When people think of the Middle Ages, they often picture gloomy castles, endless wars, poor sanitation and different kinds of plague. Rarely do they imagine belly laughs, fart jokes and scandalous tales of trickster wives, sexually frustrated priests and clueless husbands. That’s where The Court Jester comes in—a podcast that invites you to meet the medieval world in all its saucy, ridiculous, human glory.
I am Kleio Pethainou—art historian, storyteller, and scholar of medieval humour. I started The Court Jester to share the stories I kept stumbling upon in manuscripts: tales so absurd and outrageous that they made me laugh out loud in libraries. These are not your high-and-mighty chivalric epics. These are the fabliaux, the stories of the everyday people who had their minds set on getting fed, getting rich or getting…you get the idea. After performing some of these stories live, to audiences who laughed way more than they probably expected to, I wanted to see how they’d go down in a digital format. No lectures. No footnotes. Just the stories, with a bit of context and a lot of mischief.
What I found in the process is that most of these tales—once told everywhere from castles to taverns—still hold up. They’re funny, yes, but also deeply revealing. The characters chosen as the butt of the joke tell us something about who held power, who didn’t, and how laughter could subvert or reinforce social norms. From foolish husbands to scheming wives, from horny monks to ambitious knights, the people in these tales are messy, petty, and very, very human.
Each episode of The Court Jester brings one of these stories back to life. No sanitising, no modernising (although there are usually some pretty long content warnings). Just the medieval sense of humour, as outrageous, obscene, or bizarre as it really was. But my intention is not to mock the past. I want to celebrate its weirdness, its creativity and the human impulse to laugh at power, sex, hypocrisy, and bodily functions. I’m a bit too glad that this last one seems to have stayed constant through time.
The second season started recently, and the show has found a loyal audience that I like to call Fooligans (I haven’t told them, and they did not consent to this). For the second season, I have ambitious plans for the podcast’s Patreon too: interviews with fellow medievalists, deep dives into famous jesters and tricksters, and (my personal favourite) the censored stories, these fabliaux that are so incredibly inappropriate that I dare not tell them to the main podcast feed. I am already working up my courage for that one.
Which brings me to you, dear reader: If you enjoy Medievalists.net, odds are you love the kind of storytelling that The Court Jester thrives on—scholarship with a broad grin. So, head over to your favourite podcast platform and look up The Court Jester, or follow the links below.
🎧 Listen now on Acast, Spotify, iTunes, and wherever else you get your podcasts.
By Kleio Pethainou
When people think of the Middle Ages, they often picture gloomy castles, endless wars, poor sanitation and different kinds of plague. Rarely do they imagine belly laughs, fart jokes and scandalous tales of trickster wives, sexually frustrated priests and clueless husbands. That’s where The Court Jester comes in—a podcast that invites you to meet the medieval world in all its saucy, ridiculous, human glory.
I am Kleio Pethainou—art historian, storyteller, and scholar of medieval humour. I started The Court Jester to share the stories I kept stumbling upon in manuscripts: tales so absurd and outrageous that they made me laugh out loud in libraries. These are not your high-and-mighty chivalric epics. These are the fabliaux, the stories of the everyday people who had their minds set on getting fed, getting rich or getting…you get the idea. After performing some of these stories live, to audiences who laughed way more than they probably expected to, I wanted to see how they’d go down in a digital format. No lectures. No footnotes. Just the stories, with a bit of context and a lot of mischief.
What I found in the process is that most of these tales—once told everywhere from castles to taverns—still hold up. They’re funny, yes, but also deeply revealing. The characters chosen as the butt of the joke tell us something about who held power, who didn’t, and how laughter could subvert or reinforce social norms. From foolish husbands to scheming wives, from horny monks to ambitious knights, the people in these tales are messy, petty, and very, very human.
Each episode of The Court Jester brings one of these stories back to life. No sanitising, no modernising (although there are usually some pretty long content warnings). Just the medieval sense of humour, as outrageous, obscene, or bizarre as it really was. But my intention is not to mock the past. I want to celebrate its weirdness, its creativity and the human impulse to laugh at power, sex, hypocrisy, and bodily functions. I’m a bit too glad that this last one seems to have stayed constant through time.
The second season started recently, and the show has found a loyal audience that I like to call Fooligans (I haven’t told them, and they did not consent to this). For the second season, I have ambitious plans for the podcast’s Patreon too: interviews with fellow medievalists, deep dives into famous jesters and tricksters, and (my personal favourite) the censored stories, these fabliaux that are so incredibly inappropriate that I dare not tell them to the main podcast feed. I am already working up my courage for that one.
Which brings me to you, dear reader: If you enjoy Medievalists.net, odds are you love the kind of storytelling that The Court Jester thrives on—scholarship with a broad grin. So, head over to your favourite podcast platform and look up The Court Jester, or follow the links below.
🎧 Listen now on Acast, Spotify, iTunes, and wherever else you get your podcasts.
You can also support the podcast by:
🔸 Joining the YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCourtJesterPod
🔸 Following on socials (Facebook: @TheCourtJesterPodcast, BlueSky: kpethainou.bsky.social and Instagram @kpethainou)
🔸 Support the show at https://www.patreon.com/CourtJesterPodcast
And remember: in a world full of kings and scholars… be the jester.
Subscribe to Medievalverse
Related Posts