In Our Time BBC Podcasts
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- History
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.
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The Orkneyinga Saga
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Saga of the Earls of Orkney, as told in the 13th Century by an unknown Icelander. This was the story of arguably the most important, strategically, of all the islands in the British Viking world, when the Earls controlled Shetland, Orkney and Caithness from which they could raid the Irish and British coasts, from Dublin round to Lindisfarne. The Saga combines myth with history, bringing to life the places on those islands where Vikings met, drank, made treaties, told stories, became saints, plotted and fought.
With
Judith Jesch
Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham
Jane Harrison
Archaeologist and Research Associate at Oxford and Newcastle Universities
And
Alex Woolf
Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St Andrews
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production
Reading list:
Theodore M. Andersson, The Growth of Medieval Icelandic Sagas, 1180-1280, (Cornell University Press, 2012)
Margaret Clunies Ross, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Robert Cook (trans.), Njals Saga (Penguin, 2001)
Barbara E. Crawford, The Northern Earldoms: Orkney and Caithness from AD 870 to 1470 (John Donald Short Run Press, 2013)
Shami Ghosh, Kings’ Sagas and Norwegian History: Problems and Perspectives (Brill, 2011)
J. Graham-Campbell and C. E. Batey, Vikings in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2002)
David Griffiths, J. Harrison and Michael Athanson, Beside the Ocean: Coastal Landscapes at the Bay of Skaill, Marwick, and Birsay Bay, Orkney: Archaeological Research 2003-18 (Oxbow Books, 2019)
Jane Harrison, Building Mounds: Orkney and the Vikings (Routledge, forthcoming)
Ármann Jakobsson and Sverrir Jakobsson (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas (Routledge, 2017)
Judith Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (Routledge, 2015)
Judith Jesch, ‘Earl Rögnvaldr of Orkney, a Poet of the Viking Diaspora’ (Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 4, 2013)
Judith Jesch, The Poetry of Orkneyinga Saga (H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures, University of Cambridge, 2020)
Devra Kunin (trans.), A History of Norway and the Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Olafr (Viking Society for Northern Research, 2001)
Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004)
Tom Muir, Orkney in the Sagas (Orkney Islands Council, 2005)
Else Mundal (ed.), Dating the Sagas: Reviews and Revisions (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013)
Heather O’Donoghue, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction, (John Wiley & Sons, 2004)
Heather O'Donoghue and Eleanor Parker (eds.), The Cambridge History of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2024), especially 'Landscape and Material Culture' by Jane Harrison and ‘Diaspora Sagas’ by Judith Jesch
Richard Oram, Domination and Lordship, Scotland 1070-1230, (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)
Olwyn Owen (ed.), The World of Orkneyinga Saga: The Broad-cloth Viking Trip (Orkney Islands Council, 2006)
Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (trans.), Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney (Penguin Classics, 1981)
Snorri Sturluson (trans. tr. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes), Heimskringla, vol. I-III (Viking Society for Northern Research, 2011-2015)
William P. L. Thomson, The New History of Orkney (Birlinn Ltd, 2008)
Alex Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070 (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), especially chapter 7 -
Marsilius of Padua
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the canonical figures from the history of political thought. Marsilius of Padua (c1275 to c1343) wrote 'Defensor Pacis' (The Defender of the Peace) around 1324 when the Papacy, the Holy Roman Emperor and the French King were fighting over who had supreme power on Earth. In this work Marsilius argued that the people were the source of all power and they alone could elect a leader to act on their behalf; they could remove their leaders when they chose and, afterwards, could hold them to account for their actions. He appeared to favour an elected Holy Roman Emperor and he was clear that there were no grounds for the Papacy to have secular power, let alone gather taxes and wealth, and that clerics should return to the poverty of the Apostles. Protestants naturally found his work attractive in the 16th Century when breaking with Rome. In the 20th Century Marsilius has been seen as an early advocate for popular sovereignty and republican democracy, to the extent possible in his time.
With
Annabel Brett
Professor of Political Thought and History at the University of Cambridge
George Garnett
Professor of Medieval History and Fellow and Tutor at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford
And
Serena Ferente
Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Sounds Audio Production
Reading list:
Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (eds), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially 'Popolo and law in Marsilius and the jurists' by Serena Ferente
J. Canning, Ideas of Power in the Late Middle Ages, 1296-1417 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
H.W.C. Davis (ed.), Essays in Mediaeval History presented to Reginald Lane Poole (Clarendon Press, 1927), especially ‘The authors cited in the Defensor Pacis’ by C.W. Previté-Orton
George Garnett, Marsilius of Padua and ‘The Truth of History’ (Oxford University Press, 2006)
J.R. Hale, J.R.L. Highfield and B. Smalley (eds.), Europe in the Late Middle Ages (Faber and Faber, 1965), especially ‘Marsilius of Padua and political thought of his time’ by N. Rubinstein
Joel Kaye, 'Equalization in the Body and the Body Politic: From Galen to Marsilius of Padua’ (Mélanges de l'Ecole Française de Rome 125, 2013)
Xavier Márquez (ed.), Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts (Bloomsbury, 2018), especially ‘Consent and popular sovereignty in medieval political thought: Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis’ by T. Shogimen
Marsiglio of Padua (trans. Cary J. Nederman), Defensor Minor and De Translatione Imperii (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Marsilius of Padua (trans. Annabel Brett), The Defender of the Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Gerson Moreño-Riano (ed.), The World of Marsilius of Padua (Brepols, 2006)
Gerson Moreno-Riano and Cary J. Nederman (eds), A Companion to Marsilius of Padua (Brill, 2012)
A. Mulieri, S. Masolini and J. Pelletier (eds.), Marsilius of Padua: Between history, Politics, and Philosophy (Brepols, 2023)
C. Nederman, Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995)
Vasileios Syros, Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of Ancient and Medieval Traditions of Political Thought (University of Toronto Press, 2012) -
Empress Dowager Cixi
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court. Cixi (1835-1908) started out at court as one of the Emperor's many concubines, yet was the only one who gave him a son to succeed him and who also possessed great political skill and ambition. When their son became emperor he was still a young child and Cixi ruled first through him and then, following his death, through another child emperor. This was a time of rapid change in China, when western powers and Japan humiliated the forces of the Qing empire time after time, and Cixi had the chance to push forward the modernising reforms the country needed to thrive. However, when she found those reforms conflicted with her own interests or those of the Qing dynasty, she was arguably obstructive or too slow to act and she has been personally blamed for some of those many humiliations even when the fault lay elsewhere.
