Episode 3: #MedievalSoMuchMore BINGO

Ever watch a movie or a TV show supposedly set in the Middle Ages - or inspired by the Middle Ages - and wonder if things were really like that? This episode might help a bit! It is a companion to the Accessible Medievalist’s #MedievalSoMuchMore BINGO Card, a handy guide when checking out any new medieval-esque media. 

Episode Content Warning: discussions of rape, various forms of prejudice, reference to torture.

Want more? Take a look at Why Study the Middle Ages? (ARC Humanities, 2022).

Bibliography:

Kennedy, Kathleen E. “Everyday Life in Late Medieval England.” Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, 2017. https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/refeverydaylife/, accessed January 27, 2026. 

The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America. Edited by Brian P. Levack. Oxford, 2013.

Sturtevant, Paul B. “Was Sexual Abuse Normal in the Middle Ages?” The Public Medievalist, May 28, 2015. https://publicmedievalist.com/got-rape-and-middle-ages/, accessed February 13, 2026.

Tracy, Kisha. Why Study the Middle Ages? ARC Humanities, 2022.

Tracy, Larissa, host. “Talking about Medieval Torture.” Medieval Mischief and Mayhem. August 29, 2025. https://youtu.be/ntSlQdb2kIc?si=pkmyaJCJF2EpxS_x, accessed February 13, 2026.

Mentioned in Episode:
Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales
Medieval Mischief and Mayhem, Dr. Larissa Tracy
The Public Medievalist

Credits: 

Music - Medieval Theme 01 by Strobotone is licensed under a Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Sound - Back of Hall during Bingo by IESP; License: Attribution 3.0

Clip - Monty Python and the Holy Grail from MovieSounds

Transcript

Welcome to the Accessible Medievalist! I am Dr. Kisha Tracy, your host. 

This is the first of what will be an ongoing series of #MedievalSoMuchMore episodes. This hashtag refers to how much more awesome the Middle Ages are than some popular – and honestly sometimes dangerous – misconceptions make them out to be. The hashtag itself is inspired by the Twitter activism of April Reign and the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite campaign, which has since led to many other movements. I applied the idea to my #MedievalSoMuchMore, especially in thinking about how popular medieval representations reinforce inaccurate ideas about the lack of diversity in the Middle Ages. 

Frustrated with these representations, especially in various forms of media - films, television shows, video games, books, and so on - I created the #MedievalSoMuchMore BINGO card! This will be our subject today! The card is available for your use, education, and entertainment. It’s linked in the description of this episode!

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page and not to assume that everyone listening is familiar with this game, a quick description of BINGO. There is a 5x5 grid of twenty-five spots that usually have numbers in them. The top of each of the five columns spells out B-I-N-G-O. In a game, random letter and number combinations would be pulled out of a hat - or cage - or whatever. B2! N34! The first person to have all the numbers in a row, column, or diagonal on their card shouts “BINGO!” and wins. Blackout is a version of the game where every letter-number combo on your card is called.

Instead of numbers, my BINGO card includes many of the things that we medievalists complain about when the newest piece of medieval-esque media comes out. As you watch or read or play, you tick off a box when you see it. Some boxes are more lighthearted while others are more serious. For more in-depth discussion of some of these issues, please check out my book Why Study the Middle Ages?  I do want to give some content warning here for discussions of rape, various forms of prejudice and discrimination, and references to torture.

The center of traditional BINGO cards is a “free space,” so that you only need four instead of five boxes if you go through the center. I didn’t even have to think about what my “free space” would be. The Dark Ages. I have joked for many years that, if I accomplish nothing else in my career, but eradicate the use of the phrase “Dark Ages” from as many students’ vocabularies as possible, I will have been a successful teacher!

“Dark Ages” was coined in the fourteenth century by Francis Petrarch. Enamored of the classical period, Petrarch thought there was nothing of cultural value after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was a phrase that gained popularity especially in the Age of Enlightenment, which liked to characterize itself in opposition to what it saw as the “primitive” past. For the record, dismissing or devaluing around a 1000 years of human history is illogical and is generally based on incorrect assumptions or stereotypes about the Middle Ages. And yet it persists.

Once, I was playing a mobile trivia game that I used to play for stress relief, like many of us do. And the clue came up: the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. 11 letters, 3 words. Yup, you guessed it. My stress was not relieved.

So the free space on my #MedievalSoMuchMore BINGO card is “Dark Ages,” and I can guarantee nine times out of ten it will be used. 

A literal view of the “Dark Ages” contributes to another box: the Gray Camera Filter. Seriously, do they think there was no sun or color in the Middle Ages? Every medieval movie is filmed with the most washed out look as if “to be medieval” it must be drab and depressing. It’s almost comical at this point how filmmakers can’t present a vibrant Middle Ages unless it is also accompanied by Excessive Parody. This box is pretty much a “free” one too given how consistent the gray camera filter is.

The other boxes fall into categories. One is common tropes. For instance, Dirt…Everywhere. People are dirty, animals are dirty, living spaces are dirty, clothes are dirty. Just dirt…everywhere. Don’t get me wrong, dirt existed. But this impression of the Middle Ages as some kind of constantly grimy, mucky place - especially as opposed to representations of almost any other time period - is just era-shaming. 

