As a pre-Christmas treat, allow me to explain the true significance of the famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the @museecluny.bsky.social, which is the story of the unicorn's increasing disaffection with its career as a standard-bearer.

🧵 with a very useful framing: until the massive structural problems around this technology are fixed, the discussion cannot logically proceed any further (only put much better than this!)

At an archive in southern France I asked to see a certain collection. The archivist said it was still kept at the relevant castle... then went off and came back with the phone number of the marquis on a post-it note (sorry to say, I did not ultimately cold-call a member of the French "nobility" 😂)

Gods rest ye, dead Barbarians, Your hitpoints gone away, Remember that your Good cleric Has 3 Raise Deads per day To end your being spread so thin On dungeon walls all grey. Good fighting shall be yours to enjoy, yours to enjoy! Good fighting shall be yours to enjoy!

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Nice feeling to be able to comfortably read student essays in Norwegian at the end of my fourth semester of teaching here 😊 (Looking for wins in the pre-Christmas grading pile!)

Crying with laughter at the last line 😂

Don't steal pies this Christmas.

🎵'Tis the season🎵 where I wonder what the devil the designers of the user interface for our grading management software were thinking. A veritable maze of impenetrable options through which I vainly click in search of the only two things I need: the student's paper and a place to put the grade. Why.

One argument I used to make to my students about why it was important to learn history (and historical thinking) is that someone was always going to be trying to tell you things were natural or had always been this way and that you needed to be able to see that as an exercise of power.

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

There's lots of ongoing work as we're preparing for the new Museum of the Viking Age to open in Oslo. Our museum, @kult-hist-museum.bsky.social is now hiring an Associate Professor in Nordic archaeology, with expertise in the Viking Age. www.jobbnorge.no/ledige-still... #Vikingtidsmuseet

Off to a fantastic start at the Late Medieval France and Burgundy Seminar! Particularly pleased to note that we have 2 back-to-back panels on politics with all-women lineups (and across all career stages)—a sign of positive change in the field? Also, it's all Jeannes all the time, as it should be 😂

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

Well that was possibly the largest book order I've ever received. It's like academic Christmas come early!

Delighted by this "PROCLAMATION THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY TO FARMERS On Potato Cultivation" that my friend has hanging in the window of her antiquarian bookshop! "Prejudice and force of habit had long left farmers in many regions indifferent to the cultivation and benefits of potatoes."

*Finally* able to visit the renovated Musée de Cluny and enjoyed seeing old friends as well as new highlights. Particularly enjoyed this folio with not only its thorough commentary but its insanely tiny annotations—how on earth is it even possible to write that small with a quill?! O.O

I'm not going to share the man's actual words, but anyone saying the phrase "merely by giving birth" has, in fact, never done so and can piss right off

Had a fantastic time today comparing the transfer of lordships across the medieval and early modern periods! Tl;dr, aristocrats love doing whatever they need to by couching it it in whatever terms serve their purposes best 😂

making up shit about books' condition and seeing if anyone notices. Outer couplets minorly flanged; interior verso carbuncles retwinked in claret flagolet, second volume lacking grundispiece; partially twatted, flaps with some visible degrotting, but overall a pesculent exemplar

Couldn't apply to a post yesterday because I received my PhD more than 4 years ago. Couldn't apply to a post today because I received my PhD less than 5 years ago.

So kid, in your heart you want to study humanities but you worry about your job prospects? Let’s play a game. On the latest data, who is more likely to be unemployed after 15 months after graduation. The English Lit grad or the Maths grad? WRONG!

This is why, in a workshop I've introduced as part of an effort to help students to better understand what it is they're reading, I start with a talk about how academic publications come to be and what they *physically* are, and how this reflects and drives scholarly processes.

I said grabby hands, I meant grabby hands 😁 Now let's see if I can get some of these documents onto my spring syllabus!

