I'm looking for suggestions of museum/heritage education consultants for a small project, ideally south-west based. Any ideas or recommendations greatly received!

Gloomy here today, but on Saturday it was glorious (when it wasn’t hailing)

I’m leading this London Rare Book School course on the history of collecting. Ideal for anyone interested in studying the history of libraries and how and why books have survived. We’ll be looking at why special collections are special. 22-26 June. #bookHistory👇📚📖 ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...

⚠️Register before 12 April ⚠️ Marking Music: the Use of Music Books in Early Modern Europe 11–12 May 2026 @cemskcl.bsky.social & online For scholars of music, book history & related to explore how people engaged with books containing music in early modern period. www.tickettailor.com/events/aheve...

Long in the making….here’s my new article about second-hand books and the Bodleian www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/...

The jump scare of googling things close to your research and then having your own thesis pop up in the results

Just found out that Catholic writer Thomas Harding, to whom John Jewel wrote his "Reply", was not only also from Devon, but was actually born just six years earlier in the next village.

Just reading the abstract here is giving me flashbacks to some of the spreadsheets I've dealt with. Font formatting as a means to store information: don't do it!!

When your will is actually just another piece of polemical writing. Matthew Sutcliffe, Dean of Exeter in 1628: "Those false teachers alsoe amonge us that palliate popish heresies, and under the name of Arminius, seeke to bringe in poperie and endeavour, with all theire little skill, to reconcile...

Super happy to see Sara Norja and Mari-Lisa Varila’s special issue of Renaissance Studies in print! With contributions by @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social @carriegrif.bsky.social, me, and others! My article is (unsurprisingly) about binding waste. Open access here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

#earlymodern has anyone come across copies of Quarles poems in manuscript miscellanies? Nothing on CELM

I have an article out on the unusual writings of an early-eighteenth-century Anglican curate of Devon, Christopher Lantrow, who thought himself inspired by God to write political sermons in the margins of a parish library book. academic.oup.com/res/advance-...

Portrait of a Lady, by Catharina van Hemessen c. 1528–after 1587. She is the earliest known female #Flemish painter whose work can be clearly verified as hers. This picture was painted c.1548/49. (The Bowes Museum)

We are hiring postdoc researchers to join our #WrittenWorlds project at Birkbeck, with Sue Wiseman, @mdpowelldavies.bsky.social, @richardjansell.bsky.social and I. 0.5FTE, 13 months, focus on women's or provincial non-elite writing #EarlyModern 🗃️ cis7.bbk.ac.uk/vacancy/post...

I'm really looking forward to this event on Monday, where I'll be discussing William Bedwell with Prof. Alastair Hamilton and the curators of the Bedwell exhibition, Deborah Hedgecock & Bridget MacKernan. There's still time to sign up if you'd like to come along! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/william-be...

WORKSHOP: A Friendly Introduction to Palaeography! 🔎 Explore 14th century medical + culinary recipes 🔎 Based exclusively on records in our Archives 🔎 Learn about Middle English 🔎 No practical experience required 15 April | 2pm-4:30pm Book your tickets: www.exeter-cathedral.org.uk/whats-on/eve...

In person early modern metals event in London next month with me, @laurenworking.bsky.social, and Lubaaba Al-Azami. Please repost and share widely! And register here -- forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...

TCD Library is recruiting a Senior Bibliographer to help catalogue the Fagel Collection! This is a fabulous professional opportunity to work on one of Europe's great early modern private libraries. Closing 10 March at noon. Full details available at www.tcd.ie/hr/vacancies

STRANGE NEVVES of FIERY BALL over Exceter &c.

One hundred and eight, one hundred and nine, one hundred and ... ten? Ottaviano Petrucci's Canti C. N° cento Cinquanta (1503), from the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, viewer.onb.ac.at/100450FC

Been down some rabbit holes about BUCKRAM today. Earlu modern theatre people -- were 'buckram men' used as props on the stage? (literalising Falstaff's 'men in buckram'?) Military history people -- were dummy straw men, perhaps lined with buckram, used for target practice in the 16th century?

#skystorians A rare permanent job at Warwick - Assistant Prof in Early Modern British History www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO295/a...

the vision | the execution (both from Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 53.C.26, viewer.onb.ac.at/107A6269/ )

Reminder: today is the last day to respond to the UK government consultation to the cruel changes to immigration rules being proposed. Can take just 20 mins. I really recommend using Amnesty's guide to the survey because the survey is designed to catch you out media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/Am...

anyway the consultation shuts tomorrow, one minute to midnight UK time: www.gov.uk/government/c... Amnesty have some good guidance here. Go on: media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/Am...

