Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three hundred and fifteen of the Medieval podcast.

I'm your host Danielle Sebolski.

There are loads of wild statistics floating around the Internet about how much of human communication is nonverbal, raging hugely from something like half to like ninety eight percent.

But no matter how much of our communication involves words, every one of us has experienced the power words have to bring about healing or to cause harm.

With just one word, we can evoke a world of assumptions, stereotypes, and even accusations, clearly marking the difference between who's in and who's out.

And when it comes to legal terminology, the stakes are even higher.

This week, I spoke with doctor Aaron Wagner about the Language of heresy.

Aaron is an associate professor of English and Humanities at the State University of New York or Sunni Delhi, and the author of many books, both nonfiction and fiction.

Her academic work focuses on words and how they're wielded, which led her to writing her new book, The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval Literature.

Our conversation on what late medieval people meant when they used the word heresy, how the usage evolved, and how medieval people applied ideas of heresy beyond the borders of Christianity is coming up right after this.

Well, welcome erin.

It is so nice to meet you and I loved your books, so welcome to the Medieval Podcast.

Thank you.

I'm happy to be here.

This is exciting.

So we're going to be talking about some big issues.

So before we started, we just want to make clear we're talking about medieval perspectives on religion and not our own right.

Absolutely correct, condone.

The majority of the language that I study in this book, and any opinions that I'm also talking about here are my own and not my institution or anything like that.

Yes, overall, prejudice is a bad thing and we're not into it.

So not at all, not at all.

Let's just make that clear at the outset, because we are going to be talking about some dangerous words, the first one being heresy, because your whole book is the language of heresy.

So let's get this clear right at the front.

When we're talking about heresy in the purposes of this discussion, what do we mean by this and what part of the world and the time are we talking about for your work.

Okay, So heresy, I guess simply said my book says, it's not simple to define, but we do have sort of a basic working definition in as far as academics looking at the work, and that is they are beliefs or practices that are in contradiction to the mainstream orthodolog authority of the time.

And I was at a conference once where someone was like, but what is the church?

And that is a valid question as like a representative of the Orthodox institution.

At the same time, I was a grad student and was like, we all know what we're talking about.

Anyways, It's like pornography, right, I can't divine it, but I know when I see it.

So I'm looking specifically at medieval England, and I know that scholars in this area speaking for myself as well, and we can become a little insular pun intended, because England tends to feel like we're just fascinated by, like, look at what's happening in the thought and the history of England.

And so in that context, heresy, especially in the air I'm looking at and looking at primarily theology ideas practices that get associated with wiklephism or Lollardy, which are sometimes considered synonyms, sometimes not all of It's a tricky pathway to now, but I have tried to put it also in a slightly more broader, mostly European context, but also taking into consideration a wider medieval world that would have impacted the evolution of ideas and thinking in medieval England.

Right, And for your book, you're looking at literature.

Given the fact that heresy tends to be prosecuted as a crime, why are you looking at it in literature and not necessarily law.

Oh that's a great question.

I'm not a law you know.

So I think the thing about doing medieval studies, as you're aware, and I'm sure your audience is becoming very much aware of this, is that the line between the impact of literature and historical texts and religious texts starts to get kind of liminal, kind of blurry.

So I look at literature for in some ways the very simple reason that I was trained as a PhD in people English literature, but also because in fictional accounts, or in accounts that aren't necessarily relations of fact.

It gets tricky also in the Middle Ages, because even relations of fact and history play with our ideas of what we consider nonfiction or fiction, but that these give us insight into how people think and how people feel.

That we're not necessarily always looking at the law, and it's sometimes hard to measure impact by looking at just the law and just the statement.

So if you want to see what it means on the individual level, sometimes literature can give us a little more insight into that additional insight.

Well, especially because we don't have social media from the Middle Ages right.

So when that would be great though, I would love to see Marjorie Baxter's Instagram account.

Oh my gosh.

Well, when we're talking about trying to look at the way the people are talking about concepts, it's it's so different, And I'm comparing it to social media because if we look at the law records today, they may not tell us about the discussions that people are having around culture right now, which are very widely varied and sometimes spicy.

And so the best way we can look at this here, as you found, is through literature, which is one of the reasons that I was drawn into it as well when I was studying this.

All right, so you begin your book talking about heresy in general, So one of the plays that you begin here is talking about Lollardy or wickliffe Ism.

What are these things?

