The inkless doodles of Eadburg, an 8th-c. nun, discovered by new technology: now published by Jessica Hendy-Hodgkinson in EME doi.org/10.1111/emed... (Open access)

Happy New Year! In our new episode Dr Sparky Booker @historytcd.bsky.social shares some wonderful, instructive, insights into how we can explore gender, class, ethnicity & community through an exam of individual legal cases in a fascinating period of Irish history. open.spotify.com/episode/38Aq...

Watching THE GREEN KNIGHT again

Diplomoceras (the clippy) and Pseudocenoceras

more frog, again. seasonal frog

🎆Job Klaxon!!🎆 Folúntais: Scoláireachtaí Uí Dhonnabháin @scs-dias.bsky.social @dias.ie. Spriocdháta 5 Eanáir 2026 2 O’Donovan Scholarship vacancies at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Deadline 5 January 2026: www.dias.ie/2025/12/05/v...

'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.' Photograph by Daniel Ibanez

They claim financial exigency, but then turn down $4 million pledges to keep the PhD programs open and disregard financial analyses that point to the real problem—bad real estate deals, spending on consultants, and their own salaries 2/2

The manuscript of the week is RIA MS C iii 1, the Annals of Connacht. This unique manuscript records episodes in the history of Gaelic Ireland for over three hundred years from AD 1224 to AD 1544, with one later entry added (in different ink) for the year 1562.

My new book, 'The Fenian Empire: A Hemispheric History of Irish Republican Nationalism' is now live in the NYU Press catalogue and due for release in early June, fittingly on the 160th anniversary of the first major Fenian raid on Canada nyupress.org/978147983258...

Solidarity with the staff at the @britishlibrary.bsky.social, the people who actually make the place work, in the face of wretched management.

🚨 Applications are now open for the 2026–27 Koch History Centre Fellowships at Oxford! We are seeking 12 historians (9 junior, 3 senior) for a one-year fellowship at Wadham College & the Faculty of History. This year’s theme: “Scarcity and Abundance” Deadline: 17 Dec 2025 Please share widely!

We can only describe our character designs as preposterously luscious! Here's a detailed look at how we created the neighbours you'll be meeting in our upcoming game, Mandrake. #indiedev #indiegames (Please do share!)

I’ve seen some oddities on the Belfast antique auction sites — spooky porcelain dolls, eyebrow raising WW2 memorabilia, etc — but this is by far the most inexplicable:

mixing cassis with the communion wine and calling it a kirie eleison

Never forget the all-time greatest placeholder asset, from Doom 64

they're lying in wait?? im lying in bed!!! you're the vizier, figure it out!! what am I paying you the big guilders for??

strongly considering cross-stitching 'LET THE LANDTHIEVES DO THEIR WORST!' & hanging it next to the HMO license in my gaff

“Don’t gather some of the most brilliant activists in the industry, treat us like crap, and then expect us to do nothing about it.” After the Game Awards cancelled its Future Class programme, @alyssamerc.bsky.social talked to its former honorees www.theguardian.com/games/2025/n...

okay, seriously: if we were to corral this, would anyone be interested in contributing? Here is the google form: forms.gle/m2V4j4cDvwNu...

You’re a “leftist?” Hold on a minute. It says here you used to offer “running lessons” in EverQuest where you’d convince newbies to /follow you and run them directly into a goblin cave to harvest their gear. I don’t seem to remember Marx mentioning that in Das Kapital

Really exciting book news out of Norway. And while the article focusses on the sealskin binding, I'm even more excited by the fact that these neumes are not square, which suggests a date well before 1200.

New post up: a translation of Hallfreðr "troublesome poet" Óttarson's conversion verses. If genuine, they provide an amazing insight into a Viking Age pagan grappling with a change in religion. nikolasgunn.co.uk/2025/11/03/p...

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

The MS of the week is RIA MS 23 E 25, Lebor na hUidre, also known as the Book of the Dun Cow. Written in Irish at Clonmacnoise before AD 1106, it contains the oldest version of the Táin Bó Cuailgne, the Voyage of Bran, the Feast of Bricriú, and other material from the Irish literary tradition.

