You're Dead to Me - Early Medieval Papacy (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Greg Jenner is joined by guests Prof Brett Whalen and comedian Alison Spittle in 9th-century Rome to explore the early medieval papacy. As the political heart of the papacy is plunged into chaos, we step into a world consumed by debauchery and a thirst for power and hear about perhaps the most unhinged courtroom trial of all time.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Research by Jessica Honey Written by Emma Nagouse, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve Hankey

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Julie Andrews, and it is my great pleasure to bring you Jane Austen Stories, the new show from the Noiser Podcast Network. I'll be reading Pride and Prejudice. We'll walk grand estates and take tea with well-dressed gentlewomen, but in this tranquil corner of England, not everything is quite. as it appears. Listen to Jane Austen stories wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are donning our fanciest vestments and going on pilgrimage to 9th century Rome to learn all about the early medieval papacy when the political heart of the Catholic Church was planned. plunged into such chaos that historians have called it the papal Dark Ages, and that's not even the meanest thing they've said. And to help me shed some light on this tantalizingly tumultuous time, I am joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, he's a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

where he works on Christian intellectual and cultural history during the Middle Ages. He has published on the Crusades, Apocalypticism, and pilgrimage, and luckily for us, he literally wrote the book on the medieval papacy. It's Professor Brett Whalen. Welcome, Brett. Thank you so much for having me. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, writer, radio producer and actress. You might have seen her hilarious stand-up shows or seen her sitcom, nowhere fast. Maybe you've heard her on the Guilty Feminist podcast or her BBC show, Wheel of Misfortune.

She's podding fabulous. It's Alison Spittal. Welcome, Alison. Hello, I'm so excited about being here. And what a subject, first of all. The papal Dark Ages sounds like an entry for Finland in the Eurovision. It's an incredible band I would love to see. Me too, absolutely. Alison, this is your debut performance on the show, which means I have to contractually ask you, do you like history? Did you like it at school?

I did. I loved history. I had a great history teacher. So, yeah, I've always been very interested in history. Today we're doing medieval history. It's quite far back, and it's quite specific as well. And I know you were raised Catholic. You're comfortable with the history of Catholicism, but perhaps less so with medieval papacy, the political papacy.

Do you know anything about it? No, I know nothing about it. Being former Catholic, like I was very big into saint. For me, popes are administration people. Saints for me, we're like the superheroes and popes. We're like the guys in the FBI supporting them quietly. So for medieval popes as well, there must have been some absolute skullduggery. I'd say, I don't know.

I don't want to predict, but I want drama. I want this to be a mini-series on an American network TV show with Jeremy Ironson or something like that. I can promise you today, there's a lot of drama. This is an extraordinary story and some serious shenanigans happening. So, what do you know? That brings us on to the first segment of the podcast called The So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what our listener might know about today's subject. I'm guessing you know what the Pope is.

You know where the Vatican is. But the power struggles of the papacy a thousand years ago, yeah, that's not going to register, is it really? In terms of pop culture, or rather, I guess, in terms of Pope culture, There aren't loads of TV shows or films I can point to. I mean, there's the sort of Dan Brown angels and demons. If you have to read that or watch that, I'm so sorry. There's Jude Law in the Young Pope. There are some TV series that bounce around in this era, things like The Last Kingdom,

but that's all about kings and princes and warriors, not popes. So I reckon the so-called papal dark ages is pretty dark and dingy for non-specialists, which is a shame because it was extremely chaotic and debauched and corrupt. So let's crack on. First of all, papal history is all. all about popes. And the popes, of course, are the Bishop of Rome, head of their worldwide Catholic Church, the Supreme Pontiff. They have more names than the Mother of Dragons. Sir Alison, how many popes have there been since the very beginning, do you think? Oh, okay, so people

live for a short time before. I'm going to go for 10,000 popes, like that's another name of a band that I would love. That does sound like the name of a band, 10,000, yeah. They're like so sad or crew. We don't know how many people are in them. It's innumerable. The Vatican says 266 popes. That's less people that's been on RuPaul's drag race. Brett, in terms of setting the papal stage, was St. Peter the first pope, or is it a political office constituted after his death? Where do we start papal history? I mean, it sort of depends on where you look at it.

