← This Guy Sucked
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- [00:00]
A
Hi there, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary haters club. A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Cynthia Paces, who is a professor of history and a historian of East Central Europe at the College of New Jersey with a brand new book out with Oxford University Press, a copy of which you can't see this, but I'm holding it up, a copy of which I am so excited to currently have in my hands the heart of Europe. Welcome to the show and congratulations on the release of your new book.
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B
Thank you so much, Claire. Yeah, it's really exciting. Fun to see you holding it up.
- [01:34]
A
Uh huh.
- [01:34]
B
I've been so happy with how they produced it. It's like a beautiful book too.
- [01:39]
A
It really is. I always say this on the show, but I just love when I get books that are so nice to look at and display and I want to show them to people. So it's probably even better when you're the person who wrote that book.
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B
I was so lucky. They gave me lots of pictures. So good. So it was like such a treat.
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A
Yeah, we like to usually start out with a little bit of talking just so that people know that you're like a person on top of being a historian. I'm a huge F of Prague. And dedicated listeners will also know that I was an Eastern Europeanist in my scholarly past life and I still dabble. But I want to know what your favorite place to go or thing to do in Prague is.
- [02:16]
B
Oh, oh, that's such a great question. So one wonderful place that I hadn't been in a while and then this summer I sort of rediscovered it. Remembered it is. There's just this very casual beer garden that overlooks the river, and it's in Letna park, and it's very near where the old Stalin monument had been. And now there's a big metronome there. But you get this just beautiful view of the river. And really, because it's kind of in the middle, you get both banks of the river, and then it's a place still where lots of Czechs hang out, and it's a little harder to sort of get up to that top area. And so the beer is cheap, and there's, you know, like, some sausages and pretzels and French fries. And it's just a great place in the summer to meet up with people, and you always kind of see other people that you know. So, you know, it's just a beautiful place. And I've been going there for about 35 years, and I never get over the beauty of it. And so to be able to kind of have a. Have a drink and. And see the view. That's not a very scholarly answer, but that's the place that popped up.
- [03:30]
A
That's okay. I mean, I would. I was thinking about where my favorite places and places to go and things to do in Prague are, and they also involve a lot of, like, eating and drinking and looking at. At nice views. Like, that is a really wonderful part of Prague is a beautiful, beautiful city. And it almost, to me, feels a little bit like an analogous city that people may or may not have gone to is Lisbon, where you're just like. There are just these little pockets of culture, and it's just so stunningly beautiful. Kind of wherever you go, it hasn't been so utterly taken over by tourists that you. You feel like you can't still really experience life there.
- [04:06]
B
Yeah. It's such a walkable city, really, all year round, too. So I always tell people if they can go off season. But it's so walkable, and there's not the sort of obligatory, like, you must go to the Louvre. Like, a lot of it is experiencing the city architecture.
- [04:26]
A
So, yeah, I will also say, so the first time I went to Prague was in March, which was actually nice because it was the off season, and there were so many things that I had read about and thought about and then was there in front of them and being like, wow, this is so cool. So this. Now, this podcast is a Visit Prague advertisement, but everyone should go. It's really. It's a really amazing city. Right.
- [04:50]
B
And the book is really written for people who, like, want to visit the city. It's not in the weeds as much as a kind of broad view. So I'm hoping that people who want to visit will be able to kind of use it as a bit of a handbook.
- [05:04]
A
Yeah, totally. I. I could absolutely see that from this, that there's a way of reading the book where you're sort of seeing all of these spaces now as historical spaces wherever you go, without needing to, like, have a. Have a sort of like Broner's Guide or whatever it's called. Without needing to have that kind of handbook. This, I think. I think can. Can do that, which is pretty cool. We should probably talk about the point of the podcast, which is related to Prague. I'm sure that will be a shocker for people who did you want to talk to me about today?
