I hate that we're supposed to trudge through year after year after year acting like we don't already know the most effective solutions to social problems because some people don't like it. We know the best way to treat homelessness, addiction, crime, poverty, hunger, and bigotry but won't do it.

I'm teaching the medieval unit on our MA course on the history of violence next spring, and suddenly I'm torn on what theme to pick. Please vote! (This referendum is non-binding): A. Tournaments! B. University student violence!

OK, gotta climb down from the headiness of bulk-ordering books from Bennett and Kerr's half-off sale 🤓

Mamdani says in his victory speech, “we will hire thousands of teachers.” This, and not the proprietary chatbot classroom, is the future of education.

Manuscript folks: what, if any, are the conventions for citing folio numbers when they repeat within a given manuscript? That is, if I have a chunk foliated 1–100, then the next chunk restarts the foliation at 1, how do I distinguish the first f. 35v (for instance) from the second f. 35v?

It's fun when you've been working with a certain kind of medieval document long enough that your transcription speed finally catches up to your typing speed and therefore maxes out 💪

Noooo the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français changed its color scheme, the foundations of my world are falling apart 😂

The internet is often crap these days, but wow is it cool to be reading a document from the late fourteenth century that mentions a house on a certain street in a certain French town, and be able to instantly see what that spot looks like now.

There is a free online seminar on the book today, which I will sadly miss, as I’m outside digging pits and postholes. ☹️ Hope there will be an article soon. 1/2

Really exciting book news out of Norway. And while the article focusses on the sealskin binding, I'm even more excited by the fact that these neumes are not square, which suggests a date well before 1200.

TOOOOOOOOOOM!!! @tombhamilton.bsky.social! Oh this is brilliant, humongous congratulations. The Natalie Zemon Davis Prize from the @16csociety.bsky.social! 🤩 #NZD4Eva (don't forget her birthday on Saturday, our #EarlyModern feast day)

This is something that comes up a lot in my research on medieval lordship: there are certain social needs that must be met, and people will find ways of meeting them and/or meet these needs as a way of entrenching power.

A classic!

On Thursday we publish the next title in our New Historical Perspectives book series: 'Forging Fraternity in Late Medieval Society: The Palmers' Guild of Ludlow', by Rachael Harkes, is available from 6 November bit.ly/4ogSm2H Full details from @uolpress.bsky.social #Skystorians 1/2

I'd forgotten how any attempt to find out whether there's a castle (surviving or ruined) at a lordship in southern France leads inevitably to search results consisting exclusively of vineyards. I mean, it's for good historical reasons I guess, but it is patently Not Helpful (since I can't go visit).

Looking through some of my archival materials today, and would just like to shout out to the scribe of AN P 200 for having really lovely handwriting. Just look at these stylish letter forms! 😍

Well it took a whole month to get my ducks in a row and the paperwork sorted, but I'm happy these books are now on their way to @drcrossbows.bsky.social! For everyone else, remember that Gendered Reputations and Aristocratic Partnership is freely available in PDF: library.oapen.org/handle/20.50...

No neede for expensyve consultinge firmes. Heere ys a planne for excellent higher education: 1) Hire manye facultye 2) Small class syzes 3) Emphasyze engagemente & delighte 4) Sustayne & cultivate a varietye of fieldes and disciplines, even currentlye unfashionable ones -- thys ys ed, not retail

Isn't it cool how Chicago-style pizza is the best, and also Chicago-style references are the best? 😁

Even in the weird world of tech, this decision has long completely baffled me.

A neat tool I just came across: Viabundus, a digital road map of northern Europe 1350-1650, that lets you calculate contemporary travel routes/times. In 1500, going Amiens → Köln by horse took almost 7 days and 13 toll payments. #medievalsky www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/handelsstras...

Since reading longer texts is apparently something students (increasingly?) struggle with these days, I periodically think about strategies for dealing with it as a teacher, which in turn makes me think about how I read scholarship. It's definitely a skill that's learned over time.

Horrific amount of professional time goes into #GrantWriting. Learning the success rates at least helps us know that the 'failed' 99% must surely contain quite a few equally strong submissions.

A reminder that there's about a week left to pitch your paper for this year's interdisciplinary Late Medieval France and Burgundy Seminar, the loveliest event of its kind, at Durham in mid-December! There's a great (and non-exclusive) theme, and it's lots of fun for ECRs and senior scholars alike!

ONLY migrants though, no one else is to study English because it's a rip off and a waste of time, am I getting this right.

Here's an interesting student question: in the game Pentiment [spoiler alert!], the player gets this message after a character dies in a burning building. It strikes me as anachronistic in several points, but I'm also not an expert in late medieval/early modern German law or contracts:

This is good. Would also be nice if the essential research of other disciplines that have been getting relentlessly cut back of late could receive this kind of coverage too.

Hadn't anticipated using CAPTCHAs as a language-learning test, but suddenly I'm having to recall what the vocabulary item means before identifying all the pictures with it in 😂

While unis should obviously ensure sufficient teaching and library space, what the humanities fundamentally needs isn't buildings, it's humans—it's in the name for goodness' sake. Fund jobs, not construction.

As more of my valued colleagues face the threat of redundancy, here’s a quick reminder that it takes years and years of public investment to train an academic. Cutting someone with this wealth of experience loose isn’t “saving” anything. It is a massive waste of our collective resources.

Sunday morning, and not only do I have to go to Norwegian class (it's fun once I'm there!), but the damn lock on the cycle shed was dead... again. So now I'm running way late, dealing with slow bus schedules, losing precious time out of my weekend and dropping a chunk o' change on the fare to boot.

It's Michaelmas, so it's also the anniversary of the battle of Auray (1364), which marked the beginning of the end of the Breton War of Succession begun 23 years earlier. And you know what? Let's mark it with a 🚨BOOK GIVEAWAY🚨 this time! (Charles de Blois has never had a stranger memorial...)

::the medieval discourse on the inalienability of the domain has entered the chat:: (Also, it's never a good sign when yet another aspect of my research on fourteenth-century politics becomes suddenly relevant...)

I absolutely adore the 404 page for the @financialtimes.com

Hecking moment to be prepping for a course on research ethics...

Funnily enough, today Wikipedia has chosen another battle, from the start of the civil war, as their featured article!

I expected that reading my students' gameplay journals would be fun, but I did not ever expect to find the phrase "My player character is dead (mauled by bear)" in a pile of grading 😂

No! I have been so pleased to see better sleeper train networks develop in the last few years, and now this?? Why the hell do we keep subsidizing air transport when what we want and need are trains, the best form of transport devised by humans to date?

It's Michaelmas, so it's also the anniversary of the battle of Auray (1364), which marked the beginning of the end of the Breton War of Succession begun 23 years earlier. And you know what? Let's mark it with a 🚨BOOK GIVEAWAY🚨 this time! (Charles de Blois has never had a stranger memorial...)

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

The kids get it.

Cheeres to my catte. What a lovelye litel guy.

Of special interest to me and @bretdevereaux.bsky.social, among others, history is middle of the pack — similar shares of Americans say humanity knows most/all of what there is to know about history, and that we know little or nothing. How views of how much humanity knows about history break down:

AKKURAT SÅNN

In discussion with a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge last night: Me: "you've described some of the things that AI is good at. How would you describe the category of things it's not good at? **pause** Him: "Anything where it has to be right".

En tant qu'ancienne habitant de Neuilly, oui, pleurer de rire 🤣🤣🤣

ChatGPT Edu is built for conning education executives into subsidising and edu-washing planet-burning slop machines via non-consensual access to young people’s creativity AND DATA while attacking their ability to learn. At a university.