I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 January 2024

The Rest is History The Fall of the Aztecs: War to the Death Part 7. It’s time that I finished this 8-parter off, before I forget how it started. This episode deals with the Siege of Tenochtitlan – the last stand of the Aztec warriors. As they point out, Meso America was so divided that it was easy to colonize. Conquest by the Spanish wasn’t inevitable- after all, the Chinese and Ottomans had empires too- but they were unlikely to colonize Meso-America, and given the competitiveness and entrepreneurship in Europe at the time, the Europeans were always going to come. The Spanish Conquest established a template for other conquests, transforming Meso-America into a Spanish place. They talk about Matthew Restall’s approach towards the conquest (I must seek him out) which depicts Cortez as a mediocrity, and which seeks to take out the glamour of the Conquistadors, leaving the horror and drama. Sandbrook and Holland (the presenters) don’t go that far: they claim that there was courage on both sides. 

The Fall of the Aztecs: The Last Emperor Part 8 As Tenochtitlan falls in August 1521, the story of sacking of a city repeats, as it has through Western stories (think Troy, think Jerusalem). Is the Spanish Conquest to be condemned? Certainly, Protestants dined out of its barbarity, and there is a strong progressive argument against it. Cortez was still desperate to find gold, and he was prepared to torture the Mexica to find it. Meanwhile, Charles V in Europe gave his approval of the expedition, and Cortez’s wife Catalina (a forced marriage) turned up in Tenochtitlan, only to die suddenly (how convenient). How much changed after the conquest? The Mexica were not slaves and they continued to work as peasant labourers, much as they had under the Aztecs. The Spanish were deferential towards rank and hierarchy amongst the people they conquered, as long as their opponents converted. The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared, speaking Nahuatl, at a place that was already a pilgrimate site to fertility goddesses. Cortez was not good at governing. He married Malinche and gave her her own estates, remarried and started another family, then sailed off to Spain to fight innumerable lawsuits- the fate of most of the Conquistadors- and he died there.

Return Ticket (ABC) I wanted something light to fill in about 20 minutes, and this travel series is certainly light. Hosted by Jonathan Green, of whom I am not particularly enamoured, these are short travel segments taking a somewhat quirky view of popular travel spots. I’m not particularly interested in hearing about places that I haven’t seen (and am unlikely to do so now), but I was attracted to the episodes where he talks about places that I have been to. Order and chaos in Mumbai juxtaposes the sheer crush of so many people against the unseen networks that somehow make this place work. He visits the dhobiwalas in the huge open air laundry near Maha Laxmi Railway Station ( I wrote about them in my travel blog here), then Churchgate Station, where the dabbawalas collect and distribute tiffin boxes throughout the city. He finishes off in a national park in Mumbai where he sees a leopard. 

The very first episode of this program (S1E1) is London Underground- Literally starts off in the Underground but then excavates deeper into the other services laid below the Tube like British Telecom, bolt-rooms for politicians and passageways for police. He then discusses the Iceberg Houses in Kensington, where a standard Regency exterior hides multiple basement levels with pools, gymasiums, theatres etc.- in effect, inconspicuous consumption in houses that are largely unlived-in, and merely an investment product. The juxtapositon between extreme wealth and poverty is jarring, with the Grenfell Towers nearby.

But this program is too flippant for me: too many ‘stingers’ breaking up the program, too much silliness.

Expanding Eyes. I haven’t enjoyed the last couple of episodes as much- there’s a bit too much re-telling of the Iliad, with not much more added. Episode 53 deals with the turning point of Book 16, where Patroclus dresses in Achille’s armour and goes and gets himself killed. In Episode 54 the Achaeans get Patroclus’s body back, minus the armour, and Achille’s mother Thetis goes to the workshop of Hephaestus on Mt. Olympus to get a replacement. Breisis speaks of her sorrow at the death of Patroclus, and finally Achilles goes into battle himself.

History Hit The WW2 Witch Trial of Hellish Nell features Kate Lister, who presents the Between the Sheets podcast about sex- her specialty. It’s a very noisy podcast and I find her accent rather grating. She interviews Jess Marlton, manager of Bodmin Jail, which markets itself as a site of paranormal activity. Hellish Nell was actually Helen Duncan (she gained the nickname from a brattish childhood) and she was the last woman to be tried under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, more than 200 years later, during WW2. The concept of ‘ghost’ changed over time, and after World War I, at a time when communication technologies were coming into their own, people wanted to communicate with the dead. Women in particular were seen to cross over between the real and the mystical, and being a medium was a way of women having spiritual authority that they otherwise did not have. Helen began her career in the 1920s. She specialized in manifesting the dead through ectoplasm, or spiritual energy, which ended up being exposed as a mixture of cheesecloth and egg white that she regurgitated- metres and metres of the stuff.. She was brought undone by a naval officer who attended one of her seances where she ‘spoke’ with a sailor who supposedly died in a sinking that the British Government had not publicized. Although she had been charged under the vagrancy act previously, the government wanted to make an example of her. She was sentenced to nine months jail. The 1735 Act focussed on fakery, rather than earlier Witchcraft Acts which tacitly recognized the reality of witches. The act was changed again in 1951 to the Fraudulent Medicine Act, and was later incorporated into Consumer legislation.

The Partial Historians I’ve been aware of this podcast, featuring Australian historians Dr Fiona Radford and Dr Peta Greenfield but I hadn’t listened to it. Ye Gods, one of them has the most annoying braying laugh (I think that it’s Dr Rad, but I may be wrong). I was particularly interested in this episode on Roman Naming Conventions, because I find Roman names really confusing. There are four naming conventions: the praenomen (the first name), the nomen (a reference to the clan or gens that the person came from), the cognomen (this name could have a variety of meanings!), and the agnomen (nickname). It’s comical that some of the names that we know Romans by were actually quite abusive: Galba meant ‘fat belly’; Crassus meant ‘fat’; Blazus meant ‘stutterer’. Adoption was taken very seriously by the Romans, and the suffix ‘-anus’ was added to their name to denote that they had been adopted. There was change over time in women’s status vis-a-vis their family, when instead of becoming part of their husband’s family, they remained part of their gens (i.e. birth family). Slaves were often given a cute name, and freedmen often had to keep their former owner’s name, although later generations dropped it.