Sunrise Down Under. This morning at 6:30.

François Soyer, "Imperfect Sodomy: The Lisbon Inquisition and the Repression of Heterosexual Anal Intercourse in Portugal, 1580–1800." Journal of the History of Sexuality 35, no. 1 (2026), pp. 1-27. muse.jhu.edu/pub/15/artic...

François Soyer, "Imperfect Sodomy: The Lisbon Inquisition and the Repression of Heterosexual Anal Intercourse in Portugal, 1580–1800." Journal of the History of Sexuality 35, no. 1 (2026), pp. 1-27. muse.jhu.edu/pub/15/artic...

Hey! Scholars! If you're using someone's work in your class, sometimes it's nice to email them and tell them, because then they might feel good about their research instead of entirely crushed by the academic humanities' ongoing descent into the grave

NEW: This - on the signalling system that crossed Anatolia from Loulon to Constantinople -by @chrysoboullon.bsky.social is v cool. A 'trip wire' to alert Constantinople to the start of the Abbasid campaigning season. Tantalising hints that it 'employs knowledge of the longitudinal circumference... 👇

September 1550: some outraged Lisbon residents denounced some visiting Englishmen for roasting a duck on a fasting day. In the margin of the denunciation, the inquisitor wrote "concerning the Englishmen's duck" (do pato dos ingresses).

In the UK academic recession, you will be at one of these stages since many unis buy the same cuts model from the same consultancies. It is always the same process: *Talk of belt-tightening *Incidental savings (e.g. printing, refreshments) *Travel budgets cut *Promotion freeze (1/4)

OpenAI just released Prism, a LaTeX editor with embedded ChatGPT for free. Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier. It took me 54 seconds to write up an experiment I did not actually conduct. prism.openai.com

I am very sorry to hear of the passing of my PhD supervisor at Cambridge Professor David Abulafia. A very talented historian as well as a great supervisor and mentor who gave me sound career advice when I needed it. May his memory be a blessing. www.cai.cam.ac.uk/news/david-a...

I am very sorry to hear of the passing of my PhD supervisor at Cambridge Professor David Abulafia. A very talented historian as well as a great supervisor and mentor who gave me sound career advice when I needed it. May his memory be a blessing. www.cai.cam.ac.uk/news/david-a...

Missing from the coverage of redundancies at Edinburgh: this was done in such a haphazard, uncoordinated way, there are now core teams who have gone from 5 people to 1 with no change in workload or pressure and huge loss in knowledge of institutional process. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2576321...

Catalan article in the newspaper El Pais about my 2023 book The ‘Catalan Hermaphrodite’ and the Inquisition: Early Modern Sex and Gender on Trial. elpais.com/quadern/2026...

Life in regional Australia, where venomous snakes live in car engines. 🐍🤷‍♂️

Love French stamps (strong Spanish theme in this one, though).

DECRA success rate is the lowest in 14 years, since 2012 (1st year the scheme ran). What a pathetic system we have for supporting new ideas, new people… DE26: 13.1% 25: 17.9 24: 19.6 23: 15.0 22: 19.7 21: 17.1 20: 16.0 19: 17.2 18: 16.3 17: 16.7 16: 16.4 15: 14.3 14: 13.6 13: 15.6 12: 12.8

It's been brewing for months: @inriaparisnlp.bsky.social releases CoMMA (Corpus of Multilingual Medieval Archives) ! 📚 2.5bn tokens of mostly Latin and French texts 🕰️ 800→1600 CE 📜 23k manuscripts 🖥️ 18k on the reading interface: comma.inria.fr 🔍 Paper: inria.hal.science/hal-05299220v1 (1/🧵)

The perils of an Australian university campus in the springtime.

Birdlife in Australia is never dull: a discussion in progress at the feeder.

Ouch: why pay $440,000 for AI work ("including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement.")? Then again, why pay $440,000 for a single report anyway? Universities should take note. www.afr.com/companies/pr...

Ouch: why pay $440,000 for AI work ("including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement.")? Then again, why pay $440,000 for a single report anyway? Universities should take note. www.afr.com/companies/pr...

