They said, why not start the new book with a spectacular detail like a screaming skull or something, then enter a placeholder text, and wait for the inspiration to finally kick in...

teaching Whitman tomorrow, thinking about

Nice and specific, cheers.

Dummy board of a woman peeling apples, c. 1690, of English make (Victoria & Albert Museum) Dummy boards were life-size images placed in stairwells or in front of fireplaces in summer time. They were designed to amuse and also to startle visitors.

Just a regular fox taking an #earlymodern Uber. Nothing to see here. #skystorians

Part Milton criticism, part John Carey obit, & part reflection on his own cancer treatment, Willy Maley's moving essay is an astonishing testament to lives in criticism and reason 1A I'm so proud that @cmuenglish.bsky.social launched the @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social pghrev.com/living-preca...

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

For centuries, a “gossip” was a woman who attended another woman's delivery. The word was a corruption of “god-sib” or “god-sibling,” meaning “sister in the Lord.” The gossips offered support to mother & midwife. Only later did it become derogatory. More info: www.historyextra.com/period/gener...

Barnabe Rich wasn't the first to say that books and cheese are alike in that no specific example suits everyone's tastes: John Heywood included this among a hundred epigrams in 1562: www.jstor.org/stable/41723...

If you're interested in reading about the series of Sophonisba plays written in early modern England, my article with earlytheatre.bsky.social is live! muse.jhu.edu/pub/286/arti...

Tiny reindeer from a map of Norway in vol.1 of Joan Blaeu's 11 volume Atlas Major, 1662 #Christmas #Maps

Reminder that there exists an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet filmed with untrained stray cats in Rome, dubbed over by British Shakespearean actors. It's called 'Romeo.Juliet' and has never been given a VHS/ DVD or Bluray release. BUT THERE IS A COPY ON THE INTERNET ARCHIVE.

Holy shit, just learned about the typewriter art of Montserrat Alberich Escardívol, a Catalan typist. Using an extra wide typewriter and 180 color ribbons, she built up elaborate images from simple characters like 'm' and '.' and ';'. Here is her typewritten painting of the Cathedral of Barcelona.

📣 New preprint! We know humans are biased against AI-creativity. But what about LLMs, now often judging creativity in various contexts? Do they replicate, transform, or amplify this bias? We tested it. Turns out: AI is 2.5X more biased against its own work than humans. arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08831 🧵

Louise Moillon, 1610-1696, Still Life with Fruit, 1637 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum)

Nothing to see here? Well, this is a slow moving 🧵 for #skystorians and others about #eyeglasses of the past, about how to read in the past, where to buy eyeglasses, and how to do with them in general. The hashtag is #HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast Let's roll.

Mary Anning (1799–1847) was a pioneering English fossil collector and paleontologist whose discoveries in the Jurassic cliffs of Lyme Regis laid the groundwork for modern paleontology. Can you imagine getting down in the dirt in that get-up? #GirlPower #RadicalWomen

#EarlyModern meme! #BookHistory

Happy October! This woodcut of a cat with a mouse is the printer's device of the Venetian printer Melchior Sessa, and was used by his heirs in this 1598 book of sermons. (Sion A66.0/OS5) #RareBooks #SionCollege #Cats #Manuscripts

Online Lecture Fri. Oct. 17, 12:00pm EDT @sims-mss.bsky.social J. D. Sargan on Trans Studies as Book Historical Method @jdsargan.bsky.social

DIDO: Remember me, but ah! forget my fate on this device

Great to see Wautier get the exhibit she deserves! #EarlyModern www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/a...

In the newly released 2026 U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings, Carnegie Mellon University is No. 1 in seven undergraduate disciplines and 20th among national universities! 👏 ➡️ cmu.is/US-News-and-World-Report-2026

How One University Is Reimagining a Humanities Ph.D. Program @cmu.edu is turning its literary and cultural studies Ph.D. program into one focused on computational cultural studies. The reframe comes as many humanities graduate programs face an uncertain future. https://bit.ly/4ngm7R7

It is an absolute dream to have an essay in the Public Domain Review: publicdomainreview.org/essay/mary-c...

Women have been speaking out about abuse for centuries! I wrote about Anne Wentworth, a 17th-century survivor of domestic abuse, for @theconversation.com #earlymodern

In every breath you take there is one molecule of air from the last exhale of Cleopatra.

Trying to keep my professional chill but I’m SO excited Carnegie Mellon is launching a cluster hire in computational humanities—MULTIPLE JOBS! 1. Asst Teaching Track Prof in Computational Humanities - apply.interfolio.com/173622 2. Asst Tenure Track Prof in CH - apply.interfolio.com/173626

16 Sept 1672: d. Anne Bradstreet, #poet - she was the first woman to be published in the #English American colonies #otd

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

First week teaching about ancient queens in early modern drama to upper-level undergrads begins with Dido, and I fittingly get to hold class in a building with neoclassical columns that recall the Greco-Roman past quite nicely 👑🏛️

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

Very exciting: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography published a cluster of new entries on women stationers. See the intro by Valerie Wayne: www.oxforddnb.com/newsitem/906... ODNB entries are so helpful in identifying women from traces on printed material. So happy to see this work ❤️

After nearly two years running our homespun ESTC 📚📜, we’ll soon retire it at the request of the ESTC. Proud to have been part of the @print-and-prob.bsky.social team 💪, led by Nikolai Vogler, that helped our scholarly community in a time of need 💜

As a book history/digital humanities scholar, I immensely enjoyed this @rarebookschool.bsky.social talk on Warren's term, computational bibliography, as a set of tools to connect the study of artifact (microscopic/Hinman) to ideology (systemic/Darnton). (1/7)

A little bit of a personal touch left behind. De censuris Ecclesiasticis tractatus. Leiden, 1608 #NationalLibraryOfLithuanis #earlymodern #printculture

This is why I love bibliography: i want to do a really good job on a small little piece and add it to the wealth of human knowledge. Then 50 years later, someone else finds it and adores this stranger who helped them so thoroughly. I want to be for others who bibliographers were to me.

“AI” doesn’t lie. It’s not deceitful, it doesn’t have feelings: it is broken. Those who are selling AI products encourage people to anthropomorphize it because doing so avoids language that indicates what a garbage product it is they’re selling. Or, as I wrote here: www.artforum.com/features/gen...

Karen Chernick on early modern women painters you should know about

Calling scholars of #earlymodernwomen! Whether you're working on representations, histories, labor, or cultural afterlives, consider submitting to my #cfp for @rsaorg.bsky.social conference in San Francisco #RenSA26. Please share widely!

A new hub for literature! The Pittsburgh Review of Books will be both in Pittsburgh (and the Rust Belt) and of the wider world; a means of introducing the region’s vibrant literary community into national conversations as well as bringing those conversations here. beltmag.com/introducing-...

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...

Scowling at you since 1663, dear human reader. #caturday #catcontent

Can digitization preserve the past, or does it merely reinvent it? My latest article traces the metadata anomalies and hidden labor that haunt one digital surrogate: Thomas May’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra. Check it out here!