Has anyone studied how researchers and academics use library catalogues? I'm struggling to find any literature on researcher (not student) information needs and information seeking behavior. Any leads? My focus is rare books/archives/special collections, but I'm looking broadly right now.

Preparing for a local history talk next week, which means furiously looking up and drilling the pronunciation of half a dozen words. (Alas, a method that only works if you know what it is you don't know.)

My new article, 'Selling Education in England, 1650-1715' is now out (open access) in the English Historical Review! academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-...

'What a brilliant night! Wills: dry, formal, boring? This was story telling at its best: intriguing, engaging, human!’ In this new blog post, find out what happened when Chris Hoban and his band, The Executors, played to a packed house in Topsham sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult... #EarlyModern 🗃️

Thanks to @thefnl.bsky.social this exceptionally rare Tudor map of Kingsbridge in Devon has been acquired for public research at the Devon Heritage Centre, after more than four centuries in private hands.

Gosh I have not missed buggy university HR portals. On the plus side, nice to be back in a university HR system :)

Fascinated by the implication of not being able to visualise a past that existed before living memory. This rendering of a 14th-century Scottish interior is giving early twentieth-century, vintage vibes.

James II gets cancelled, Chichester cathedral

Any good critical writing on the relationship between bibliography and genealogy?

This is a stunning resource, beautifully presented - congratulations to Ros Smith Kathy Acheson and their team emwmlibrary.com

Skills in UX/UI Design, Coding Web/Application Development, Systems Integration +/or Database Mgmt? Join us in York (UK) to: - Experiment with real museum data and problems - Collaborate with a small, focused group of people - Influence the future of collections use knowledge Link in Alt Text 👇

One of my favourite genres of Google Books is those with unlooked for but fun provenances. This copy of Bodleian librarian Thomas James's Ecloga Oxonio-Cantabrigiensis, now in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, was owned by Sebastian Tengnagel (1/2) books.google.co.uk/books?id=MS9...

Now available online! www.cambridge.org/core/books/h... 🌿📚💚🪲

*small embarrassed voice* A little plug for my article on Devon book sales c. 1700, which has gone online open access. tl;dr book auctions weren't just a London/Oxbridge thing: a flourishing second-hand book market centred on Exeter included auctions from the 1680s. doi.org/10.1093/libr...

Having worked with a few different genre/subject schemas for early modern books, my main takeaway is the value of explicitly differentiating (at the very least) between terms that describe form/genre and those that describe subject matter, rather than bundling different associations under one term.

Dressing up as a catalogue ghost, that product of a 19th c typo that drains the time of researchers and librarians and which—after initial banishment—reappears unexpectedly elsewhere. For extra horror: the ghost entry seems to describe a source which will solve all your research problems, but alas.

Distressed, today, to find that happenstantial is not a word, when it very clearly should be.

Just in time for #GreenLibrariesWeek , a new LIBER Digital Scholarship & Data Science Topic Guide focused on Digital Sustainability Explore digital sustainability and learn how GLAMs can measure and reduce their digital footprint [1/2]

Realised that it’s now been longer since submitting my thesis than I spent writing it. More or less managing to suppress worries about what I should have achieved in that time with the thought of how happy 2021 Anna would have been to know she would get to work on a couple more projects.

My two modes of writing: 1) what an exquisite sentence, you clever girl 2) your ideas are too POOR, your knowledge too WEAK, your prose INSUFFICIENT (see also, rereading past work)

Job! Postdoc in Digital Cultural Heritage: Data Ethics & Software Ecosystems, on new EU funded grant. 3.5 years, @designinf.bsky.social, Edinburgh. Design ethical processes, & evaluate open source tools for Digital Cultural Heritage Objects, with me! elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Have to say I’m very much here for people-giving-away-their-windfall-apples season. No photo because I’ve been too busy eating the things.

Is there a German word for the joy of unexpectedly finding a trove of new archival evidence and simultaneously the dread of having to somehow account for it in an already overflowing article you’d ‘finished’ doing the primary research for?

A submission for early modern name of the day: Jewell Sparke, who subscribed in 1712, and signed his name with added sparkle