1/At Macquarie Uni we are losing 50% of our units in my faculty. This is on top of cuts in 2020. We estimate by next year my faculty will be teaching 80% fewer subjects than pre Covid. Disciplines being cut do not have declining enrolments. @jennaprice.bsky.social @michaelwestbiz.bsky.social

I am not quite sure how this works, but here's a free open source editable historical map that's pretty decent on medieval Europe.

I was sitting at my desk and had a feeling that someone was watching me.

Springtime in Australia.

Portugal's foremost twentieth-century poet, Fernando Pessoa, opining on Australia (Portuguese: É-se feliz na Austrália, desde que lá se não vá).

Portugal's foremost twentieth-century poet, Fernando Pessoa, opining on Australia (Portuguese: É-se feliz na Austrália, desde que lá se não vá).

Receiving my author’s copies of my latest book: always a wonderful feeling but this time also a bittersweet one.

Beware swooping trees.

Just found the longest word in the English language.

Saw some of my fellow inhabitants of Armidale using surfboards as makeshift sleds this morning! #Australia #Armidale

Siberia Down Under. #Australia #Armidale

Snow in Australia will always feel strange to me

Snow Down Under... and it's only getting heavier! #Australia #Armidale

History falling apart: early 17th century Inquisition trial dossier. digitarq.arquivos.pt/documentDeta...

4. Every other discipline thinks they can do history but they often cannot

A question for Lusophones. Here is a blasphemous sentence from a inquisitorial trial: “que era puta mui grande e aleivosa farta de cães, gatos e negros." The official meaning of "fartar" is to be "satiated [with food].". Could it have a different (and ruder) meaning?

A question for Lusophones. Here is a blasphemous sentence from a inquisitorial trial: “que era puta mui grande e aleivosa farta de cães, gatos e negros." The official meaning of "fartar" is to be "satiated [with food].". Could it have a different (and ruder) meaning?

Another frosty Antipodean winter morning and another colorful visitor in the garden (Armidale, NSW).

It's winter here in Australia but we still get these colourful visitors on frosty mornings in the NSW northern tablelands.

Latin as a living language in 16th century Europe. In 1552 the inquisitors in Lisbon were interrogating an Englishman accused of sacrilege and because the Englishman "could not speak Portuguese well and knew Latin, they asked him questions in Latin." digitarq.arquivos.pt/.../0b68019c....

My father just sent me these pictures from his (somewhat neglected) village church in Burgundy. Plaster fell off the wall revealing these pictures. Any informed guesses about the age/date. My guess would be 16th century but I'm not an art historian.

My father just sent me these pictures from his (somewhat neglected) village church in Burgundy. Plaster fell off the wall revealing these pictures. Any informed guesses about the age/date. My guess would be 16th century but I'm not an art historian.

My new book, "The Blood Libel in Medieval Antisemitism", is out with ARC Humanities Press in July 2025 as a paperback for a very affordable $18.95 or £16.95 (ISBN 9781802701807). www.arc-humanities.org/978180270180...

A cannonball found fired in 1568 found again after 457 years in the bell tower of a Liège church in Belgium. www.rtbf.be/article/pers...

I know that I complain a lot about early modern documents and the time it takes to read them but this one was EASY.

Maria Duran was accused of being a man and put on trial for sorcery by the Portuguese Inquisition, The ‘Catalan Hermaphrodite’ and the Inquisition by François Soyer is an exploration of Maria’s life & early modern gender norm transgressions. Out in paperback! bit.ly/44ttWfH

Hey @lusomedieval.bsky.social, this article is really fucking good!

I guess this was Plan B if the Geneva/Reformation hustle didn’t work out.

My new article is out: "Delegated Governance: Rethinking the Idea of Premodern Jewish Autonomy." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 43, no. 1 (2025): 215-229.

Baarle-Hertog: Imagine living in a bit of the Netherlands, that's surrounded by a bit of Belgium that is itself surrounded by the Netherlands.