Episode 32: Kingdom of Heaven with David Perry, Matt Gabriele, Thomas Lecaque, & John Wyatt Greenlee

You've been asking for this film ever since I announced there would be a Historians At The Movies Podcast. Today we jump in head first to the Director's Cut of Ridley Scott's 2005 epic, Kingdom of Heaven. This is a beautiful and seriously flawed film, but it is fun to watch. I decided that a film this big needed an army of historians, so I invited back HATM Podcast alums David Perry, Matthew Gabriele, John Wyatt Greenlee to talk all things Crusades. We talk about the film's strengths and its flaws, and dive deep to discuss things that matter, such as how to see this film as a response to 9/11 and exactly how many orcas would it take to fight Liam Neeson.

About our guests:
Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies and the chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. His research and teaching generally explore religion, violence, nostalgia, and apocalypse, whether manifested in the Middle Ages or the modern world. This includes events and ideas such as the Crusades, the so-called “Terrors of the Year 1000,” and medieval religious and political life. He has also presented and published on modern medievalism, such as recent white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages and pop culture phenomena like Game of Thrones and the video game Dragon Age. His book, co-authored with David M. Perry, is out now: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Harper Books, 2021). His new book will also be with David M. Perry and is entitled Oathbreakers: The Carolingian Civil War and the Collapse of an Empire in the Middle Ages (Harper Books, 2024).

David M. Perry is a journalist and historian. He is the co-author of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, out now from Harper Collins. The Boston Globe called it “incandescent and ultimately intoxicating.” Perry was a professor of Medieval History at Dominican University from 2006-2017. His scholarly work focuses on Venice, the Crusades, and the Mediterranean World. He’s the author of Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015). Now he works for the University of Minnesota, convincing students that studying history is good for them and good for their careers (it is!).

John Wyatt Greenlee is a life-long map enthusiast. I love how maps can make fantasy worlds come alive, and how they can give context to histories. He holds a PhD in medieval history, with a focus on the history of maps and map making. He has written articles on cartographic analysis, setting maps within their historical and cultural contexts. He has built multiple digital projects annotating medieval map. In addition to maps, he spends time working on his other major academic interest: the role of eels in human history. He is The Surprised Eel Historian on Twitter — perhaps the world’s only eel historian!

Thomas Lecaque is an Associate Professor of History at Grand View University. He was born in France, lived in Bulgaria for the first two years of his life, and grew up in Kirksville, Missouri. He holds a Ph.D. in Pre-Modern European History from the University of Tennessee, an M.A. in English with a focus on Old English and