Episoder
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In Black Music, a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of the avant-garde jazz scene. Brent and Adam, both jazz critics, discuss Baraka’s intimate connections to major players in the scene, and how his work squarely tackles the challenge of writing about music. Published while he still went by LeRoi Jones, the collection provides a composite picture of Baraka’s evolving thought, aesthetic values and literary experimentation. Whether you’re familiar with the music or totally new to the New Thing, Black Music is an essential guide to a period of political and artistic upheaval.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Subscribe to Close Readings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: [email protected]
Further reading in the LRB:
Adam Shatz: The Freedom Principle
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/may/the-freedom-principle
Adam Shatz: On Ornette Coleman
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n14/adam-shatz/diary
Philip Clark: On Cecil Taylor
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/april/cecil-taylor-1929-2018
Ian Penman: Birditis
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n02/ian-penman/birditis
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In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible. But before reaching that conclusion he had written several novels taking aim at his ‘crazy, sterile generation’ with a sparkling, acerbic and increasingly reactionary wit. In this episode, Colin and Clare look at A Handful of Dust (1934), a disturbingly modernist satire divorced from modernist ideas. They discuss the ways in which Waugh was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, with his belief in the artist as an agent of cultural change, and why he’s at his best when describing the fevered dream of a dying civilisation.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Perry:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n16/seamus-perry/isn-t-london-hell
John Bayley:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n20/john-bayley/mr-toad
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Manglende episoder?
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Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the ways in which it reveals a passionate commitment to republicanism while recoiling from political extremism. Mark and Seamus discuss why, despite Wordsworth’s claim of being innately republican, discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution is strangely absent from the poem, which is more often preoccupied with romance and the imagination, particularly in their power to soften zealotry.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Perry:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/seamus-perry/regrets-vexations-lassitudes
E.P. Thompson
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n22/e.p.-thompson/wordsworth-s-crisis
Colin Burrow:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/colin-burrow/a-solemn-and-unsexual-man
Marilyn Butler
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n12/marilyn-butler/three-feet-on-the-ground
Thomas Keymer
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/thomas-keymer/after-meditation
Get in touch: [email protected]
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In this episode, we tackle Juvenal, whose sixteen satires influenced libertines, neoclassicists and early Christian moralists alike. Conservative to a fault, Juvenal’s Satires rails against the rapid expansion and transformation of Roman society in the early principate. But where his contemporary Tacitus handled the same material with restraint, Juvenal’s work explodes with vivid and vicious depictions of urban life, including immigration, sexual mores and eating habits. Emily and Tom explore the idiosyncrasies of Juvenal’s verse and its handling in Peter Green’s translation, and how best to parse his over-the-top hostility to everyone and everything.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Remembering Peter Green
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/september/peter-green-1924-2024
Claude Rawson: Blistering Attacks
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n21/claude-rawson/blistering-attacks
Clare Bucknell & Colin Burrow: What is satire?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/on-satire-what-is-satire
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Mary and Irina resume their discussion of Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on three stories of female agency, deception and desire. Alibech, an aspiring hermitess, is tricked into indulging her powerful sexual urges; Petronella combines business and pleasure at the expense of her husband and lover; while Lydia demonstrates her devotion by killing hawks and pulling teeth. As Mary and Irina discuss, these stories exemplify the ambiguous depiction of women in the Decameron, where the world is powered by rapacious female lusts, sex has no consequences and conventional morality is suspended.
