Look what arrived today, or at least the ebook did. This is the first encyclopedia devoted exclusively to medieval women’s writing globally,focusing on the thousand-year period between 500-1500. Entries on about 250 women writers plus longer thematic essays. You’re welcome.

Another helpful note from the catalogue of medieval fragments from the Danish National Archives: Found in the reading room, January 28 1957. Splendid.

Blog post on an early modern deathbed meditation from a Bregenz convent prayerbook, with context, analysis, and a provisional transcription/translation of the Seventh Word. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #ArsMoriendi #Nuntastic #EarlyModernStudies #Catholicism #blog #Research #AcademicChatter

Come get a job in academia, where the answer is: “your colleagues hate each other for obscure reasons and whatever you do will be interpreted as picking sides and held against you forever.”

My therapist: Don’t worry, Merovingian cursive is not real, it can’t hurt you Merovingian cursive:

What symphony would you take to a desert island—and why? A classroom exercise on listening, disruption, and remembering what drew us to music in the first place. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com

What a sunrise 🥹

Finally was able to get an outage map to load for Dickson Electric. This is 12:20am Monday.

New week, here we go. #academicchatter

Morning! #MosaicMonday

Before we see them, we hear them. Cowbells. Clappers. Warning before encounter. "The real challenge is stigma." On #WorldLeprosyDay, I explore the uneasy balance of care and exclusion through Cadfael S1E3. Read more: silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #Leprosy #Cadfael #MedievalStudies #Stigma #Care

Over 9200 NES meters without power, and this number has escalated quickly.

"We have to help people understand what is (the current, shared reality), we must collectively imagine what can be (a future possibility), & we have to diligently labor for what must be (organizing to sustain life/​livingness & for liberation)." @prisonculture.bsky.social on how to move forward.

Don't miss the third image!

@dicksonseverewx.bsky.social the snow has started in earnest in white bluff (8a, Jones creek and bill duke rd)

Blog post: Editing isn’t one giant fix-everything move. Different kinds of revision need different kinds of attention; trying to do it all at once is a great way to freeze. Choose your horizon! silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #writetips #AcademicWriting #Revision #Drafting #WritingLife

Tomorrow's front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 24, 2026

Get the blog sent directly to your inbox seconds after it's published. Subscribe on the right side of the website. nashvillesevereweather.com

It’s so cold that the University of WISCONSIN has canceled classes tomorrow

Grinding a ton of coffee tonight in case the power goes out and all I can operate with our tiny generator is the electric kettle for pourover 🫣

#3GoodThings 1) my son brought me leftover banana pudding from church today! 2) I solved my citation challenge. Less is better; I’m not writing historiography here, so am staying archive-forward 3) sunshine, abundant sunshine. Cold but lovely sunshine

Breaking news: New baby alpaca born a few hours ago. So we moved the moms & young ones to another prairie so the big boys—male llamas and horses—don’t play too rough with the baby. Please accept our timeline cleanse as you battle to preserve the 250-year old experiment of American Democracy.

Another blog post on that Thalbach Segen that I wrote about last week -- a "blessing" to be performed by the Sister during the mass. This gives the 2nd half of the prayer and its assessment silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #16thc #prayer #nuntastic #blog #Research #Catholic #WorldView

Tomorrow the trains will be well, all trains will be well, and all manner of trains will be well.

Also I may be rewatching The Good Place to feel better about the universe.

Welcome new followers! I am assuming a sudden influx from X 😉 Whether you followed me there before or not, I'm the same person here — expect some strong political opinions (some better informed than others), lots of education, music, South Asia, and the odd #proofofdog in the form of whippet pics.

I transcribed and translated a Catholic Segen, a kind of activating prayer, from the 16thc Thalbach prayerbook. Here I provide Part I and an assessment of *how* the prayer works silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #nuntastic #16thc #Catholicisms #Prayer #Segen

In my opinion, this is the only kind that works

Reading a not very good article and came across this FASCINATING line: "For a long time, since many people who owned books could not read them, the physical nature of books was more important than their [...] content." Girl WHAT

…I have some bad news for this person about manuscripts

Books before literacy simply satisfied humanity's innate desire to own and regard book-shaped objects, Amy.

In 1478, the abbots of St. Bernard's in #Hemiksen, St. Michael's (#Antwerp), and St. Gertrude's (#Leuven) all made a pledge to lend their help to the Beguines of the Low Countries, and to protect them from anyone who tried to violate their historic rights. #WomensHistory

Starting the year out with a January-calendar blog post, looking at "Calendars, Convent Books, and the Lives They Touched" in the Roman Breviary "verteütschung" (Augsburg 1535) silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #EarlyPrint #nuntastic #Calendar #January #blog #research

A blog look-back on 2025: posts on monastic life, sound & space, Margery Kempe, writing process, research tools, janky translations, and gratitude. A year of thinking in public—and outsourcing my brain. Maybe something here will resonate with you too. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #blog #research

5.20 a.m. on Monday 28 December 1908, the prosperous Sicilian port city of Messina is mostly asleep. The evening before saw the inauguration of the city's new public lighting system and a Christmas performance of Verdi's opera "Aida" at the Vittorio Emanuele Theatre [Thread] >> 1

I try to remember to say this at the end of every year. If you buy my books, thank you. If you buy them as ebooks or audiobooks, thank you. If you buy them used, thank you. If you borrow them from a library, thank you. If you borrow them from a friend or steal them from an enemy, thank you. ❤️

This year I was lucky enough to get to choose to do mostly things that aligned with my beliefs and values. I’m grateful, because the year was a doozy in all other ways. Here are a few I’m most proud of:

"Modern" in this context means post-1500. Which is how I always mean modern.

merry hiding out in the guest room to those who celebrate

I blogged about my non-fiction reading for the year. So many books, so much fun! silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #bookstodon #Nonfiction #AmReading #blog

You might question her methods, but credit to Bari Weiss: her leadership has pushed 60 Minutes into new formats and attracted a bunch of new viewership outside the normal broadcast audience.

Today's blog post is a "What I'm reading" entry, the #fiction #Mystery #SciFi version! silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #Books #blog #AmReading

I keep coming back to variations on this theme. But I got an idea stuck in my head four months ago. I wanted to make a book real in the world. And against all odds, now it is. It feels like some crazy alchemy, turning thought into physical form.

What if we all sent in AMS abstracts but they were all proposing a single enormous round table about why corporatizing scholarly societies is bad, actually

#ResistanceUnited #ProudBLUE #ONEV1 #DV1 I’ll leave it here for the sake of human decency. 💔

my impropriety has always been decidedly unfashionable - Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons