Next to Jesus Maria Johannes, another triad: amen amen amen. Unusually, the reason for invoking it thrice is explained: it is in honour of the Trinity as the superscript letters show (p[ater], f[ilius], s[spiritus sanctus]). @magdalenoxford.bsky.social MS. lat. 71.

Exciting news from Cambridge, where a donation has funded a permanent lectureship (sorry, “Assistant Professorship”) in the History of Knowledge Pre-1400. The only explicit restriction is “not medicine”, but it is in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/53305/

Every time discover a new piece on the dangers of LLMs, particularly for research and teaching, I add it to a Zotero library. I figure that I might as well share it, so here's my library of Cautionary AI Tales: www.zotero.org/groups/62758...

It’s rare to see a piece of journalism about the use of “AI” in universities that doesn’t salivate over the prospect of students outsourcing their reading and thinking to a mindless generator of (on a good day) superficially plausible text. Here’s a good one from Belgium: apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

ATTACKS from bots are a major problem for libraries scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/10/07/g... "Can we differentiate the behavior in our systems from the motives of the operating individual or organization, and should we be in the business of judging “good” and “bad” site visitors and uses?"

MLGB is back!! Delighted that Medieval Libraries of Great Britain @bodleian.ox.ac.uk is now back online. We are also working had on plans for the next phase of the resource, enhancing & adding data & functionality. HUGE thanks to my colleagues for their hard & clever work mlgb.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

A great thread applicable to scholars outside the US. Much of the work that historians do is not strictly what they’re paid for. Being able to do it depends on historians being stably employed, with access to resources, and with flexibility built in their schedules. All of those things are at risk.

Breaking news: OpenAI researchers use actual intelligence to discover that bears shit in the woods! Stay tuned for their “landmark study” on the pope’s religious affiliation. (PSA: it is a category mistake to call the generation of falsehoods “hallucination”.) www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Breaking news: OpenAI researchers use actual intelligence to discover that bears shit in the woods! Stay tuned for their “landmark study” on the pope’s religious affiliation. (PSA: it is a category mistake to call the generation of falsehoods “hallucination”.) www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Crest fallen.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Note that although the upgraded high-res digitization can be viewed at BAV, the Biblissima interface allows a much higher-resolution download.

Reminder @theguardian.com has a partnership with OpenAI; which explains this thinly sourced excuse of an article that relies on ONE Masters student and OpenAI's International Education Lead countered by measly words of "caution" from ONE university admin.

We need more "unfunded" research, not less. Or rather, we need more "core" funding and much less project based funding. Then universities can *invest* in core research infrastructure (including people), reduce precarity, and focus on growing and retaining talent.

Join us next week to assess ⚖️📏 the role quantity played in diverse premodern cultural domains and practices. It is possible to attend on Zoom (if you send me an email).

New Wyclif polemic discovered! Only 250 words long, but not obviously detached from a larger work. It isn’t ascribed to him in the manuscript (no titulus or colophon) but the style is recognizably his. I’m posting it here because the content is eerily topical. #medievalLatin #medievalSky #genAI

Provenance to die for: the works of Tacitus (Antwerp, 1581), edited by Justus Lipsius, and scribbled on by both Isaac Casaubon & Richard Bentley (Master of @trincolllibcam.bsky.social). @theulspeccoll.bsky.social Adv.d.3.14.

The University of Warwick has paid a lot of money, I'm guessing, for their internet banner ads on the Guardian and elsewhere. But they can't spell "curiosity". This isn't a US-UK variant. They just, genuinely, have a massive spelling error in their banner ads.

BREAKING: THE discovers a new grammatical category of questions to which the answer is “No”! Also, “Isabel spent over 20 years working in technology innovation and digital transformation at American Express and Visa… before transitioning into academia full-time in 2015. Her teaching reflects this” 💯

OMG PEOPLE! I have the BL hack of all BL hacks. Why didn't this occur to me before? It turns out the Wayback Machine has snapshots of MS metadata from the old Digitised Manuscripts site. I tried it for the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, in honor of his day, and lo! web.archive.org/web/20140305...

“The Daily Mail claims the number of people who click its links from Google search results has fallen by around 50% on both desktop and mobile traffic since Google introduced its AI Overview feature.” Every cloud… www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Something special at Leeds: the surprise discovery of a Wyclif manuscript at Merton College, where he was a grad student in the 1350s! Gigi Campi can’t make it, so the other talks will be less compressed. Jordan Lavender’s will be about his discovery; mine will be more general. #IMC2025 #medievalSky

Wyclif’s Anglo-Polish editor Michael Dziewicki was brought up a Quaker but converted to Catholicism in his mid-teens and spent most of his 20s training as a Jesuit. In his final edition (1909) he explained his life’s work to “such Catholic and High Church friends as I may have unwillingly pained”:

Those of you working on manuscripts may be interested in this new imaging device, which is really a game changer: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Disturbed by much in digitised manuscripts today. 1, the occasional jump scare of a finger in the scan (a body horror evolution of the manicule); 2, the transcription tool which is impossible to turn off and hallucinating fuffers and all sorts.

POSTDOC OPPORTUNITY! @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social are advertising a full-time 6-month postdoc position to work with Andrew Dunning on redeveloping the Medieval Libraries of Great Britain project as a sustainable, open-access digital resource for manuscript studies. 🖊️ Apply by 14 July

Something special at Leeds: the surprise discovery of a Wyclif manuscript at Merton College, where he was a grad student in the 1350s! Gigi Campi can’t make it, so the other talks will be less compressed. Jordan Lavender’s will be about his discovery; mine will be more general. #IMC2025 #medievalSky

Great timing! Part 2 of 2: my and Simon Whedbee’s edition of the glosses to the 13th-century pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, by… Roger Bacon? With some new thoughts on authorship, function, style, and newly identified sources of the scholia.

