People sometimes ask me: What happened to eel-rents? Why'd they disappear? And...I'm not sure. But I that think the 1348/9 Black Death was a big factor. The numbers of eels due annually in rent by century is striking: 13th C: 437,426 eels (map 1) 14th C: 33,997 eels (map 2) 1/4 🗃️🧪

Hike your own hike. I'm setting out with a stretch goal, a practical goal, and a "have fun" goal. At the very least I will accomplish one of these!

I know it’s #AprilFoolsDay but I’ve just discovered the micronation of Slowjamastan and I really need it to be real: www.slowjamastan.org/laws/

They: Hi! Through our unhallowed ransacking of the world's knowledge, your computer can now talk to the dead. Me: Can it talk to my printer yet? They: haha no

NEW Analysis of ash residue from incense burners preserved at #Pompeii reveals the substances burnt as offerings to the gods in Roman households and the long-distance trade undertaken to acquire them. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

Hello #MedievalSky and #Antiquity from the #PresentDead! Here's my #cfp for a hybrid conference on "interacting with the Dead in Antiquity & the Middle Ages", to be held in Graz, Austria on 2-4 Sept., 2026 presentdead.uni-graz.at/en/news/blog... Please do circulate it to interested parties :)

What happens when you spend too long cataloging lines, rubrics, crosses, and prayer structures in a 16th-century prayerbook? Apparently I default to poetry. Send help. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #ManuscriptStudies #Nuntastic #Kalamazoo2026 #scribes #blog #research #BreakTime

It’s infuriating, but also just so depressing. *No one* in charge of any part of our educational infrastructure seems to understand why it’s important for people to…read things that are difficult.

A prayer said once is an event. Repeated across the day, it becomes a practice that holds. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #medievalstudies #religion #nuntastic #blog #research #repetition #prayer #Catholic #16thc

#MedievalSky I received a very important announcement today. Feminae, the bibliographical database on medieval women created and run by Margaret Schaus for the past couple of decades, is going offline as of 1 April. Download as much as you can ASAP: inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/Feminae/Adva...

And as you get older you realize the REWRITING is the consummate process of thinning, and correcting that a lively brain performs even as you sleep.

One thing that AI evangelists seem to assume, particularly legal AI evangelists assume, is that the thinking and analysis is quick, and the writing is just tedious busywork that slows us down. But the writing IS the thinking and analysis. You work out the thinking and analysis by writing it down.

The “writing is thinking” posting will continue until a single freaking person in Silicon Valley has figured this out

I deciphered some heavily abbreviated scholastic Latin pasted in a binding and found Johannes Nider’s Praeceptorium divinae legis hiding in the flyleaves of a Thalbach devotional book. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #fragmentology #bookhistory #incunabula #medievalists #blog #research #nuntastic

Roncesvalles Pass is open for transit, Frankish king Charlemagne said. “The only thing prohibiting transit in the pass right now are the Basques attacking rearguards,” he said. “It is open for transit should the Basques not do that.”

Plese repost & share! *THE OPEN ACCESS COMPANION TO THE CANTERBURY TALES*, a free, scholar-produced onlyne resource for teachinge and learninge *The Canterbury Tales* at the universitye level: opencanterburytales.lsusites.org

What happens when medieval songs become raw sonic material? In Schnittke’s Minnesang, fragments of Minnesinger melodies appear, dissolve, and re-emerge inside a 52-voice choral texture. A listening guide + spectrogram analysis. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com

wearing my women in stem t-shirt on international women’s day to celebrate the fact that i was given that and a reusable water bottle instead of equal pay

This is a key point. In the end they cancelled pretty much ALL the grants, whether the bot deemed them DEI-related or not The ChatGPT assessment was for show, not determinative, but it enshrined “efficiency” as the top priority and steamrolled over any scruples about process.

And what about this pun: "Evangelium", made of an image of the biblical "Eva" and a few letters. Halleluja.

Finally it's publishable (if not perfect - spot the mistakes!). Open access until March 17 #nuntastic #earlymodern #womeninmusic #skystorians #earlymusic

The long fifteenth century started in 1215.

Booke, booke, Reade a booke, Reade anothir booke, Reade a large amounte of bookes - Bookes are freakinge awesome

How much do you REALLY read, and how much of those reading materials are online and what's the proportion online/offline? My hunch is that we are now reading A LOT of very short form material (tweets, skeets), very little in the way of articles, and books, much less in print. This is worrisome.

Musicologists love antiphons. But a 16th-century prayerbook suggests the real center of gravity in the Divine Office was the psalms. The evidence? Counting drop caps. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #codicology #manuscripts #DivineOffice #chant #musicology #Catholic #nuntastic #blog #research

👀 Over the last few months, I’ve been working with the terrific triumvirate @spparkle.bsky.social, @emiliekmmurphy.bsky.social & Hannah Yip to set up “Sonance: A Journal of Early Modern Sound Studies”, a diamond open access journal dedicated to historic sounds in all their wondrous & eclectic forms.

Someone asked for a thread of my medieval story times (twist my arm!), so here they are. I’ll pin and add as I go!

A whiteboard full of grants, garden plans, taking a walk, and petting the cat -- a post about managing all the big things at once. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #ScholarlyLife #WritingLife #Priorities #Organizing #blog #research

This stunt where ICE releases people far from home with no proper clothing and no way home should be treated as attempted homicide. In this case, actual homicide. These cases are not accidental or based on misunderstandings. They are deliberate attempts to inflict bodily harm.

What does a singing bear have to do with Chaucer? A lot, it turns out. We trace how the Marian chant Alma redemptoris mater shaped medieval ideas about learning — from schoolrooms to miracles to manuscript images. Open access: academic.oup.com/nq/advance-a... #MedievalStudies #Chaucer #Musicology

The headline does not convey how completely batshit this story is. The Archive Today (archive.ph etc) admin weaponized the site's captcha to attack a blogger who wrote about them and *altered archived screenshots* as part of the attack. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Just to kvetch for a moment: We have a $1K Dell computer and a $250 Nimo computer. Guess which one is back at the repair shop for the 2nd time??? Yeah, Dell is no longer reliable as a brand. This time, the screen has come unstitched from the motherboard. It wasn't rough handling, either. Bah.

History is sometimes an act of accumulation: 397 folios. Hundreds of candles. Countless tiny details. Today’s blog post discusses reading for details that earlier editors thought didn’t matter. #AcademicLife #MedievalStudies #nuntastic #SlowScholarship #blog silencesandsounds.blogspot.com

#pedagogy: in my medievalisms seminar yesterday I gave a group oral midterm. They had ample notice, and I called it a “colloquy” — they knew they needed to be in dialogue. My role was to facilitate & ask them how this or that aspect of our work so far tied into these themes. 1/4

Blog post: Threefold illumination, one determined nun: first despise yourself, then fall in love with God, then surrender everything. Medieval spiritual growth, step by step. silencesandsounds.blogspot.com #nuntastic #Prayer #EarlyModern #DevotionalLife #blog #Research #Prayerbook

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!