Episode 32: Kingdom of Heaven with Dr. David Perry, Dr. Matthew Gabriele, Dr. Thomas Lecaque, and Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee
You've been asking for this film ever since I announced there would be a podcast. Today we jump in head first to the Director's Cut of Ridley Scott's 2005 epic, Kingdom of Heaven. This is a beautiful and seriously flawed film, but it is fun to watch. I decided that a film this big needed an army of historians, so I invited back HATM Podcast alums David Perry, Matthew Gabriele, John Wyatt Greenlee to talk all things Crusades. We talk about the film's strengths and its flaws, and dive deep to discuss things that matter, such as how to see this film as a response to 9/11 and exactly how many orcas would it take to fight Liam Neeson.
David M. Perry is a journalist and historian. He is the co-author of Oathbreakers and The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, both from HarperCollins. Publishers Weekly is calling Oathbreakers “An enlightening portrait of the medieval mindset” while The Boston Globe said The Bright Ages was “incandescent and ultimately intoxicating.”
Over the last few years, Perry’s work on history, parenting, disability, and politics has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Smithsonian, Slate, CNN, and many others.
Perry was a professor of Medieval History at Dominican University from 2006-2017. His scholarly work focuses on Venice, the Crusades, and the Mediterranean World. He’s the author of Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015). Now he works for the University of Minnesota, convincing students that studying history is good for them and good for their careers (it is!).
Dr. Matthew Gabriele is Professor of Medieval Studies at Virginia Tech University. His research and teaching focus on ideas of religion and violence, as well as nostalgia and apocalypse, focused on the European Middle Ages and how that period has been remembered by subsequent generations. He currently teaches at Virginia Tech.
He has published several scholarly books and numerous peer-reviewed articles, which have led to invited talks given to universities across the United States, and he has also presented his research at universities in England, Scotland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. In 2010, he was a visiting researcher at Westfälische Wilhelms Üniversität-Münster, and in 2023 he was the Donald J. Bullough Fellow in Mediaeval History at the University of St. Andrews, UK.
His public writing has appeared in such places as The Washington Post, Time, CNN, Slate, and MSNBC. He was between 2018-19 a columnist for Forbes, and was a columnist for Smithsonian Magazine between 2020-21. He has appeared as an expert on the History Channel and NPR, and other interviews with him on radio, podcasts, and TV have aired locally, nationally, and internationally.
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. I also work 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.
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.