2020-11-01
39 分钟This is medieval death trip for Saturday, October 31, 2020.
Episode 84, medieval true crime, one concerning miraculous justice for a mutilated priest.
Hello and welcome to Medieval Death Trip, the show where we explore the wit and weirdness of medieval texts.
I'm your host, Patrick Lane, and once again we've arrived at our Halloween anniversary episode, and it seems like it wasn't that long since our last one, though at the same time, last Halloween feels like an eternity ago.
This Halloween episode will be a little different from previous ones.
Rather than being a standalone fright fest, it will be the first of a little themed miniseries on the subject of medieval true crime, though the true part of it perhaps needs some qualifiers and scare quotes and an asterisk, at least as far as today's text is concerned.
But really, shouldn't the true in true crime, even in its common 21st century usage, come with some of those same qualifiers and hedges?
For those of us in podcasting, and im sure for many of you trend savvy listeners, the boom in true crime content over the last few years has been impossible to ignore.
Though true crime podcasts have been around for ages, this boom is generally credited to the first season of Sarah Koenigs podcast serial, whose first episode came out in October of 2014 and has been credited with bringing podcasting into the mainstream media and mass market.
Thats one of those narratives that undoubtedly has some truth to it.
Indeed, probably a lot of truth to it, which Im sure is oversimplifying and omitting other factors and corollary narratives.
After all, its the same year and month that this podcast youre listening to debuted.
So whos to say whats really responsible for the boom in podcasting?
I know from Twitter that some of you who listen to this podcast are also fans of true crime as a genre, and that makes perfect sense to me.
Theres a shared emphasis on the combination of the macabre with the documentary.
Theres also a concern in common about deriving entertainment from real suffering, an ethical question for both producers of this kind of content and listeners.
That issue is particularly sharp, I think, for true crime that covers recent cases where you also have to consider the lives of actual survivors and relatives whose trauma youre either narrating or consuming.
My life is a little easier with this show just because of the distance of time and the fuzziness surrounding the reality of many of our sources, but the concern is still there, and wrestling with it was one of the reasons I took so long in making this summers episode about the persecution of the Jews during the Black Death.
My own interest in true crime comes with some reservations.
I certainly do consume it, though, mostly in the form of tv forensic procedurals, shows primarily focused on the investigative aspects of crime.