For those who missed Thursday's Book in the Spotlight, here is the recording! Great conversation between Christine Shepardson, the author of A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious DIfference in Late Antiquity, and @philipforness.bsky.social!

Ah yes, the "Thdpsssps"

Next Thursday 11 June, 10 AM! William M. Barton (Universität Innsbruck) •Byzantine Letters in Golden-Age Spain: On Vicente Mariner’s translation of Theophylact Achridensis’ Correspondence• Image, BNE, MS 9813, f. 673r

As job titles go it can't get much better than this.

Come work with the CLAIM team in the new ERC project in Vienna! Apply here: jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Postdoct... Details CLAIM.univie.ac.at/ @erc.europa.eu | @univie.ac.at | @etf-univienna.bsky.social

Since we cannot seem to rely on any governments for this and the problem certainly will not solve itself, please tell someone this week to stop using their phone while in traffic. It saves lives. #nophonesintraffic

Tomorrow!

Iain Gardner has been doing fantastic work making Manichaean texts more accessible... global.oup.com/academic/pro...

an Ottoman Lord’s Prayer: a thread. so i recently found out—i can’t remember from whom, but if it was one of you please let me know!—that there is a community of Turkish-speaking Chaldean Catholics in Kirkuk, Iraq, who continue to use Ottoman Turkish as a liturgical language. 1/

If you missed Thursday's paper by Karolina Tomczyszyn (KU Leuven), the recording is now on our YouTube channel youtu.be/AfxOpW8PqFA

"why use google?" webpage from 1999

Wishing they did reprints of Robert Thomson's translations of the Armenian histories. It is impossible to find a copy of Lazar P'arpec'i for example.

Next week! With Christine Shepardson (The University of Tennessee Knoxville) and @philipforness.bsky.social (KU Leuven)!

Als er over vijftig jaar nog geesteswetenschappers zijn, en als zij zich afvragen hoe de afbraak van de letteren is verlopen, hebben zij aan de reactie van het Nijmeegse College van Bestuur op het aftreden van Paula Fikkert als decaan Letteren, een goede bron. neerlandistiek.nl/2026/05/paula/

Tomorrow!

Archaeologists in Turkey uncovered one of the oldest and best-preserved images of Jesus ever found: a 3rd-century fresco showing Christ as the “Good Shepherd.” The discovery in ancient Iznik offers rare insight into early Christianity and Roman-era beliefs

Ancient Roman Gold Mines Discovered in Spain’s Pyrenees scitechdaily.com/ancient-roma...

I found a bizarre, unidentifiable mythical creature in the medieval manuscript Kitāb al-Bulhān—the most peculiar I've ever seen.

Words such as 'museum', 'formula', and 'ratio' instantly give away their Latin origin, but 'wall', 'street', and 'kitchen' come from Latin too! These were borrowed very early: into Proto-West Germanic, the ancestor of English. Today’s graphic shows six construction terms. Next time: food words.

This rare Roman pottery lamp, shaped like a foot wearing a sandal, was made between 50-60 CE, and was found at Borough High Street in Southwark. Archaeologists discovered the lamp in a rubbish pit, close to buildings that had been burnt down during the Boudican rebellion in 60-61 CE. #FindsFriday

“An artist in London plastered fake OpenAI ads inside city subway cars calling attention to ChatGPT’s close ties to a series of youth suicides. The artist Darren Cullen,… has conducted many similar “subvertising” campaigns before.” I salute you, sir

Quite a 'Q'(uicumque agri atque mancipia quibuscumque personis de fisci nostri iure donantur) at the beginning of Book 10: De iure fisci BnF MS Latin 4412; Various legal texts including Codicis Theodosiani libri sexdecim; late 8th to early 9th century; f.50v @gallicabnf.bsky.social

This might be the impetus I needed to start making my own cards.