Read more on the Decameron in the LRB: https://lrb.me/decameronpod
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Get in touch: [email protected]
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Brent Hayes Edwards talks to Adam about Aimé Césaire's 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thought and a precursor to the writings of Césaire's protégé, Frantz Fanon. Césaire was Martinique’s most influential poet and one of its most prominent politicians as a deputy in the French National Assembly, and his Discourse is addressed directly at his country’s colonisers. Adam and Brent consider Césaire’s poetry alongside his political arguments and the particular characteristics of his version of négritude, the far-reaching movement of black consciousness he founded with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Subscribe to Close Readings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde’s life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just ten months earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James’s Theatre in London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying do with his comedy, written on the cusp of this dark future. The ‘strange mixture of romance and finance’ Wilde observed in the letters of his lover, Alfred Douglas, could equally be applied to Earnest, and the satire of Jane Austen before it, but is it right to think of Wilde’s play as satirical? His characters are presented in an ethical vacuum, stripped of any good or bad qualities, but ultimately seem to demonstrate the impossibility of living a purely aesthetic life free from conventional morality.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Colm Tóibín on Wilde's letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n08/colm-toibin/love-in-a-dark-time
Colm Tóibín the Wilde family: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n23/colm-toibin/the-road-to-reading-gaol
Frank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n19/frank-kermode/a-little-of-this-honey
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In his long 1938 poem, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and, above all, honesty – and applied them in a way that has few equivalents in English poetry. This diary-style work, written from August to December 1938, reflects with ‘documentary vividness’, as Ian Hamilton has described, on the international and personal crises swirling around MacNeice in those months. Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s lively depiction of the anecdotal abundance of London life and the ways in which its innovative rhyming structure helps to capture the autumnal moment when England was slipping into an unknowable winter.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Samuel Hynes: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n05/samuel-hynes/like-the-trees-on-primrose-hill
Ian Hamilton: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n05/ian-hamilton/smartened-up
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The Annals, Tacitus’ study of the emperors from Tiberius to Nero, covers some of the most vivid and ruthless episodes in Roman history. A masterclass in political intrigue (and how not to do it), the Annals features mutiny, senatorial backstabbing, wars on the imperial frontiers, political purges and enormous egos. Emily and Tom explore the many ambiguities that make the Annals rewarding, as well as difficult, reading and discuss Tacitus’ knotty style and approach to history.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Mary Beard: Four-Day Caesar
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n02/mary-beard/four-day-caesar
Anthony Grafton: Those Limbs We Admire
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n14/anthony-grafton/those-limbs-we-admire
Shadi Bartsch: Fratricide, Matricide and the Philosopher
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n12/shadi-bartsch/fratricide-matricide-and-the-philosopher
Mark Ford: The Death of Petronius
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/mark-ford/the-death-of-petronius
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been hurt by love, a love ‘more fervent than any other love’, and intends his work as a guide to life and love for young women in particular. In the first of two episodes on Boccaccio’s hundred novelle of sex, dishonesty and foolishness, Mary and Irina consider why both the preface and first story – about the disreputable merchant Cepparello – start with a confession, before looking at the later tale of the gardener Masetto and his noble efforts tending to the needs of every nun in a convent in Lamporecchio.
Subscribe to Close Readings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Read more on Boccaccio the LRB: https://lrb.me/decameronpod
Get in touch: [email protected]
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Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiography, history, biography, fiction, music criticism and political science, its fourteen essays set the tone for Black literature, political debate and scholarly production for the course of the 20th century. Souls was an immediate bestseller, the subject of furious debate and a foundational work in the new field of sociology.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Subscribe to Close Readings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is: they see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/clare-bucknell/his-own-dark-mind
Marilyn Butler: Success
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/marilyn-butler/success
John Mullan: Hidden Consequences
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n21/john-mullan/hidden-consequences
Thomas Jones: On Top of Everything
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/thomas-jones/on-top-of-everything
Get in touch: [email protected]
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‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. The poem’s most obvious preoccupation seems to be the Victorian notion of the ‘fallen woman’. When she wrote it Rossetti was working at the St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate, a refuge for sex workers and women who had had non-marital sex. Anxieties around ‘fallen women’ were explored by many writers of the day, but Rossetti's treatment is striking both for the rich intensity of its physical descriptions and the unusual vision of redemption it offers, in which the standard Christian imperatives are rethought in sisterly terms. Seamus and Mark discuss how post-Freudian readers might read those descriptions and what the poem says about the place of the ‘market’ in Victorian society.
