Pinned Post, or, What Is This Blog Exactly?
Given the recent influx of new followers, I figure I had better make us a pinned post so people know who we are and what we're doing. Because, as much as I enjoy just posting whatever, this is a podcast account and people should know that. Especially if they like weird medieval stuff, as that is our whole deal.
The Maniculum, available wherever you normally get your podcasts, is a show where we read medieval literature, make jokes about it, and then suggest ways to adapt it into TTRPG material (or other forms of storytelling). We try to pick especially strange medieval texts, most of which you would be unlikely to come across in your typical medieval-lit survey course, though we have done a few well-known ones (most notably our series on Egilâs Saga).
Itâs hosted by Zoe and Mac. (This is Mac typing now; I do most of the Tumblr posting. Zoe sometimes posts as @meanderingmedievalist.) Both of us are medievalists with like degrees and stuff, so we at least kind of know what weâre talking about when we discuss medieval literature. Mac has a Ph.D in English Language & Linguistics and currently teaches introductory writing at An Unspecified University. Zoe has an M.Phil in Medieval Studies and works as a professional game designer â she did narrative design on Pentiment, if youâre familiar with it.
The general structure of the podcast is that one of us (we take turns) chooses a text and reads / paraphrases / summarizes it for the other, who responds to it with comments & questions & jokes & digressive tangents. Then we close with a series of segments where we pull interesting features, ideas, etc. from the text for potential use in your TTRPG / storytelling projects.
If you want to check out the show but donât want to start at the beginning where you have to listen to us figure out what weâre doing (the audio on the first handful of episodes is a bit rough, for instance), here are some suggestions:
Our 2022 Halloween special (link here), where we read a selection of medieval stories about undead creatures.
An episode (link here) about the dragon Fafnir and the famous slaying thereof.
The Story of King Constant (link here), a fairly short and obscure tale from medieval France. (The episode is still a normal length; the story is short enough that the full text fits comfortably into a single episode with no summarizing needed.) I include this one because I feel itâs a good self-contained representation of what we do.
The first episode (link here) of our two-parter on the Peasantsâ Revolt, released to commemorate May Day 2023.
Lanval (link here), one of the most widely known stories by Marie de France. This is also good as a self-contained episode, and it's a story that may be familiar to you already.
And if you want to jump into a series:
The first episode (link here) of our seven-part series on the highly-regarded Icelandic text Egilâs Saga, about a Viking warrior-poet who is also kind of a dick.
The first episode (link here) of our ten-part series on Perlesvaus â our longest series on a single text so far, wherein we work through what might be the weirdest Arthurian romance out there.
If this just popped up on your dash, sorry for the long self-promotional post. Hope you come check us out. New episodes every other week.
