your mother. And it's just so beautiful because to her, she is his mother. It doesn't matter that they don't have a biological tie. But eventually, anyway, she takes him to go and meet his biological mother. That just, you know, is a tale that was written a thousand years ago. And yet there must be so many people who are living in adoptive families,

who maybe have that moment of reckoning where they suddenly maybe think about who is their biological parent and how does an adoptive parent deal with that moment? And to me, that's pretty timeless. Yeah, I think that's such a good example. And also to do exactly what you were saying at the beginning and your letter to your students, how can this actually reflect on our real life and what we think are the ideas of how we should react to things as well? suppose. We sort of, I suppose, the products of our parents and our grandparents and our very recent history as well in terms of how we think things should be viewed. But maybe this is

a really good way of getting a very different perspective. So motherhood also relates obviously to the roles of women in past society. And I think quite a lot of people who perhaps haven't really studied the period so much tend to think of women's roles as very passive as being mothers and wives and so on and having these very clear roles. Is that real and genuinely in the sort of literature that we have from Ireland especially, are those the main roles we see of women, are those sort of things that are being essentially put out there in this sort of public, as you said earlier, this very public view or what they're being writing about? To some extent, yes, but there are also some quite sort of intriguing female characters

that do buck that trend, you know, that stand out as being sort of different from what's presented as the standard feminine ideal. One nice example, I think, is Everd, who is the wife of Kuhlun, who is the wife of Kukhulen, who is. who is always portrayed as very wise and offering good advice, a good counsellor, you know, which maybe points sort of obliquely to women couldn't hold roles of political power. You know, we don't have any instances in early medieval Ireland of a woman being a political leader, but it's almost certain that women were advisors to their husbands, counsellors to their husbands, and that seems to be reflected in the literary character of Everett,

Kuchelan's wife. but she's at the same time held up as her feminine ideal is in her virtue and all that kind of stuff, but she's clever and presented as clever and presented as giving sort of good sound advice. So that sort of maybe hints at the kind of influence that a high-status woman could have. But I think there's also a kind of common misconception that I've encountered quite a lot, which is this idea that somehow under early Irish law, women had a better status or more rights than women did in other early medieval societies. And it's not true. And I don't know sort of really where it comes about. But I mean, early Irish law

clearly shows that a woman, her value, is half that of a man of equivalent rank. You know, a woman is worth half a man. And she is in her early life under the power of her father. And then once she's married off, she's under the power of her husband. And women just have a lesser status in society. And so I think it's sort of more looking at how does some women manage to sort of overcome those limitations or restrictions. And one place where women do clearly have the capacity to attain some sort of political power is in the church. Nunnery's, the abbess of the church of Kildare, for example, would have been one of the most powerful people in early Irish society controlling a massive ecclesiastical landholding and so on. So, you know, there are ways to have escaped that sort of

limitation, especially if you come from a high status family to begin with. But, yeah, women's rights were severely curtailed under early Irish law as with most other early medieval societies. And you did have a reference as well in there to this possible idea that Christianity was very beneficial for women or that was sort of attractive rather to women, especially perhaps with this idea of going into a nunnery or having a sort of a religious career essentially as a way of maybe escaping, having to be married, having to be into essentially an arranged false marriage. Is that something that you think is quite a realistic view? Well, I picked that out really from the testimony of St. Patrick, who when he's there in Ireland in the 5th century working as a missionary and he has left to us his confessio, his personal testimony, he talks about enslaved people and women being particularly numerous amongst his converts.

And he makes a remark that the fathers of these women don't like that they're converting to Christianity. So I was just sort of trying to think a little bit about why that might be the case. And it just seems to me that one explanation for that would be that entering into a church does at least give women possibility of some sort of autonomous choice as to how they're going to live their life that doesn't involve being a form of alliance that their father can form through their marriage with sort of strategic member of another dynasty or whatever. So I think Christianity is obviously an institution that is itself hierarchical and in terms of seeing it as a potentially liberal. career. I am, of course, only thinking of women that are already coming from high status backgrounds. It's not going to be of much help from someone who's from down the social hierarchy. But it seemed to me to explain St Patrick's comments to understand it as maybe women taking a choice that doesn't involve marrying whoever their father wants them to marry. And another topic that you talk about,

because of course, you wrote this book during a pandemic. So we talked about already a little bit. And in lockdown, so there's huge changes to do with travel and to you as being in, you know, in a particular place and time. And to sort of cover that travel idea first, and I think you talk about also how we might have this idea that people in the middle age were sort of staying put quite a lot. And of course, this will also be different from different strut of society. So the reality for somebody at the bottom of the scale won't be the same as at the top. But I mean, is this realistic? I mean, did people generally speaking not travel much in your sort of experience of these sources? Or is travel actually quite frequent?

