Leenia


I don't know whether you could listen to these via some 'podcast' app; it might be possible. They are sent out in podcast form.

In case you aren't familiar with them, Melvyn Bragg takes a topic and selects academic experts on it as guests. They submit notes to him in advance, on the basis of which he guides the discussion.
The 'experts' for the Tristan episode were

Laura Ashe Worcester College, University of Oxford
Juliette Wood Cardiff University
Mark Chinca University of Cambridge

There is a reading list for each programme on the website: here is the one for T and I:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06sny88

Mark Chinca, an expert in medieval German, was there because the story appears in German, of course, and Dutch.

Ann

'The Matter of Britain' was mentioned in the Radio 4 Programme about Tristan and Iseult that I mentioned.

Jack

Florence linked to "Turkey": I am very vague on dates here, though in theory I like to have them clear, and but just maybe via Venice which at one point had an empire including surprising bits of land round the Adriatic. This discussion is making me look at bits of European history we never did in school, where even the 'wars of the three kingdoms' was unhelpfully (I now think) taught as the English Civil War so that until recently I had little idea how the Irish and the Scots a) were intertwined historically and culturally and b) were involved in those wars in complicated and surprising ways. The sort of crap teaching of English History that the Conservatives want to see a return to I suppose.

Ebor:

No, we shouldn't say 'dark ages'.

I'm thinking how much Latin was a common language across culture for a long time.