“The power to reform lies with the academics, for only they can teach, research and examine. Every senate should go on strike until the last chair of council has been strangled with the entrails of the last CEO of the Office for Students.” Metaphorically, of course! thecritic.co.uk/how-to-ruin-...

This is from Routledge’s 2024 ebook of a 1989 Variorum volume. The OCR correctly read ‘pomo’ 6 times but got distracted by the other word 3 times. Somehow I feel even a Latinless proofreader would have spotted it – but think how much money they’ll have saved by not employing one! #posthumanities

If we could convince the transhumanist techbros that the AGI deity will never attain sentience without all the data in the archives as well, we might be onto something

Another great resource I'd somehow missed knowing about: @matthewholford.bsky.social collated **DATED & DATABLE** MSS in published catalogues with MSS available online. This incredibly helpful list is sorted by country of origin & sequenced by date. holfordm.github.io/resources/da... #medievalsky

It's #IMC2025 Registration Deadline Day! 🎉 🎉 The Registration site will close at 23:59 (BST) (GMT+1) Tonight! 😱 Click the link here to register: www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/register/ 😊

“Has AI ‘transformed’ university for the better?” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

OUP published my first book and did a fine job of it. The involvement of professional human people at every stage did not strike me as a luxury or something that could be easily disposed of.

Postgrad students have been assured that these redundancies “won’t impact” our studies, but they already have—and how can they possibly replace a supervisor whose expertise is, in many instances, foremost in their field?

I briefly check ChatGPT every year or so to reassure myself that it’s effectively just a bullshit merchant. Prompt for the slurry below: “I think [Wyclif’s] French epigrams are his best work. They're not independent publications, but you can find them in some of the Latin works, e.g. the Trialogus.”

The biggest problem at the moment is that AI companies have moved to using crawlers that try to pretend to be legit requests from human users. Traditional methods such as robots.txt and blocking by user agent strings no longer work. That's why you're spending more time looking at things like this...

I need to rant & praise re: folio numbers in digitized manuscript interfaces. Long boring 🧵 coming, unless you, too, obsess over niche usability matters. Background: when I'm choosing MS images to use for my saints+manuscripts posts, I want to navigate to the page I want, download a high-res image,

Speaking as an author who has now had a recent article I wrote promoted not once not twice but THREE times by people who used AI to summarize it, & which summaries were all DEAD WRONG (not just wrong but wrong in a way that makes me sound basic & banal AF): I am infuriated by what we are doing.

Three weeks after I unmasked St Henry the Exuberant, he popped up in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion! Blurb: “With today’s overabundance of … misinformation, students and researchers alike can be overwhelmed in identifying what’s trustworthy… and what’s accurate” 💯 x.com/brunellus/st...

Three weeks after I unmasked St Henry the Exuberant, he popped up in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion! Blurb: “With today’s overabundance of … misinformation, students and researchers alike can be overwhelmed in identifying what’s trustworthy… and what’s accurate” 💯 x.com/brunellus/st...

Registration DEADLINE Friday 16th for online summer school Advanced Readings in Medieval Latin, May 27–July 3. Two 1½-hour classes per week for 6 weeks, $500 (£375ish). We've not had many takers, so at just over £20 per hour this is pretty cheap for small-group tuition. marco.utk.edu/summerlangua...

Registration DEADLINE Friday 16th for online summer school Advanced Readings in Medieval Latin, May 27–July 3. Two 1½-hour classes per week for 6 weeks, $500 (£375ish). We've not had many takers, so at just over £20 per hour this is pretty cheap for small-group tuition. marco.utk.edu/summerlangua...

And of course this is also what students are seeing when they open a PDF of an article or book chapter. What with AI at the top of every Google search and "Co-pilot" on Word, they're having actively to resist constant encouragement to let the computer do all the work.

Interesting in joining us for the best value premodern summer language training around? Then hurry and register because SPACES ARE LIMITED in Beginner and Int. Latin! Lots of space in Beginner Syriac and Adv. Latin though! More info: marco.utk.edu/summerlanguages! #medievalsky #classics #digiclass

I’m teaching an advanced online class in medieval Latin from May 27 to July 3 as part of the Marco Summer Language Program. This would be good preparation for the Toronto Level II exam in September, but of course it would have other uses too. marco.utk.edu/summerlangua... #medievalLatin #medievalSky

FUNDING!! We’re delighted to say that the AND project has received a new AHRC grant! For the next four years we’ll be working on the completion of the Second Edition - not just the revision of V- (our final letter!), but also an overall consolidation (and expansion!) of all entries (A-Z).

Oh dear. Well, I suppose it's been eight years since Catherine Nixey's *The Darkening Age* peddled a highly selective Gibbonian narrative about Christianity causing "the Dark Ages, so it was inevitable we get another such book. @profaliceroberts.bsky.social is well qualified in medicine, ...

Studi sull'Aristotelismo medievale 4.4 (2024): the special issue dedicated to John of Ripa, OFM, with articles on his views on latitudines, beatific vision, theory of distinction, intuitive cognition, experience & reflexivity, his legacy, and much more. buff.ly/2l0QPo5