Forthcoming with the CSMBR Online Lecture Series csmbr.fondazionecomel.org/events/onlin... #Avicenna #Brain #Diagram #imagetext #Medieval #IslamicateTradition #Rhazes #Ventricles

And THIS is why I occasionally browse entire sections of #NewberryLibrary shelves! It's a new-to-me Greek alchemical manuscript, possibly 17th c., with text from the 7th c. scholar Stephen of Alexandria... i-share-nby.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01...

Pasts Imperfect is back from break! This week, we focus on AI ethics and labor with @illdottore.bsky.social, Christine Johnston & Leigh Anne Lieberman. Then, ancient bees in jawbones, Roman camels in Basel, a book on temple robbery, new ancient world journals @yaleclassicslib.bsky.social & much more

Exciting news for #histsci friends in the heartland: The 2026 meeting of the Midwest Junto will be held at Purdue on April 17-18! The Junto is America's oldest regional history of science organization. Learn more and submit abstracts before Feb. 15: midwestjunto.wordpress.com #histSTM #CFP 🗃️📜

Friends, I hope you’ll share this widely. The @jcblibrary.bsky.social is hiring 2 3-yr research associates for collaborative work on religions and freedoms in the early Americas. Info is here and I’m happy to take questions offline: brown.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/staff-...

Why thank you, anonymous staff person, for your work digitizing this astronomical tract on the nova of 1604, but could you have possibly OPENED UP THAT LOVELY FOLD-OUT DIAGRAM YOUR BLURRED FINGERS ARE SHOWN HOLDING CLOSED before snapping the image? 🧐 😆 🥺 (@dbellingradt.bsky.social will appreciate)

Of potential interest to DC-based history of science & STS colleagues... (And reminiscent of several sessions at the most recent @historyscience.bsky.social & @shothisttech.bsky.social meetings!) #histSTM #histsci 🗃️📜 #histtech #histmed #STS

#MedievalSky #BookHistory

Application deadline is January 30th for this week-long workshop on methods & primary sources in the history of astronomy, June 2026 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Observatoire de Paris; a limited number of grants for participants will be available. 👇 🔭 #HistSTM #MedievalSky

I loved the image at first sight but couldn't immediately fathom how it was created. Now there is a wonderfully clear thread to explain the kit and process, with the bonus of a hi-res zoomable version at the end. Hmm, could I print out a large version to go on the wall? (Or a backlit transparency?!)

The Transformation of Infectious Disease Histories Three Decades of Paleogenetics and Historians’ Responses 13 Jan. 2026 5 PM CET=11 AM EST online lecture @monicamedhist.bsky.social csmbr.fondazionecomel.org/events/onlin... @csmbr-pisa.bsky.social

Some thoughts about how learning about its role in the early modern world helped me appreciate astrological thinking & Tycho/Kepler chat. Thanks Jason! Actually can’t believe we’ve done this for two years now!

Threads of Time: Prints, Textiles & The Tactile Archive. Forgot to post about this nifty interview with Mia Funk from The Creative Process a while back... Let's call it the first press for my Printing on Fabric show (opening Dec 10!). www.creativeprocess.info/arts-intervi...

🤩 The #LowCountries seminar programme is up! Would you look at this exciting line-up! Fridays, 17:30 @ihr.bsky.social & zoom Register here: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/... (you don't have to register if you come in person, but if you do it helps with showing numbers so appreciated!) #SkyStorians

‘Editors silently rewrote passages that seemed tawdry, or just left them out; it was routine to excise Pepys’s sexual escapades while preserving his wife’s rages, which just made her seem unhinged.’ @deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Samuel Pepys’s diary. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

If anyone needs a break from the news, can recommend this extended photographic tour of how chefs, dietitians, commissary staff, and handlers keep the variety of animals at the Smithsonian's National Zoo well fed: wapo.st/4qWsavV [gift link]

Context: I teach at an HSI and many of my students are children or grandchildren of farm workers. I'd like to give them more context for their own histories and also counter all the students' knee-jerk refusal to accept the idea of US empire

#MedievalSky #histSTM #histmed CFP: “The Science of Natural Properties: Knowledge, Transmission, and Practice (6th – 15th century)” (Bologna, June 17-19, 2026). Transportation to Bologna is covered for speakers of accepted papers. Deadline: 15 Jan 2026. www.academia.edu/145294551/Ca...

