Read bad art. Write bad art. Critique bad art.

With 3 major art shows on C17th-18th women, is the Autumn of Early Modern #WomenArtists! Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750 nmwa.org/exhibitions/... Michaelina Wautier-Painter www.khm.at/en/exhibitio... Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer www.mfa.org/exhibition/r...

☞☞ Hands-on reading ☜☜ The manicules in #rarebooks are fantastically diverse. Some are tiny & discreet, others take up half the margin; some have flowing sleeves, or even little faces. They’re glimpses into the personality of readers/scribes highlighting passages worth reading. #bookhistory 💙📚📜

The new issue of Renaissance Quarterly is *fantastic* & in it you'll find: - Disabled artistic expression of Hendrick Goltzius (whose hand self-portrait is the cover of this issue) - *Incredible* drama between 16th-century shipbuilders - Visual poetry about Thomas Becket - VOLCANOES! Go read it!

📣 We are delighted to announce that the Fall 2025 issue of Renaissance Quarterly (vol. 78.3) has been published online. You can view it here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #RenTwitter #earlymodern #Renaissance @universitypress.cambridge.org

Hello everyone! Sharing a cfp for the International Medieval Congress at Leeds next summer, organised by Gummies Marie Besson and Brooklyn Arnot. Check it out!

This frontispiece in my book just made me laugh a lot. Is this Buddhist reincarnation, or some other form of afterlife?

Just over ONE WEEK to go! The deadline for submitting an abstract for the Winter Conference is Friday 12th September! Share the news with your friends and come on down and join us in Norwich 🏰 @ueahistory.bsky.social @uniofeastanglia.bsky.social @chase-dtp.bsky.social

On the Anthropic piracy settlement & compensation for authors whose work was stolen by their A.I. machine: Authors -- check if your work was pirated by Anthropic here: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a... Then you can check the copyright and get compensated as part of the federal lawsuit.

can't agree more. more print, local print, traditional publishers, self-made, all of it.

One of our featured reviews for this issue -- free to access!

I'm so excited to see this article appear in an upcoming special issue of RQ!

We are thrilled to announce that the Summer 2025 issue of Renaissance Quarterly (vol. 78.2) has been published online. Take a look: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #RenTwitter #earlymodern #Renaissance @universitypress.cambridge.org

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Medieval History we’ve asked eight distinguished historians each to use an article from the journal’s first five years as a jumping off point to discuss historiographical trends. @tandfresearch.bsky.social

The NYT decided to kick trans people in the teeth the day after Skrmetti. They wrote a hit piece blaming trans people for their own oppression and attacked the people who have fought hardest to stop this effort to eradicate us. They turned to Brianna Wu to further their narrative.

The NYT was cited in the Supreme Court ruling used to strip trans people of healthcare. This is EXACTLY WHY the “just asking questions” crowd of centrist edgelord journalists are dangerous. They launder transphobia through faux neutral “debate” and act like it’s intellectual curiosity

Check out the new issue of RQ! There's the Bennett Lecture from @rsaorg.bsky.social 2024, PLUS articles on Muslim war narratives, race and blushing in Renaissance art, multilingual migrants, and tombs as treasure. Cover image is Lautaro, a Mapuche leader of Indigenous resistance against the Spanish.

Remember to call or write to Stephan Bunker, Wayne Farrin, Dani O'Halloran, and David Rollins to thank them for supporting trans kids in Maine!

anyone who’s done sustained historical research will recognize the feeling that it just takes soooo long. SO much longer than you’d think when starting the idea that there’s some magic bullet that resolves this work so you can just churn it out faster is antithetical to the core ethos of the method

Lost in this 4,500 word article is the opaque recognition that LLMs are the tech sector's solution to human labor cost. This is not an issue of labor (we have it) or value (we pay for it), it's an imposed concern about productivity from an economic point of view (it's expensive!).

keep running into people saying they will stay on facebook no matter what because to do otherwise is to "let them take away our voices" and I just ... don't think we need to trust corporate platforms with our voices. especially when said platforms just see said voices as content to be mined for $$$

I’ve noticed an uptick in dismissals of the concerns of teachers about AI. Some say that it’s *their* job to find a way to evaluate work that AI can’t replicate. I would just ask that you talk to real teachers and really listen. I’d also suggest reading a bit about writing and the brain.

The horrors persist, but today I am excited to see that my review of "May We Be Spared to Meet on Earth" was published in the Mariner's Mirror. It was a joy to review this incredible collection of Franklin letters. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Happy #WorldBeeDay 🐝 These are the industrious #AberdeenBestiary bees. They are going into hives known as skeps (from the Anglo Saxon, skeppa, for basket). These are made from woven straw or other plant fibre and require the beekeeper to have great skill to harvest the honey and not harm the bees.