So John Wickliffe Late Medieval, which we very roughly could define as between like thirteen hundred and fourteen eighty five or fifteen hundred, really rough time span there.

John Wickliffe is a later medieval English theologian who generally just got people cranky all the time because I don't think he would view himself as a heretic, and he wasn't burned until after his death, which is an ironic little twist as well.

But he's constantly questioning and pushing.

He's like, I'm a scholar and I'm a theologian, I'm going to just ask questions.

And so he's raising questions about some key tenants of the Orthodox Church at the time, which were things like how exactly does the bread and the wine get transformed into the body and blood of Christ, So the issue of transubstantiation.

He's wondering about, Hey, should more people have access to be able to read and look at the scriptures?

And so that's questioning sort of the latinate culture of the church authorities at the time.

He's also in general raising questions about like, are people being good priests, like in the areas they're responsible for, are they actually living there?

Are they preaching there?

Are they just using it as a form of income.

So he's making people uncomfortable.

People like early Lancastrians are a fan of some of his stuff, the things that give them a little bit more power compared to the Church.

But eventually, for late medieval England, the Orthodox opinion kind of settles against Wickliffe, and so in the book I discussed that Wicklifites and Lollards, whether you consider those the same things or not is an open question and sort of debate.

Lollards are a little bit later, so we tend to think like early fourteen hundreds for kind of the height of the Lawlard movement and Lollards.

It can be simplistic to say they're proto Protestants, but I still think that's an easy way to kind of wrap our heads around them.

So they're taking a lot of the same ideas that Wicklifight and Wicklifight scholars and theologians are raising and kind of putting them into daily practice, or at least that's how I've kind of defined it here.

For me, there's kind of a distinction between are we going to read the work of learned theologians in universities that are in some ways doing mental exercises, or are we looking at people who might not even be able to read themselves.

Maybe they're memorizing, maybe they're participating in oral culture and are practicing that theology.

So certainly there's an overlap a lot of times we're talking about the same theology.

But my distinction that I draw there is sort of what kind of context is it being practiced in?

Again, that's kind of personal to me.

It's not necessarily how everybody would define those two.

But at the end of the day, an important thing I think to take away is that they are sharing similar theologies and ideologies that say, hey, I want to read the Bible, or I don't need to go to church and confess I could just pray to God right here and thinking through things that impact the authority of the church.

Well, I have to pause us here because they're I be people who are at home listening and going how could you say these things without getting burned?

Like I thought everyone got burned right away for saying something bad against the church.

So how and we're talking the second half of the fourteenth century.

Now, how is the church dealing with heretics at this moment.

Yeah, so we don't have legal per se burning of heretics until fourteen oh one.

De Heretico Comburendo for the burning of Heretics comes out sounds like a book being published, but is enacted some people say retroactively to justify the burning of a heretics.

So around this time is when we're thinking of that kind of corporal, terminal type of punishment.

But it's important to keep in mind at the same time that it was still relatively rare, Like if you take all the people who might be Lollard's or Wickli fights in England, it's still going to be a very very very small percentage to end up in that extreme circumstance.

And that's because ideally the church wants people to recan't to return to the fold.

That's much more beneficial in some ways for them.

A majority of people, like in the Norwich Heresy Trials, which is a little later, like fourteen twenty eight to fourteen thirty one, a lot of the records we have are people recanting, so they're saying absolutely bonkers things in the context of their world, but they're like, I don't want to die.

I don't see any benefit to that, right, And it's a little bit of a different.

In the intro to the book, I talk about some of the Protestant ideas, like modern Protestant ideas that I think are kind of buying into some of the martyr victim kind of angle, marginalized angle, where there's this idea that well, you've got to stay true to your belief, you've got to go to the end, you've got to die if you truly believe in this stuff.

And I think we see the rise of that mentality more with like John Fox and early Reformation and Renaissance.

And I think in the Middle Ages there was a practicality around like I mean, sure, I'll say that I I don't believe that anymore.

I don't know that it meant a sincere change of heart, but you know, there was kind of a pleasant practicality around what was worth dying for and whether they thought God cared that they died for what they said in a court system.

Well, and I think that there is also space, a lot more space before fourteen hundred and fourteen oh one for actual mistakes, right, And so you could say, oh, no, I actually didn't understand this, and then you would get forgiven you.

I might have to do some penance, and then everything is okay, because there is space for actual, genuine mistakes.