You know, on one level, the pope is just the bishop of Rome. He's the leader of the local church in the city. And there were certainly Christians in Rome back in the first century, back in the days of St. Peter. and they presumably had a bishop pretty early on. And there were Christians with bishops spreading all around the Roman Empire. All those bishops were sometimes called popes, by the way, Papa in Latin. But what's going on different in Rome is the fact that the idea that Jesus Christ, in the Gospel of Matthew, 1618, made the apostle Peter, his kind of deputy, right?

He was the rock that Jesus founded the church on, and he gave him the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And then according to tradition, Peter went to Rome and actually founded the church there and handed down that power to the next bishop, his successor, according to some of the list named Linus. It gets passed down, this power down through the ages, right? So by the second, third centuries, what you start to see are bishops like Victor. He's Pope around the year 199, weighing in on controversies in the church. There was a big controversy about the correct way to date Easter at the time. And they start to claim a power that isn't just about being the bishop of Rome, but it's a universal power over the entire church.

So, you know, four or five hundred years after the time of St. Peter, you start to see the title of Pope being reserved for not all bishops, but just the Bishop of Rome. And that's when he's really becoming, like, the Pope. No one was keeping a list of popes in the first, second century. And I think in the third and fourth century, people kind of retroactively made these nice, tidy lists. So I think we can be, you know, appropriately suspicious of the exact number of popes. And Allison, do you know why the papacy is based in Rome? It's not just the gelato. It only occurred to me today

where does the term Roman Catholic come from? Tell me why. I'm trying to think of something funny, but the curiosity is overtaken my brain. St. Peter's critical here. And also St. Paul, you get two for the price of one here, because there's a tradition that St. Paul also went to Rome.

It's the capital of the Roman Empire. It's the heart of the Roman world. And so the idea that these two really important apostles went there and they founded the church there. I think, you know, I guess nowadays we call it an origin story, right? So that is the origin story, but today we're looking at the early medieval European situation. So we're scrolling forward into the sort of 800s and 900s. We've got this massively important religious and political institution, but it descends into absolute infamy.

The papal Dark Ages is the nice way of describing what happens. Yeah, they had this chronicle. It's called the Book of Popes. Amazing name. Isn't it? I think that runs from about the 6th to the 9th century, and it gives these little mini-paper biographies. But after the 9th century, it kind of trails off. No one writes another people biography for like 100 years. So for 300 years, they've done the papal biographies and then they get to the crisis and they're like, you know what?

We haven't got time. We haven't got time. There's another poping. The popes are like the sugar babes in the way that like the middle sugar babes are not really talked about that much. It's just Chavon. I remember the early days. Justice for Amel. That's what I say.

I know. Okay. We reached the late 800s. The papal dark ages is a phrase that's sort of commonly used by historians to talk about this period where politically speaking the paper sees is weak and vulnerable and chaotic. Alison, you ever heard of Formosis? I've never heard of Formosis before. Is it a type of yoghurt?

It sounds like it would keep my blood pressure down. Formosis in Latin means handsome. Do we get a handsome pope? You get a handsome pope, the Jude Law Pope, the young Pope. Young Pope. He is handsome, undeniably. He's handsome for a bit, and then it goes a bit wrong. Brett, can you tell us about Pope Formosis?

and the notorious thing that happens to him. Formosis is a bishop. He's the bishop of Porto, which is just outside Rome. The Pope Nicholas I, sends him up to Bulgaria on a mission to convert the Bulgarians. And he does a good job. He's a successful missionary. Later on, though, he gets tangled up in these kind of local, nasty Roman politics. He's deposed at one point.

And eventually, he actually manages to become Pope himself. This is in a 891. He's now holding the top spot in the church. But again, he gets caught up in this political infighting, including this question of who's going to be the next king of Italy. He dies, apparently of natural causes, in 896. There's a pope right after him, Boniface the 6th, but he's only Pope for like 15 days, so we don't really need to worry about him. The Pope after that, Stephen the 6th, is not a fan of Formosus. And some things happen from there that are a bit shocking.

Some things happen is a very, very kind way of describing. what it's about to happen. Alison, in 897, we get the most unhinged courtroom drama you can possibly imagine. How do you think Pope Stephen the 6th continues his beef with Pope Formosis, who by this point is dead. You're going to dig him up, aren't they? Good job. This is that going to happen.