Read the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
This episode features a full reading of 'Goblin Market' by Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones at the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour. Watch the reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHW9MevJk
Find more about the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation here: https://www.thepoetryhour.com/foundation
Subscribe to Close Readings:
In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast to unlock all the episodes;
In other podcast apps here: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Read more in the LRB:
Penelope Fitzgerald: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n05/penelope-fitzgerald/christina-and-the-sid
Jacqueline Rose: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/jacqueline-rose/undone-defiled-defaced
John Bayley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n06/john-bayley/missingness
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In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account of the bloody and chaotic power struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. In their first episode on Latin literature’s so-called ‘Silver Age’, Tom and Emily dive into this brutal and unforgiving epic poem. They explore Lucan’s slippery relationship to power, his rhetorical virtuosity and the influence of Stoicism on his worldview.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract form this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
John Henderson: Dead Eyes and Blank Faces
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n07/john-henderson/dead-eyes-and-blank-faces
Nora Goldschmidt: Pompeian Group Therapy
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/nora-goldschmidt/pompeian-group-therapy
Thomas Jones: See you in hell, punk
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/thomas-jones/see-you-in-hell-punk
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and closer to an impossible and perhaps comical ideal of chivalric perfection. In 'Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight', his most well-known incarnation, Gawain faces a series of peculiar tests and apparently fails them all. 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle', a later poem, takes many elements from 'The Greene Knight' and exaggerates them to the extreme: the cups the knights drink from are so large they’re impossible to drink from, and Gawain faces an even more peculiar sequence of tests, but meets them all perfectly. Irina and Mary discuss the degree to which this exaggeration can be taken as a satire on chivalric expectations, and whether by this point the character of Gawain should be considered more monastic than knightly.
Read the text here:
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-sir-gawain-and-the-carle-of-carlisle
Read some Arthurian background in the LRB here:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n24/tom-shippey/so-much-smoke
Subscribe to Close Readings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts by clicking 'subscribe' at the top of this feed;
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Get in touch: [email protected]
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After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife, Nadezhda, spent the rest of her life dodging arrest, advocating for Osip’s work and writing what came to be known as Hope against Hope.
Hope against Hope is a testimony of life under Stalin, and of the ways in which ordinary people challenge and capitulate to power. It’s also a compendium of gossip, an account of psychological torture, a description of the poet’s craft and a love story.
Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to discuss his final selection for Human Conditions. They explore the qualities that make Hope against Hope so compelling: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s uncompromising honesty, perceptiveness and irrepressible humour.
Subscribe to Close Readings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on Emma as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider how the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Barbara Everett
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n03/barbara-everett/hard-romance
John Bayley
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/john-bayley/yawning-and-screaming
Marilyn Butler
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austen-s-word-process
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that attempts to unite his death with the 600,000 deaths of the civil war and reconfigure the assassination as a symbolic birth of the new America. Seamus and Mark discuss Whitman’s cosmic vision, with its grand democratic vistas populated by small observations of rural and urban life, and his use of a thrush as a redemptive poetic voice.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Get in touch: [email protected]
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In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the margins of Roman society, writing primarily for plebeians and upsetting the conventions they simultaneously established. Plautus’ ‘Menaechmi’ is full of coinages, punning and madcap doubling. Terence’s troubling ‘Hecyra’ tells a much darker story of Roman sexual mores while destabilizing misogynistic stereotypes. Emily and Tom discuss how best to navigate these very early and enormously influential plays, and what they lend to Shakespeare, Sondheim and the modern sitcom.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in this dialogue with Solomon, printed in Antwerp in 1492, that we find him at his irreverent and scatological best as they engage in a battle of proverbial wisdom. Mary and Irina consider some of the more startling and perplexing of the riddles and discuss how the development of Marcolf’s earthy rejoinders tells a story about justice and political power.
Read the text here:
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/bradbury-solomon-and-marcolf
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
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Get in touch: [email protected]
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