Right, Yeah, there's space for mistakes.

There's space for literature that's experimenting maybe Chaucer famously.

Right, We're always pinning down different meanings on to Chaucer because we view him as sort of this almost blank page that were like, what conflict in the Middle Ages?

Is he commenting on that?

Certainly, as people kind of study Arundel's constitutions, which are famous constitutions that come out fourteen oh seven, fourteen oh nine that say, hey, you can't write, you can't read, you can't you talk on the vernacular about this stuff.

Before that there is more openness, and after that things might feel a little more repressive.

And so again, looking at the heresy trials, you're getting insight into some of the oral communities, not the written texts.

And so I think you see some of the resistance there that you don't necessarily see in all of the circulating literature.

Okay, so we've been mostly talking about sort of official terms.

This person's a heretic, They're not a heretic, they're lollered.

They're not a lallered.

But you get out really early in the book this type of words that people are throwing around when they're meant to denigrate somebody who has heretical beliefs.

And this was really kind of speaking to me in the terms of like current climate, the words that we use to be dismissive of other people and their ideas.

So what did you find looking at that?

So part of what got me onto this project was the fact that I was seeing a lot of collocations, which is our fancy term for just like words that we see constantly in companionship with each other in these texts, and there'd be this constant Jews, Saracens, heretics kind of collocation, right, which again I'm using terms of the period, not what I would use in my own life.

So this is what's written in the text.

So I was like, how much are these being conflated identities or not?

And so it was interesting when I started looking into it.

Of course, there's a vast amount of scholarship on well, was Judaism considered a heresy or was it considered another religion was is lum considered a heresy or was it considered another religion?

And it wasn't fully established at the time either, Like we have consensus opinions that shift, and so it started to feel like it's really convenient to use any one of these terms, depending on contexts, to st and in for the other potentially, So if the law lord's doing something you don't like, maybe they feel a little Jewish to you.

And for censorious anti Semitic authorities, this allows them to dismiss them even further.

But the other step that I found that I had to kind of adjust my own perspective on as I was going in sort of like, let's look at our marginalized law lords and wicklophytes and how they're being mistreated, is that I realize the law lord and wicklophyte texts are also engaging in this, just pointing it in the other direction.

So there was a real reciprocity of everybody just feeling okay to throw around these terms for the person they didn't like.

Yes, absolutely, so before we go further, maybe it's good to establish how people could look at distinctly different religions and call them heresy.

So the way I think about it is looking at from the medieval Christian perspective, everyone in the world, the known world, has the same information, and yet you're not coming to the correct conclusion, which is ours, which is you know, the whole trinity, transcencentiation, all of that stuff.

Is that how you see it?

Yeah, pretty much, I mean.

And what's interesting is I realized also as I was working through this, is that as I got very insularly focused on England, I forget that, like a majority of the power in the world is actually with people who would think that Christianity is the heresy, right, which we it's easy to forget.

I mean, most English writers also obviously are opting to forget that.

But so they're this concept of sort of religions of the book that all three quote unquote Abrahamic religions kind of seem to share towards like they all kind of recognize that they are related in some way to each other because they share these figures like Abraham or something, right, and then they have different interpretations of the narrative that gets captured in the Christian New test of it.

And so even though for us practically for us these feel like three very distinct religions.

There's research on the classical era to look at and say, okay, Judaism really kind of crafted Christianity as a heresy as it was developing, right, and all these sort of narratives that show that there was like a haresiological process happening as these religions sort of splintered off from each other, and so ultimately they're all jostling for pre eminence, like which of us is the real interpretation, the real version?

Like you were saying, like, do you have the right interpretation of the facts.

Yes, it's really interesting because the more you read around, of course, it all all depends on where you're standing that's the right interpretation.

But we're coming from sort of a majority in England right now, which is the quote unquote Church.

Okay, So when we're talking about the ways people are talking about lot loards and vites, and then by extension Jewish people and Muslims, they're using this word that comes out as jangling.

Tell us about the word jangling, because I think this is so interesting.

So jangling is just my new favorite like medieval word, and it's what the first chapter focus is on.

And since i'm fascinated by the study of heresy and people basically reading or speaking against the rules.

Jangling really caught my attention, and jangling, I think, in some of its initial connotations, is more like what we would think of as gossiping, like just talk that isn't fruitful, isn't producing anything.

Maybe it's raising resentment, but it's often used against people that aren't considered to have authority anyways, so they need to shut up.

