Wait for the wheel of fortune to turn your way

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1:27Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

1:59Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-CONTACTS. Sometimes things go your way. Sometimes they don't. That was the approach that many people in the Middle Ages took to life, because they had an understanding of time that was more cyclical than we tend to have today.

2:40You can channel this in your day today by being patient, taking a breath and waiting for the wheel of fortune to turn back your way again. In this special episode of Life Lessons from History, from History Extra, recorded in front of an audience at the Gloucester History Festival in the autumn of 2025, I chat to the great medieval historian and broadcaster Janina Ramirez about what we can learn about time and patience from the Middle Ages. my name's dave musgrove and the concept of this podcast is simple i find great historians and archaeologists and ask them to propose a lesson from history that might help us live happier healthier better or more productive lives today and then we chat about it it's the history well-being crossover that you didn't know you needed but hopefully you might enjoy

3:33what we're going to talk about today is time and patience and what Nina's learnt about those topics and how maybe we can sort of help to understand time and get a bit of patience in our lives today tell us about medieval people told the time what do they know about time as you wonderful people of Gloucester know I am a medievalist and my happy mental emotional state is to be thinking about being alive in the medieval period and when you ask me what was a life lesson what's what could I possibly say that would be inspiring or hopeful now in a time that really feels extremely high paced, tense, fearful, anxiety inducing.

4:19What could I possibly say to help people now? And I thought, well, let's talk about how the people I study, the individuals and the communities and the groups of the past in the medieval period, how they understood that very basic concept of just the passage of time. Because the people of the past were us. They had shared all our interests, all our major concerns, life, love, family, health, but they are different and they do things differently. And in one major aspect, they are different, which is that we have a completely different way of really having a handle on the passage of time to the way that they did.

4:57I mean, but purely just the logistics of telling the time. We have watches. We have really, really microscopic ways of assessing the passing of every second. They did not have those things. And without that, how do you bring an order to your day? Well, one of the only ways you can do it is by working with nature. And just the very shape of a medieval day was organic. It changed. We all moan and lament about daylight saving, where the clocks go forward, clocks go back. What the medieval world did was it adapted to the daylight hours that they had. If the day was shorter, they did everything in a shorter amount of time.

5:38If it was longer, they stretched it out. So just the very essence of it was sort of expanding and decreasing. And I think that we are losing touch of that. We don't relate to the natural environment in the same way they did. I've got a couple of examples here of things that they could use. By the time we get to the 14th century, yes, there are astrological clocks right the way back, particularly coming out of the Islamic world as well. Huge developments in ways of navigating time and space. But a very basic way of managing time was to light a candle. And there's an account from 13th century Paris, from the university in Paris, about an election that was going to take place.

6:21and the amount of time that people, the students were allowed to go and vote in this election was the amount of time it took for a two ounce wax candle to burn down. And so they were measuring sort of hours according to how much of the candle would burn down. So there are ways of managing it. Of course, sundials, water clocks, those sorts of things. But I think the thing I want to talk about with you today, Dave, is just that maybe we need to be a bit more relaxed in our attitude to time well i mean were they quite relaxed in their attitude to time back in the day were they always late for instance if they didn't know the time how can you be late if you don't know what's on time maybe that's live by that now maybe that's the point maybe that's the point i mean tardiness and laziness these are unslothfulness these are sins that they wouldn't have celebrated particularly but you know the way that communities were guided in terms of time meant that there were very clear demarcations for when something would happen when the bell rang in the church that meant everybody at that point in that community reset to that time yeah I think we really underestimate the power of bells within Christendom I was struck but I've just come back from Istanbul and when you hear the calls to prayers coming out of the mosques regularly and the sound of the human voice being projected out of these towers there would have been points you know in Europe going over towards the Middle East where the sound of bells ringing in Christian churches would slowly blend and be replaced by the sound of voices calling out in mosques and that would have shown you sort of time and space that you were moving through different cultures and different religions but still the same technique of kind of calling the community together at these regular times.

