#GlobalMiddleAges #MedievalSky #aDNA Paleogenomic study on Islamic Ibiza. 2 individuals suggest Sub-Saharan origins (Senegambia & southern Chad), "providing direct evidence of trans-Saharan connections via military & slave networks." #OpenAccess www.nature.com/articles/s41...
An excerpt from “Pandemic in the Medieval World: Teaching a New Black Death Narrative in the 21st Century,” a podcast with Monica H. Green, Lucy Barnhouse, Winston Black, and Will Beattie, The Multicultural Middle Ages, Season 5, Episode 1, 25 March 2026, https://www.multiculturalmiddleages.com/post/pandemic-in-the-medieval-world-teaching-a-new-black-death-narrative-in-the-21st-century-green-bar. 31:23 Here’s a case where we can look at a pandemic that is far enough distant from us that we can look at it with some equanimity and bring those critical skills into play and ask: How did this happen? What is going on? What element of this is simply biology? What element is climate? What element is war? Other kinds of contexts. And pull those different strings out and DO THE WORK THAT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO DO AS ACADEMICS! To actually figure out how the world works, and how it has worked in the past. … I think we should be having a global debate about this, about these questions, and about pandemics. And again, all the more so urgently because of what we’ve all been through in the past almost six years.
Ad for Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast, Season 5, episode 1: "Pandemic in the Medieval World: Teaching a New Black Death Narrative in the 21st Century." Against a yellow background, there is an image from a later 14th-century manuscript showing a crowded cemetery scene.
Why I do this. And why it's #OpenAccess. #GlobalMiddleAges
Reposting for the evening crowd. #MedievalSky #GlobalMiddleAges #EarlyModern 🗃️ 🧪 @womenknowhistory.bsky.social @mideastmedieval.bsky.social
Parrots. aDNA. #GlobalMiddleAges. What a fascinating research project! This link leads to a sumary: www.earth.com/news/parrot-...
Cover. It shows an insight into a cloister vault.
The newest volume in our series Sense, Matter, and Medium: Visual Culture in Medieval Syriac Traditions. From North Africa to China, this volume showcases the breadth of Syriac Christian art and material culture.
www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...:
#MedievalSky #MedievalArt #GlobalMiddleAges
New for #GlobalMiddleAges. "most impressive is an extensive repertoire of rare Yuan dynasty blue-and-white porcelain, far more than has ever been recovered from a documented wreck site anywhere else in the world." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #TengriSky #Ceramics #Singapore
Free for download until Feb. 12: Calahorra Bartoloma, The Great Palace. #MedievalSky #MedievalMiddleEast #GlobalMiddleAges #Byzantium www.cambridge.org/core/element... Thanks to Pasts Imperfect for the notice!
List of the publication prizes awarded in 2026 by the Medieval Academy of America: The Haskins Medal Travis Zadeh, Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos (Harvard University Press, 2023) The John Nicholas Brown Prize Sarah M. Guérin, French Gothic Ivories (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022) Rowan Dorin, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton Univ. Press, 2023) The Inaugural Byzantine Studies Prize Baukje van den Berg, Homer the Rhetorician: Eustathios of Thessalonike on the Composition of the Iliad (Oxford University Press, 2022) The Article Prize in Critical Race Studies Krisztina Ilko, “Chess and Race in the Global Middle Ages,” Speculum 99/2 (2024), 480-540 The Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize Paul Ulishney, “New Evidence for Conversion to Islam in Anastasius of Sinai’s Hodegos,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 78 (2024), 29-48 The Karen Gould Prize in Art History Brigitte Buettner, The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture (Penn State University Press, 2022) The Monica H. Green Prize Rachel Schine, Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race (University of Chicago Press, 2024) The Jerome E. Singerman Prize Michelle Karnes, Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World (University of Chicago Press, 2022)
Congratulations to all the winners of this year's publication prizes from the @medievalacademy.bsky.social! Fabulous work in so many fields.
#MedievalSky #GlobalMiddleAges #History #ArtHistory #Chess
Oh, and there is an English version of this #GlobalMiddleAges book:
History of the World, vol. 2: Entangled Worlds: 600–1350, Cambridge/MA: The Belknap Press, 2025.
www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...
Screengrab of the New York Times history quiz answer to a question about the Malian emperor, Mansa Musa. (The answer is "1324," the year he destabilized Egypt's economy because of the amount of gold he brought while on pilgrimage to Mecca.) Text: Mali's emperor, Mansa Musa, makes an opulent pilgrimage to Mecca. Stopping in Cairo, he gives away so much gold that he destabilizes Egypt's economy. The price of gold reached $5,000 an ounce on Monday, a record high as global tensions grow. Not noted is the source of the image of Mansa Musa. This is from the famous Catalan Atlas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Atlas.
