One whole week of Duet! It’s been an absolute whirlwind of incredibly enriching conversations with @petroc.bsky.social @elizabethalker.bsky.social and @drkkennedy.bsky.social and SUCH a delight to see this whimsical little book out into the world. Available now in all good bookshops!

Explored how we see music - instruments as art, sound as colour. We could have talked for hours @ @wolfsonoxford.bsky.social. @elliechan.bsky.social @oxmusicfaculty.bsky.social @duckworthbooks.bsky.social @headofzeus.bsky.social @oxfordlifewriting.bsky.social

This Monday, with @elliechan.bsky.social and @drkkennedy.bsky.social Details: www.musicatoxford.com/whats-on/boo...

Just announced! To celebrate the launch of her book ‘Duet’ Dr Eleanor Chan will be in conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy (author of 'Cello') on Monday 22 September. Tickets are just £6.50. Details: www.musicatoxford.com/whats-on/boo...

"LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text"

Tonight!!! Exploring how Beethoven was used during World War II, featuring the only interview Elly Ney's family have given to English language media 😱 this was such a fascinating doc to make

Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, almost all letter writers had to use letterlocking. "Letterlocking" provides an archival history of the practice, including sources so readers can learn how to make locked letters for their own correspondence: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204927...

Here's an idea for Microsoft: ditch the stupid AI BS and improve the software.

just imagine working at microsofft and thinking “let’s spend billions, steal a load of intellectual property, and destroy the planet to make an interface to write bad essays” rather than “let’s update MS Word so users can comment on footnotes”

Team, exciting news! Duet: An Artful History of music not only has a cover, it is also available to preorder! It’s a visual history of music 35,000BCE-present day, but also about failing to become a musician; about second chances; and about learning to look and listen.

We are characters in Act III Scene IV of a longer story and it’s just basic self-respect to want to know how we got here. Everyone deserves a chance to ask.

The premodern world held possibilities and imagined futures: the physical and metaphysical systems that were actively built and contested then continue to inform the world in the present. Read our statement on the value of Renaissance & Premodern Studies: www.rensoc.org.uk/statement-on...

Take that, Picasso: the frenzied work by Faith Ringgold that took MoMA by storm by Hettie Judah for The Guardian www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Queen Elizabeth I died #OTD in 1603. This volume of sermons by John Udall (London, 1596) luxuriously bound in velvet & with silver thread may have been made for presentation to the Queen, carrying her arms on both covers. Cambridge UL SSS.24.32.

Fascinating post today by Sarah Lindenbaum on a delightful copy of the book of common prayer, with multiple early modern female owners buff.ly/3x7ASkk #HerBook #EarlyModern #18C

This sums it up perfectly. It’s not a conversation.

Her husband: nO yoU cAnNot bE a cOnCErt pIanISt Anna Casparsson: *creates stunning embroidered art instead* A fascinating musical-visual intersection at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm

And a Happy Valentines Day to us all, with love from Thomas Trevelyon's Elizabethan Meme Book.

It’s only taken her 8 months but Madame is finally starting to get the hang of this feline research assistant malarkey.

Want to know more about the discoveries relating to Thomas Cromwell's Book of Hours, now on display in the Wren? This blog post will tell you everything, from the link with Holbein's portrait to how Raman spectroscopy was used to identify the jewels in the binding. Not to be missed! t.ly/ot3RS

I figured it out! There is now a Musicology feed here on BlueSky. You can find it at bsky.app/profile/did:... (and please let me know if you have feedback!)

(CN - suicide) For those of you who are London-based/adjacent, this event features some excellent historians and is in aid of PAPYRUS, who work for prevention of suicide and the promotion of positive mental health and emotional wellbeing in young people. An extremely important cause. Pls share.

An exciting discovery at Christ's College Cambridge - early Tudor paintings uncovered in roof! Comments from yours truly included... www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/camb...

#onmydesktoday: a book about the print culture in 16th and 17th centuries focusing on the idea of the ‘gap’. That’s a step towards a cultural history of absence. For #bookhistory and other fields that investigate into silence, space and emptiness. Bonus point for the “empty” book cover, #skystorians

Easing myself gently into 2024 (and post another bout of covid) writing about Cornelia Parker’s Breathless (2001) today. Feels awkwardly poignant.