8:09So bells in the Christian West and sort of voices in the Islamic East. But when we think about the hours, the monastic hours as well, those again would have been very clearly monitored. The community would have had very obvious ways of knowing at what points in the night they needed to wake to go collectively to pray they would have known when to stop work in the field and stop and go to prayer so they were keeping track constantly but I think there wasn't necessarily the sense of well you're two minutes late for that or you know as long as they're all together doing it at the same time yeah that's an agreed upon moment yeah yeah so punctuality wasn't necessarily a great value I often think well no that's not true I occasionally think about the soundscape of medieval towns and bells and just we don't really hear bells very much nowadays but you know in somewhere like Gloucester I don't know how many churches are in Gloucester quite a few there would have been a cacophony.

9:07Absolutely absolutely and I think it becomes competitive as well I mean if you think take Gloucester for example you know when one community has set up a very expensive community purchased bell I mean bells are a huge thing to forge and they become a very large contribution from the community to that particular establishment. So you put your bells in the cathedral, that becomes the main bell, the main sort of loudest bell. But then another guild, another community sets up a church, they set up their bell, their bell sounds slightly different. And then another community on another corner has their bell.

9:41They're identifiers, you know, they are ways by which groups within groups are identifying themselves. They're aligning themselves with St. Nicholas's bell, or they're aligning themselves with Trinity Bell. So yeah these soundscapes they are practical but they're also they're deep they run deep spiritually I in my like my latest book I've written about Joan of Arc and bells so her visions were triggered by the sound of ringing bells and what I found really interesting in the reports of her trial from the people that knew her growing up you can imagine it she's growing up in this village Don Remy with other teenagers all the same age and some of the girls are kind of giggling about boyfriends and they're worrying about their hair and they're not bothered when the bells start ringing but there's this pious little kind of righteous saintly joan who the second she hears the bells go she slips straight into prayer she removes herself so even within communities some would be well and truly engaged with the monastic hours with the spiritual aspects others couldn't care less they're just going to carry on about their business and in that way we're not dissimilar from the people of the past.

10:47There'll be people with more extreme attraction to the religious side of life, and then some that it doesn't touch them at all. And I think that thinking about these soundscapes kind of shows us that variety as well. I didn't realise we're going to go quite so deep into bells, but it's very interesting. They are interesting. I want to talk about the medieval conception of time because there is this idea that it's kind of circular, right? And a bit different to the way we see it. Yeah, so if we talk about cycles, I mean, I mentioned at the top that, of course, There's an elasticity to the day, which comes from changing in daylight hours.

11:20But there's also the seasons. I don't know about anyone else. I found this winter really long. It felt like an extra, extra long winter. Not quite sure why. It rained a lot. It was a lot of rain and not enough sunshine. But even seasonally, you know, there can be longer winters, harder summers. But the idea of monitoring the skies, looking at the stars, seeing the patterns, These are two eliminations from Le Terre Richer, which is one of my favourite medieval manuscripts by the Limbo brothers. And you can see the sky above, the celestial spheres above, and what's happening in terms of what star sign it's in, what constellations you'd see.

11:59And then underneath these incredible miniatures of the labours of the month. So this is February, which is one of my favourites. Look at this lady. She's so worn out from having brought the sheep in, done all these horrible chores while she's freezing cold, that she's heating her feet by the fire. There's a little cat sitting by her feet. This is me in the winter. That's the chores they have to do. It's hard. It's brutal. Fast forward to June and there's harvesting. There's all these the idea that everybody, men, women, everybody are out in the fields performing set tasks. and so you would know what you had to do and again if this is a life lesson podcast my life lesson would be listen to what the earth is doing at various times in the year I love gardening and I love growing vegetables and so I do structure my year around what bulbs need to go in here what I'm going to harvest then and that's what our ancestors have done for as long as humanity has been farming.