Well, I was trying to look at the different kind of levels of society and the different kinds of travel that people might experience. So at one end, there are, for example, people who are captured and enslaved. They could travel quite considerable distances and be sold on through the international slave trade. In terms of trade, there's traders that are going, you know, quite considerable distances again through the international trade routes, which you yourself have written so beautifully about in the River Kings. And then I was thinking about people, again, this is at the kind of upper end of the social hierarchy, but people who travel abroad for study and for learning.

And that's pretty considerable numbers. And obviously, you know, warfare, pilgrimage, all these other things that are causes for travel. I think they do sort of disrupt this idea of the medieval peasant being born and dying in the same village sort of thing. And of course, there were people who would not, not have travelled very far in their lifetime, but at the same time, there are all these networks of movement, some of them across quite considerable distances, whether for educational purposes

or trade or through enslavement or whatever. And so I was trying to capture, I think, is the sense of that kind of movement that's going on. Yeah, and I think it's really interesting because you come at that from a literary and the historian's perspective or the written sources. And it's definitely something that we see backed up in archaeology and objects, and you do mention some of these long-distance travelled objects, well in the book and things like human remains and skeletons where we can now look at individual life histories and movement. Those sources absolutely back up, I think, what you're studying as well, that people were mobile and they were able to travel, which is really interesting.

Absolutely, yeah. I think for me, having read, for example, your River Kings and thought about that material evidence, I just think it's really nice the way that we have literary texts, we have books, we have the sort of written words, testimony of travellers that really complement the material evidence and really give us a nicely rounded picture, I think, of at least certain sections of society moving internationally and across cultures, across languages, and it's a much more mobile Middle Ages than perhaps the traditional popular view. And then, of course, we've got the contrast to that, the idea of staying in place, which obviously in the pandemic lockdown year became quite relevant.

And you write about your experiences of that as well and tying in that to your family and all of those experiences. I wanted to just end this by talking a little bit about the idea of writing about history. So as I said at the beginning, your book, which I thoroughly enjoy and absolutely recommend, is a really nice blend of the sort of personal and the professional. So you go from very, very frank and very candid description of your own life and your own thoughts and your own feelings to introductions to some actually quite in depth and quite sophisticated, learning that you would only get at degree level or something like that.

But then you also talk about the idea of history and the idea of writing about it and the contrast. And there's a really nice quote where you say that history is not the same thing as the past. And you talk about this difference between history and the past. Could you sort of explain a bit to our listeners what you meant by that? Yeah, sure. I mean, the past is everything that's happened before this moment now. It's enormous. It's almost infinite.

You know, there's no way that you could write about everything that's ever happened. So we have the discipline of history which involves pulling things out from the past and putting together a narrative. History is the stories that we tell ourselves about the past. And the stories that we choose to tell, tell us something about our own society. It tells us about our own priorities, what we think is important, whose story deserves to be told and so on. And I think what I wanted to do a little bit was get away from this idea of the historian as this sort of Godlike, all-seeing person who can tell an objective story about the past, because everybody brings themselves to the study of the past. And I just wanted to explore the idea that, to quite an extreme degree perhaps in the book,

but to explore the idea that it's our own experiences that shape which stories we pull out from the past as historians. And so I have always suspected that my interest, for example, in international connections and Ireland's history of engagement with other cultures and other societies may be related to the fact that I moved around a lot when I was very young and that I'd grown up in different countries and that perhaps somehow my own status as an Irish immigrant in England growing up. Maybe that that affected what I chose to look at, that maybe that had something to do with why I was. so interested in Ireland's connections with other cultures in the Middle Ages. And so yeah, I just wanted to explore that in a slightly experimental way, I guess. It is, I admit, you know, not a usual kind of academic history writing that I would normally engage in. But I think we do need to rid ourselves of this idea that the historian is this all-seeing objective person who can stand above the past and comment on it. I think we do bring ourselves to the

study of it and it shapes the stories that we choose to tell about the past. And I think you've done that so well because you're really showing some of those individual stories how we can tell them and exactly how they relate to you or not or whatever. So I think it's a really great example and I'd absolutely recommend that everybody read Fierce Apathears Appetites, Loving, Loosing and Living to Access in My Present and in the writings of the past by Elizabeth Boyle. So Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining us here today. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. So thank you all so much for listening as well to this episode. of Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and do join us for the next episode. Please do subscribe. If you haven't done so already, you can find our newsletter in the episode notes wherever you

find this as well. That's Medieval Mondays for all medieval information you could possibly want in your inbox. And please do recommend us to your family and friends and it will help us get more listeners. Thanks again. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit.