Like if you and I were back in Berlin, 1935, and I said to you "Hitler is very scary," you may be correct that "German society was always antisemitic" But you would be correct in a stupid and trivial way that I am not going to respect, because you are missing the point, and being very smug about it

The thing about correctly pointing out the cynical way that "civility" and "decorum" are often employed is: You have to bear in mind that the utter refusal to cloak one's racism behind seven proxies is a *novel and meaningful* development Civility - and its absence - is laden with *meaning*

Since I doubt anyone else will post it here, I regret to inform Bluesky that Gavin Williamson's pet tarantula has died, and he has made a photo montage to Angels commemorating him.

My recent book on Lothar II and his divorce presented lots of translated texts... but I couldn't fit everything in! Here's one of the pieces that didn't quite make it: the Summit of Koblenz in 860, when the Carolingian kings smoothed things over between them (again). blogs.ed.ac.uk/cwest3/2026/...

A thread of my blogposts about Radbod for #FrisianFriday 1) A general introduction asking the basic questions and assessing what we can really know about Radbod. longhairedkingsblog.wordpress.com/2025/09/03/r...

Glad to have contributed this little write-up to Routledge Resources Online, on ducal power and how it fit in to the complicated tangle of medieval French politics! If you'd like a copy but your institution doesn't subscribe, do get in touch 😊

My new article is out - in which I suggest that the additions to the St Augustine’s martyrology were authored by Goscelin of Bertin (open access) @ihr.bsky.social @ies-sas.bsky.social #medievalsky #bookhistory doi.org/10.1080/0304...

🔥 VERY important that this hits target. The rally happens just 3 days before the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote -- so the visuals from it will be used across media. Link —> www.gofundme.com/f/national-r...?

The geography of this is delightful!

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was released 46 years ago today. One of Hollywood’s most popular films and most anticipated and acclaimed sequels, the making of story is as huge as you’d expect. 1/39

I‘d second Alex‘s enthusiasm here. For anyone thinking about going to #IMC2026 I wrote up some thoughts a few years ago here which I think are still relevant: salutemmundo.wordpress.com/2023/05/18/a...

The circle of academic life - receiving feedback that says that your article could do with a clearer structure and more signposting just as you’re conducting peer review recommending that someone else’s article could do with a clearer structure and more signposting.

'As the world’s largest bibliographical database for medieval studies, it has established itself as a “freely accessible literature database for medieval research in the entire European language area, covering all disciplines"'.

New blogpost, in which I ask one of the truly burning questions of early medieval studies and answer with a resoundingly equivocal "probably not". But you should read the post anyway. longhairedkingsblog.wordpress.com/2026/05/20/w...

actually so angry about that Russian oil decision that I can't even really bear to feel my own fury, it's so all-encompassing that I can only glance at it from an angle, once in a while, then think about something else

We appreciate the radical honesty in some of our Great Viking Survey answers: GVS: 'Can you explain what you thought about your museum visit?' Participants: 'To be honest, I have no idea if it was good information' 'it made me hate vikings more' 'I was there for the food which was great'

Michael Whitby. Single-handedly channeling the rage every editor of a collective volume has ever felt throughout generations.

Podcast – Marc Bloch, penser l’histoire au Moyen Âge : une série de dix podcasts sur l’œuvre scientifique de Marc Bloch rmblf.be/2026/05/19/p...

Something I miss - when consulting unpublished PhD theses at the University Library in Cambridge, you had to add your name to a page attached to the front. There was a small collection of theses that were very useful and for one reason or another never published...

My dudes and dudettes, Camus should be way higher.

Hey kids! Interested in manuscripts and the future? Well then, feast your eyes on this brilliant new article by Bruno Schalekamp (RU Nijmegen) on “Compiling and Reading the Latin Manuscripts of the Sortes sanctorum". It has transcriptions and everything! #MedievalSky muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

My favorite fun fact about old Welsh law was if the bees on your land got pollen from your neighbors land, you owed the neighbors a portion of the honey. (There were extensive laws about bees.)