I knew. Okay, cool, go, cool, cool. Oh, wow. I mean, you've got to have a special type of spite to dig as well. You know, what did they do? Okay, tell me, tell me, tell me. Pope Stephen the 6th orders the exhumation of the course. corpse of Formosis, and he is put on trial. So it is called the cadaver synod, and Brett, do you want to give us

the lurid details? This is amazing. This is amazing. How do you try a rotting corpse? Weekend at Bernie's just like popped into my head. There's this great painting by Jean-Paul-Laureen. It's from 1870. It's, it's not medieval at all, but it's one of these great, I think one of the more famous representations of the ever synod. So Formosius's rotting body is after nine months in the tomb. He was dug up. He's dressed up in the full papal regalia. He's propped up on the throne and his body is put on trial. Pope Stephen the six is there leveling the charges against him and kind of interrogating him. And supposedly there was a deacon off to the side or behind him, acting like a ventriloquist. No. Yeah, speaking for Hermogius. Oh, I'd love to see that on Britain's got talent.

So we put his hand into the back of the head. if he really like shoved his hand in and moved his jaw that would be really it's the bridge too far i think yeah there's definitely someone giving answers on behalf of formosis who is a rotting shell of a man but anyway alison that is the scene so i mean can you imagine that as a tv drama now how does the defendant plead dead your honor dead so stephen is yelling his questions the deacon is doing the corpse ventriloquism the corpse is uh found guilty obviously of course he is because they're not going to be like, oh, he got off on a technicality. Clearly, they're finding him guilty.

What do you think his posthumous punishment is? Please say it's death again. Please, it has to be. This is double death. Death squared. It can't be nine months on community service. He's not going to be able to sweep up. He's a corpse.

It has to be death. It's a sort of reputational death. Oh. All of his acts as Pope were nullified. Oh, no. He was stripped of his papal vestments that they put on him. Remember those robes they put on him, well, they took him off again, ceremonially.

They snapped off his three fingers he had used to bless people. Whoa. And then they reburied him in a commoner's grave. And Stephen said it was because Formosis had committed perjury, coveting the papacy, violating the laws of the church. So those are the sort of crimes he's accused of. Because we're hearing about him now, was there like a retrospective on this, is it Frombrosia?

Formosis. From Moses. From Moses. Was there kind of like a renaissance for him? Because why do we know so much about him? Great question. I'm thinking like a historian, Alison, very nice. He's reburied in a commoner's grave, and then the chaos is not over yet, is it, Brett?

Pope Stephen seems to get concerned that some of Formosius supporters might actually dig up the body and kind of turn it into like a martyr or almost like a saint, right? Get the relics and turn those into a focal point for devotion. Stephen orders the body to be dug up again, and according to some of these chronicles, he gets thrown in the tiber. The cult of relics was a really big deal in the Middle Ages. I mean, I visited St. Valentine's Bones. There's an incredible thing in Dublin where you can look at like wish books and I'm no longer

Catholic. Love the iconography. I won't lie. Love sitting in a church. But like, yeah, this is so interesting to me. Sorry, I totally interrupted you there. No, no, no, no. With my enthusiasm, Brett.

Continue, continue, continue. No, you're spot on. And you're the one who first brought up saints the beginning of the show. That's really helpful to remember that there's this whole kind of culture around dead bodies, you know, breaking them up into little bits and sending them. them around and putting them into altars. That's what they do to Formosis, though, that they throw them in the river because they want to make sure that no one gets their hands on his body and turns it into a saintly relic. And yet? He doesn't become a saint, but there are stories

here that, a monk or other stories, it's like a fisherman who's in the tiber. Imagine that you're like fishing in the tiber. You know, you put the pope's corpse. Wow, where did that come from? And that the body does get rediscovered, right? And some sympathetic supporters of Format. just get their hands on it. To do it, I think Stephen was probably worried about. There's this one priest actually, yeah, this other story, Auxilius of Naples is this guy. He's writing at the time, he says there was a thunderstorm, so this is where maybe God was getting involved, and it caused the Tiber to rise up, and at that point, the body was discovered. According to another story, this monk had a prophetic dream. Of course. These are signs that Formosius was wrongly, I think,