So there's research talking about women being considered janglers because you're thinking of power dynamics of like, oh, these women are over here chattering.

They don't know what they're talking about.

Obviously, I think women know what they're talking about, but the medieval the medieval writer is not so much.

So jangling became a kind of fascinating word to me.

And initially I was kind of working out of Chaucer's Manciple's Tale, and most of the Manciple's Tale is just the manciple talking about his own ideas about the world, and he uses the term jangling a lot, and so I started tracking it through medieval literature, and it seems to become as we become more and more fixated on orthodoxy of speech and writing.

In that late fourteenth century early fifteenth century work, it seems to be to be more and more connotated as specifically religiously dangerous speech as well that will either threaten your own standing in society, or your religious standing, or your safety within the Kingdom of God, like all of that kind of stuff.

So I just like jangling.

It often gets used also by about birds and like, which the Manciple's tale is sort of about, depending on the tradition, raven or crow who's talking against his master, depending on how you interpret it.

But it's that day of jangling, like that harsh kind of crowing in raucous and just it's causing problems, And so I look at that as a form of heterodoxy in these texts.

Well, it is still a jarring word, right When people say that something is jingling, it's nice, but if it's jangling, it's not nice.

And so it's interesting to have that sort of have consistently and have it be applied to people who are saying speech that is not useful and in a way sort of sort of warning people it feels like that their speech is not useful.

So like what you're saying is jangling to sort of tell other people as a signal like this is not speech that you should be paying attention to or repeating.

Yeah, and it can so nicely be alliterated with other words like japers and things like that, which are tricksters.

They're people you don't trust.

So yeah, it's convenient term.

Yeah.

I was trying to think of what could be sort of a parallel and right now, when we talk about people we don't want to listen to, it's yapping, which is again like a really harsh word that's meaningless, like little dogs yap, don't pay attention to them.

It feels like that's sort of similar.

Yeah, very much.

Yeah, So what you noticed was especially around the turn of the fifteenth century, so around fourteen hundred ish, this word jangling is applied to well, it's applied to women's speech before this, but it starts to be applied to women's speech in a way where gossiping starts to turn towards heresy.

And this leads us in the direction of which is so, what's the difference between a garden variety heretic and which Because everyone wants to know this, you know, we're just we're recording this during spooky season, and everyone wants to know what's the difference between a heretic and a witch.

Oh, well, that's another difficult question.

I feel like my book is just a book of questions.

Sometimes the answers.

Good research should be about questions.

We're first of all, dealing with sort of a transformation of what which means.

So when we first see which in English language, we're not necessarily seeing the gendered form that we're used to now.

So if you were to ask someone now to be like Agatha along, it would be it would be the female which stereotype who has that same connotation of like sticking your nose in where you're not supposed to be talking about things you're not supposed to talk about in earlier terms, which was kind of neutral as far as gender, So it could be anybody who's practicing necromancy or some form of magic, or even just some sort of like secret knowledge that isn't explicitly condoned.

It also doesn't have early discussions of neuromancy, and magic doesn't have quite the same stigma as it does as it becomes more gendered.

So obviously we see gendering at the same time, as we start to see magic as a product of almost like possession or someone acting through you, as opposed as a product of educated secret access to knowledge that you, as a really smart dude, can like enact on the world.

And so the overlap, I think, especially as we move into the more gender definition of which is that we can start calling heretics, which is now if we want, because oh, that connotes like a very easy violent association.

So we're talking about all these terms that get combined to make it perhaps easier to shove out people who believe differently than you.

The more you can pile them up, the more you can layer those kind of negative connotations on them.

So we often think of which is as that magic idea, and a heretic is more about the ideology.

But they start to lead or transition into each other.

Now are you seeing and this is a question I don't remember being addressed in the book, so maybe way out of left fields here, but are you seeing the same sort of rights of people recanting and get sort of getting away with repenting when it comes to witchcraft as you saw when you were looking at heretics.

Interesting, I didn't look at that per se because a lot of the research I'm doing is kind of just as we're transitioning, as opposed to firmly establish like continental witch trials, that are the stereotypes we know.

So I look at it, for example, in the context of the Saints' Live of Saint Catherine, who doesn't practice magic in the way that we would recognize it, but she has sort of aristocratic access to knowledge, is very learned, and is able to hold her own in a debate with men, so of course, wow, what's wrong with her?

