Watch This

I would highly recommend tuning into BBC4 at 9pm tomorrow evening to catch the second part of ‘Guilty Pleasures’, a historical documentary written and presented by Dr Michael Scott.

I’m not typically a huge fan of documentaries because I get impatient and irritated by the general level of ignorance assumed of the viewer. However part one of this documentary was intelligent and interesting, and it did help that the presenter himself was rather easy on the eye. His over enthusiasm was occasionally irksome and there seemed to be a lot of justification for the study of history (with clichéd lines such as ‘by understanding the past we can understand our present’), but overall I was impressed.

The first part focused upon the various types of luxuries in Ancient Greece, such as fish, statues and even long hair, and also the different attitudes towards these luxuries. Part two promises to focus upon how luxuries conflicted with the teachings of the medieval church.

I’ve touched on the issue of luxury for the medieval church in the course of my own research. Wealth was one of the central problems for monastic communities and the issue which each new order vowed to eradicate but never quite succeeded in doing. The Cistercians, for example, abandoned traditional Benedictine monasteries to isolate themselves in uninhabited parts of the countryside around Europe. In doing this the Cistercians wanted to provide for themselves through their own labour. However the popularity of the order was to some extent their own undoing and the Cistercians became renowned for their wealth.

Rather than being biographical or focused upon a particular historical event, this documentary is intriguing for presenting a cultural history that spans centuries. At the very least this documentary is worthwhile watching for the beautiful historical objects and settings it showcases.