12:58But we don't do that intuitively, a lot of us anymore. We think about going on a summer holiday somewhere in the summer. We might go, somebody goes skiing in the winter. We don't think about these rhythms and these things that are happening around us. So the medieval mind did. It had to. It was life or death. If you planted at the wrong time, you weren't going to eat through the winter. And that's another thing I think we learn from the medieval attitudes towards time and the seasons. And just when we were chatting about this on email, it was the same day that I run this same route five miles from my house.

13:31Five miles. Forget me. Thank you. Thank you very much. And it was the day when the blossom comes out. And it was the day when I recognized spring on this route. It's normally flooded. And yeah, this is, so yeah, it did mean something to me. Anyway, what am I talking about? So, okay. So they had a better understanding of how kind of the natural rhythms fitted in into their timescape. Did that make them less stress in any way, do you think? Oh, God. I mean, how long is a piece of string? I mean, in any worldview, there's going to be all sorts of manners of stresses and pressures. And the pressures that we face today are different to their pressures.

14:06But we are, I think, overwhelmed with geopolitical fear in a way that they would never have understood or recognised. But at the same time, they were living by the next harvest and by the next cold snap, which could destroy their family. So different fears, different anxieties would have hung over them to us. I think that in terms of their understanding of how, of the elasticity of time, there's another aspect that I don't think we give enough credence to, which is if we're thinking particularly of Britain, Western Europe, up Christendom in the medieval period. The religious aspects of their life, the spiritual side of how they conceived of their existence was different, I think, to the majority of us now in a secularized West.

14:54They genuinely believed that there was a pattern to their life whereby they come into creation, they have a spell on earth, they die, and they will go on to an eternal life, be it a good one or a bad one. So they saw life as a sort of passage, as a movement through time. And not only that, they are being asked every day, every week in mass, they are being asked whenever they think about Jesus and about God to contemplate what took place in Bethlehem, in Jerusalem 1 ,400, 300 years before then, as if it was still happening now. They're being asked to live like Jesus lived, to feel his pain like he did, to experience those things.

15:44So they're collapsing biblical time and real time on a daily basis. When they're in church and the Holy Communion is being raised up, they're being asked to say, this is actually Jesus, a man who lived in the Middle East around the year zero, but it's also happening in, say, 12th century Paris. So that time is collapsing regularly. And I think that that's something that we also struggle to understand from our very linear and organised way of thinking about time. It just wasn't that rigid. It was much more fluid. That's really interesting. So they didn't have the same linear narrative that we do.

16:25And from what you're saying, it had a very flexible approach to history, essentially. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, the obsession we have as historians at a history festival to pin down a date, to pin down the details and the data. I mean, there would, of course, have been pedantic historians in any age. And we know from surviving medieval manuscripts that, of course, you know, there are certain individuals who are extremely rigorous and wanted to tell you how many men and where and when. Well, there were those dudes in Durham Abbey who would spend ages trying to calculate the date of Easter, and they've got fantastic tables doing that sort of thing.

17:02Yeah, yeah, yeah. Detail mattered to a lot of people. But on a general basis, no. I mean, again, I can return to Joan of Arc and thinking about where she had her visions in the Bois Cheneau, the grey wood. When the trial comes up, they're being asked, you know, why is there a legend associated with this wood? Who were the individuals involved? What was the romance? And all the people of the community say it happened sometime in the past. It was a legend. Something happened up in that wood. It's very inexact, but it's more blending mythic and real. And the facts don't necessarily matter as much as the morality and the story.

17:37So, and again, I think that that's something that their attitude to the past was more like that. Yeah. So do you suppose a medieval farmer in 13th century Lincolnshire would have been very uncomfortable with a swanky wristwatch? Yeah, so it looked very nice. He wouldn't be able to chant. Yeah, no plug points. I mean, how can we ever know? I mean, I was listening to Mary Bear's new book and she does this thing where she sort of throws forward from thinking about the ancient Greeks being in a particular site like being in Athens. And if you could fast forward that person from 5th century BC Athens to now and showed them what Athens looks like now, what the hell would they make of any or all of it?