And she seemed to be sort of channeling Jesus or the Lady Mary in these contexts, and Jesus also gets called a witch in that same Saints life, so it's association.

It starts to be like she has ideologies, she's debating, but it gets kind of represented as she's a vessel through which this power is working.

And that's how we get the later gender definition of which is the same thing.

It's women are actually smart, They're not practicing educated necromancy, right, They're just like vessels for the devil.

So that's to say I didn't look a lot at that, But what I will note is that when you start getting into the later witch trial kind of stereotypes that we're familiar with, and you have like the Malleus Maleficarum and the Hammer of Witches and those kinds of texts.

I think there is a little less room because the goal here is like we know what we want and we're just finding the language to get there.

And so I do think we see an uptick in execution continentally.

Now there were again very very few, if any try and remember of explicitly execution just for witchcraft in the same way that it was happening on the continent and Reformation and Renaissance.

So that's I guess my answer too.

Well.

I was asking this question because when it comes to heretics, as you're saying, it seems to be like we make a logical like air quotes, a logical argument about what is correct, and these people are incorrect, and it's very evident by logic.

But it seems to me when we start to get into like witches and especially gendered witches, all speech is suspect, so that all speech can lead you down the wrong path, and so you almost can't listen to witches defend themselves, and often they can't defend themselves because their speech is inherently a problem that could lead you astray.

Is that That's how I see it?

Do you think that's about?

Right?

A lot of the language in like the Malleus Maleficaran, but also earlier stuff around like Joan of arc who is implication in witchcraft, kind of adjacent stuff is that they are dangerous speakers, Like, yeah, their tongue will lead you down the wrong path.

So I think it does look different, right, And I'm again I don't want to speak out of turn since I don't have necessarily a lot of research to hand about this, but I'm guessing the tone of a trial, for like a continental witch trial is going to feel a little different than the kind of fairly private, lollered trials, Like you'd come into the court that's gathered there, right, You've listened to all the stuff read about you.

You would repeat whatever document you were given and like stamp your sign at the bottom.

Right.

I have a feeling it felt a little different because of the added connotations of which and of this danger that went beyond just infectiousness of heresy.

Yes, one of my favorite parts of the book was you pointed out that I can't remember which scholar it is was saying that, which is, they hang out in like basically what we call a covin now, and they're very happy.

And that's part of the problem, is that they're happily, you know, indulging in this speech and this witchcraft, and that's just not right.

Yeah.

I find the emphasis on emotions interesting, and I'm sure it's because the emphasis on like, well, they're too happy, that's a problem, right.

But there's also moments when the church is looking at the lowlets and they're like, man, they're too sad, Like why are they going around so somber and sad about everything?

So there's constant sort of evaluation of your affect, like how are you presenting yourself to the world.

Are you fitting your like safe norm balanced emotional state?

Yes?

And the only right way is our way, like stop stop doing things your way.

Yeah.

Yeah, It's always interesting to see people justifying how they are being prejudiced against other people because it's always so slippery and takes a lot of mental gymnastics.

As you were saying, okay, so we should wave into the conversation of conversos.

Who are the conversos of medieval Europe and England, especially.

For your work conversos.

I think you're a right to say medieval Europe at the beginning, because we're seeing this as a term and identity more commonly talked about Posts twelve ninety when in England this is the moment of the quote unquote expulsion.

So Jewish identity is at least going to be a lot less public.

You're not going to see it maybe or recognize it quite the same way.

But the converso is one who has converted from Judaism to Christianity.

And there are some famous, like basically public debates held in very prominent places like in front of the Pope and things like this, that are largely performative, and they're meant to show like, here's a converso, someone who converted, debating someone from their old faith.

Right, see how clearly Christianity is the better faith.

Even if it didn't always seem like it was working out that way, it was easy to spend like, well, obviously that argument is worse, right, right, And so the converso becomes this sort of ominous figure though because as much as it represented conversion, which for the Christian authority was like great Christian authorities were also hesitant to fully accept that as real.

They always had this little suspicion of like, you're just saying that you don't believe that, or even if you believe it, now you're gonna be much more liable to fall back into your old faith or your old ways.

So the converso figure becomes kind of a tricky figure for that reason.

In England we see it mostly dealt with the King sort of sponsors or patronizes the Domus conversorum or the House of Conversion, which is meant to be Hey, if you're Jewish and supposedly we've expelled all of you, if you convert, there is a place here will provide some protection, We'll provide some resources like physical aid, food, lodging.