A good article on Clara Peeters:

The @acls1919.bsky.social, AHA, & @modernlanguage.bsky.social filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin the unlawful dismantling of the NEH: "Congress believed NEH to be essential to the functioning of our democracy, & the public interest would be served by honoring that determination."

The twelve-ish remaining days of University of California Press books at 40% off! Spring Sale. 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #anthropology #sociology

Have you ever wondered where the maps you see come from? Well! I draw maps for a living, and on my Patreon page, I walking through the hows and whys of different mapping projects. It’s free, so take a look! And sign up for a free membership to learn even more! www.patreon.com/SurprisedEel...

#MedievalSky And everybody else who needs to know this: the journal Arthuriana has just published #OpenAccess this study about the illustrations in the sole surviving medieval copy of the story of *Silence*: muse.jhu.edu/pub/91/artic... If you've never heard of this amazing story, dive in now!

I am so charmed by the ALCHEMY.

📣 The RSA San Francisco 2026 Calls for Papers submission form is now open! Submit your CfPs by August 15 to organize sessions for our Annual Meeting being held February 19–21, 2026. The Public Index of Calls for Papers is also online: www.rsa.org/news/701177/... #RenSA26 #RenTwitter #earlymodern

If you are stopped by Trump's ICE goons, or any other kind of cops: I INVOKE MY RIGHTS TO SILENCE AND COUNSEL AND WILL NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS WITHOUT MY ATTORNEY PRESENT. Memorize it. And don't let ICE in without a JUDICIAL warrant. No, administrative warrants don't count.

Closing the Classics Library to make room for what will really be administrative offices (regardless of what it’s called). Montclair students have been trying to save it. www.northjersey.com/story/news/e...

As Renaissance Studies approaches its 40th anniversary, we discovered that some of our Special Issues from earlier decades were lost! Having 'rediscovered' such riches, we are re-issuing a series of them and new volumes will be appearing every month in 2025! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal...

“I have my students use generative AI to —“ and now I have checked out and no longer care about whatever you’re saying 👍

I got the best teaching evals of my career for a large course last semester— along with three teaching awards— after rebuilding my intro class around in-class handwritten essays. I simply do not believe that this is unsolvable or that students don't care about actually learning to do their work.

RQ 77.4!! 🎉🥳 Read about brazen, desirous, grim lady knights; women in early humanist circles; Indigenous authority in the 16th-century Andes; the rhetoric of precarity in early modern politics; & the story of a disabled Roman woman who self-advocated to write her own will. Go check it out!! 😍

A few years ago, I found this manuscript which changed the course of my research. Delighted my article on early modern precarity and how 'précaire' went from being an obscure bit of jargon to a contentious buzzword has now been published in Renaissance Quarterly. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We are pleased to be supporting: "Trans Sainthood in Transistion, ca. 400 - 1500" @ghilondon.bsky.social and online on 22 - 23 May 2025 Programme details and Zoom registration; pastandpresent.org.uk/registration...

any time someone says “why don’t you like AI?” I can simply scroll through my feed on here and show them 4-5 new op-eds saying things like “I replaced my memory with AI” or “AI does all of my critical thinking now” or “I created an AI virtual assistant for my job and sexually harassed it”

Love this photo essay on Rhiannon Giddens' "Biscuits & Banjos" festival. The joy is impossible to ignore. www.npr.org/sections/the...

PLS REPOST: "The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability—medieval and otherwise—with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration." www.aup.nl/en/book/9789...

I reviewed the Morgan's wonderful, complicated exhibit on Belle da Costa Greene for the TLS. There's just over a week left to see it, which I urge you to do if you can. (I wrote this in December! Publication schedules are weird!) www.the-tls.co.uk/arts/visual-...

Why even have a brain, any ideas, any ability to express them, any kind of communication with other people, any desire to solve problems or invent anything, any reason to learn, any use for your eyes or your heart, or any reason to teach or create

Disappointed to learn yesterday that Project Muse have also fallen for the 'AI' hype. It's an environmentally ruinous scam being pushed by Silicon Valley because they have nothing better to sell us. JHUP should know better.

Tomorrow, a certain online mega-retailer launches a book sale, just days before Indie Bookstore Day on 4/26. This is no coincidence; Bookstore Day is one of the largest revenue drivers for indies. Indies need our support to thrive & build community spaces for all...mega-retailers do not.

anyway. if any of YOU are writing an article and want some medieval style illustrations made by a real person and not the plagiarism generator that kills the environment, I know a guy (it's me)