FEATURES:

The Unreal Reality of Stage Combat
"Renaissance" talks to stage combat experts to reveal the secrets behind festival hand-to-hand battles that are both entertaining and based in history. Knowledge of proper technique is tempered by the necessity for theatrics, especially in the slapstick potential of a stage fight.

Animals on Trial
In modern society many animals enjoy specialied legal protection, and we don't arrest them when they break the law. In the Middle Ages, we discover how animals, both domestic and wild, often needed to hire their own lawyers, and were held accountable for crimes they committed.

England's Military Odyssey
We visit the massive Kent Show Grounds in Southeast England, home of Military Odyssey, a spectacular tour de force of 2,000 years of military history from the ancient world to modern times. It's the largest and longest running show of its kind in Europe with thousands of fully uniformed and equipped historical re-enactors and living history groups from all over the United Kingdom and continental Europe.

Viking Exorcism
To the Vikings, the bounds of law were still considered to be enforeable even after death. Hauntings were the province of lawyers, then, rather than clerics. We reveal how when ghosts appeared, Vikings could hold a "door-court," a duradomr, to rid the house of the dead.

Eltz Castle
The confluence of the Rhine and Mosel Rivers at Koblenz, Germany is an area that was devastated in the seventeenth entury in the Thirty Years' War and by the French in the War of the palatinate Succession. Most of the ancient castles are in ruins, but the magnificent Eltz Castle escaped destruction, and we'll take you to this amazing fortified jewel.

Parisian Bread!
We take you behind the scenes to the bakery of Gerard ulot, one of Paris's best known artisan bakers who carries on the traditions of the past, creating each loaf of bread by hand. The ingredients Mulot uses for basic bread - flour, water, saltand leavening - are the same ingredients used in the Middle Ages.