What is your backstory?
“There are two bits which are important here, two sides to my personality. I am an academic in Mediaeval French. Going back to school, I had a love of languages and history. I have also done stand-up comedy, which I did completely separately to the academic work.”
Why did you want to write this show?
“I am part of a monthly panel show at the Stand Comedy Club on High Bridge, in Newcastle, called ‘Nerds just want to have fun’. This was set up by Neil Harris and was originally all about science.
“So, I said I could come in and do something on Mediaeval science. I gradually drifted away from talking about science to just doing something that was Mediaeval, whatever the theme. But that first night was the spur to bringing the two sides of my personality together. And then I thought it would be good fun to do a show about the Middle Ages.”
Which aspects of the Middle Ages is the show about?
“I wanted to avoid certain Mediaeval themes such as kings, battles, and diseases and go against what would be in the National Curriculum and instead show it as a time of imagination and ideas.
“It’s a very visual show with slides from Mediaeval manuscripts. The show focuses a lot on images, and this is what people seem to enjoy. For example: there are drawings of animals, or how Mediaeval people imagined an octopus would look without having seen one. One picture ended up making an octopus look like a shark that goes to the gym. People thought that the octopus was a really dangerous beast that could reach up to ships and grab sailors.
“Then there were the inventions. There was a monk who tried to invent a way to fly with his own homemade wings, and you can imagine how that worked out. Still, it was the only time he ever appeared in historical records and although he jumped off the roof of a monastery, he did survive, but he broke his legs. He thought the main problem was that he hadn’t made himself a tail.
“I like the idea of showing monks not only praying, but acting something like mad scientists … after all it was the monks who made many of the books that survive.”
How do you deal with the change in mindset between Medieval and modern society?
“I don’t deal with it the explicitly but I use examples to illustrate, like weird pictures of strange animal-humans with dragons’ feet. I talk about why this would have made sense to Mediaeval people because they personified ‘nature’ as a woman who was a blacksmith, or a carpenter, using tools to make creatures. So, for the Newcastle show I used images of body parts that she had used, but in a new combination.
“I just want to try and show something more appealing about Mediaeval life and the Mediaeval mind and the way that, for example, maps told stories at the same time as showing geography. For example, the Hereford map which is so big that it takes up a wall in Hereford Cathedral. It shows Alexander the Great, Noah’s Ark, elephants, and unicorns, which were another example of nature messing around – the body of a horse, with a horn on its head.
“Indeed, when Marco Polo travelled to Asia and saw the rhino, he thought that this is what people had been telling him about unicorns. So, he was able to come back and say, ‘oh yes, they’re real but not quite what you think they are.’ In fact, he said that ‘actually’ unicorns had the body of a bull not a horse.
“I also like telling humorous stories from the period, so that we could end up laughing with them, not just laughing at them. There are lots of humorous texts about sexual events in dark castles, when nobody knew who they were in bed with, and lots of misunderstandings. People in the Middle Ages had a sense of humour and they liked to hear a bawdy tale. They also liked lots of puns and word play.
“People sometimes get the wrong idea, because nearly the whole population went to church and there’s a misguided idea that religion held science back; but that simply isn’t true. Often, the monks were the scientists, so in fact religion was not a barrier to science. In the Mediaeval mindset people thought that God had made the universe and the world, so they wanted to know what made it work.”
What can we learn from the show?
“First and foremost, the show is fun. But I hope that what can be learned is the humour, imagination, the beauty of some of the books, and the charm of some of the images from Mediaeval times. Some of the material is great. The aim is to have fun. And, you don’t have to be an expert on the Middle Ages; just come along and enjoy the show. It’s a very visual, and I’m going to show a lot of images, and you don’t have to have any prior knowledge to enjoy it.
“There will be something in this show that will surprise everybody, and will charm you, and make you laugh. There will be interesting things to see, and interesting stories to hear.”
You can see Luke in his show ‘Bloody Marvellous’ in Newcastle on 22 July, and in Durham on 24 July.