Two examples of a distinctively Romano-British artefact: the sinuously gorgeous dragonesque brooch for #FindsFriday 😍 These particular copper alloy beauties, inlaid with red and blue enamel, were found in Faversham #Kent c 1895 © Trustees of the British Museum #Roman #Archaeology

If you like your Halloween served with a heaped helping of book history, may I recommend ✨Book Curses✨, whose pages are darkened by curses from antiquity to the present day. Come for particularised gory threats, stay for perceptions of the material text. Written by some woman.

Skeleton draped in a shroud Northern France, c. 1600 (Musée du Louvre)

OK lads, the new @lankumdublin.bsky.social is about to drop and I can not prepare you adequately for Lankum doing techno, you have been warned: youtu.be/aLLnF4vxaeY?...

I'm doing a side project linked to the cultural history of video games in 1980s Ireland and I'm finding exactly what I expected to find

The Societas Celtologica Europaea is now on Bluesky! ➡️ Our goal is to support the scholarly study of Celtic languages, literatures, and cultures in research and teaching and to promote cooperation among Celtic scholars. 👋 Follow us for updates on our student prizes, conferences & more!

I'm looking forward to speaking on the activities of the North-Eastern Boundary Bureau, 1923-25 at this conference in Lifford on 8 November. Booking details are below. The talk will expand on my research, which was published #OpenAcess with @ria.ie last year: muse.jhu.edu/article/956691

excited is an understatement for how i'm feeling about Rhys' talk today! details in link below :) if you are an Oxford uni member, please do pop along; if not but you're around Oxford, drop me an email; and if you'd like to attend virtually on Teams, please also drop me an email!

Last night I attended the launch of Dublin in Deeds: Records of the Guild of St Anne, 1237-1778, @ria.ie The freely accessible digital resources and contextual essays are here on the Virtual Treasury website: virtualtreasury.ie/gold-seams/g... #Spéirghorm #MedievalSky

If you saw me present on Iolo's abolitionist poetry at the Glasgow @bars.bsky.social conference don't worry, this is about a different, much weirder poem. Who doesn't like druidic transmigration of souls, eh?

Speaking online/in-person tomorrow (17:15 UK Time) @oxfordceltic.bsky.social @jesusoxford.bsky.social on Iolo Morganwg's anti-slavery poetry and the slippery metaphor of enslavement in C18th radical Celticism Email David Willis if you want a Teams link! talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/2dc...

On 10 November we will be joined by Hiram Morgan (UCC), who will talk about '"Anatomies of death": forced famine in the Tudor conquest of Ireland'. All welcome, in-person or online: www.qub.ac.uk/schools/Iris...

aaaaaaaand it turns out the answer to "how TF did some guys with a ladder steal the French crown jewels" is "cuts to arts funding mean the Louvre is massively understaffed"

R.I.P. one of the last cornerstones of a functioning decent web.

Join us for this term's Queer and Trans Pre-Modern Reading Group @ucl-ias.bsky.social ! Newcomers very welcome, just email me to sign up! For more info: tinyurl.com/y7kue3ek.

a tiny bit of good news is that we have secured funding to digitize john milton's copy of holinshed's CHRONICLES (1587). the images will form part of MILTON'S LIBRARY, an open-access site featuring the 10 books positively identified as milton's w/ transcriptions/translations of his marginal notes.

I Photoshop Paddington into a movie, TV show, or pop culture until I forget: Day 1673

See how fucking easy it is when you have a spine?

Papers from the @ria.ie @ceilteachomn.bsky.social @scs-dias.bsky.social conference on the Book of Lecan, which took place last week, are now available to listen to on SoundCloud. Enjoy! #MedievalSky #SpéirGhorm www.ria.ie/audio/the-bo...

tories have this duality where they will thunder about humanities degrees being rip-off waste of time but will tell starry-eyed how you Boris Johnson is a genius because he memorised the first six lines of the Iliad in Greek, which you can in fact do without even knowing Greek

MLGB is back!! Delighted that Medieval Libraries of Great Britain @bodleian.ox.ac.uk is now back online. We are also working had on plans for the next phase of the resource, enhancing & adding data & functionality. HUGE thanks to my colleagues for their hard & clever work mlgb.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

...And you thought you were stretched too thin! 😬 cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DD-0...

Wow! Brilliant for writers!

This is what we're talking about when we say we're excited to have honest-to-goodness sunlight in our new game, Mandrake.