- [05:33]
B
So it's somebody that it's very possible that most of your listeners don't know about. He was somebody I had heard of, but when I was doing research for the book, I learned a lot more about him. But his name is Edward Kelly, so it is not a Czech, not a German somebody actually probably from England, although he sometimes claimed to be from Ireland. And he was somebody who told a lot of stories about himself. But he ends up being in Prague in the late 16th century. So somewhere in the 1580s and 1590s, he ends up living in Prague. So I wanted to talk about him because he is quite a charlatan. He is the person, in some ways, most responsible for what I would call the dark side of what we know about the dark arts. So he's an alchemist, and he was also something called a scryer, which is a person that can talk to angels or also kind of summon spirits in seance kind of settings. But all stories seem to indicate that he was really amazing at fooling people, at kind of being whatever he thought the people around him wanted him to be. Made a lot of money quickly and then ended up losing it, ending up in jail in Prague and dying, trying to escape captivity. So we can break all of this down. The reason why, like, he popped in my mind when I first heard about your very cool podcast is that he sucked like, a lot of, like, snake oil salesman kind of people suck in terms of, like, they're tricking people, right? They're trying to make some money. It's hard to know what they actually believe about themselves. I think some people do kind of convince themselves that they are special in some way or magical. But in general, there's a lot of evidence that we can talk about that he was a Bit of a fraud. But the other thing, and this is the thing that makes me insane when I'm reading about him and the period of time in which he's living in Prague is that there's lots of really cool, interesting things happening in the city. But when somebody who knows one thing about Prague, they'll say, oh, that's the place where all the magicians were. That's the place where the alchemists were. That's the place where that crazy emperor was trying to find the elixir of life or turn everything into gold. And it's so much of a fraction of what was happening in Porog at that period. And there were a lot of things that were like pretty wild and cool that were happening at that time that we actually don't hear about because everyone's like, ooh, magic. It's a lot in a way to lay at this guy's feet, but in a weird way, because he was so outlandish and he sort of dies in this spectacular way that even though most people don't know him per se, I feel like his story totally changes the narrative of like what Prague was in the Renaissance period.
- [09:01]
A
Totally. And I think you're totally right that what people will be familiar with even within the reproduction of this period of time in like TV shows and books and things like, I don't know why this immediately popped in my head, but there's this book series slash TV show called the Discovery of Witches that I was thinking about recently and they go to Prague in it and it's. There's this whole alchemy and that's what people think of in this time period. And so his. It's not him necessarily that's doing all of this, but his story is one of these ones that helps to supersede everything else around this time period.
- [09:38]
B
And you know, you say TV and movies and things like that, but if you're a tourist in Prague, we talked about some really fun places to go. But there are also like just amazing museums and the Castle and the Jewish Quarter. But then there are these like rinky dink little pop up museums like the Wax Museum of the Occult. And I went into one place the last time I was there, which was called like the Alchemy Museum. And I was like, maybe this actually has some interesting things because there were alchemists there, there were people who were doing all this experimentation. But it was basically like, it almost looked like a prop set for like a bad Harry Potter play or something. Like these bottles that were clearly like Somebody like, banged on them and made them look dirty and put. Put like some, like, skull and crossbones. And so, you know, you could kind of wander in and you could buy, like, an elixir or whatever, but it was clearly, like, so phony. And, you know, so I'm like, go to the real places.
- [10:40]
A
Yeah. And I mean, some of the big things that people want to do in Prague are like, go see the astronomical clock, the astrological clock. That's like the. And it is cool. I will say it is cool. That being said, it was smaller than I thought it was going to be, and there's nothing to do other than kind of like, look at it.
- [10:59]
B
You kind of watch it.
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A
You kind of watch it. Yeah.
- [11:01]
B
I have a very soft spot for it because when my daughter was three and a half, we were there and she loved the clock. And one time we went to see. Every time we were nearby, we'd have to stop. And one time it didn't work and she burst into tears. Like, on the middle of Old Town Square. It was late at night, there were hardly any people there. I was like, oh, the apostles are resting. But she loves the clock.
