Episode 25: The Thirteenth Warrior with Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee and Dr. Thomas Lecaque
For our 25th episode, we have only one question: IS THERE A CAVE?
This week we are joined by two scholars ready to get medieval on us all: Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee. We're celebrating the great epic that wasn't: The 13th Warrior. This movie is so good and so bad at the same time that it's hard to quantify. But we're gonna do it anyway. We're talking Vikings, the Abassid Empire, man-bears, and maybe the greatest language scene in film history. Grab some mead, because it's made from honey, just like this podcast.
Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee is a medievalist and a cartographic historian, as well as a historian of roads and pathways and pilgrimage. But he is best well known for my work on the role of eels in pre-modern England from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. He is heavily engaged in outreach and public engagement to make the eel history more widely known, and to raise awareness for the role of eels as an endangered species. His work with eels and eel history has been profiled in TIME, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Hakai Magazine, and The New Yorker.
Dr. Thomas Lecaque is an Associate Professor of History at Grand View University. He has a Ph.D. in Pre-Modern European History from the University of Tennessee, an M.A. in English with a focus on Old English and Anglo-Norman literature from Truman State University, and a B.A. (also from Truman) in History with minors in Philosophy & Religion and English.
His research has moved on to looking at the same language of religious violence and apocalypticism and its impact on other time periods and events. His current project looks at the rhetoric of holy war across languages and denominations in the wars of empire between England and France and numerous Native polities in the northeastern section of the United States. He also works on expressions of these sentiments in contemporary America, largely via public essays in places like The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Bulwark, Religious Dispatches, and the History News Network.