Pretty short post this week about my new article, including an action shot of me presenting at my very first conference all the way back in 2018 #medievalsky

A survey from 1977, but I wonder whether this has changed.

“We appear to embrace implausible beliefs about how good we are. Almost 70 percent of the faculty surveyed at one university believed themselves to be in the top 25 percent of their colleagues with respect to teaching ability” hedgehogreview.com/issues/merit...

Feeling this as my first book moves towards publication and I'm putting together a book proposal for a second book. I have few expectations that either book will be my ticket to a permanent posting. But they'll exist and people will hopefully read them, which matters rather more.

Ma I'm famous

You are all strongly encouraged to follow @eddiemeehan99.bsky.social’s excellent example and order The Carolingian South now! If you do it fast you’ll probably get to read the physical copy before I do! *shakes fist at international post* #medievalsky

Just got this into the library - really looking forward to reading it! (And fingers crossed for a paperback soon!)

This summary of different early medieval literature is still one of my favourite things on the internet. #medievalsky

The proceedings from last summer's medieval 'semana' in Estella-Lizarra, on Languages and Identities in the Early Medieval West, have now been published (OA)! Feat. excellent studies by @francescatinti.bsky.social, @elvabjohnston.bsky.social, @hwaetspur.bsky.social, and many others not on here.

This is bad but I think this is a place where AI is revealing a pre-existing problem. I think peer review is a good thing and in an ideal world one of the things it would catch is fake citations. In practice that’s really hard under our current system.

People project onto Buttigieg not just their views of gay men, but of liberal men, men who work white collar jobs, the legions of prosperous and respectable men who for one reason or another don’t quite meet the bullshit idea of what a masculine man looks like and aren’t remotely insecure about it

If you're interested in the comparative history of the Roman and Han Empires—or just want to know what all the fuss is about—you could do worse than begin with Michael Loewe's (posthumous) synthesis, favorably reviewed here. *Many* viable topics for further analysis lurking in these pages...

Open access

"This report analyzes the critical financial state of UK higher education in 2026, arguing it's more than a temporary squeeze."

I’m delighted to see this write-up of our article on vikings and the sudden appearance of arctic falcons in medieval Baghdad! #medievalsky

If anyone in the UK fancies pre-ordering my new book #CharlemagnesDream with 20% off this week, that is a thing here: uk.bookshop.org Released this October! #medievalsky (Only the ebook when I checked but I have queried whether the hardback might be included)

Vikings Traded Falcons with Medieval Baghdad, Study Finds www.medievalists.net/2026/05/viki... great research by @medivalist.bsky.social and @samottewillsoulsby.bsky.social #medieval #Vikings #Abbasids

these international preseason games are wild

People who know more about twentieth-century British politics than I do: To what extent was the Thatcher-Major-Blair run of relatively long ruling prime ministers an unusual outlier?

I know it's been said a million times but honestly, honestly, the US-Israeli war on Iran is genuinely one of the most fucked up things I have seen in international affairs in my life. It is genuinely shocking to me, in a way I think it would be bad to lose sight of, just how bad this has been.

Hey, Rebecca, do you know where I can get a copy of little known up-and-comer Friedrich Hölderlin's complete correspondence in English? SO GLAD YOU ASKED. Now out in paperback from @sunypress.bsky.social. 750 pages of translated epistolary awesomeness. sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-...

The Starmer premiership - by and for people who think that making a frowny face is the same as making a hard choice and that being boring must mean you have a policy rich agenda.

It’s so cool that we have a pejorative epithet for using actual data to inform our judgments about the state of the world.

Steel industry: £1.1bn in GDP and 20,000 employees University sector: £265bn in GDP and 400,000 employees What the fuck am I missing here.

Pleased to see my paper on the production and use of millefiori in Britain and Ireland (c. AD 580–850) published open access by @antiquaries.bsky.social A labour of love for a while now and definitely the most colourful illustrations I’ve ever produced, they were a bit of a nightmare to draw up...

Charlemagne sat there grumpily: Yeah but does he have an elephant? All the best royal Charles’ have an elephant.

The new viking game about the 845 siege of Paris is looking great!