I know. Just what everyone needed, an episode about an election. To take a break from reading and watching election postmortems, I decided to return to one of my favorite teaching texts, the monk Jocelin of Brakelond’s Chronicle of the Abbe...

This episode is devoted to a truly unique and pretty weird Arabic text, The Book of Charlatans by an obscure early thirteenth-century Arabic scholar, Jamal al-Din 'Abd al-Rahim al-Jawbari, commonly known simply as al-Jawbari.  At ...

In this episode I talk with the distinguished historian of the crusades Dr. Steven Tibble about the motivations of crusaders and of those Europeans who settled in the Crusader states of Outremer. Steve is the author of five books dealing with t...

On 3-4 July 1187 the Sultan of Egypt and Syria Saladin enjoyed the greatest military victory of his career. The Battle of Hattin, a two-day battle fought along the road leading to the town of Tiberias and, on the following day, on the Horns of ...

Yes, Kristin Lavransdatter is the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time. That isn't as impressive as it might sound, as the movie only brought in $3.7 million in box office receipts, but virtually all of that came from domestic s...