convicted, right, clearly. And, oh, Xilius, by the way, is one of the, of these priests who was ordained made into a priest by, guess who, by Formosius. So I think he has his own vested interest in wanting to be Team Formosius. And when Formosus's acts are all nullified, that would send these kind of ripples through the whole church. If you just nullified everything a pope did. And so someone like Auxilius, I think, probably had his own reasons for wanting to rehabilitate Pope Formosus. So I guess Stephen has failed in his quest. He buried him and then threw him in the river and both times it's gone wrong. What do you think happens to Pope Stephen the sixth, Alison. Do you think it all ends very nicely for him?

Does he get tried when he's dead? I wish. Sweet justice. He doesn't get tried in a court of law, but he gets his comeuppance, doesn't he, Brett? And it's a pretty violent comeuppance? Yeah, I mean, so people like Auxilius of Naples have it out for Stephen after this all goes down. And he gets pushed out of power, not too long after.

And he's stripped of his vestments. He's demoted to being a monk kind of on a house monastic arrest. and he's eventually strangled to death. There's so much bloodlust for these popes. I am aghast. I'm from Ireland. They love popes there. So thank you for that, Brett.

That's an excellent summary of the Cadavac Synod and its consequences. So Carmic Justice for Stephen. Then we get the new guy, Pope Romanus. Now, he's got a good name. It's Rome. He's called Romanus. I've got a good feeling about him. Does he do well?

I'm sorry. Yeah, he gets overthrown pretty quickly and trundled off to a monastery and dies four months later. What of? We think may be poisoned, but I've got really strong feeling that Pope Theodore II, the best of the chipmunks, he's going to nail this. How long does he last, Alison?

Let's, uh, I'm going to go two years. Three weeks. No. Yeah. When I say three weeks, that's the generous version of the story because the other story is that he dies within 12 days. So, Theodore II has not gone great. No.

He's murdered by foul play, but Brett, he is still linked to the cadaver synod. He's still linked to Formosus, isn't he, Theodore? Yeah, I mean, already Romanus had already started this process of actually of annulling Stephen, the sixth acts, right, and kind of rehabilitating Formosius. Romanus held a synod, reinstating Formosius and condemning Stephen. And then, yeah, Theodore keeps this process going. It's interesting, right? There's like multiple synods by multiple popes after condemned.

Hemming Stephen the Sixth actions and overturning the verdict of the cadaver synod. So you get the sense of how important this was for people to unwind this. Putting a corpse on trial, it wasn't really a winning move in the long run. No, it makes he look petty, I have to say. It's really petty. Yeah. Okay, so we have Theodore dies after only three weeks maximum. He's then replaced by another pope.

Things are unfortunately not massively improving. Alison, we asked you at the beginning to guess how many popes they were in total. I'm now going to ask you to guess how many popes were there in the eight years between 896 and 904. I'm going to go for 18. I love the way you embrace the chaos. It was nine popes in the years, which is still pretty bad. But not all of those did one year. Some of those were doing just a few months.

There were some caretaker popes involved in this. Some definite caretaker popes. These popes being elected, you know, inverted commas, but there's actually an awful lot of sort of sinister underhand politics happening here. We have some very powerful families with wonderful names, the Theophilacti, the Crescentiae and the Tusculani. They are the kind of medieval mafia mob bosses of papal politics, aren't they? Yeah, I mean, you can't understand what's happening without really thinking about these powerful Roman families. And so they're putting their own on the throne.

And then within a few months or a year, that Pope is bumped off, murdered, deposed. So many popes were killed or deposed. We don't even have time to list them, Alison. That's how many it was. The papacy clearly is in dire straits here, Brett. The obvious question, I suppose, is, are various kings and princes and rulers and political decision makers? Are they just given up on the papacy?

No, I don't, I mean, Rome still, it is still such a touchstone point, right? Popes still have this layering of legitimacy. They're the only ones that can bestow. You can be a really powerful king, but if you want to really have the imperial title and have people recognize it as meaningful, you need a pope to be the one to hand that crown over. Just to give you an example, there are these rulers in Germany in the late 900s,

conveniently named Otto the first, Otto the second, and Otto the third. They become really powerful, powerful enough that they want to reclaim the imperial title. So, yeah, Otto goes down, I think around it's like 955. He goes down to knock some heads in northern Italy and actually meets with the Pope and gets crowned as emperor. The Otonians, as they're called, the Ottonian dynasty, He donates properties to the papacy. Emperor out of the third is interesting.