With
Yangwen Zheng
Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester
Rana Mitter
The S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School
And
Ronald Po
Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at Leiden University
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production
Reading list:
Pearl S. Buck, Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China (first published 1956; Open Road Media, 2013)
Katharine A. Carl, With the Empress Dowager (first published 1906; General Books LLC, 2009)
Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (Jonathan Cape, 2013)
Princess Der Ling, Old Buddha (first published 1929; Kessinger Publishing, 2007)
Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press, 1987)
John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Harvard University Press, 2006)
Peter Gue Zarrow and Rebecca Karl (eds.), Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Harvard University Press, 2002)
Grant Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling (Hong Kong University Press, 2008)
Keith Laidler, The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (Wiley, 2003)
Keith McMahon, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)
Anchee Min, The Last Empress (Bloomsbury, 2011)
Ying-Chen Peng, Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making (Yale University Press, 2023).
Sarah Pike Conger, Letters from China: with Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and the Women of China (first published 1910; Forgotten Books, 2024)
Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (Atlantic Books, 2019)
Liang Qichao (trans. Peter Zarrow), Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Classics, 2023)
Sterling Seagrave, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (Vintage, 1993)
Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (first published 1991; W. W. Norton & Company, 2001)
X. L. Woo, Empress Dowager Cixi: China's Last Dynasty and the Long Reign of a Formidable Concubine (Algora Publishing, 2003)
Zheng Yangwen, Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History (Manchester University Press, 2018) -
Philippa Foot
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, Philippa Foot (1920 - 2010). Her central question was, “Why be moral?” Drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas, Foot spent her life working through her instinct that there was something lacking in the prevailing philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s which held that values could only be subjective. Could there really be no objective response to the horrors of the concentration camps that she had seen on newsreels, no way of saying that such acts were morally wrong? Foot developed an ethics based on virtues, in which humans needed virtues to flourish as surely as plants needed light and water. While working through her ideas she explored applied ethics and the difference between doing something and letting it happen, an idea she illustrated with what became The Trolley Problem.
With
Anil Gomes
Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, University of Oxford
Sophie Grace Chappell
Professor of Philosophy at the Open University
And
Rachael Wiseman
Reader in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production
Reading list:
Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford University Press, 1978)
Philippa Foot, Moral Dilemmas (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford University Press, 2001)
John Hacker-Wright, Philippa Foot's Moral Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013)
Benjamin Lipscomb, The Women Are Up To Something (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Chatto, 2022)
Dan Russell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Cambridge University Press), especially ‘Virtue Ethics in the Twentieth Century’ by Timothy (now Sophie Grace) Chappell -
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'the greatest poet of his age', Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542), who brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet, so preparing the way for Shakespeare and Donne. As an ambassador to Henry VIII and, allegedly, too close to Anne Boleyn, he experienced great privilege under intense scrutiny. Some of Wyatt's poems, such as They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek, are astonishingly fresh and conversational and yet he wrote them under the tightest constraints, when a syllable out of place could have condemned him to the Tower.
With
Brian Cummings
50th Anniversary Professor of English at the University of York
Susan Brigden
Retired Fellow at Lincoln College, University of Oxford
And
Laura Ashe
Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production
Reading list:
Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds.), Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance (Routledge, 2016)
Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (Faber, 2012)
Nicola Shulman, Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy (Short Books, 2011)
Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Patricia Thomson (ed.), Thomas Wyatt: The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1995)
Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Thomas Wyatt (ed. R. A. Rebholz), The Complete Poems (Penguin, 1978) -
Mercury
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the planet which is closest to our Sun. We see it as an evening or a morning star, close to where the Sun has just set or is about to rise, and observations of Mercury helped Copernicus understand that Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun, so displacing Earth from the centre of our system. In the 20th century, further observations of Mercury helped Einstein prove his general theory of relativity. For the last 50 years we have been sending missions there to reveal something of Mercury's secrets and how those relate to the wider universe, and he latest, BepiColombo, is out there in space now.
With
Emma Bunce
Professor of Planetary Plasma Physics and Director of the Institute for Space at the University of Leicester
David Rothery
Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University
And
Carolin Crawford
Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus Member of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production
Reading list:
Emma Bunce, ‘All (X-ray) eyes on Mercury’ (Astronomy & Geophysics, Volume 64, Issue 4, August 2023)
Emma Bunce et al, ‘The BepiColombo Mercury Imaging X-Ray Spectrometer: Science Goals, Instrument Performance and Operations’ (Space Science Reviews: SpringerLink, volume 216, article number 126, Nov 2020)
David A. Rothery, Planet Mercury: From Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World (Springer, 2014)