Spotted in an Oslo metro car

I will say that my (already limited) self-restraint on buying books has really gone out the window now that I'm a paren. "But it's for the *baby*!" is the perfect excuse to yield to that impulse 😂

5 authors I've read 5+ books by: Lynn Flewelling N. K. Jemisin Martha Wells Naomi Novik Ann Leckie

The timeframe of my impending deadlines is starting to have real "This is Fine" meme vibes 🙃

I find it very pleasing that sometime around 1040, an Icelandic skald addressed the king of the Norwegians as "sinjórr", showing that already at this early stage the French vocabulary for lordship had entered the Nordic world.

...I hate trying to figure out how big anything was in the past (If anyone happens to know of a handy reference work discussing French regional variations in units of measurement, please do point it my way! Sounds like the kind of thing some 19th-century person might have compiled, I dunno)

V2.0 (which is also visualizing the data in a different way). Guess which piece of property was the most important?

I'm back at my let's-diagram-this-lordship game

SO FUNNY COINCIDENCE, as an undergrad I had these manuscript fragments remounted properly for display! 😁 In 2009–10 I was lucky enough to take a course in which we collectively curated an art exhibit using the College's collections.

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms. 24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images. The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

SO FUNNY COINCIDENCE, as an undergrad I had these manuscript fragments remounted properly for display! 😁 In 2009–10 I was lucky enough to take a course in which we collectively curated an art exhibit using the College's collections.

Oh wow! This is what happens when you're photographing MSS & don't capture the text in the inner gutter. 1st, here's the photograph (made about 100 yrs ago) of the Codex Salernitanus, f. 82ra. Although that big tear of the page is obvious, the inner gutter hasn't been fully captured in the photo.

Help! @frenchhistory.bsky.social really wanted this for journal cover next year (we’ve got exciting things coming on quantitative and computational methods) but it’s a challenge finding higher res versions/rights holder. Do YOU have suggestions to track these down OR alternative, similar images? 🙏🏻 🗃️

A really exciting slate of papers for this year's Late Medieval France and Burgundy Seminar! If anyone will be in Durham and wants in (or maybe even wants to attend online, I don't know?), drop me a line and I can share details!

"So a lot of it is about grain" is, in retrospect, perhaps not the strongest opening hook I have ever composed 😅

Palaeography 🧵! Or why it can take a historian a while to confirm what they already suspected must be the case and not really get any further than they were—but this time with confidence 😂 I'm working with documents that list the incomes of medieval French lordships, so a lot of it is about grain.

::grabby hands::

It's not just evil, it doesn't work. It's not just evil, it doesn't work. It's not just evil, it doesn't work. It's not just evil, it doesn't work. It's not just evil, it doesn't work. It's not just evil, it doesn't work. It's not just evil, it doesn't work. It's not just evil, it doesn't work.

Possibly one for @greenleejw.bsky.social but really for anyone who feels like a bit of C14 French palaeography, what's the last word on the top line? "Item le tiers de la huche ? anguilles dudit vivier." I'd have expected "aux" but it's... not. What other word could link eels with their reservoir? 😂

OK but how *is* the medieval historian Kaeuper pronounced? I don't think I've ever had to say it out loud but I will next semester 😂

Left to my own devices I'm all about Baskerville (with Garamond as an acceptable runner-up), but I use it mainly for my own documents rather than e.g. slides, since I know sans-serif fonts are more accessible for some students. (I have fewer strong opinions on those, but Avenir is nice.)

THREAD. A collection of photographs of excellent sheep I have met on walks. You will find the captions to each photo in the alt text.

Fuck off @microsoft.com, get this shitty slop-generator out of my workspace and back to hell where it belongs Anyone know how to kill this dead on a Mac? Meanwhile, looks like I'll be using alternatives to Word for the foreseeable.

This is a sad & horrifying tale of how millions of kids' opportunity to get good at reading has been hampered by offering them 'path of least resistance' work-arounds. This is exactly what I foresee happening as we shovel AI into curricula too. There are no short cuts to training your brain.

To which we might add that, as with so many things, the solution (as proposed by some of the people discussed here) isn't simply "do as the men do"—it's to rethink whether the norms associated with femininity (friendliness, warmth) don't have some advantages we could do to embrace more.