My favorite fact about the year's 1st meteor shower is that it is named after an obsolete constellation! Quadrans Muralis (the wall-mounted quadrant) was proposed by Jérôme Lalande in 1795 and was well-established when the #Quadrantids received their name in the late 1830s. #histSTM #astronomy 🗃️🔭

I think I’ll repost this (links to a thread) every hour for a while. We’re in our 250th year as a republic. The people who overthrew the king issued the Monroe Doctrine not to claim a sphere of influence, but to say to European monarchies, “No kings imposed on our sibling republics, either.”

This afternoon's showing of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Cardinals" included a few intermissions with a red-bellied woodpecker. 🪶

H-Science, Medicine, and Technology (H-SMT) is looking to recruit new editors and advisory board members. networks.h-net.org/group/announ...

A sad loss for Virginia and U.S. historians and museum colleagues: wapo.st/49k4ha6 [gift link]

📣 We are thrilled to announce that the Winter 2025 issue of Renaissance Quarterly (vol. 78.4) has been published online. You can view it here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #RenTwitter #earlymodern #Renaissance @universitypress.cambridge.org

This appraisal by a fellow Renaissance historian is a very useful commentary on why James Hankins is not and should not be representative of the field today. New people, new sources, and new perspectives (including from existing scholars) come into a field all the time. That's good!

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over

The destruction of knowledge and history is haphazard & breathtaking. NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts.

Yes, such an excellent read and still timely for anyone who hasn't yet encountered it: 👇 bookshop.org/p/books/weap...

What? This seems like it needs a lot more warning and publicity, given people send in grant applications and job applications and so forth this way.

I spoke with @carlzimmer.com about our terminated grant on wildfire smoke and homes:

Latest article in this series by @dinograndoni.bsky.social @byaliceli.bsky.social & @joshualott.bsky.social on examples of how conserving different wildlife species can also help save human lives: wapo.st/4peEOoI [gift link]

For 1 week, The Burlington Magazine offers as open access Judith Mann's review of the Musée Jacquemart-André exhibition 'Artemisia: Heroine of Art,' www.burlington.org.uk/archive/exhi... #ArtemisiaGentileschi #womenartists #artherstory

There are very few surviving portrait of Johannes Kepler and each of them has a question mark hanging over it for some reason #histsci thonyc.wordpress.com/2025/12/27/c...

New old board game!

Post-doc with a medieval intellectual and book history project, working with manuscript fragments from across the Nordic world: 👇 #MedievalSky

On the Ukrainian origins of "Carol of the Bells," including a short 1923 choral recording with the original lyrics about greeting the new year: 🎄 🇺🇦 wapo.st/4qq8PCU [gift link]

Also the ancient Egypt original version. 🎶

For more volvelles, medieval science, and a shout-out to @sebfalk.com's book, see also today's Linda Hall Library post on John Westwyk, whose 14th-century manuscript on an astronomical instrument was originally attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer: www.lindahall.org/about/news/s... #HistSci #MedievalSky

As a mandolinist, biblical scholar, and music-theory nerd, this thread hits so many of my interests, I can’t even

[SATIRE] "9:00 P.M. Crawl into bed exhausted from the cultural weight of being the town spinster librarian, but grateful I can read all day and enjoy peace and quiet and generally do whatever the hell I want. It actually is a wonderful life." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-d...

Come and visit us at @uni-wuppertal.bsky.social !

Why didn’t I immediately respond with this one: when I first got to UNC, an amazing librarian reached out to tell me about a trove of ~250 uncatalogued Italian manuscripts that had been sitting in Special Collections for a century…

Notice of upcoming lecture on 13 Jan. Sponsored by @csmbr-pisa.bsky.social. Of interest to #MedievalSky #EarlyModern #VastEarlyAmerica #EpiSky #histmed

Reading about Ethel #Voynich (1864-1960) today for some writing and wow, what a life! Her father George Boole developed the idea of Boolean Logic. Her mother Mary was the librarian at Queen's College London. Four sisters, all math geniuses.

Telescope Types xkcd.com/3182/

It's depressing & appropriate that the star of a much-lauded movie about Brazil's descent into authoritarian dictatorship should express both sympathy and warnings for Americans as one of his friends is kidnapped off a Los Angeles street by masked agents of the state: wapo.st/4p6haue [gift link]

A little review of some of the things I wrote this year. 🧵 It was of course the Year of Quantum, a highlight of which was the meeting on Helgoland in the summer. Here's what that was all about, and what happened there. www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/the-hol...

Read it, add to it, enjoy it!