Always great to see Mansa Musa in the news (though perhaps not for this reason). From the Saturday, 31 Jan 2026 history quiz in the New York Times, reporting on gold prices 5x what they were in 2017. #MedievalSky #GlobalMiddleAges
A paper I will want to study closely when I write next about #ConstantinusAfricanus: www.pdcnet.org/augstudies/c... #GlobalMiddleAges #MedievalSky
This is fabulous news, Dr Perry! Very much looking forward to this! #MedievalSky #GlobalMiddleAges
#MedievalSky If you're not already familiar w/ the great 11th-century émigré from Tunisia, Constantinus Africanus, this blogpost from @mqassiti.bsky.social is a great introduction! This is one of the best #GlobalMiddleAges stories around, b/c it shows how Arabic medical learning united Europe!
The Medieval Chinese Origins of Venice’s Winged Lion Revealed www.medievalists.net/2025/09/medi... #GlobalMiddleAges
Works by #French #medievalist Jacques Le Goff (1924-2014) in #Chinese translation, all published in recent years. #GlobalMiddleAges #medievalStudies #MedievalHistory #中古 #中世紀 #歐洲歷史
I am delighted to announce that my co-authored article on Mamluk maqamas on #BlackDeath has just been published in a lovely special issue of JAIS. journals.uio.no/JAIS/article...
#plague #MedievalSky #GlobalMiddleAges #EnvironmentalHistory #histmed 1/2
The titlepage for a special issue of the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. The title of the collection is "Environmental Challenges in Premodern Eurasian and Medi-terranean Narratives." Cover image: Illuminated Manuscript, Book of kings (Shāhnāma), Rustam kills a dragon (the third feat), Walters Art Museum Ms. W.602, fol. 76b,by Walters Art Museum Illuminated Manuscripts.
Oh wow, major work of interest to #MedievalSky #GlobalMiddleAges #EnvironmentalHistory. A new special issue devoted to "Environmental Challenges in Premodern Eurasian and Mediterranean Narratives": journals.uio.no/JAIS/article.... Kudos to the editors for bringing this work so quickly into print!
The Dresden Codex.
The design and reconstructible history of the Mayan eclipse table of the Dresden Codex, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪 #Astronomy #GlobalMiddleAges
One of the more interesting facts about the so-called #GlobalMiddleAges is that, while East Asian historians often use an emic framework of ca. 200–1000 for the medieval (zhonggu 中古), Western GMA folks insist on a Eurocentric "medieval millennium" of 500–1500. #periodisation
Registration for online attendance is open for our first two research seminars this semester. Check out events at ahc.leeds.ac.uk/medieval. To listen to @rhigarthjones.bsky.social on 28 October at 17.30 BST go to ahc.leeds.ac.uk/medieval/eve... #medievalsky #globalmiddleages #abbasidhistory
Very happy to share this piece by David Bachrach where he explains the process of how he and his father, the late Bernie Bachrach, wrote the book, Warfare in the Global Middle Ages, which comes out today! www.medievalists.net/2025/09/writ... #militaryhistory #globalmiddleages #newbooks
Still new estimates of pre-Contact Indigenous populations in the Americas. www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1... #GlobalMiddleAges #DemographicHistories #Chaco
I had so much fun writing this article, getting to follow al-Manṣūr’s diplomacy across the early medieval world from Carolingian Francia to Tang China. #medievalsky #globalmiddleages
Really important findings about the question of population migrations vs cultural mixing in pre-Contact NW Mexico. Mitogenomes (from the mitochondria) of 114 individuals are used to study 8th to 15thC, w/ focus on the 13th. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #MexicanHistory #GlobalMiddleAges #aDNA 🧪🗃️
Are any #MedievalSky folks able to help with this request? #GlobalMiddleAges
Oooh, Gérard Chouin just flagged this new podcast, "L’Afrique atlantique au XIVe siècle, du dépeuplement à l’esclavage": www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/... #GlobalMiddleAges #MedievalAfrica
A map showing the purported routes of plague during the late medieval plague pandemic known now as the Black Death. The map, which is assigns dates to the waves of plague, suggests that the outbreak started in the region of the Caucasus Mountains, then spread in a clockwise fashion into Europe, only skirting the littoral areas of North Africa. Source: Benedictow, Ole. The Complete History of the Black Death (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021).
Another map of the Black Death, this time treating it as a pan-Eurasian phenomenon but again only including the northern rim of Africa (though here allowing for the Horn of Africa to be included, too. Source: Belich, James. The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).
Or, to put it another way, why is most of Africa missing from these two maps of the Black Death (Benedictow 2021; Belich 2022)? #GlobalMiddleAges #phylogenetics
