Tag Archives: Robert Bartlett

Do you want to study the supernatural in the Middle Ages?

Well you’re unlikely to be able to attend this course (if you are then you’re very lucky!), but if you want to read up on what the supernatural meant in the Middle Ages then I would recommend looking over the course notes for Eileen Joy’s The Medieval Supernatural.

I have created a page on this blog that captures the reading list as I just wanted to make sure I had all the suggestions recorded somewhere. In particular I would recommend the work of Robert Bartlett as a good introduction to the subject.

In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know . . . . there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world.  The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination — and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality — but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.
~ from Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
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Normans BBC series available on BBC iPlayer: Another one from Robert Bartlett

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Inside the Medieval Mind, I should also mention that there’s a major BBC series running at the moment about the Normans in England. Again it is written and narrated by Professor Robert Bartlett. I haven’t seen any of them yet, but I am sure it is worth seeing.

Here’s a clip from YouTube about the Battle of Hastings in 1066:

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Inside the Medieval Mind: Great BBC Series

I caught the third episode of the BBC series Inside the Medieval Mind, presented and written by Professor Robert Bartlett. The episode I watched was on Belief. I thought Bartlett did a great job of not just recounting religious beliefs, but instead delved into beliefs around life and death and how the two were linked together. The series is actually a couple of years old I think, but I managed to catch an on demand episode last night via Virgin Media. It seems to be possible to watch the whole series online at OVGuide, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Here’s a clip:

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