He works really closely with Pope Sylvester II, who was his former tutor, actually. And they seem to have these big, ambitious plans to kind of bring back the glory of the Roman Empire. They both die at 1002 and 1003, like within a year of each other. And nothing much comes of this partnership. And it takes another decade or so before another emperor is crowned. These rulers don't walk away from the appeal of Rome. Okay. But there's clearly a crisis going on.

Alison, if you were the chief exec of the papacy, we've reached the year 1000 here. So what reforms would you be putting in place to try and protect the brand? Is there celibacy now or is that later on in the... It's theoretically on the books at this point. Okay, but not always observed. Let's put it that way.

It's a great question. I would get the devil out of the church. That would be my big thing if I was spoke. Step one. Step one. Brett, how do you remove the devil from the church? How do you reform the papacy? After 200 years of absolute crisis, we've reached the early 1,000s.

Are there going to be reforms coming down the pipeline? The 11th century, I'm certainly not the first medieval historian to talk about, sometimes called the papal reform movement, where people are trying to sort of clean house here. One example of this is in 1049, you get a new pope. Leo the 9th, he's generally considered the first reformer pope of the 11th century. And he's more or less installed by the emperor at the time, Henry III. But when he shows up, actually shows up in Rome to take up the papal office.

He comes, it's described in some accounts in the manner of a pilgrim. He's barefoot. He's humble. He tells the people of Rome that if he's not worthy to be their bishop, he'll leave, right? And then in the 1070s, you get to Pope Gregory the 7th. And he left such a stamp on this new spirit of reform. It's sometimes actually called the Gregorian papacy. And to your point, he wants to get priests to be celibate.

He wants priests to stop getting married and passing their church property onto their kids. He wants to get rid of simony, which is the idea that you can like buy a bishop or buy a position as an abbot. And so there really is this idea they want to get the Pope out from under the thumb of lay people, which includes kings and emperors, by the way, and really broadcast the idea that the papacy is the ultimate spiritual head of the Christian world. And that's how you're going to reform the church is by the Pope stepping up into this role. So is it given to Pope ultimate power?

In some ways that I think when we think of the papacy as being a big deal in the Middle Ages, it's really the 11th century when that starts to happen. So you wind up with Clement and then you have a series of popes over the following decades. We're basically kind of popes in exile, right? They're not actually in Rome. But they have a lot of support. You see the popes, a series of popes. What was it? sticking with the reform up to their eyeballs. One of the interesting ones is Urban the second. He's elected Pope in 188. Pope Urban, that's a genre of music that was happening in the two fashions. Have you heard of Urban, Allison? Does that name and Ring any bells?

I haven't. I didn't relate to Keith Urban, the husband of Nicole Pittman. Yeah, Carl Urban, Pope Urban and Keith. They're all the same urban. It all the same urban. same family. No, it's... He's an important Pope. He's savvy. He gathers a lot of support from different European rulers and bishops. Pope Urban II is one of the most famous popes from history. He's going to do something

very, very famous. Do you know what it is, Alison? It's in the 1090s. Oh, I'm... All right, I'm going to give a hint. Okay, please. Orlando Bloom. Orlando Bloom. The calcium kid? Does he become a boxer?

Does he become a boxer? Or is he a pie? You've gone two pirates at the Caribbean, Brett. We should have gone the other way. We should have gone with Ridley Scott. Oh, yes. Yes. Kingdom of heaven. So kingdom of heaven. Okay, cool. So is he a tough pope? He calls the First Crusade. Ah, yes. Okay. Which is a huge moment in global history. It's obviously going to be a horrifically violent religious war.

