Interventions | The Intellectual History Podcast

In 1597, Queen Elizabeth I wrote a letter to the mythical Christian Emperor of Ethiopia, an elusive figure known since the Middle Ages as 'Prester John'. The letter may not have reached its intended audience. But for contemporary historians, it sheds light on the attempts of sixteenth-century Europeans to conceptualise Africa. Yes, they were happy to believe in myths and fables, happy to see in Africa a place of mystery and barbarism. But beneath its scorching sun, they were also prepared to discover communities and kingdoms akin to their own. 

John Harpham, Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma, reveals the significance of these perceptions in his sweeping survey of travelogues, cartography, shipping records and political tracts. By demonstrating that Africa was seen to conform in all its endless variety to Roman ideas about the role of captivity in warfare, he shows how Europeans and early English-American settlers were able to reject discredited Aristotelian accounts of natural slavery while still relying on a hallowed Roman tradition in their efforts to justify and establish American Slavery.

Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall
Produced by Joshua Shortman and Nicole Sekulic

Should you judge a book by its cover? Victorian historians and their readers did; and through examining the decisions that went into binding, titling, annotating and prefacing historical works, we can recover some of the anxieties and labour that went into creating the image of the historian we have today.

This is Elise Garritzen's task, in 'Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England: Books, the Literary Marketplace, and the Scholarly Persona': a work which draws on over 500 nineteenth-century publications to shed light on the struggle to impose a respectable order on the chaos of history. Hosted by Joshua Shortman

Who will rule the rulers? Who will chaperone the chaperones? Who will guard the guardians? These questions are rarely associated with Plato. Usually seen as the arch-defender of the rule of the enlightened few over the ignorant many, he has not been perceived as a friend of accountable government. But is this traditional picture of Plato true?

Melissa Lane, the world’s foremost interpreter of Plato’s political thought, thinks not. Far from being blind to the need to hold political leaders to account, Plato was in fact deeply invested in developing a system of limited rule in which the order of offices would be directed to the good of the ruled. 

Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall
Produced by Joshua Shortman

Theophrastus was an ancient Greek philosopher. He wrote widely on topics including metaphysics, plant-life, dizziness, odours, and juice. Most notably, though, he was the author of a colourful text detailing the vices of thirty typical characters from Athenian city life. The impact of this short book of sketches, known simply as Characters, was prodigious. In early modern Europe, it spawned an entire tradition of character sketching and character classifying which, for a period of some two hundred years, formed a central current in the great stream of moral and political philosophy. 
Join Katie Ebner-Landy, author of the path-breaking Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types, as she uncovers the history of Theophrastus’s peculiar work, revealing a forgotten way of doing moral philosophy, one centred not on hidden principles but the characterisation of personality. Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall and Joshua Shortman

Martin Crusius (1526-1607) spent most of his life in the Lutheran town of Tübingen. While there, he became Europe's foremost expert on Ottoman Greece. Drawing on hundreds of conversations he held with the Greek Orthodox alms-seekers who visited his home, he painted a picture of a people unparalleled in its richness and scope. Yet he also constructed a narrative of the religious and cultural decline of Greece which shows his self-proclaimed philhellenism to have been entangled with a disdain for Ottoman culture and a desire to spread his Lutheran faith. 

Join Richard Calis, whose research into Crusius’s intellectual world has shed new light on the history of Protestant reform, ethnography, and early modern cultural encounters, as he takes us into the mind and home of one of sixteenth-century Germany’s most original scholars. 

Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall
Produced by Joshua Shortman