I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

Doing research for this weeks podcast episode and there was so much I didn’t know about Sir Francis Drake.

The podcast has been taking a bit of an unexpected break but should be back to posting regular episodes soon! In the meantime we've launched a new merch store with new items, higher quality materials, and cheaper shipping options! #medievalsky

In every academic book there is a secret second book hiding in the footnotes. Sometimes it is the first draft that had migrated there to escape the revisions. Sometimes it is the author's tortured secret rebuttal of their own claims, and sometimes it is the incipient form of the their next book.

📢JOB ALERT 📢 We are looking to appoint a F/T open-ended Lecturer in Late Medieval / Early Modern History (1400-1700) @lancasteruni.bsky.social. This is an amazing opportunity that we are very proud to announce, so please spread the word far and wide! www.hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

in 10 years, college could be where you go to be smarter than AI, but no school is brave enough to trailblaze here.

Adulthood is just cycling between "If I don't say yes to every opportunity, no new opportunities will ever be offered to me" and "Oh no, I have said yes to too many things" over and over until you die.

These five librarians are running for state political offices across the country. Here's why they're running, and why librarians make good candidates. bookriot.com/librarians-r...

Felt the need to get candlesticks for the bedside so I can read at night “atmospherically.”

Can you imagine going back to 1776 and telling the Founding Fathers that in 250 years, the King of England would be standing in the United States Capitol lecturing American lawmakers about the importance of democratic norms?

I’ve said this before, but the fact that an AI with perfect information can figure things out doesn’t really help in a field where the primary difficulty is understanding what you don’t know.

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

"Funding will continue to support transitional agreements, but from 2028/29 UKRI funding will focus on fully OA publishing and will no longer be available for hybrid OA." Pretty big open access policy update from UKRI. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Our latest podcast episode, "Murder for Hire Outside St. Paul's Cathedral" is now available everywhere podcasts can be found! Today we are discussing a story of intrigue, adultery, and of course, murder in 14th century London.

If anyone needs an audiobook rec, I cannot recommend highly enough James Redbank’s The Place of Tides.

An amazing medieval library to distract one briefly from current news and marking - the magnificent Bodleian Library in Oxford (Picture taken at a recent visit) #Medievalsky

Yorkists overthrowing Henry VI in 1461:

📔 Explore BHL’s newest oldest item! In our #BHLat20 series, we’re highlighting Circa Instans (c. 1190), now the oldest work in BHL, predating the previous oldest item by 300 years. From the @nybg.bsky.social’s Mertz Library, now online: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2026/04/circ...

Hit a small snag in my research. Some of the records I need haven’t been digitized by the London Archives as far as I can tell. Anyone know of where I can find digitized lists of prisoners from the Tower of London from 1500 to 1700? #medievalsky #earlymodern

#CFP for #earlymodern folks! @hannah-historian.bsky.social and I are putting together a special edition of the Journal of Epistolary Studies on "Letters as Paratexts in the Early Modern World"!

Today we are jumping forward in time to the 19th century and talking about the Mary Ann Ashford Case and how a modern day dog solved a crime by digging in his own back yard. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! Also, check out our merch available on our website medievalmurder.org

As a librarian, I will do what I can to maintain basic AI literacy while simultaneously advocating for its violent death 📚

The things we need to stay alive have gotten both more expensive and worse at the same time. A much higher percentage of our income goes to basic staying-alive accoutrements, if you're wondering why people feel bad about the economy. And everyone is underemployed. 🚨hyperbole siren🚨

Jesus this thread is brutal, Canada is decimating federal funding for their libraries and archives including completely cutting libraries in prisons & entirely removing the register of historic places

Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.

Welcome to the Royal Studies Journal We’re an open-access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to global royal studies across all periods, places, and disciplines. Explore our latest research, special issues, and book reviews, Join the conversation: rsj.winchester.ac.uk @royalstudies.bsky.social

I decided it was time to abandon my 10+ year old Kindle and stop supporting its maker. So meet my new e-reader!

Amazing treasures of medieval legal history to distract one briefly from current news and marking - the Catslechta ˙ (or Cat-sections) - an old Irish legal text on cats (the Senchas Már) which even sets out various categories of cats based on various characteristics or talents. #medievalsky

New Episode: We are finishing up the Táin Bó Cúailnge, also known as the Cattle Raid of Cooley, with the final installment. Today we are picking up after Cu Chulainn sadly killed his foster brother Ferdiad in one on one combat. - Image: RIA MS 23 E 25, Lebor na hUidre / The Book of the Dun Cow -

Uh oh, @guardian, you should take a hint from a lesson @npr learned years ago. If you're going to use a "historical" image in a piece, make sure it actually relates to the history you're talking about. Your Black Death (plague) image is actually leprosy! www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a... 🗃️

Is it imposter syndrome, is it anxiety, or is it the truth? 🫠 Just one of those days where I don’t feel like I’m doing enough and I’m not qualified to do anything at all

Only forty pages left…

If anyone is interested, my podcast, @medievalmurder.bsky.social is looking for guests for the coming year! If you are a historian, have a book coming out, or just want to chat all things Medieval Murder, feel free to reach out! #medievalsky

"If you read nothing else in this post, please read this: Whatever you prompt in a chatbot, you publish via that chatbot. If you feed an unpublished novel into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, you have effectively published that novel." ai-humanist.beehiiv.com/p/please-und...

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

Text mining before the age of LLM training.

Medieval manuscripts are shaped by countless decisions made by scribes, illustrators, binders, and other hands. Thomas C. Sawyer explores how these choices, both material and textual, reveal the rich and complex world behind the making of a #medieval book. Read the blog: buff.ly/1iqlhvD #medievalsky

"I got my PhD by writing prompts instead of doing research, I'm winning" got some bad news, there still no jobs and now you also know nothing

The US army corps of engineers is considering, right now, what would be the largest destruction of coral reefs in US history. To make a port slightly bigger. People know this, right? www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi... 🧪🦑🌎

I remember when trying to forgive student loans was massive overreach of Presidential power.

Nope.

I work in an academic library where patrons can chat with a human librarian 24/7. We use a co-op so librarians across the world help each other when your specific staff are off duty. This is a pretty common service, and it generally provides better info than AI for reference questions. Jusy FYI 🤷🏻‍♀️

I just want to live in a country where the leader can’t enrich themselves with our tax dollars, the government does what the people want, and the wealthy have to follow the laws. You know, like a democracy.

Bless her heart. She's never checked out a book from a library, has she?

Today we have a very special guest on the podcast, Gigi Berardi, acclaimed writer, Fulbright Scholar, and Western Washington University Professor who will be talking with us about her new book, Bianca’s Cure. If you have any questions about Dr. Berardi's work or Bianca's Cure check out her blog.

Very excited for this week’s Medieval Murder Podcast episode that will feature a very special guest talking about a new book! 👀 #medievalsky

Has anyone studied how researchers and academics use library catalogues? I'm struggling to find any literature on researcher (not student) information needs and information seeking behavior. Any leads? My focus is rare books/archives/special collections, but I'm looking broadly right now.

There is nothing as aesthetically pleasing as a medieval abbey ruin. #medievalsky

A eulogy for the mass market paperback, "one of the most brilliant technologies in the history of the world."

If anyone needs a moment of peace, look to the stars.