- [11:27]
A
It is cool. But it's, like, funny that that's kind of one of the main thing people are like, if you go to Prague, you must experience this clock in part because it's tied up in this whole, like, mystical, alchemical, occult, sort of esoteric.
- [11:42]
B
Time period, like, sort of wacky things.
- [11:46]
A
Yeah. Which, to be fair, I do think are cool and interesting. But I can also see how that changes the historical narrative around this time and ends up making everything else seem less important in comparison. Comparison. I also think when we talk about Edward Kelly, there's another person that people might be familiar with who we need to. Well, several other people, but one that he's heavily associated with. And so they might have come across him in conjunction with. And that is someone named John Dee, who is an English mathematician, astronomer, teacher, astrologer, occultist, alchemist guy. He's the core astronomer for Queen Elizabeth I.
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B
Right.
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A
And he is far more famous than Edward Kelly. Yes, yes.
- [12:29]
B
And legitimately so, from what we know. Yeah.
- [12:33]
A
And Edward Kelly has a very strange relationship with him, which we will get into, and is a big part of what's wrong with Edward Kelly.
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B
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [12:41]
A
But it's important that you know who this other guy, John Dee, is in order to. To get what Edward Kelly's thing is, because a lot of it is him sort of like being a clinger on of John Dee or an Associate of John Dee that allows him to enter all these halls of power as a result of this relationship.
- [12:59]
B
Absolutely.
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A
We should probably start by talking a little bit about Edward Kelly's early life, I think, or what happens before Prague. You know, you mentioned that he claimed a lot of things. And I think it's funny that we now have kind of a running theme on the show where I would say like a third of the people that we talk about on the show are like, just really into lying about themselves.
- [13:26]
B
Right, right. The frauds.
- [13:29]
A
Yeah. They're like, we've realized, like, oh, a lot of the people that we don't like, we don't like them because they were just serious grifters, basically, who just had this long term grift that ended up harming people far beyond them.
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B
Right.
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A
And he already kind of fits into that, into that pattern, which I find very funny. Can you tell me a little bit about his life before Prague?
- [13:55]
B
Yes. We don't know a lot about him in terms of like where he sort of arises from. Exactly. A lot of what we know is John Dee kept diaries. And so we often have Kelly, through John Dee's kind of very complicated relationship with this man. John Dee was sort of in awe of some of Kelly's abilities. And yet from the start, almost questions like, is this guy for real? So basically, Dee is known. He was like you said, he was educated at Oxford, he was a mathematician. He had what scholars think is one of the largest personal libraries in Europe. And at some point, Kelly shows up at Dee's house in England and tells him that he is familiar with Dee's work and that he knows how to contact angels. Sure, yeah. So to be fair, this was a passion of his that he wanted to be able to summon the spiritual world into our world. He did many, many things. And I think you alluded to this. One thing that is important is that in this Renaissance period, you can't make the distinctions, you can as much between alchemy and science and astronomy and astrology. And also we're so used to like, well, what are you majoring in? Chemistry. Whereas a lot of these sort of scholars, I mean, we have the term Renaissance men. Right. They're philosophers, they're scholars, they're theologians, they're scientists. And there's this real desire during the Renaissance to understand the natural world. So Dee is doing a lot of different things, but one of the things that he is very concerned about as a sort of subject of Elizabeth I, are the religious problems that are happening in England. This civil wars The Catholic reign of Mary, followed by Elizabeth's Protestant reign. And he really feels he is a Christian, and he feels that he might be able to, through his wisdom philosophy, his audiences with the queen figure out a way to reconcile the different forms of Christianity that are emerging during the Reformation. So Kelly somehow knows that this is one of John Dee's many, many interests. And he comes to his house, and we already kind of get a sense from Dee's diaries that he's sort of like, again, is this guy for real? Because Kelly is referred to in different places as Edward Talbot. So we have sometimes he's Edward Kelly, sometimes he's