How medieval literature is giving two SFU professors new life*

Medieval literature may be centuries old, but its stories remain insightful, fascinating and sometimes delightfully strange.

Simon Fraser University (SFU) English professors David Coley and Matthew Hussey have spent five seasons exploring those stories through The Canterbury Fails, a podcast that brings overlooked medieval texts to life for a wide audience.

The podcast's name is a playful nod to Chaucer's famous Canterbury Tales. Rather than focusing on well-known works however, Coley and Hussey delve into obscure, overlooked and downright bizarre examples of Old and Middle English literature. Each episode pairs a medieval text with a themed cocktail, blending scholarly discussion with humour and conversation.

While the tone is often irreverent and entertaining, the podcast tackles surprisingly timely questions about morality, power, political propaganda, religion and belief. Even when discussing familiar classics, as they do in the most recent season, Coley and Hussey uncover new perspectives that invite listeners to see centuries-old texts in a different light.

What is also clear is how much fun they are having. Whether solo or joined by special guests, their mélange of medieval scholarship and mixology demonstrates how research can be rigorous, accessible and genuinely entertaining. Through The Canterbury Fails, they are showing how 1000-year-old poems and stories can still spark lively debate and resonate with audiences today.

We spoke to Professors Coley and Hussey about their work.

How did the idea for The Canterbury Fails come about, and how does it feel to be wrapping up a fifth season?

Coley: Dark days at the start! During the pandemic, Matt and I co-taught a double-length grad course on medieval historiography. It was a great course—a career-highlight course—and our students were incredible. But we were literally closed in our houses the whole time, teaching from our kitchen tables, trying to make this ambitious, two-term course on medieval history-writing engaging. As it proceeded, it became clear that one of the reasons it did succeed was that we worked well in collaboration. We developed surprising arguments that neither of us would have made individually, and equally important, we cajoled, joked and disagreed in productive ways. The gig became fun again, even in the jagged teeth of COVID.

Hussey: As part of that course, we recorded introductions to themes, ideas, histories of texts for the students, so we got used to a mic and talking to each other in that podcasty private/public way. So it worked to carry on. But there were good reasons within our field as well: medieval studies was remaking itself in the 2010s and early 2020s, and a public-facing, fluid, collaborative project open to all comers was important. As to wrapping after five years? Really only Old English can express it: “Hwær sindon seledreamas? Eala beorht bune...Hu seo þrag gewat!" [Where have the joys of the hall gone? Alas the bright cup! How the time has fled!]

Many listeners may never have taken a medieval studies course. What misconceptions about medieval literature do you hope the podcast helps change?

Hussey: Students always come in with two a-little-bit-true-but-also-completely-false misconceptions about medieval lit. One: everyone is farting and having sex all the time. Two: everyone is extremely pious and serious all the time. The wildly varied stuff we have read on the podcast blows that up. I mean, a fishing manual by a nun, riddles about Biblical battles, recipes to cure almost everything, celebrations of Viking defeats. Sure, there are religious texts and bawdy texts, but they are all very human texts.

Coley: I totally agree with that second point. New students often assume that medieval people were always devout and solemn and always deferential to temporal and spiritual authority. And sure, there’s some sucking up to the King in medieval texts (I’m looking at you, John Lydgate), and there’s piety, too. But there’s also critique and humour and doubt and frivolity. The reason we nixed the initial title for this article—"How two SFU professors are giving medieval literature new life”—is because these works are overstuffed with life. They give much more life than they take.

The podcast often explores themes such as power, morality and propaganda. What have you learned from medieval literature that feels particularly relevant today?

Coley: Speaking for myself, I’ve come increasingly to see how complexity is the enemy of authoritarianism. Fascism loves a simple answer: “Only I can fix it”; “Build the wall”; “Make the trains run on time.” But real solutions require nuance and imagination and understanding. They demand flexibility and thoughtful argument. To be ham-fisted about it, that’s what literary study teaches. We don’t deal in silver bullets in the English Department. You don’t come to us for a 45-second pitch and a slick presentation. There’s real work to be done here.

Hussey: Medieval literature is old and weird enough to be very much “other”—as Hartley wrote in 1953, “The past is a foreign country”—but medieval literature is so full of spiritual longing, erotic desire, political angst, uproarious hilarity, all the things my students call “relatable” that it is not “other” at all. It is us. One can do some amazing thinking, questioning, and feeling in that sweet spot.

Have there been any texts, stories or ideas that surprised you by feeling unexpectedly modern? Is there a text you wish more people knew about, and what makes it worth reading today?

Coley: Matt, do we talk about the Colkelbie Sow here?

Hussey: We cannot ever not talk about the Sow, but I might make a case for the quiet, careful meditation in A Treatyse on Fysshyng wyth an Angle (Season 1, Episode 10), written by an English nun named Julianna Berners. She writes so fully engrossed in the embodied physical details of tying flies, the rippling water’s surface, the slanting sunlight, and more, that it is clear (as it has been long before and long after) that fishing isn’t just about fishing.

Coley: She also thinks the fish as moral actors, allowing her sense of them (and surely of us) to percolate through. “The pyke is a good fysshe,” she writes, “but for he devouryth so many as well of his owne kynde as of other, I love hym the lesse.” That frank, anthropomorphic assessment of the pike—I love him less because he devours his own kind—is disarming, and it does a lot of heavy lifting. Definitely not just about fishing.

Is there a particular episode that you're especially proud of or that you would recommend to a first-time listener?

Coley: So Matt deflected from it in the last question, but the Colkelbie Sow (Season 3, Episode 4) remains one of my favourites, if only because you can hear us struggling mightily with the poem on even the most basic levels. I also deeply appreciate some of the episodes from Season 5, where we consider how medieval literature negotiates discourses of power and misrule. It was challenging in those episodes to move from obscure texts like the Sow to heavy hitters like the Knight’s Tale and Beowulf, but thinking such canonical works through our current political and cultural moment was important.

Hussey: Just the plot summary alone of the Sow is like a rollercoaster ride through the premises of three or four bad jokes. But I really enjoyed and learned from the deep dive we did into a two-line cryptic wisdom poem of the eighth-century, “A Proverb from Winfrid’s Time.” Two lines, but it opened up questions of secrets, truth, the uses of poetry, and definitions of heroism.

Is it true there may be a book related to the podcast in the works? Can you tell us anything about it?

Coley: There is! We’ve invited some incredible scholars to discuss their favourite unheralded medieval texts, and we’ve asked them to model in print the conversational back-and-forth that has been so important to us. The Canterbury Fails started out as a chat between friends over drinks, a standing date after a tough period of isolation. I don’t think either of us expected a book contract.

Hussey: And it will have amazing bespoke cocktail recipes matching each of the essays by these great scholars. Who wouldn’t want a collection of witty and learned essays on rarely read medieval texts and delicious libations as their stocking stuffer? Perfect for everyone on your list!

For more visit:

The Canterbury Fails
David Coley’s faculty page and Research Expertise Engine profile
Matthew Hussey’s faculty page and Research Expertise Engine profile

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