Brett, this is, in terms of medieval Christianity, this is a sort of watermark moment, isn't it, for the papacy? Because this is an assertion of strength. I think so. You know, here's Urban. He's in the middle. of this ongoing fight with Henry IV. He can't even really go to the city of Rome, but he's outworking the crowd sometimes literally. In 1095, he preaches this sermon in Claremont in France and calls for Christians to go. And as he sees it, liberate the Holy City of Jerusalem. And this becomes known as the First Crusade. At the time, and certainly, in retrospect, the kind of show-stopping demonstration of the Pope's authority on a, I guess now we might call like an international level. In the Crusade, it actually captures Jerusalem in July 1099. And

Pope Urban II dies just like a few weeks before news reaches Rome that the Crusaders had actually, after this three-year campaign, managed to capture the city. Urban's very symbolic of a kind of a new direction with the papacy, I think. We now get into a new phase where the papacy is still political, it's still controversial, but there is more strength in the office, I suppose. Was Ervin looking for that war to get the Europeans together against what they would perceive as a common enemy and give these rich people something to do? Rich, also in violent, the peace of God is happening at the same time.

And there's this idea like, stop killing each other. Start killing other people. Yeah, go kill the so-called infidels as they view them. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, that's a whole other episode, Alison. But, you know, that's brought us to the end of our conversation, to the end of the papal dark ages. The nuance window!

This is where Alison and I spend our two minutes re-burying a pope. we've just dug up, while Brett has two uninterrupted minutes to tell us something we need to know about today's conversation. So my stopwatch is ready, Brett. If you are ready, the nuance window, please. Yeah, great. And you know, you've made this, Alison, particularly, I think, with all of your great comments, you've made this pretty easy. I think we've really grabbed a hold of some of the nuance of the situation, right? So I'll be the first to admit that something like the cadaversen, you can see it as a sign of the fact that the Middle Ages were the dark ages and it was irrational, it was grotesque, it was barbaric. But I do think we need to avoid this impulse.

I think of it as like a historical confirmation bias, if you see what I mean, for the way we view the medieval as opposed to the modern world. But we saw on the show today, right, bishops around medieval Europe, like the popes of Rome, were deeply enmeshed in political life, right? Italian politics, the pope is the biggest landlord in medieval Italy, after all. And they're certainly involved in local politics with these families that Greg mentioned earlier, struggling for control of the city. And this is really the case after the collapse of the Kirillian Empire. governing institutions, like of all different kinds, were really under new kinds of pressure. In that context, the cadaver synod kind of makes sense, so to speak.

It has its own kind of internal logic. You know, on the other hand, keep in mind, contemporaries knew the cadaver synod was outrageous, right? This wasn't just like another day in the crazy Middle Ages. I mean, people in the 9th century knew that this isn't how the successor of St. Peter is supposed to act with the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And the same thing goes for like being murdered with a hammer or sleeping with your mistress or using church property for your own personal gain. So even in the middle of these struggles

and in the middle of these troubles, you see these calls for reform, which really pick up steam in the 11th century to get the Roman popes out from under the thumb of these local families, out from under the thumb of emperors, and really do things differently. And, you know, that leads to something like Urban II,

being in a position to stand up as the leader of Christendom and call for the First Crusades. So from that kind of more nuanced perspective, I think that the people dark ages, and I'm making air quotes here with my fingers, really become less sensationalistic and more historically important because, you know, they allow us to kind of to see and track these broader changes in medieval European history as a whole.

Thank you so much, Brett. That's fascinating. Alison, any thoughts on that? I feel nuanced up to the eyeballs. My mind has been opened so hard. Like with medieval ages, I just thought it was like eating large drumsticks and jousting, but this has been so great. Fabulous. Well, thank you so much. Alison, thank you so much, Brett.

And listener, if after today's episode you want to know about the Crusades, why not go listen to our episode on Saladin? And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends. Make sure to subscribe to your dead to me on BBC Sound, so you never miss an episode. But all that's left for me to do is say a huge thank you. To my guests in History Corner,

we had the fantastic Professor Brett Whelan from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thank you, Brett. Thank you so much. Thank you, Alison. I had such a great time. Thanks. Me too, Brett.

You're a legend. Thanks so always. And in Comedy Corner We had the awesome Alison Spittle Thank you Alison Greg Brett Everybody else

It's been knowledgeable and beautiful Thank you Pleasure thanks for coming And to you lovely listener Join me next time As we excitedly assume More forgotten historical subjects

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