Shower thoughts: What would Pope Innocent IV done if Frederick II of Germany had commissioned a painting of himself as Jesus healing the sick and then circled insults about the pope that would have made Henry IV blush?

I’m just a historian of of the medieval Papacy asking for an interdict. I just want to see what it looks like in practice!

🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻

What a day to be someone who has written a dissertation on the Avignon Papacy. I thought my day would never come.

This is the dream, honestly. My only concern is that the cost of the books might be prohibitive for my students. And I only teach survey classes. Pretty clear I need to totally reinvent how I approach both F2F and online courses, though. Attendance this year has been abysmal.

No.

1. Latin Christendom 2. Early Modern Jewish History 3. Early Medieval Europe We had to do 1 geographical, 1 topical, and one temporal. There were subtopics in each, including apocalypticism, memory, heresy/orthodoxy, etc.

Hi! El Pasoan here! Um, WTAF?

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

Nevermind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: Witches and Witchcraft On Death and Dying History of Christianity to 1500 Independent Study (Latin): Suetonius’ “Life of Caligula” Religion, Politics, and Society

i would like more discussion of the Middle Ages that isn't right-wing crusader fetish

There it is, the dumbest thing ever to stain the internet.

For @today.yougov.com , I asked Americans what they think about the European Middle Ages. The results are mixed, but not particularly positive. Find out more, with lots of charts, in my full article: today.yougov.com/entertainmen...

Cowboy is the GOAT.

What a loss. To say that Moore’s work had a profound influence on my own scholarship would be a massive understatement. 😢

Podcasts can be a great addition to any lesson! If you're considering using our episodes, check out our page for educators, which features a spreadsheet sorting episodes by era, location, and keywords: www.footnotinghistory.com/teach.html

We're back! We're kicking off 2025 with an episode about Hummel and Howe, a pair of infamous criminal attorneys from Gilded Age New York. Listen now: www.footnotinghistory.com/home/hummel-... YouTube version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ95...

RFK’s elevation is going to be such a disaster for the autism community. Divisive. Fraudulent. Abusive. Ignorant. Dehumanizing. I’d like you, right now, to read this by @juststimming.bsky.social and me. /1

Hello again, BlueSky.

@kpreeo.bsky.social Glad to see you here, dude. Hope things are good. Been thinking about you.

@kathleenbelew.bsky.social Hi, Prof. Belew! Myself and my colleagues at El Paso Community College, UT El Paso, and New Mexico State University would love to have you out for a talk re: white supremacist violence- is the best way to go about this via your agent? We’d love to work something out!

I don’t often open the Once Bird App, but I just did and it took two clicks to read a blue check arguing that we should have listened to Joseph McCarthy. I’d like to go back to the Atlantic and walk out into it and never return.

Giving a talk on the Sicilian Vespers later this month. Thought I’d have some fun and make a flyer modeled on a teen magazine spread.

I’m doing a public lecture next month on the Sicilian Vespers. I decided to call it, “Fred, Chuck, Mike, Pete, and a not-so-innocent Pope: How the Sicilian Vespers Remade the Mediterranean World.” I refuse to have anything other than a good time. 🤣

I did a workshop for my college today on how to use some often-unused features of Adobe Acrobat. I never imagined a career in which I would do such a thing. Not going to lie, it’s really gratifying work. After all, it’s teaching - the thing I love to do the most.

Today is my two-year cancerversary. I’m so, so thankful that a single surgery got me to remission. Since the dx, I’ve been living a bit more authentically and for the moment, doing things I always said I’d do but never made the time. Life is good. I hope it stays that way for a while.

Hoping to build the same sort of community/feed here that once existed over on the Birb App. Twitter was my favorite social media space for a long time; it’s a shame that it’s new proprietor is such a POS. Here’s to greener pastures… errr… bluer skies(?)