Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World

Latest Episodes:

Pedro Tafur 6: In the Baths and at the Fairs Oct 02, 2024

Show notes

Our 15th-century traveller returns to Venice and goes overland into central and western Europe, making friends and catching up with some old ones along the way. He'll heal at the thermal baths, and there's talk of Bruges, Antwerp, medieval trade and textiles, and the fairs.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350.University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

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Pedro Tafur 5: Doomed Empires and Slavery on the Black Sea Sep 04, 2024

Show notes

Pedro Tafur ventures out from Constantinople to visit a sultan, an emperor, and the centre of the Black Sea slave trade.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Barker, Hannah. That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Gregory, Timothy E. A History of Byzantium. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

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Pedro Tafur 4: Cyprus, Chios, and Constantinople Jul 27, 2024

Show notes

Our 15th-century traveller dodges catastrophe on the Mediterranean and drops in on late-imperial Constantinople, where there's plenty of seafood and the roots of Pedro's family tree.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Gregory, Timothy E. A History of Byzantium. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.
Byron, Robert & Rice, David Talbot. The Birth of Western Painting. Routledge, 2013.

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Pedro Tafur 3: From Cyprus to Cairo Jul 02, 2024

Show notes

As our Castilian traveller makes his roundabout way toward Mt Sinai, he finds ill-health but lots of help on Cyprus, while around Cairo he's struck by the street food and crocodiles.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Excerpta Cypria: Materials for a History of Cyprus, edited by Claude Delaval Cobham. Cambridge University Press, 1908.

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Pedro Tafur 2: Busy Days in the Holy Land Jun 21, 2024

Show notes

The journey of our 15th-century Castilian traveller continues, as Pedro Tafur leaves Venice and makes his way to Jerusalem, where there will be no shortage of things for him to see and do.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Antrim, Zayde. “Jerusalem in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Periods.” Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem, edited by Suleiman Mourad, Bedross Der Matossian, and Naomi Koltun-Fromm, 102-109. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Dalrymple, William. In Xanadu: A Quest. HarperCollins, 1990.
Little, Donald P. “Mujīr Al-Dīn al-ʿUlaymī’s Vision of Jerusalem in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115, no. 2 (1995): 237–47.
Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. Penguin, 2003.

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Pedro Tafur 1: The Mediterranean Tour May 27, 2024

Show notes

Pedro Tafur, a 15th-century Castilian, makes his way around Spain and Italy with lengthy stops in Genoa, Venice, and Rome, and generally has a pretty pleasant holiday.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Verità, Marco, Laura Speranza, Simone Porcinai, and Daniele Angellotto. “The Sacro Catino in Genoa: Analytical and Technological Investigations of a Unique Glass Vessel.” Journal of Glass Studies 60 (2018): 115–28.

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Medieval Lives 8: Giovanni Fontana May 01, 2024

Show notes

Giovanni Fontana was a 15th-century Italian engineer and inventor. His designs included everything from systems for retrieving sunken ships and automating the defence of fortifications to measuring time and producing music. He created locks, clocks, and magic lanterns.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

Fontana, Giovanni. Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum figuris... Digitized at https://codicon.digitale-sammlungen.de/inventiconCod.icon.%20242.html
Gilbert, Bennett. “The Dreams of an Inventor in 1420,” Public Domain Review.2018. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dreams-of-an-inventor-in-1420/
Grafton, Anthony. “The Devil as Automaton: Giovanni Fontana and the Meanings of a Fifteenth-Century Machine,” in Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, edited by Jessica Riskin. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Grafton, Anthony. Magic and Technology in Early Modern Europe. Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 2005.
Grafton, Anthony. Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa. Harvard University Press, 2023.
Rossi, Cesare and Russo, Flavio. Ancient Engineers' Inventions: Precursors of the Present. Springer, 2016.
Sparavigna, A.C. “Giovanni de la Fontana, Engineer and Magician.” Cornell University Library, 2013.

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The Fire at Louvain Apr 28, 2024

Show notes

In the late-summer of 1914, a city burns and its university library with it. Unusually for this podcast, the story takes us into WWI, but there are medieval connections to the story of Louvain (Leuven) and what happened when the German army came to town.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

Bazydlo, Angela. “Manuscript lost in WWI fire turns up in Clark Archives.” https://clarknow.clarku.edu/2021/08/30/manuscript-lost-in-wwi-fire-turns-up-in-clark-archives/
Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Battles, Matthew. “Knowledge on Fire.” The American Scholar 72, no. 3 (2003): 35–51.
Bouwman, André. “Book burning in Louvain, 1914.” https://www.leidenspecialcollectionsblog.nl/articles/book-burning-in-louvain-1914
Delannoy, Paul. “The Library at the University of Louvain,” The Nineteenth Century, Vol. LXXVII - No. 59, p. 1061 May 1915.
Derez, Mark. “The Flames of Louvain: a Library as a Cultural Icon and a Political Vehicle,” What do we lose when we lose a library? Proceedings of the conference held at the KU Leuven 9-11 September 2015.
Gusejnova, Dina. “Librarians as Agents of German Foreign Policy and the Cultural Consequences of the First World War.” The Historical Journal 66, no. 4 (2023): 864–86.
Kipling, Rudyard. “In Aid of Recruiting.” https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/readers-guide/rg_speeches_29.htm
Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Matin, A. Michael. “‘The Hun is at the Gate!’: Historicizing Kipling's Militaristic Rhetoric, From the Imperial Periphery to the National Center: Part Two: The French, Russian, and German Threats to Great Britain.” Studies in the Novel 31, no. 4 (1999): 432–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533357.
Ovenden, Richard. Burning the Books. Harvard University Press, 2020.
Ovenden, Richard. “One of Europe’s Great Libraries Didn’t Stand a Chance… In Either of the World Wars.” https://lithub.com/one-of-europes-great-libraries-didnt-stand-a-chance-in-either-of-the-world-wars/

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Fernao Mendes Pinto 10: Lisbon at Last Mar 26, 2024

Show notes

The Fernao Mendes Pinto story reaches its conclusion, and he finally reaches Portugal once more.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Hart, Thomas R. “Style and Substance in the Peregrination.” Portuguese Studies 2 (1986).
Hart, Thomas R. “True or False: Problems of the ‘Peregrination.’” Portuguese Studies 13 (1997).
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “Real and Imaginary Dialogues in the Jesuit Mission of Sixteenth-Century Japan.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2/3 (2012).
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “The Oriental Voices of Mendes Pinto, or the Traveller as Ethnologist in Portuguese India.” Portuguese Studies 10 (1994).
Spence, Jonathan D. The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds. W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

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Fernao Mendes Pinto 9: With Francis Xavier in Japan Mar 13, 2024

Show notes

The story of Fernao Mendes Pinto intersects with that of the Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier, and takes him back to Japan.

If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.

I'm on BlueSky @a-devon.bsky.social, Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

Sources:

The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
App, Urs. “St. Francis Xavier’s Discovery of Japanese Buddhism: A Chapter in the European Discovery of Buddhism (Part 1: Before the Arrival in Japan, 1547-1549).” The Eastern Buddhist 30, no. 1 (1997).
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “Real and Imaginary Dialogues in the Jesuit Mission of Sixteenth-Century Japan.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2/3 (2012).
Willis, Clive. “Captain Jorge Álvares and Father Luís Fróis S.J.: Two Early Portuguese Descriptions of Japan and the Japanese.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22, no. 2 (2012).

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