📣 STUNNED ARCHAEOLOGIST KLAXON 📣 ...
(It is actually an interesting find in the context of funerary practices at that time and in that place - where Roman, Hellenic, and Egyptian practices clashed, combined, and syncretised) #mummification #archaeology
www.independent.co.uk/news/science...
Summer term 2026 schedule for the IHR Earlier Middle Ages Seminar in London.
The IHR Earlier Middle Ages seminar reconvenes in May, with another great line-up of papers for the term! #medievalsky
On 10 May I'll be one of the speakers at this event at the Barbican, talking about the persecution of London's medieval Jews and their defence of the Tower of London from siege in 1267: www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/202... #medievalsky
Relatedly: digitizing archives should be an add-on, not an excuse for destroying physical documents. I used to be a curator at the British Library Map Library. An essay of mine that connects the physical space of a library/archive to arguments about why LLM-based genAI can only ever be garbage:
The cyberattack on The British Library in October 2023 knocked out ebooks and almost ever other computer thing there for years.
Ebooks just came back. They were knocked out everywhere using the BL’s license (legal deposit libraries I think? More libraries?)
Distributed physical copies matter.
Centre for Law and History Research Workshop on *Law, History and Reproduction' 1 May 2026, 10 am to 5 pm BST @ Room 2.13, Wills Memorial Building, University of Bristol Law School, BS8 1RJ Contact: Dr Gauri Pillai (gauri.pillai@bristol.ac.uk) and Dr Elena Caruso elena.caruso@bristol.ac.uk)
PROGRAM 10:00-10:30 Coffee and introduction by the organisers Session 1 10:30 - 11:15 am Dr Angela Kintominas, Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney, 'A Hidden History of Women's Work: Excavating the Regulation of Reproductive Labour Across Work, Welfare and Migration Legal Regimes in Australia' (online) Discussant: Dr Katie Cruz, Law School, University of Bristol. 11:20 - 12:05 pm Francesca Frisone, University of Messina, Defining the indefinable. Obstetric and gynaecological violence in Italy from an historical point of view' Discussant: Professor John Foot, Department of Italian School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol. 12:10 - 12:55 pm Desi Yunitasari and Devi Yusvitasari, Melbourne Law School 'Gender-Based Violence and Reproductive Criminalisation: Feminist Interventions in the Legal History of Reproduction in Indonesia' (online) Discussant: Dr. Gauri Pillai, Law School, University of Bristol. Lunch 13:00 - 14:15 pm Lunch at Moltobuon!' for authors and discussants (Moltobuono 59 Park St, Bristol BS1 5NU) Session 2 14:15 - 15:00 pm Anisha Aggarwal, Vinoj Manning, Ami Sahgal 'Do Laws Carry History? A Study of Abortion in the Indian Subcontinent' (online) Discussant: Dr Andrea Espinoza Carvajal, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol 15:05 - 15:50 pm Dr Kay Crosby, Newcastle University UK Legal Gender Recognition in the 1920s and 1930s' Discussant: Professor Lois S. Bibbings, Law School, University of Bristol 15:55 - 16:40 pm Dr Andreana Dibben (University of Malta), 'Repeating the Script: Moral-Legal Discourses, Feminist Mobilisation, and Reproductive Governance in the MAP and Bill 28 processes in Malta' Discussant: Professor Sally Sheldon, Law School, University of Bristol 16:45 - 17:00 pm Closing remarks by the organisers
I’m very much looking forward to speaking at this event on legal histories of reproductive justice at the University of Bristol next week. My paper is far less well developed than I’d hoped, but I think there’s still enough there for an interesting discussion.
Can't believe it's been a year since the publication of my book, The Destruction of Medieval Manuscripts in England! 📖
Run to your local bookstore to buy your copy 🏃♀️
but actually don't 😊 because the whole book is free to download from Oxford's site: 🎉 🙌 🎂
academic.oup.com/book/59790?l...
Sint-Nicolaaskapel, Nijmegen, probably built around 1000 on the site of the Carolingian palace and inspired by the palatial chapel in Aachen. One of the Netherlands’ oldest extant buildings. Very cool!
Universities: researching and working not just for you but for us, and stronger when collaborating rather than competing.
2.5 year postdoc opportunity at CoE NARS, Tampere University. The focus is on the history of everyday nationalism and we encourage applications dealing with the history of childhood and youth. Please distribute far and wide and encourage great scholars to apply. tuni.rekrytointi.com/paikat/?o=A_...
Delighted to announce the upcoming Colloquium on Medievalisms, co-organised with CREMS in person at Queen Mary University of London!
Please join us on Saturday, 2nd May, for some medievalists' fun! 😊
Registration via link: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/medievalis...
Looking forward to seeing you there!