Edward Talbot. But in some plays, Dee crosses off, Kelly writes, Talbot crosses that off again, puts Kelly back. That's one of the reasons we don't know exactly what his early life was, because people have looked for him in the records at Oxford. They figure he must have been fairly well educated. Most scholars are pretty sure he truly knew Latin and certainly could speak with authority to some of the kind of big minds of the 16th century. But he shows up, and at the beginning, John Dee is kind of like, oh, this guy, I don't trust him. And he has. One of the telltale signs is that his ears apparently are lopped off. Now, different people who encountered Kelly have a variety of descriptions of these ears. One is like one ear. One is. It's a part of an ear, one that he wears his hair long, he wears a cap. So people are suspicious because that was a sign that maybe he had been found guilty of fraud because that was a punishment for people who are, like, in the pillory and then had their ear locked off. He already is suspicious. Like, this guy's been in trouble before, but somehow through. They call it a showstone, and they use. Which is kind of a mirror, but they also have crystal balls. So all those cool occult kinds of things. Kelly convinces Dee that he is talking to these angels. And over time, he translates what the angels are telling him into these books of Enochian wisdom. So it's like E, N, O, C, H. And it's this whole language that Kelly says he can speak and very few others can. But then, of course, there's like, we had to, like, hear the wisdom, but then burn the books. So we don't have these books, right, that are supposed to be in the. In this great language. But John Dee is like. I mean, he's a respectable guy. So scholars do say, like, Kelly must have done something worthy of convincing Dee that he had something going on, like, that he was capable he had some gifts.
- [19:28]
A
Sure. And I think one of the things that we're trying to do on the show or that we have been doing as a way of sort of heading off some of the more obvious criticism that we do get and are often like we feel are likely to get, is people will say, like, well, you're judging them by modern standards. And I want to be clear with a lot of this stuff that we're talking about. We're not talking about this just to be skeptical of the thing that he says that he's doing. Right. Like, we're trying to actually judge him by the standards of his day and prove that he also sucked back then, too.
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B
Right.
- [19:59]
A
Like, the. The boundaries between what is seen as scientific experimentation, scientific inquiry, like you said, alchemy, occult, all of these things are very porous. And so when we're looking at this, we're not looking at it to be like, well, this is stupid that he's saying this. We're looking at it to be like. But even judging by the standards of his time period, he still does things that are bad. For example, he. We think, like you said, we think he had already been convicted of fraud and then said, well, like, let me try to get in with these other people afterwards.
- [20:34]
B
He's arrested at the time. Yeah, he's probably accruing debts. People are taken in by him. But then they also start to say, you know what? I think I was taken in by him. So I think that's, in a way, part of my point of, like, why he sucked. Because it's fascinating to look at, like, what did people believe in the 16th century? And one of the things that I sort of found out that I didn't really understand until I wrote this book was that there was so much interest in this idea of matter and what everything was made of, and whether every object, whether you're talking about a rock or a person or a plant, is somehow made of some kind of building block that everything shares. The scientists at the time are trying to understand that very thing, and they make a lot of important discoveries about it. And tying with that. This is also when we're having these theological debates about transubstantiation, like, how could Catholics believe that this is the blood of Christ? And scientists are writing about this from almost a scientific perspective. Like, if we go down to the very building block of matter, we can say that these things are the same, but they are put together in a slightly different way, or there's a different energy around them. So you read this stuff and you're like, wow, these guys were onto something. And they weren't crazy. They were actually beginning a lot of our modern understanding of science, of chemistry, biology, physics. And, you know, they were also thinking about that question that scientists do today, too, like, can I be a religious person but still understand how the universe got to be where the way it is? Those debates are still there.
- [22:46]
A
Thanks for listening to this preview of a Patreon exclusive episode. To subscribe and listen to it in full, head over to patreon.com this guy sucked.