Steely skies and a breezy day but I know a warm welcome awaits inside as I come for some #fragment fun.

Satyr:

In my hand and soon to be in yours - the latest issue of @mediumaevum.bsky.social, in which you can travel from Portugal to Burgundy (via Florence or London) and from the seventh to the fifteenth century +

I'm on a roll with @magdalenoxford.bsky.social manuscripts. In the last few weeks, identified one book of hours as probably made for the future Suxtus IV, and in another ms an unnoticed copy of Richard Swineshead's Calculationes. Now onto this beauty, the last one needing a finalised description.

If the present PM were effective in persuading his various rivals that this is not the time for infighting and the distraction of a contest, the media would be so frustrated, their inclination would be to crucify him.

This is such a worthy initiative from @mediumaevum.bsky.social and, in these difficult times for the Humanities, a most necessary one.

Exciting news about @mediumaevum.bsky.social and its future with @chicagojournals.bsky.social : www.journals.uchicago.edu/medium-aevum

It's official: @britishacademy.bsky.social has announced its latest act of generosity, this year's Senior Research Fellowships: www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche... I am particularly honoured (and humbled) that my award is this year's Thank Offering to Britain fellowship +

May is only six and a half hours old and already I'm feeling lazy.

Hello, my precious.

Excited for this later today. Hope to see you there!

Only for a year but still a peach of a job for a medievalist / early modernist with skill in Palaeography and an appetite to teach Latin: the most engaged students you can hope for, a supportive community @memsunikent.bsky.social, in the beautiful city of Canterbury: jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Thank you: good to read this. Let's add that govt policy has often been informed by VCs' vision for HE's future, including student loans which secured bank loans for a splurge of building in the 2010s - loans which those banks now scrutinise with a more suspicious eye.

After the @mediumaevum.bsky.social AGM, it is a delight to hear @profhelenfulton.bsky.social give the Society's Annual Lecture on political poetry, the Welsh Marches and the Wars of the Roses.

Later than planned, but now in Cardiff for the @mediumaevum.bsky.social conference and AGM. My first time in the Welsh capital - is it always summer here?

Interested in Caroline Minuscule or in things Celtic or in Alfred the Great? Then come and hear Dr Jason Chess at the latest London Palaeography Seminar @ies-sas.bsky.social: Tuesday 28th April, 5:30pm. Book here for in person or online attendance: ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

Wonderful to hear Jonathan Arnold, Michael Ramsey Professor of Theology @kent.ac.uk, giving his @memsunikent.bsky.social seminar on a conjunction of subjects where he is an undoubted world expert: John Colet and music.

This must include the gerundive.

Keen to improve your understanding of Islamic Literary Heritage? This course will give you the opportunity to study manuscripts from a wide range of periods, locations and textual genres across the Islamic world. Book now 👉️ ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini... #palaeography #paleography #LIPS26

Someone in the White House has been reading Petrarch and been getting very mixed up about Babylonish captivity.

OA is a great principle but in practice it is often a euphemism for Author Pays - or Institution Pays, which is even worse.

Quite the welcome walking onto campus @kent.ac.uk

Wednesday was Ghent, today was Brussels, and yesterday was:

We are looking forward to seeing many of you, in person or online, tomorrow. Because of illness, this will be a single bill! We send Petra best wishes and look forward to hearing Clotilde on 'Exploring the Reception of Marbod of Rennes' _De ornamentis verborum_ (c. 1100-c.1300)'.

St Mary's, Eastry.

I have some elliptical lavatorial humour but they thought I was taking the...

To Winchester for @komldsp.bsky.social exploration of cathedral and college.

For those of you who cannot get enough palaeography and all things manuscript: join us next Tuesday, 24th March, 5:30pm for the latest seminar in London's Senate House featuring a stimulating double-bill of excellent young scholars, Clotilde Lemarie and Petra Mijanovic: ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

Felix Id. Mar.! The day that sends shivers down the spine of any would-be tyrant and so accelerates that self-destructive spiral of suspicion and repression described by the Socratic philosophers. A day to honour Brutus.

An inkling of an inknovation.

To @cburycathedral.bsky.social for the last @memsunikent.bsky.social Palaeography session for the term and a delight to see the Cathedral Gate once more unwrapped, complete with its Renaissance decoration.

In which we discuss oyster shells and candles, pigments and what to do when you have a hole in your parchment:

It's not too late: as it's @worldbookdayuk.bsky.social, why not listen to a lively conversation about the best books - the handwritten ones - on the latest English Heritage podcast. www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspir... Hope you have as much fun as we did recording this!

Yes, this does look odd. Why *is* that ticket machine pretending to be a piece of luggage?

What this says: we teach much more than tools for a job, we teach skills for life as a citizen.

That was fun: recorded a podcast this morning for English Heritage on medieval manuscripts, with their curator Susan Harrsion, expertly guided by host @amyfmatthews.bsky.social . I'll be interested to hear how it sounds...

Even funnier when you translate it into Latin: iamne aestas? interrogavit Pu minime, Februarius remanet, ait Porcellus tristissime fututu, dixit Pu. At least, it tickled me.

This is very exciting news and I am sure @memsunikent.bsky.social will want to celebrate. Great cover, but hope the subliminal messaging is not that all the time cooped up with the typescript has given you Stockholm syndrome!

11th-century? Is this then, @uk.theconversation.com, an earlier St Francis than the one who discussed in the article who died 800 years ago? Or did you calculate 800 back from when you were writing this post which must then have been in 1826? Is this evidence the internet is much older than assumed?

Don't forget this CFP cmtc.queens.ox.ac.uk/call-for-pap...

I think they may have misunderstood the campaigning tradition of having a list of people to knock up on election day.

A twist of lemon should be reserved for one thing: the pre-Lenten G&T before the pancakes.

Given how long I have spent in the same room with it, I could write a tale: The Wig and I.

Altum quinque. (@magdalenoxford.bsky.social MS. lat. 109).

Thank you to Special Collections @kent.ac.uk for hosting @memsunikent.bsky.social MA students and showing such exciting items held in the library. You could tell how excited people were!

This is TODAY! Not too late to register. Hope to see you later.

I am late to this but I am very sad to learn of the death of my former colleague and friend, Tom Freeman, known to many as THE expert on Foxe's Book of Martyrs, but of so many other early modern and, indeed, medieval topics. And of Diet Coke. www.essex.ac.uk/news/2019/03...

First London Palaeography Seminar of 2026 coming up! Eyal Poleg, no less, speaking on 'The Science of Erasures' - Tuesday 3rd February, 5:30pm Senate House and online. To learn more and to register: ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

Back home after the memorial event for Prof. Martin McLaughlin, about whom a few words: bonaelitterae.wordpress.com/2026/01/25/c...

TEN DAYS TO GO until the deadline for this Call for Papers. We already have some great speakers lined up but we want YOU to be among them, so sharpen that pencil and get scribbling. (What, you mean some people don't use pencils anymore? O tempora).