Concerning Redcaps

Concerning Redcaps

Author: Medieval Death Trip November 24, 2025 Duration: 1:14:57
For our eleventh anniversary episode, we follow the fairy path of the redcap, from recent cinema through tabletop gaming, into Victorian folklorists and Romantic balladeers, and finally hunting up their ancestry in medieval manuscripts. Today's Texts: "Redcap." Monster Manual III, edited by Greg Collins, John D. Rateliff, and Gary Sarli. Wizards of the Coast, 2004. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/monster-manual-iii/page/n137/mode/2up Henderson, William. Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. W. Satchell, Peyton, & Co., 1879. Internet Archive. Leyden, John. "Lord Soulis." Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. 2, edited by Walter Scott, James Ballantyne, 1803, pp. 353-388. Google Books. Leland, Charles Godfrey. "Etrusco-Roman Remains in Modern Tuscan Tradition." Congrès International des Traditions Populaires, Première Session, Paris 1889, Société d'Èditions Scientifiques, 1891. Google Books. Gervase of Tilbury. Otia imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor. Edited and translated by S.E. Banks and J.W. Binns. Clarendon Press, 2002. Thomas of Walsingham. Historia Anglicana. Edited by Henry Thomas Riley, vol. 1, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863. Google Books. Croker, Thomas Crofton. Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. 2nd ed., John Murray, 1838. Google Books.

Step into the strange and vivid world of the Middle Ages with Medieval Death Trip. Each episode is built around a single primary source-a chronicle, a poem, a letter, or a legal record-that reveals something peculiar, grim, or wonderfully unexpected from the period. The chosen texts are the real draw, offering unmediated glimpses into a mindset that can feel both alien and strangely familiar. You’ll hear about bizarre miracles, brutal justice, mystical visions, and the quiet, odd details of daily life that history books often overlook. After presenting the document in full, the host provides context and personal reflections, piecing together what the story might tell us about the people who wrote it and the world they inhabited. This isn’t a dry academic lecture; it’s more like a guided tour through the archives, pointing out the bloodstains and the marginal doodles with equal fascination. The podcast lives in the intersection of several genres, pulling from history, literature, and cultural study to examine how medieval people made sense of their reality. Listening feels like uncovering a series of forgotten artifacts, each one a conversation starter about belief, violence, humor, and humanity. For anyone curious about history’s shadowy corners and the raw, unfiltered voices of the past, this series provides a consistently engaging and thought-provoking journey. The approach is both serious and accessible, treating these centuries-old accounts with respect while never shying away from their inherent strangeness. Tune in for a deep dive into the archives, one unsettling and fascinating story at a time.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Medieval Death Trip
Podcast Episodes
MDT Ep. 73: Concerning a Mouse and a Frog [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:48
This episode, we turn to another genre of wisdom literature: the fable. We look at four versions of the fable of the Mouse and the Frog from across one-and-a-half millennia, with quasi-classical versions from the Vita Ae…
MDT Ep. 72: An Icelandic Vision of the Afterlife [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:04
This episode we take a look at Sólarljóð, an Old Norse poem that mixes a Christian tour of heaven and hell with the stylings of eddic poetry. We also consider what it might have in common with one of the fugues of the Gr…
MDT Ep. 71: Concerning Stained Glass and Notre Dame [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:19
As the recovery process begins after the April 15th fire the consumed the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, we reflect on the event, we learn how to make stained glass from a 12th-century artisan, and we hear about…
MDT Ep. 69: The Confession of St. Patrick (Part 2) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:42
We conclude St. Patrick's Confessio this episode, taking a look at Patrick's education and literary style, as well as the cultural context of missionary activity in the 5th century. We also are left wondering if that mon…
MDT Ep. 68: The Confession of St. Patrick (Part 1) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:08
This March, we're going back to one of the earliest surviving St. Patrick texts, his own autobiographical Confessio. This episode we'll hear the first half, which covers Patrick's abduction from the coast of 5th-century…
MDT Ep. 66: Concerning a Man Consumed by Mice and Other Plagues [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:07
We kick our 2019 with a return to narrative history, hearing about a terrible way to die and how not to profit off the deaths of others during a plague from William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum, and we also look…
Feed Update Announcement [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:11
Listeners! This weekend (Feb. 9-10) I'll be updating many of the descriptions and tags on old episodes in our podcast RSS feed. There is a possibility that some podcast manager apps (especially iTunes) will interpret the…