Dr Mary Bateman

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168 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Dr Mary Bateman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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You're Dead to Me · Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth · 7 Mar 2025 podcast
You have poets like Louisa Stewart Costello, whose funeral boat probably influenced Tennyson with his Lady of Shalott, which is interesting. One of my favourites is Elizabeth Stewart Phelps. So she's actually writing in America. She's American, but she's writing in the same sort of time period as Tennyson. And she's an early feminist.
So she paints these amazing reimagined stories featuring Arthurian characters, but very much set in kind of contemporary, lower and middle class America. So you'll get a vision of Guinevere with a toothache sat on her little cricket stall by the fire, lusting over their lodger. That sounds amazing. And opium fever dreams and everything. I've never heard of that.
Yeah, a lot of people haven't, but actually some of the most important innovators, I think, in Arthurian literature at this time were not Tennyson and that lot. It was actually some of the female authors. I'd love to read some of that.
Interesting stuff. And then also in the art world as well. So there's a photographer called Julia Margaret Cameron.
Very well known, yeah.
Yeah, and her Arthurian portrait series that she is asked to do for Tennyson for an 1874 edition of his Idols is very, very famous. It contains these kind of photo portraits of people from the Arthurian world.
Yeah. Julia Cameron was born in Calcutta and she owned coffee plantations in Sri Lanka. And her and Tennyson were both very, very pro-Empire. And they saw the Arthur story as a story about a king who's a civilising force. I mean, Tennyson's poems describe... Yeah, it really is. I mean, Tennyson describes Arthur taming people like wild beasts. It's all very uncomfortable.
There's a famous painting, actually, by George Frederick Wyatts of Sir Galahad that is hung not just in Eton, the original, but all over schools and nurseries across the British Empire as a kind of propaganda tool, really.
Ideal, upright, civilised masculinity.
Tintagel is still a massive tourist hotspot. One of English Heritage's most successful. Obviously Glastonbury, people still flock to Glastonbury.
Was found there by some Glastonbury monks in 1191.
They'd had a disastrous fire.
Six years later. I fancy that. There's all sorts of stories even today about Arthur sleeping beneath a hill or in a cave somewhere ready to come back. That's classic though, isn't it?
Everywhere.
Well, Mount Etna in the Middle Ages. Is there? Yeah, it's theorised as this is where Avalon was in a medieval text.
Sleeping king, yeah. You've got Snowdon, Alderley Edge in Cheshire.
Arthur's Seat, Arthur's Oven in Scotland as well. There's all sorts of landmarks with Arthurian names.
Yeah.
Hull up in the northeast. Why Hull? It's a very long story that I don't have much time to get into today. Can you do it quickly? I can do it really quickly. This particular coat of arms with the three crowns on blue was used by other figures as well. Hull was the king's town founded in 1299.
Kingston upon Hull. I don't think that the arms date to that early, but they were used later on and continue to be used. And they happen to be Arthur's coat of arms, you see most commonly as well.
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