UK Reproduction fees 📜 www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/12/29/c...

Byrd Studies in the Twenty-first Century (Clemson, 2023) is out now! You can see a preview in Googlebooks and a link to buy below. www.byrdcentral.com/post/new-book

If you're looking for the answer to the question why QMUL is in the dire state it is in, then I don't think management could have been more clear than with its evasive non-answer and refusal to interact even with a key journalist in a national newspaper. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Our focus is not only European but also global. If you are interested in publishing with us, take a look at our author guidelines (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal...), have a brief chat with our brilliant editor, Kevin Killeen, or ask someone who has published in RS how they found the process!

If you are interested in publishing with us, all submissions go through rigorous (but fair & constructive) peer review. We encourage submissions of articles & special issue proposals in all topics & fields associated with the capacious & wide-ranging “Renaissance”.

Thrilled that Tara Hamling's and my article 'From Rejection to Reconciliation: Protestantism and the Image in Early Modern England' is now available to view open access on the Journal of British Studies website! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

To clarify for those not in UK academia: this means no foreigners qualify to even apply for museum jobs, anything in heritage or libraries, junior fac jobs, UK postdocs, all are entirely out of the question. And do that math outside academia- no foreign nurses, teachers, and on and on.

Volvelle Calendar! Peter Apian's 1524 Cosmographia has some memorable hand coloring through that cut-out solar-lunar dial, doesn't it? #MovableMonday #NewberryLibrary i-share-nby.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01...

Early modernists on bluesky, I have a question! I'm looking for interesting half-sibling relationships - especially onstage, but also elsewhere (fairy tales are all of interest, as are real half-siblings). I'd love to know your thoughts!

Kiyoshi Saito, circa 1960

Spent yesterday doing my first on-location recording for something pretty damn exciting! Tune into Music Matters on Radio 3 this Saturday at 11.45 to hear me in action! #earlymodern

Ohhhhhh.....

Looking for seasonal music to play or sing with friends? To Shorten Winter's Sadness: English Music and Song for Christmas and Winter from the 16th & 17th Centuries www.rondopublishing.co.uk/product/to-s... #earlymusic #earlymodern #christmas #winter #carols #christmasmusic

So it looks like my British Library collection requests DID actually go through last week - does anyone know how long they hold them in the reading room for?

Visualisations of music notation in the wild! From a (probably) Victorian banner for St Wilfrid, recycling segments of ecclesiastical vestments. Particularly love the ghostly holes, showing where gilt thread would once have embellished a far more elaborate foliated starting letter!

Anyone whose visit to the BL has been thwarted might find that the Guildhall Library has some of the items you wanted to see. They have a *big* collection of early printed books as well as secondary sources: www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do... They're open Mon-Thurs. Much quicker retrieval too!

Call for proposals: Integrating the Image: visual culture, material culture, and Early Modern British History, Newcastle University (UK) January 8-9 2025. #bookhistory #printculture #earlymodern Full details: networks.h-net.org/group/announ...

Enjoy the Reformation and Halloween with the classic 95 Reese's being nailed to a door

Congratulations to Nandini Das as her book 'Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire' wins the £25,000 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2023 www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/courtin...

Join us for DOUBLE book launch - 'Ignorance & the Unknowable in Early Modernity', celebrating the scholarship of distinguished duo Sandrine Pargeau & Kevin Killeen, 11 Dec 2023 17.00GMT #SRSlyGood #EarlyModern crowdcast.io/c/parageau-k...

Delighted (infuriated) to announce that the timely arrival of this witch coven board game (that I kickstarted last year) has proved that a debilitating brain injury has done nothing to stop Rich from being literally undefeatable at any given board game. Pleasing progress, but also GRRR. #septima

Utterly enthusiastic review of the Holbein drawing show equally utterly devoid of any ACTUAL understanding of late medieval or northern Ren art or Tudor history. jfc. count the fictions. Are these drawings absolutely jawdropping? Yes. Go see them if you can. Is the review a hot mess? Also yes.

An emblem for us all, struggling through every Wednesday, everywhere: ‘Cannot swym at all’

And a Merry Wormfest to Ye All.