Next Thu 28 May, 10 AM Karolina Tomczyszyn (KULeuven) •Approved Teachers and Insignificant Rhetoricians: Literary Curation in the Letters of Jacob of Edessa, George, bishop of the Arabs, and John of Litarb• Don't forget to register w/ @andyhilkens.bsky.social to receive the Zoom link

I'm hiring for a funded PhD in 'global' medieval history or trans-Mediterranean entanglements at my chair in Bochum, Germany, from 1 Oct 2026 — 3 yrs, your own project, 3 hrs/week teaching in the History Department, at 65 %of TVL-13 (~€2050/month after tax). Apply by 31 May — or please share 👇

Rachael Helen Banes (University of Vienna) gave a paper in our seminar last week on a fascinating graffito. Here is the recording if you missed it! youtu.be/lpn2WIEnaL8

The word ‘queen’ is distantly related to ‘gynaecology’ and ‘misogyny’. It’s also related to Norwegian ‘kone’ and ‘kvinne’, but they’re not full cognates. While ‘queen’ comes from Germanic *kwēniz (wife), ‘kone’ and ‘kvinne’ stem from *kwenōn (woman), which in English became ‘quean’ (ho).

This Thursday!

It may be helpful to remember that even if you do something really great and society someday erects a statue for your glory, it will spend its entire existence being pooped on by pigeons

✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa. Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality. docuracy.github.io/datini/ #DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory

Ast soboles Domini BnF MS Latin 2421; Rabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae Crucis (De laudibus sanctae Crucis), ff.1r-45r; end of 10th century or beginning of 11th century; f.4v @gallicabnf.bsky.social

Next Thursday 7 May we are hosting a paper by Rachael Banes (IMAFO, ÖAW) who will be speaking about a mysterious inscription •A Fowl Demon? The "Demonic Duck" Graffito at Didyma in its wider Epigraphic Landscape• If you're not yet on our mailing list, please register w/ @andyhilkens.bsky.social

If you missed this morning's paper by Larissa Ficulle Santini on fertility control in Byzantium, here is the recording! youtu.be/V4khg32-r-w

“Use AI to brainstorm but not to write.” “Use AI to help you outline but not to write.” These are commonly proposed as “ethical” ways for undergrad students to use AI, but I’m sorry, brainstorming & outlining are just as integral to writing as the actual construction of sentences.

Tomorrow!

These scientific illustrations by Orra Hitchcock (1796–1863) — executed on poster-sized linen swaths and hung on classroom walls — are striking for their modern abstraction. More here in our post by @eayers0: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hitchcock-illustrations

I finally caved and bought a copy. Could be fun!

Here is another version of this "fish" with a canon on its back, a crown on its head, and both chicken and lion legs. What a story.

Prayers of Ephrem (Graecus, not Ephrem of Nisibis), read in modern Eastern Armenian translation (translated from ancient Armenian, in itself translated from Greek)

Literature is for Europeans. History is for Everyone Else. Comparative Literature has a geography problem medium.com/global-liter...

Open access Enochica in HTR! Kirsten Macfarlane on “A principio fuit canonicus”: The Controversy over 1 Enoch in Seventeenth-Century Europe” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

“To my lord Toma ibn Erben, who is currently in Saumur, a city in France on the river Lijeris (Ligeris, i.e. Loire)” Address for a letter from the Egyptian Copt, Yūsuf ibn Abū Dhaqn to the Dutch Orientalist Thomas Erpenius. Leiden, ms or. 1228

I can't count how many ancient Egyptian figurines I've seen in the past 35-ish years, but this is the first ever hedgehog. Move over faience hippos, there's a new favourite...

Next week!!!

If you missed Michael Erdman's paper last week, here is the recording! www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvBg...

This wonderful conference in Rome starts Wednesday! Looking forward to present some glimpses of my favourite biblical manuscript(s)!

20 euros says that someone used AI to write that speech for him and then didn't bother to check.

Preparations for a conference next week, for which I will delve into the topic of Harklean biblical manuscripts, albeit from an angle that is too often ignored: the late medieval and early modern period, and the explosion in paratextual material, which can be traced back to two scribes in Qartmin.