Ok, I acknowledge that the thought of more lectures might not be the most pressing issue for you at the moment, but bear with me!

There are a number of universities who are putting their lecture series online. These are recordings made of undergraduate lectures and are therefore well within the scope of things you should be engaging with. I tend to listen to these whilst driving the 100 minutes from my house to Bristol and it is surprising how much you can get through. I’ve mentioned some on Dante’s Divine Comedy, but there are others:

University of California, Berkeley

• History 106B The Roman Empire
• History 5 The Making of Modern Europe, 1453 to the Present
• History 4A The Ancient Mediterranean World

Yale

• Introduction to the Old Testament

For the following, you’ll need iTunes:

Stanford

• The Historical Jesus

This is a classic piece of scholarship of the New Quest for the Historical Jesus school.

Reformed Theological Seminary

• History of Philosophy and Christian Thought
• Church History Courses
• New Testament Courses
• Old Testament Courses

Also look at Concordia Seminary

UC Berkely have made available mp3s of various lecture series, which are well worth a look. Last time, I mentioned three lectures on Dante’s Divine Comedy which are part of a course on Man, God, and Society in Western Literature delivered buy Hubert Dreyfus. The course description is:

Man, God, and Society in Western Literature – Spring 2007. Philosophical issues as expressed in poetry, drama, and the novel. This course will compare and contrast the Greek, Medieval, and modern worlds, as reflected in their greatest literature, with special emphasis on the role of the community in reconciling conflicts between sub-groups in society and the individual’s ability to understand and control his own life. We will also follow man’s realization that the changing answers to these questions are themselves self-interpretations.

You can get hold of the mp3s for this course here. The Divine Comedy is about halfway down, but you might like to listen to some of the others.

I didn’t really cover much of the Dissolution yesterday, but the reaction of the population to the closing of the monasteries by Henry’s commissioners tells you something about the role of religious communities in 16th century England.

Radio 4′s In Our Time recently did a good 45 minute programme on the Dissolution.