In this episode, art historians Sarah Frisbie and Rachel Quist discuss the advent and proliferation of relics and reliquaries in early Japan. Grappling with tensions between material and immaterial, visible and invisible, they discuss how these objects channeled and, indeed, became the Buddha, preserving the Buddha’s sanctity while also rendering Buddhism accessible across the Japanese archipelago.

For more information, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

Sam Lasman (University of Oregon) and Samantha Pellegrino (University of Chicago) discuss monster-making in the medieval and modern Islamic world. Drawing on examples from Persian epic, modern Iranian cinema, ancient alchemy, and Iraqi fiction, they discuss encounters with supernatural beings, the creation of “artificial” life, and the politics of fantasy.

For more information, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

In this episode, Dr. Paola Rodriguez takes us into Dante’s Divine Comedy, exploring four characters within their historical context. She examines them as micro-historical episodes used by Dante to criticize and denounce certain societal mores of his time. The theory of micro-history itself functions as a central device in Dante’s narratorial structuring, lending itself to the process of historical redressing of injustices.

For more information, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

In this episode, we chat with Dr. John Kee about his contribution to Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, in which Kee explores the intersections of ecology, aesthetics, and human relationships to the natural world in the context of Byzantine representations of snakes in text and imagery.

For more information, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

What did it mean to have a voice in the Middle Ages? And why is music essential for understanding the medieval voice? Join musicologists Saagar Asnani and Flannery McIntyre as they discuss how the voice can reveal the relationship between music and identity.

For more information, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

In 2019, the discovery of ultramarine pigment in the dental calculus of a medieval woman provided the first physical evidence of female scribes, challenging the widespread assumption that manuscript copying was an exclusively male activity. In this episode, scholar Estelle Guéville draws on her doctoral research to explore the overlooked history of medieval women scribes and show how they played a far more significant role in literacy and book production than traditionally believed.

For more information, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

As a saint caught between the Italian and Iberian worlds, Saint Louis of Toulouse (d. 1297) is an important yet often forgotten piece of the religious and political history of Iberian expansion. In this episode, PhD candidate Jessica Minieri and MMA Pod producer Loren Cantrell trace the long history of the theft, movement, and translation of the relics of Louis of Toulouse—a saint associated with the House of Anjou in the Kingdom of Naples. Between his death and 1800, Louis’s relics were split between cities in Iberia, southern France, the Philippines, and California all in connection with Spanish conquest worldwide.

For more information, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.

In this episode, Loraine Enlow chats with Pilar Rivett about Rivett’s research on ninth-century baptismal and exorcistic rites and Jewish–Christian relations under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious.

Their conversation challenges scholarly assumptions about a decline in the culture of diasporic Judaism in the Latin West in pre-Rabbinic times (4th–9th centuries). Instead, they argue in favor of a Latin Jewish textual tradition.

For more information, visit www.multiculturalmiddleages.com.