What are humanities and social sciences research good for? Consider Enslaved.org: putting names to as many of the people trafficked during the Atlantic slave trade as possible. Insisting on the dignity of every human being. #Talkabouthumanities #talkaboutsocialsciences
The V&A agreed to pull a map it wanted to use for catalogue to a 2021 exhibition Fabergé: Romance to Revolution. It also removed a photograph of Lenin from the book because the Chinese printers said Lenin could be deemed “sensitive” by the Chinese censorship body
www.theguardian.com/culture/2026...
Hey yesterday I emailed an archivist with, and I quote, “do you know what ‘bundle dated 1190-1200,46’ might be?” And they emailed me back within an hour with the full text of a deed and a translation
so yeah, ask a librarian (and archivists)
A brown monkey-like demonic creature is throwing a person head-first into a hellmouth that is in the form of a large monster with long, sharp teeth.
A hungry hellmouth being fed.
BnF, Français 13096, fol. 86r (early 14th century)
Yeah, the papacy was famously an apolitical entity for nearly two millennia.
I remember back when I did my librarianship MA they deliberately de-emphasised specific tools when it came to things like search design and information retrieval "because any tool we teach you about will be obselete early in your career". Instead it was hugely about underlying principles.
Exciting times for the study 11thC England: the 'lost' seal of Edward the Confessor has been rediscovered in the Archives nationales de France! #SkyStorians #MedievalSky
1st C AD Roman floor mosaic depicting Medusa’s head in the central roundel from a luxurious house that was buried in the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius that buried everything in the region, including the towns of #Pompeii and #Herculaneum.
📷 my own, #MANN, Naples.
#MosaicMonday #Archaeology
We need an adult debate on free speech. Some people will be offended US academic Cass Sunstein, who is visiting Dublin this month, reminds us that college campuses 'need offensive speech'
Exercising my free speech here to say applying what is happening on US university campuses to Irish campuses is very wrong. There is no stifling of free speech or learning here. For eg I teach about feminist activism & also give readings on anti feminism, similarly with LGBTI activism, our students
This is a great reminder and something that ChatGPT cannot do but academic editors can! And are really good at it!
Initial 'H'(oc) formed of two hairy creatures, with a demon's head above and a little dog below.
Bodleian Library MS. Add. D. 104; Haimo of Auxerre, In epistolas S. Pauli; 1067; Italy, Rome, S. Cecilia; f.43v @bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Amazing treasures of medieval legal history to distract one briefly from current news and marking - the Catslechta ˙ (or Cat-sections) - an old Irish legal text on cats (the Senchas Már) which even sets out various categories of cats based on various characteristics or talents.
#medievalsky
Continuing my "meta" arc, this time I'm talking about why its worth reading academic books even if you are not an academic. Also why I think a lot of the criticisms against academic works don't hold up, and how the line between pop and academic work isn't always clear cut. #medievalsky #history
Here's the open access article in question for anyone curious or if they'd like to check if the summary "dos die Leut damals ned deppart warn" is accurate: works.hcommons.org/records/q7fs...
#medievalsky #earlymodern #envhist
An excerpt from a teaching module on different ways to interpret the same genetic data for the history it gives of disease migration. The text reads: "Now look at the second scenario. The Black Death genomes are still dated the same. And they can still be associated with the Black Death mortality as it is commonly understood because they come from more or less well-dated gravesites associated with that event. But because the other lineages, 1A and 1B, diverged from the Black Death lineages before any of them entered Europe (their branching points are all still in the “orange” region), the Black Death events no longer tell us anything about the within-Europe histories of the other lineages. They may have entered Europe via different routes than the Black Death lineages. They may have even entered Europe before the Black Death."
A phylogenetic tree suggesting a thesis whereby the new strains of Branch 1 Yersinia pestis entered Europe three separate times, not just once. Source: Green, Monica H. The Black Death: The Medieval Plague Pandemic Through the Eyes of Ibn Battuta. World History Association, 2025. https://doi.org/10.17613/n3h76-6dg78, Lesson 3.
A #histmed note for today. Learning how to read a phylogenetic tree is one of the most important (& easiest!) skills a historian of medicine can have. As we move into evolutionary understandings of infectious disease histories, we can readily teach how to decipher this crucial #RosettaStone. 🧪🗃️
Delighted to have presented my paper on Hampshire's peasant women and land, c.1300-c.1400, at the New Researcher sessions for #ehs100! I've really enjoyed all the other papers I've heard this weekend, everyone's doing such fascinating research.
Across history, witchcraft has been understood in many different ways. 🧙
In this Journal of the British Academy conversation, leading academics explore the cultural history of witchcraft and how its meanings have shifted over time.
Read if for free on Open Access 👇
https://bit.ly/4sjcuTv
As part of the @echistsoc.bsky.social centenary, the Women’s Committee will screen a retrospective, featuring women economic historians, in their own words, on the past, present and future of women in EH. Screening Friday, 10 April, 18:25, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, LSE. Short clip 👇
