My reading agenda for January is all fun adventure mystery. Next up: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. This is leading up to February, when I’m going to start reading Don Quixote as part of a book club I agreed to participate in while drunk. But luckily I have until the NY book fair to finish.

license my roving hands

I’m back finishing up my description of Agnes Blannbekin’s Life and Revelations and it strikes me that she experienced life like she was in the teletubby world—faces are always appearing to her in things (sun, stars, communion host, a lamb) and talking to her. What a remarkable document!

Question for all my VD18-heads: I have a book that I found a VD18 number for in OCLC, but it won’t come up the online database. I can find the subject/author—but she has no publications linked to her identity. Have anyone else experienced this or have an idea what’s going on?

By the way, no praying mantids made appearances at my party—but we’ve continued to find more (and bigger ones!) today. If they want to take up residence in some isolated corner and eat spiders, they are welcome. But traversing the floor risks the depredations of the cat.

After cooking the beans, I have assembled the cassoulet and put it in the oven, where it will stay for three hours. The bean broth tastes incredible—simmered with a carrot, clove-studded onion, peppercorns, herbs, garlic, ventrèche, and trotter. I think this will be a good one 🤞🏻

It’s cassoulet day! (transferred)

As we approach the Epiphany, here's a Bohemian glassware depiction of the arrival of the Magi from 1604 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

It’s 1990, I’m 1 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state It’s 2004, I’m 15 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state It’s 2026, I’m 37 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state

I have determined that a praying mantis egg sac has hatched in my Christmas tree

Oh god… 5 more

2 more apprehended 😭

In the last 12 hours, I have found two baby praying mantids in my house. Which to be honest, I do find a little alarming. Am I going to open a drawer and find 1000 of them? Is it going to happen at the party I am throwing tonight?

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Bad Government, 1338–40, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

Our new couch allows partner and I to both read in a reclined position together in our living room so I’m looking forward to many more years of cozy reading time ♥️

Something that surprised me about UCLA is that you have to pay to “join” the alumni group, but for free they sell your info to credit card companies for decades after you’ve graduated!

I’m trying to read more novels this year. Just finished my first: The Prisoner of Zenda. This was a throwback to my childhood love of swashbuckling adventures and it was a quite silly, enjoyable romp.

When the yoga teacher uses the word “booty” you know they are about to bring out some horrible CrossFit/pilates moves

Placet

Ongoing FedEx delays have resulted in the postponement of cassoulet to Sunday. It’s fine… really… I’M FINE WITH THIS

The guy who wrote that works on Syriac manuscripts. I don’t think those are unimportant at all—but they might be less obviously important than the scholarly movement which made Plato’s works accessible to the Latin-speaking world & inspired, i.a., the discovery of the shape of the solar system.

What was the last movie or TV show you watched in 2025?

expanded edition 📽️

I am glad to see the back of what was in many ways a very difficult year. Mostly, though, I am really missing my dog today.

and forgive us our emails, as we forgive those who email against us

This is the first year in my working life I haven’t had or taken off this week. Idk wtf I was thinking. I am going home right now. Never doing this again.

This whole thing just makes me really sad. His work is important to me.

The politics here are reprehensible but also really sad. He was a great scholar once. He had philological skills that no one has anymore. There are very few people who could produce that kind of work today. And to some extent, that's what this is about. He's mad that our field lost its former status

Our Lady of the Bent Bulb

A needed ingredient for the dish I’ve made every Jan 1 for the past give years has been delayed by FedEx. I’m just going to make it Jan 2. That’s the energy I’m trying to bring to 2026.

And Tiny Gawain who did NOT die

Pythagoras shunning fava beans, accompanying the advice, "Do Not Eat Beans!" from Speculum principis (Mirror of Princes) [fol. 25 recto], French, 1512/1514 (National Gallery of Art)

Being sad about my country’s descent into fascism.

Humanities programs have ceded scholarship of the premodern to bad actors on the right. This is a serious problem, not only because it represents a loss of current and future knowledge, but also because it enables white supremacists and Christian nationalists to twist history to their own ends.

I selected this movie at Blockbuster to watch with teen friends and they STILL give me shit about it, 20+ years later, as if it is not a classic film at least worth watching even if you don’t like it!!

I love his outfit

Reliquary bust of St Thecla, Strasbourg, c. 1290-1350 (Rijksmuseum)

Elephant rat. ‘Hours of Joanna the Mad’, Bruges 1486-1506. BL, Add 18852, fol. 203r. #medieval #medievalart

I had a wonderful Christmas with my family but I am soooo happy to have my house back to myself now

Back in the office today, managed to identify a binding as Augsburg using EBDB, helping my colleagues make a positive type identification using the Typenrepertorium website on two unsigned indulgences used as printer’s waste. Teamwork makes the dream work 😎

Why is it that tech and AI boosters keep saying "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" when making arguments about AI's supposed inevitable dominance? Did they not read the story? The genie does, indeed, go back in the bottle. Maybe we should start there.

Pieter Bruegel The Elder Massacre of the Innocents c.1565-67 (Royal Collection Trust, HM CIII) The artist’s very contemporary take on this event, showing soldiers of his own day carrying out his atrocity in a snowy Flemish village.

When I post images of people now unidentified, I am fascinated by the way people fretfully rush to an identification - usually famous - a Tudor, a Stewart etc. Many seem to find it hard to accept that those once well-known are now forgotten. But it’s also comforting in its way.

My mom is telling me right now that a few months ago, she watched a TV show about a rare book dealer who solves crime… but he is “kind of a redneck” and she didn’t like it… she can’t remember anything else ???

The Angels' Kitchen, Eugène Grasset, originally the cover for the 1893 Christmas issue of l'Illustration magazine.

My question is what NPR is going to do about their Steve Inskeep problem. (I'd ask him myself, but he blocked me ever since I asked him politely to stop giving tongue baths to fascists in his interviews)

The rule at my house is pre-1900 or sung by Frank Sinatra

Hell yes. This was precisely the point I was making in a paper that disputed efforts to “scientize” paleography computationally. static1.squarespace.com/static/55577...

At my house, all presents come wrapped in the @lrb.co.uk. I don’t believe in buying wrapping paper and I have A LOT of LRB back issues. Also, you’re getting a book.

The first appearance in print of ‘Hark! the Herald’ (altering Charles Wesley’s ‘Hark, how all the welkin rings’), in George Whitefield’s ‘Hymns for Social Worship’, 1753. Happy Christmas, everyone!