This week's show is the second in our double feature of plague movies! Sara and I watched Black Death, a bad film about torture and misogyny that is very much Not Bergman. We talked about funeral rites, fourteenth century timekeeping, and why it's a bad idea to give your trashy dude movie a specific date and location. Find Sara on Twitter @tinyredbook Historical Friction is a podcast about storytelling, pop culture, the past, and why we reenact it. Support the show on Patreon at...

This week's show is the first in a double feature of plague movies - Sara and I watched The Seventh Seal, and talked about how it represents religion, art and mortality. This is a fairly serious episode, but next week's is unhinged.  Partway through you might notice Sara's audio change - we had some slight tech problems and had to use our backup recording, so please be gentle with us like we're a bowl full of fresh milk. The music at the end is 'The Seventh Seal' by Scott Walker, because I...

Hi! We're back! Kicking off a spooky Autumn/Winter season, today's episode features Helen Victoria Murray to discuss Lizzie (2018), a fictionalisation of the real-life Borden family murders. We talked about crime and gender in fiction, the representation of class and power, and trying to make true crime sexy. This episode contains discussions of sexual violence, abuse and murder. Find Helen on twitter @helenvmurray Historical Friction is a podcast about storytelling, pop culture, the past,...

It's hard when the Pope is your dad, and your actual dad is the Pope. Melissa came back to reclaim her title of "Worst Film Watched For The Podcast". These films are terrible but they're also cultural landmarks, responsible for a lot of art historians and a key part of modern conspiracy culture. We discussed holy grails, the Vatican "Secret" Archives, what symbologists even do, and cancelling the Papacy.  Find Melissa on Twitter @hosmeriana, and follow Lads On Grand Tour Historical Friction...

Dangerous Beauty (1998), also released as A Destiny Of Her Own or The Honest Courtesan, is a fun and frothy romance about Veronica Franco, a poet and sex worker in 16th century Venice. Yes, we talked about the banana scene, but we also discussed the history of sex and religion in Venice, the Inquisition, and how far the film industry has come (and still has to go) in representing diversity in the past. It was a delight to have Professor Catherine Fletcher on to talk about this film with me,...

Look, this show is absurd. It's the French Revolution with zombies and literally nothing makes sense. It was cancelled after one season and that's definitely for the best, but it was still kind of fun to watch. Claire and I talked about royalty, fantasy and weird nationalism in a show that has absolutely no subtlety. We discussed the "Magical Negro" trope, which is explained further here Claire mentioned Lady Oscar, and I recommended A Place of Greater Safety Find Claire on Twitter...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you know the drill. This week Lizzie Rogers and I watched Lost in Austen (2009) and talked about lipgloss, Mr Darcy, and the Austen Romance Industry. We also dug into what happens when historic houses become fictional sites, and tried to understand just what it is about Pride and Prejudice that people can't get enough of. We mentioned: Colonial Countryside, and the work of the National Trust to unravel connections to colonialism at its properties -...

For this episode, we're doing something a little different and discussing the heavily fictionalised past as represented through fairytales. Focusing on Ever After (1998), Abigail Fine and I talked about 90s Hollywood girl power, gender roles, and some of the nastier tropes these films use. We mentioned: A chapter by Christy Williams, called The Shoe Still Fits: Ever After and the Pursuit of a Feminist Cinderella Marina Warner's work, specifically From The Beast To The Blonde and some modern...

WE'RE BACK, BABY. After accidentally plugging The Dig twice last season, I finally watched it! It's fine! In this episode, Hannah Taylor and I discussed the representation of women in archaeology, why "Anglo-Saxon" is nonsense, and trying to make digging cool. A couple of suggested readings on the use of "Anglo-Saxon" and "dark ages":  this New York Times article from 2019 about Medieval studies and racists M. Rambaran-Olm's excellent three part primer, including a bibliography Erik...

For the last episode of 2020*, we watched A Timeless Christmas, one of this year's Hallmark holiday films. The film is about a museum director who is somehow simultaneously a docent falling in love with the man she wrote her PhD on, a 1900s industrialist accidentally time travelling to the present day. It was irredeemably bad. Madeline and I got angry about collections handling, romance tropes,  museum budgets, and secret drawers.  *I'm taking December off to research and record, so the show...

Continuing an accidental series of episodes about archaeology, this week's episode covers three films - The Mummy, originally made in 1932, and its 1999 and 2017 remakes. Dr Nicole Cochrane and I talked about pith helmets, the racialization of Egypt, "lost world" fiction, and colonial nostalgia. Find Nicole on Twitter @tinyhistorian How Academics, Egyptologists, and Even Melania Trump Benefit From Colonialist Cosplay (Hyperallergic) "Who owns Egyptian heritage?" with Heba Gawad (Manchester...

Explosions! Swords! Horse girls! Melissa made me watch Pompeii (2014). We talked about the swords-and-sandals genre, the specific place of Pompeii in popular imagination, volcanos and Kit Harrington's hair. I do not recommend this movie. Please make more sexy trashy films about archaeologists. Find Melissa on Twitter @hosmeriana Historical Friction is a podcast about storytelling, pop culture, the past, and why we reenact it. Also sometimes bad wigs. Support the show on Patreon at...

For this episode, Helen Victoria Murray and I revisited Desperate Romantics (2009), the show that made a generation of teens (or maybe just us) fall in love with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. We discussed the differences between Victorian fame and 2000s celebrity, the relationship between aesthetics and accuracy in artists' biographies, and all the ways in which William Morris deserves better.  Find Helen on twitter @helenvmurray Historical Friction is a podcast about storytelling, pop...

In this episode, we talked about gender and sexuality in three recent stage productions of Twelfth Night, and what happens when you look for queer history in a play from the 1600s.  We discussed the 2012 Globe production, the 2017 Globe production, and the 2017 National Theatre production, as well as the 1996 film directed by Trevor Nunn. Find Eleanor on Twitter @elaffleck The Brutus/Cassius Beauty and the Beast fanvid Historical Friction is a podcast about storytelling, pop culture,...

Hi! It's a trailer! Welcome! Episodes release weekly on Mondays, so the first real episode is up on 2 November. Support the show on Patreon Follow the show on Twitter Follow Alice on Twitter --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/historicalfriction/message