18:26I mean, how would they understand how a car has appeared? But in the terms of moving towards progress, there's never a moment of pure invention, like, oh, we're going to invent electricity. But there's progress that evolves over centuries, over millennia. And so the idea of coming to a wristwatch, it's gone through so many permutations before it's got to the wristwatch. Like your medieval Lincoln man might recognize a sundial. And because he recognizes the sundial, he might recognize what the shape of the face is and he might recognize an astrological chart. But would he know what the watch is or how it works or how it ticks?

19:03No. But he'd probably be able to conceive of what it is as an idea. Yeah. So I don't know. It's always really interesting. As historians, we throw ourselves backwards. But isn't it interesting to think about throwing ourselves forwards? Like what might this place look like in a thousand years? What might Blackfriars look like in a thousand years so yeah you see i'm collapsing time in space people it's beautiful this is quite the podcast you are getting straight into your medieval vibe i mean my my watch will also tell me whether i've slept well and how my heartbeat's going so it does it does all manner of interesting positively divine yeah okay so we've gathered that medieval people saw time in a different way to us how's that help us oh now now before you put so you need to put on a picture of long fork tower which is a brilliant place it's in peterborough is that anyone in the audience been to long fork tower it is absolutely one of the most underrated sites in the uk it's my favorite medieval sites the oldest surviving complete set of domestic wall paintings in northern Europe.

20:11It is a very cool place. Very rarely open, but a really cool place. So what are we seeing? Describe what we're seeing. Well, the reason I put Longthorpe up is because I think Longthorpe is such a strange little kind of intellectual Rubik's cube of a building. And you stand inside it and you're inside the mind of this quite sort of, I imagine, I think he must have been quite precocious. He considers himself extremely learned, A bit of an early reminiscence man. And what he's trying to do with these wall paintings is display to his visitors the breadth of his understanding of the universe. So he has the saints and the martyrs with their scrolls, but he's also got the philosophers and the thinkers of the ancient past.

20:53He's got political satire. There's a bonacon. He's got a farting beast. A farting bonacon that is sort of crapping on the English crown, dare I say it. Bad bonacon. So a little bit of political satire. He's also got a beautiful arcade of musicians, of celestial musicians, because he probably would have entertained in this space. But he's also covering the real basics of the medieval worldview. So he has the wheel of the senses. Now this is unique. It is such an amazing image because, I mean, it's so blurry and I'm sorry, but you've got fortune in the middle and then the spider's web is probably touched.

21:34the cockerel is probably hearing we're not entirely sure which animal relates to which and senses but this idea of a of a circle of experience that your senses are sort of complete and rely on one another to have a full existence and then the ages of man and this it's quite badly worn but it goes from nativity all the way through up to the kind of the high point of a young virile farmer and then a decline to the elderly person there walking with a stick but it's this idea from cradle to grave and the sort of the movement of being a static baby in a manger to then being a static corpse in a coffin that this is we move through with increasing agility and decreasing agility through these arcs of our life and it's fine because every one of those arcs are important.

22:32Every single one of them matters, but they are a process. And don't fight them. When you are young, you are young. When you are not, you are not. And it is part of this cycle. And that's the thing I love about Long Thought, but more generally about this medieval worldview. Don't resist. You are part of a natural cycle. And so I love that. I wanted to talk about that arc because to me, it's really powerful. I think your friend Alice Roberts would dispute that because she's always posting on Instagram how she's fighting age. I know. With her exercise regime. I'm leaning happily into both age and decrepitude.

