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

Procrastinating (never!) by browsing books in the library. Here’s a copy of Lewis Morris’s The Epic of Hades that was gifted in 1901 by Marie Muller to Ernest Newlandsmith, who would quote from it in The Temple of Art (1904). Then gifted to the Exeter University library by a Mrs W Wordsworth.

‘Tis the season for getting home and finding one’s pockets mysteriously full of perfect conkers

Can anyone help me with an eighteenth century history question? If a clergyman writes c. 1730 that they do not have money for a license from their parish or college (they're a Fellow), what kind of license would this be? Marriage?

Cambridge student Ambrose Bonwicke, writing to his father about a prospective room mate in 1711: “He ... is genteel enough in his dialect, being neither a northern nor western lad, out of which two quarters bad dialects usually come”

Turns out not being able to access your dms because of not having done the age verification thing doesn’t stop anyone else from messaging you. I’ve now turned off my dms, but if you sent me a message earlier today a) sorry! b) can you email me instead? test.pure.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/a...

Join the @stemma.bsky.social team! We've just advertised a two-year postdoc on WP2, "Networking Early Modern Poems." Apply by 30 September; details at link below. #earlymodern #dh #postdoc #jobfairy www.universityofgalway.ie/human-resour...

What was John Locke doing, as he eagerly learned about, bought, and read contemporary works of biblical scholarship? My latest article looks at a less familiar side of Locke's life, suggesting it reveals an underappreciated early modern world of 'everyday erudition'. #earlymodern #skystorians

Day two of conference two this week, and I’m happily soaking up the early modern public library goodness of Chetham’s

Day two of the Built With Books conference @livesandletters.bsky.social ! My paper this afternoon will be for demonstrating how the EBDO and CEBEME datasets can be used to find old and second-hand books in early modern England

The walk through Hyde Park isn’t a bad consolation for not being able to get the tube

My team will be talking about Narcissus Marsh and how medieval manuscripts ended up among the “best and most useful books for each faculty and science” in his public library for Dublin. @marshslibrary.bsky.social #BuiltWithBooks Oh and we also have a mummy and some pirates 🏴‍☠️

The classic case of going into a draft specifically to cut words and somehow ending up with a net gain of several hundred words.

We are delighted to announce the first batch of the new Early European Print collection, now freely available to explore online here: www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/collections/... Read more about collection and some of its highlights in our latest blog post: ow.ly/g1MH50WxSmH

Author copies arrived today! 😍🥳 #dh #bookhistory #medievalsky

Dipping back into some book provenance notes in preparation for the @livesandletters.bsky.social Built With Books conference and have quickly become stuck trying to disentangle the thicket that is the social networks of book owners c. 1600.

‼️Next year, the REBPAF Final Conference will be held in Dublin.‼️ We invite submissions of papers & posters; the deadline is 15 Dec 2025. We look forward to your contributions and to welcoming you to Ireland!📚 #REBPAF #MSCA #REBPAFConference #CfP #BookHistory [See images for details & how to apply.]

Got to love* a HR exit survey all about wanting to understand my decision to leave when I'm actually at the end of a fixed term contract. *not love

A few allotment joys from this evening’s session, ft. rudbeckia from my mother in law, a compost slow worm and lots of blackberries

Database documentation time, which means I am once again trying to answer the "what is a book?" question (as far as it's modelled in the data!!). Made more complex in this project by the fact we're drawing on different datasets which model books in different ways.

WHAT A WEEK! An utter delight to see so many #EarlyModern 'ists chatting, thinking, discussing together in beautiful Bristol. So many conversations started and ideas sparked. If you're looking for people you met, we tried to update the starter pack of #RenSoc25 delegates:

Hello Bluesky, in September I'll be out of contract and would be grateful to hear of any potential teaching (early modern lit) or research (with archives, rare books, humanities data) work. I'm based in SW England. Thank you!

Returning from #RenSoc25 brimming over with early modern goodness, in awe of the incredible research being presented, and buoyed up by the collegiality and community in such abundant evidence, despite everything. A huge thank you to the organisers!

A blockbuster day at #RenSoc25, talking all things how-to, utility, local identity & readership alongside lovely & brilliant scholars — thank you @emilyrowe1.bsky.social for organising our roundtable on satire & sincerity, & @walla7437.bsky.social for chairing our panel on microgeographies!

The beautiful first issue of #RenSoc2025 ‘s very own newspaper, printed on the Bristol Common Press! Issue 2 will be type set tomorrow, with delegates invited to suggest material!

Published now open access ✨️ Scholars have invented men to explain away women's labor in the British print trades. In this ex, a misgendering travels from a catalog to WorldCat and Amazon. It shows how linked data's fragmentation perpetuates old assumptions. oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bs...

Packed in haste: what have I forgotten?

Apply by 14 July to work with Andrew Dunning to make the Medieval Libraries of Great Britain project online accessible again - 6-month postdoc position @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social. Pls advertise, @oxmedstud.bsky.social @bkhistoxford.bsky.social medieval.ox.ac.uk/medieval-lib...

If you're coming to the Continental Books (CEBEME) panel at #RenSoc25 on Friday afternoon, you'll get a sneak preview of our project website (developed by Annie Zheng at Manchester using the Sampo-UI framework).

The garden is awash with roses, along with my camera roll

We can agree that shorts are acceptable conference wear no?

Posting again for Monday morning. Lecturer (fixed term) in Medieval & Early Modern Literature sought here in the School of Lit, Drama & Creative Writing at UEA. Email me (address in ad) with any queries. Please share widely. #skystorians #medievalsky #earlymodern

Job! Fixed-term, 1 year lecturer in Med/Ren Lit at UEA (covering the fellowship of @satyrane.bsky.social) ... it's a lovely, friendly School ... vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/16...

News articles on a repossessed bar in Exeter recount how Thom Yorke once played a gig there—I don’t know how they missed the fact that it was built to replace the WW2 destroyed pub nearby which I _think_ was the one which was next door to one of Exeter’s early book auctioneers in the 1720s.

Has anyone written on the auctioning of goods (especially of the dead) in London in the first half of the seventeenth century? Interested in the work of criers, how estates are sold off etc.

Furiously highlighting simultaneous panels in the programme and worrying how I’ll choose which one to go to before realising that one of the panels in that session actually involves me, so I should probably go to it.

I was wondering where a flurry of new follows had come from! Most excited for SRS next week, and a little overwhelmed by the number of amazing sounding papers in the programme.