The same is true of the apparent No Bathing rule, another box on the BINGO card.  There is a wonderful open access resource, the Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, that has essays on all kinds of topics related to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as the Middle Ages more broadly. Highly recommend it. As noted succinctly by Kathleen E. Kennedy in “Everyday Life in Late Medieval England,” “medieval people bathed as frequently as possible, and in towns and cities public baths were popular. At home, everyone kept hands and faces as scrupulously clean as they could and also endeavored to clean their teeth.” So there you have it!

Media-makers seem obsessed with four particular points of history: the Viking Age, the Black Plague, the Crusades, and/or the Inquisition. It seems that most pieces of medieval-esque media must include at least one of these (and, if they can get more than one in, the better!). This is very dismissive of the wide range of time periods and historical moments during the Middle Ages. #MedievalSoMuchMore!

That leads into the Insufficient Research and Historically Inauthentic boxes, which are particular annoyances for medievalists. We totally recognize literary license and love creativity, but it would be nice to see a well-researched film set in the Middle Ages every once in a while! Which means, while they are at it, realizing that Viking Horns or Suits of Armor are generally completely inaccurate! And don’t get me started on the oversimplification and overrepresentation of the Feudal System.

While we are on that subject, two other ubiquitous elements are Witch Trials and Torture Devices. The witch trials in Europe were mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after the Middle Ages - indeed, during the so-called Renaissance period, which is often, contrary to the Middle Ages, held up on a pedestal as a time of invention and enlightenment and all that is good. (Which also speaks to the reason for the BINGO box for Anti-Science! Apparently, science and scientific thinking thrived in the ancient period, then disappeared, and then reappeared? It’s kind of confusing.) As we’re arguing here about the medieval period, the Renaissance is in reality a bit of everything, positive, negative, and neutral, like every period of human history. If you’re interested in witch trials, you might want to take a look at the The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America for some background. In terms of torture devices, I recommend another podcast Medieval Mischief and Mayhem with Dr. Larissa Tracy, who is an acknowledged and highly published expert in the field of medieval torture and, believe it or not, no relation despite our matching last names! Her episode “Talking about Medieval Torture” - and she is much braver than I am, hers are video podcasts! - is very useful in thinking about both the misconceptions and the realities related to medieval torture. In short, as she says, the popular impression is that “torture was everywhere. Everybody's doing it. There's torture all over the Middle Ages.” The reality? Dr. Tracy’s answer: “Torture was not used with impunity. Torture was not used everywhere. There were many, many people who actually argued against the use of torture in medieval judicial processes.”

This persistent belief of the use of torture in the Middle Ages is part of the larger issue of the representation of the period as Hyper Violent with a particular focus on Violence against Women. If medieval-esque media like the television series Game of Thrones is to be believed, violent acts such as rape were the norm, were encouraged, universally accepted. In “Was Sexual Abuse Normal in the Middle Ages” on another great resource The Public Medievalist, Paul B. Sturtevant responds to this representation: “I am not saying that rape did not happen in the Middle Ages. What I am saying is that it has been one of the great horrifying constants in our society throughout every age, and that in many ways we are not so far from our medieval forebears in our perception of it.” There is a tendency to accuse previous time periods of such violence in order to distance ourselves, whether unintentionally or, what is more disturbing, intentionally in order to protect or excuse perpetrators and the culture of violence today. This also goes for Queerphobia, Disability Stigma, and anti-Semitism. Somehow, these are either presented as “primitive” beliefs that are far removed from modern society OR as evidence that supports continuing these prejudiced beliefs - both of which have nothing to do with the real Middle Ages.

To return to the subject of women, is it asking too much that we include other roles for them besides the Damsel in Distress?! Medieval women have such complex and nuanced stories, made contributions of every form, were involved in everything. Can we please stop erasing that - and, may I add, in more than just representations of the Middle Ages? This is of course also part of medieval-esque media being Male-Dominated - and not only that, but promoting Toxic Masculinity as somehow having historical roots and authority. 

Another dangerous misrepresentation of the Middle Ages is a Eurocentric one, particularly one in which No People of Color apparently existed. Let’s be blunt - this is false. For one, there was much going on around the world during the 1000 years generally associated with the Middle Ages. Thinking that Europe is somehow alone or the most important is frankly arrogant and unproductive. Second, the Middle Ages are wonderfully diverse with interaction and contact among a variety of peoples. Certainly we need to take a close and critical look at instances of Othering, in the Middle Ages - as well as in the Renaissance, in the Enlightenment, in the Modern era, in the Ancient world…you get the idea. But it is equally important to highlight when people came together, connected, worked and lived alongside each other. Those stories need to be told too, and they just so often aren’t.

So. Final words of advice: if you see a piece of medieval media, especially one that dubs itself as the True or Real Story, I recommend some heavy skepticism and a lot of research! Be critical, think it through, and check your #MedievalSoMuchMore BINGO card. Or, of course, ask your friendly neighborhood medievalist!