So I think the question arises like would there be some people who would take advantage of that if it gave them a place to stay and resources and support and defense against violence potentially, So converso becomes a tricky label because of the authoritative structure that makes it hard to both be a Jewish person also hard to be a converso.

And so I think we find ourselves in slippery terms when you're dealing with people resisting an authority that wants a very strict definition or a set label.

Well, one of the moments that really jumped out from your book is that moment where you have a converso who's talking about his new belief in Christianity, and it's this is being performed in front of them, hope, and then Pope points to him and says, look, he's one of you, and it's like, there is never a point where you are Christian enough as a converse so to please everybody.

And one of the things you point out as well is that there seems to be almost an expectation that something should physically happen to you to make you look different, so everyone knows like it's this weird sort of human expectation that something should be so fundamentally different about you that it just removes all doubt.

And yet that is not how things work, No.

Not at all.

And I think both the third and fourth chapters the book dealing with Jewish and Islamic identity and existence in the Middle Ages is building on lots of great research out there that's already been done.

That's saying, you know, religion becomes basically an aspect of race or ethnicity in the Middle Ages, that we might not think of it that today, though I think today, even today, we might slip into that occasionally depending on whose rhetoric you're looking into, but especially then you might be considered other in terms of race or ethnicity solely because of your religion.

So it takes almost a physiological character to it.

And so obviously there are horrible stereotypical images of Jewish people in manuscripts and illustrations of the time.

And similarly, a lot of times if you're looking at like the exoticized or other Muslim figure in a medieval text, you're seeing these horrible caricatures of a physical appearance that is different from the English or you know, the European writer's physical appearance.

And so yeah, they're like, well, how will we ever know you still carry this bearing or this appearance that was you before?

So how can we trace that?

Right?

And so much fear and anxiety about someone slipping in and changing other people and tempting them away from the Christian orthodoxy.

Yeah, and I think this connects back to that idea that you were talking about before, as viewing heresy as contagion, which is definitely something people were quite worried about at the time.

So we're talking about physical transformation of conversos.

I mean, literature is your bag.

You notice that romance writers quote unquote fix this right, So how did they treat yes, right?

How did they treat conversions in romance literature?

So and romance literatures we're talking about like the fun TV of the time, like this is the pulp fiction.

These are the adventure stories.

So you want your audience feel self assured that everything's going the way it's supposed to go.

And so in these romances and in these narratives, you have characters, especially Muslims in these texts physically transform and so scholars, I'm not the first person to notice those.

Obviously, scholars have been looking at and studying this.

So sometimes you will have someone who's converted change from having black skin to like this brilliant, shining white skin, right, And it's kind of disturbing and upsetting because reading into the implications of that.

But the text seems to these texts, especially since they're romances and they're thinking about adventure and they're thinking about warfare, they recognize the power and strength inherent in the Islamic statehoods right, the Islamic nations.

So they recognize that this is a threat in more than one way, both physical kingdom land, but also spiritual.

And in fact, if they look at the Middle East or around Jerusalem, they're seeing lots of conversions.

They're seeing people convert in those areas to what is the Orthodox religion there.

That makes it easier to get along there.

So they want to convert the Muslims and these texts because they kind of want them as allies.

It's not just fear of the other, but it's also like, I realize you're kind of strong and kind of a threat, So isn't it better if we make you more like me, so people don't get the wrong idea about whether they should confm to you.

And so I think we see that happening in the romances especially.

Yes, it is difficult to read medieval romance for this reason, because you know you're going along and you're reading a story, and then you just get hit in the face of these awful, awful portrayals of people, usually as you say, from the Middle East, and then by the end they have a miraculous transformation, and then they are always like unblemished as a word that often comes up, which is just terrible to read.

Yeah, So for anyone that reads medieval romance, you know, take a deep breath before you do it, because it happens a lot in medieval romance, especially in the periods that you're looking at.

Yeah, and there are lots and lots of grim scenes that the romance seems to kind of take in stride, like, yes, someone went in and slaughtered an entire city that I think our modern sensibilities were like what, So, I think trigger warnings almost on every single I don't know if I could think of a single medieval romance.

Yeah, trigger warnings on a lot of them.

Yeah, on the entire Middle Ages.

One of the things that you say really clearly that I think doesn't get said enough.