23:11Okay, so they were at peace with the idea of ageing. Yeah. And that's okay. So that's obviously a good thing to be at peace with. That seems reasonable. Yeah. But again, how's that going to help us? How's that going to help us today live happier lives? Let's move on. Let's move on, because I think at this point, you know, when we're talking about cycles and we're talking about kind of patterns, one of the most powerful ones that we encounter so often in medieval texts, going right back to, you know, Boccaccio and sort of ancient philosophical texts, is this idea of the wheel of fortune. To me, what I love so much is Fortuna is almost always a woman in these cases.

23:49This is a really powerful image. Look, she's blindfolded. One half is sort of beautiful and hopeful and the other is dark and desperate. And just in her very costume there, she's sort of balancing out the positive and the negative. But it's this idea that, you know, your fortunes may rise, but they may fall as easily as they rise. and I think about this a lot I was right we're going to get onto mysticism and thinking about kind of ways of dealing with the world but in 2016 it felt like a really critical year you know we got Boris Johnson we had Trump the first time around things felt like they were changing there was a emotional shift as much as a very tangible economic and political shift you know I can wake up and if I switch on the news, it affects my mood.

24:42Something is happening in Washington and I'm angry and upset for the rest of the day in Oxfordshire. We are connecting ourselves across time and space with things that are draining us to the point where it's affecting our personal lives, right? Now, it's absolutely brilliant that we are informed and it is an absolute inevitable of what we've lived through, which is the digital revolution. We have lived through the single biggest thing that humanity has ever experienced. We have globalized and we have digitized. And the result of that is a massive pendulum swing towards over-information, over-engagement, and over-anxiety in terms of things that are beyond our control.

25:20Now, I'm a big believer in pendulum swings and a big believer that things will calm down and we will learn to use these tools the way they were meant to help us rather than to hinder us. But these last 10 years, we have been dragged along on a bullet train of anxiety with the fortunes of others. And what I keep having to remind myself almost on a daily basis is the wheel of fortune rises and it falls. And I am watching what I hope is this side of the wheel at the moment. And I am patiently loving it. because with these changes, with these slow transitions, look back to the Cold War and think how we were all living under that anxiety.

26:07Look back to the World Wars. Humanity pulls through and things come round and the wheel keeps turning. If that's not a life lesson, come on. That's a pretty good life lesson. That is pretty good. Come on. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen. Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms.

26:50Brussels clean up nicely at Sweet Green. Maple glazed, roasted, and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweetgreen's fall harvest is back on the menu, and the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the Sweetgreen app. I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, autobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor.

27:26Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

28:01Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. And I imagine when you chat to Mary Beard tomorrow, she'll talk about the dangers of presentism and thinking that, you know, what we're living through today is the be-all and end-all. Yeah. In fact, I know she will. She absolutely will. And that's her new book is all about that. And it's profound. I mean, I'm absolutely loving it because she absolutely believes that. And in terms of, I think my contemporary friends that are historians sort of sit in two camps, really. You've got your David Olajoga, who is desperately miserable about everything at the moment.

28:39Like everything is absolutely awful. The world is coming to an end. And then you've got like me and Mary sort of going, oh, hang on a minute. Just be a bit patient. Wait for it to all come, you know, turning round. I don't know if it's a modern historian versus a sort of ancient medieval historian thing too. Like maybe because Mary deals with 4 ,000 years of history, I deal with a couple of thousand years of history. We see longer patterns. We see longer developments. And I guess it gives you a bit more patience. And that's what we were going to talk about is patience. Let's do patience, yeah.

29:10I think the two come together, time and patience. so I've spent I've been filming this week and I've been with a crew who obviously you know you've had a long day filming we sit down it's the end of the day we talk about the news we talk about what's going on and in this particular these are friends that I was working with they are anxious they're anxious about their jobs being replaced by AI they're anxious about you know what's happening in terms of the Iran war and I have to sit there and just say to them over and over again calm down Take a breath. Be patient. It will come round. And they were sort of laughing at me to begin with.