A Great Interview on Medieval Catholic England

Our readers will certainly enjoy this fascinating interview recently given by Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson of Cambridge University on the podcast of the Catholic Truth Society in England, hosted by the CTS’s CEO and publisher, Pierpaolo Finaldi. The interview ranges over a wide variety of topics, but the part that I found especially interesting is where Dr Johnson talks about the relationship between monasteries and their tenants farmers in medieval England, and how the medieval worldview affected all kinds of things, from cartography to the use of apple orchards. (This starts from her new book Vanishing Landscapes, which examines how our relationship to plants has disappeared over the centuries, and what we have lost as a result.) In the last 20 minutes, the topic turns to the Catholic literary revival of the interwar period, and the particularly important role of women in it.