And again, you are working with a lot of scholarship that's been done before, Like kudos to these amazing scholars who have been looking at this for a long time.

You say this very clearly, and that because of these romances, when people come across especially Muslims in this case that we're talking about, you've never come across one before, people don't know what the correct thing to do is in terms of religion.

Are you supposed to kill this person or are you supposed to convert them?

And I think maybe we don't talk often enough within our field about that confusion that is happening because of these romances and because of the crusading rhetoric and all of that stuff.

So do you want to talk a little bit about seeing this?

Yeah, there are some guides essentially like religious theological guides, which I love because they almost read like an FAQ section and they're like I heard someone was asking, you know, isn't it just cool if we like just be neighbors with this not Christian or with this heretic And they're like, to me, clear answer, No, you need to like be thinking very strictly about how you're maintaining orthodoxy.

And no, they're not going to go to heaven if they're not believing this X y Z thing.

But what I love about this moment is I don't think that authority'd be writing on that if there weren't people going around talking to me like, I don't know, Phil next door seems fine, probably he's okay, and the church being like no.

So I love those moments because you see potential for in the midst of what is in a lot of ways a very not taller society, especially on orthodox textual level.

But you still see glimpses of humanity where people are just like, this is another person.

They're probably cool, it's mine, And I think that's kind of a relief when you're looking through a lot of the other stuff.

Yes.

Yes, And this is one of the things to recognize because you're looking at literature, that this is sort of a remove from the people on the street, where you can sort of represent them in fiction, but we're not actually hearing what they're saying.

And I think there's often a moment where they're like, well, Phil says that this bread and wine isn't actually Jesus, so is it?

I don't know.

There's a lot like yeah, like Phil's eating some meat on Friday that I don't know, it smells pretty good, maybe it's cool to eat it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so of course the church can't burn everybody because there are just too many people, but they are, you know, increasingly.

Something that you noted and something other scholars have noticed as well, is that they're an increasing clamping down on what is appropriate and what's not.

And this happens over the centuries you're looking at and increasing into the early modern period.

Yes, definitely an attempt to feel better because they have all of this down there and writing at least right.

They have their constitutions, they have their rules.

But humans aren't that easy, and you're going to find that heterodoxy and that diversity of thought, regardless of how much we see preserved mostly orthodox authoritative texts.

Yeah, because it is in reality very hard to hate Phil when he's a nice guy.

It's really hard.

I mean Marjorie Baxter, who I talk about, who's like someone who was examined in the North Heresy trials, Like I think probably she would have been a totally annoying neighbor, I'm being honest, But in the text she's kind of awesome, and she's like punchy and colorful, and you could just see this real person peeking through the like very formulaic trial dis course and I don't know that's fun.

Yes, well, it just goes to show.

And one of the goals that you've stated in the book is to complicate this that it is not easy or simple, no matter how many people in the literature and in the sermons try to make it simple and easy.

It's never simple and easy, because that's not the human condition.

No, and that's again, we're literature.

I think helps us remember that in a way that maybe just reading the legal document would it.

Okay, So I'm going to give you the opportunity now to talk about Marvel.

And if you're not comfortable.

About this, we don't fandom.

No, you're cool with it.

Yeah, I'm cool with it.

So you finish the book with Marvel?

What does Marvel have to do with any of this?

I did the very typical academic thing, which is like, I need to make my work relevant, which even though I would argue all of it's still relevant, but you want to do the very explicit move I think.

And so I've watched them a lot of the Marvel work.

I like a lot of it.

So by no means am I coming in to like just squash all of Marvel.

Some of my friends know an amount of Marvel trivia that I cannot possibly imagine never holding in my brain.

But much like the medieval romances of their time, they are going to preserve and reflect sometimes more troubling instincts or ideologies that are still present in our society, And I think if you're living in twenty twenty five and you don't realize that there are still problems around the discourse around women, around Jewish people, around Muslim people, then you probably just haven't been paying attention.

So of course these things are going to creep into Marvel, and not all of them are even as dated references as you would like to say.

You'd like to say, well, in the fifties or in the seventies that showed up, but in fact they're still showing up in the nineties and then the two thousands and things like that.

So essentially, I look at WandaVision for example, to look at rep presentation of women, right, and in that we see like the Scarlet which being portrayed as a very problematic woman, right, Like a lot of it is her navigating issues of gender that basically get projected into issues of magical controversy.

But that's just kind of representative or indicative of some of the stuff happening under the surface.

Also, you have characters in the Marvel universe, and thankfully they haven't focused on these characters and a lot of their like big blockbusters yet, but characters their names are Saracen, which is a kind of a medieval pejorative term in the way that we adopt it, because it's, first of all, it doesn't have a lot of actual intrinsic meaning to it.

It's sort of wobbly and its meaning but also gets preserved, I think as exoticized and problematic in all the ways that we talked about.

So if we're seeing Marvel, which again, like our medieval romance, is the popular lid of our time, I just think it reminds us of the fact that these conversations are still ongoing, because they're creeping even into there.

And people who tell you, as I have been told, that you just analyze stuff too much, I think is a fallacy, and that we could certainly analyze even the things we're consuming and sort of our downtipe.

Well, yes, I mean, I think it is difficult to make the argument for using Saracen as a character's name is cool.

No, no, no, there isn't really a way to argue that that's still okay, although I have no doubt someone on the internet you will argue with me for that state, because that's the nature of the Internet.

So having looked at language and heresy and other ring and all of this stuff from the late Middle Ages?

What do you want to leave people with?

Looking at the way that both people in the Middle Ages and us today, the way we talk about each other, and how these words affect people, well.

I think some of the big takeaways for me are that language is never what we think of a stereotypically just language.

Language is a form of action, and it's going to eventually build and impact people in very real, very physical ways.

So just boys talk anything like that, right, is not really a thing.

That's not really a thing, I would say.

Also, though, we have to be careful sometimes when we're crafting.

Like again, coming from my own background, I grew up much more evangelical than I am today, and there's a tendency to want to map ourselves onto sort of an underdog mentality and being very careful of what the underdogs are saying as well.

Right, that we're none of us free of potentially buying into discourse that's convenient to us when we want to make a point or when we want to win an argument.

So making sure we analyze our own language, even when we think like we're on the right side of history, making sure that we're talking about that side of history in the right terms.

Yes, always doing the best we can.

And as Maya Angelou said, when we know better, we do better, and we just got to keep learning and working at it every day.

And I think that this book is really going to, I hope, have an impact on the way people look at this period and England and its literature, and the way that people are talking about religious terms, and the way people are talking about each other.

So thank you so much Erin for being on and talking with us all about it.

Thank you so much for having me.

To find out more about Aaron's work, you can visit her website at Aaronkwagner dot com.

Her new book is The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval Literature.

Before we go, here's Peter from medievalis dot net to tell us what's on the website.

What's going on?

Peter, Hey, Hey, Well, we at medievalis dot Net we tend not to make too many comparisons to Game of Thrones, but this one news piece gives the Middle Ages is a real go on violent Okay.

So yes, our researchers out of Hungary were able to piece together the final moments of the life of Bella of Moscow.

He was a duke and a grandchild of the king, and according to chronicle counts, he was killed in twelve seventy two, ambushed by a rival.

It was almost like a fight that just kind of broke out, right, But however, his bones were preserved, and he just a forensic examination and figured that he was attacked by at least three assailants using sabers and swords, leaving him with twenty six wounds, nine of which to the skull.

Wow.

Yeah, the researches even right, this was quote overkilled unquote.

Well yes, although I don't know if we can count like one assassination as being demonstrative of the Middle Ages, because like I think some murders today are pretty grisly as well.

Yeah, sure, sure, you know it.

Just this seems particularly gruesome.

All the details are in the article, and we got a lot of details.

All the people who love true crime, especially medieval true crime, they can check out all of the gory details on medievalist dot net.

Yes, so we have that, plus so much lighter fare on music in medieval Persia.

And I look at the new TV series Robinhood, which apparently is from MGM.

Plus, I didn't even know there was a new Robinhood out.

I mean, there's so many streaming services now it's hard to keep up.

Yeah.

Yeah, indeed, same with like kind of films.

Everything's kind of like under the radar.

Even we keep an eye out for this kind of stuff, like medieval themed TV shows or movies.

So yeah, let us know if there's something new that's being played around your part of the world.

Yes, and he's talking to you listeners, not to me.

Send a message to medievalist dot net at gmail dot com if there is a series that is particularly good, right indeed, indeed, Well, thank you, Peter.

I'm glad you're sounding better, and thanks for stopping by and telling us what's on the website.

Thanks.

Thank you as always to all of you for being here and supporting indie history.

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