🚨Just a week to go until the deadline! 🚨 We've received some really exciting proposals already. If you work on the intersection of #earlymodern crime and religion and have something to offer you really don't want to miss these #RenSA27 panels! 🗃️

News articles like this actually make me a bit sad. Do we (and I'm speaking as a historian who has made his home in Wales) really need this type of external validation of our history? 🗃️ www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

What determines relationships between interviewer and interviewee in oral history research? bit.ly/4gwipCy Nilakshi Das's new Transactions article questions the value of 'insider' status, arguing instead for models of positionality based less on identity than training and approach #Skystorians 1/2

New book cover alert! The second, expanded edition of the Science of Demons is coming out at the end of this month! It features two new chapters and an epilogue, as well as corrected and updated content. Preorder (with a discount!) at www.routledge.com/The-Science-... #earlymodern #hextag

Wow. This sounds fascinating!

The PARISH ERC CoG project is now on Bluesky – follow us for updates! We are also recruiting 2 postdoctoral researchers to study #earlymodern parish communities in the Dioceses of Olomouc and Transylvania. Please share the call! Spread the word! #ERCCoG www.abtk.hu/en/positions...

An exceptionally frustrating start to the week... Wordle 1,850 6/6* 🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩 🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩 🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩 🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

A quick snap of Simon Ditchfield's closing remarks at his retirement event in York yesterday. A big thank you @emiliekmmurphy.bsky.social and Tara Alberts for organising. It was a really remarkable often funny and moving occasion with so many well-wishers that some had to watch from the corridor!

A fantastic organisation. Historians together strong. 🗃️

SOO good to see a paperback copy of the Basque Witch-Hunt out there in the wild! Really hope it will help find the book new and interested readers. 😊 #earlymodern #skystorians #hextag 🗃️

Just reposting this! These panels will automatically be accepted for #RenSA27 Would be really fun if we could get this collaboration of #earlymodern crime and religion of the ground!

The paperback of The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History is out next week, and @bloomsburyhist.bsky.social published a blog in which I explain why I called it a secret history. The witch hunt is well known but the familiar story never quite rang true for me: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/discover/...

to everyone at risk or redundancy in academia right now:

Announcing this on the day of Burnham's big speech really makes you wonder what game is being played here? Is her position not as secure as the journalists have been claiming? Or is it so secure that this is effectively a power grab, letting everyone know where the real power lies?

Thanks to all sending messages of support as me and my colleagues in Humanities and Social Sciences at Exeter face being made redundant in September. I'll be back here once it's less hot & I can think. Please consider signing & sharing this petition: www.change.org/p/stop-redun... #EarlyModern 🗃️

The paperback of the Basque Witch-Hunt is coming out on 9 July and @bloomsburyhist.bsky.social just shared some wonderful promotional material with me. 🥳 www.bloomsbury.com/uk/basque-wi... #earlymodern #hextag #skystorians

RIP Carlo Ginzburg. His landmark works in #earlymodern microhistory and innovative historical methods have had a great influence on myself and many others.

At Cardiff University's third annual Supernatural Event. Our excellent guest speaker Ceri Houlbrook is kicking us off with a lecture on witch bottles! #earlymodern #hextag #folklore

As the @rsaorg.bsky.social 's Religion discipline rep, I'm excited to share two #earlymodern #CfP for #RenSA27. The first, coorganised with Amanda Scott, is entitled "Banishment and Exile in the Early Modern World": www.rsa.org/forms/FormRe...

Not a very common scene in #earlymodern religious art, I think, but one close to my research interests: the fall of Simon Magus. 1658 painting by Sébastien Bourdon in Montpellier cathedral.

Good morning from the Provence! Long hike to Nîmes today. 😊

Sign outside our current Airbnb. "Is there life after death? Enter and you will find out." (The dogs are lovely!)

I worked at a Vodafone call centre as a student in the early 2000s welcoming new customers to the network. I left when they started ranking us by the number of calls we made, because predictably the *quality* of those calls went down sharply. AI is new but managers on efficiency drives are not.

It took this Holocaust historian six years to find a publisher... A good reminder that sometimes one can be right and it's the world that is wrong.

Heute vor 100 Jahren wurde der Historiker Raul Hilberg geboren. Sein Buch „Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden“ ist ein Grundlagenwerk der Holocaustforschung. Doch als Hilberg es 1955 fertigstellte, fand er sechs Jahre lang keinen Verlag.

Ahead of being moved into shared offices, I boxed up my books, or at least those books I think (/hope/pray) may still fit in the new space... Now what are the odds that at least one of these boxes will go missing in this gigantic merry go round? 🤔 🙃🙃🙃

The shop sign exhibition in the Musée Carnavalet really is a marvel of #earlymodern #18c and #19c life. Highly recommend (and it's free!)

"Brexit: The Hangover." The view from France.

It's time.

Prof. Lyndal Roper deserves this honour so much. Nobody is more inspiring, enthusiastic, and encouraging, and she is such a brilliant scholar. I'm honoured and very glad to have had the opportunity to pay tribute to her (even under an alias?!). Congratulations Lyndal!

My two great loves are whodunnits and 🐑, so this film was literally made for me. Turned out to be a really good murder mystery!

Ordered some replacement acrylic panels to restore the ancient green house in our garden and the name of the company really amuses me. 😂

Any early modernists out here who have any recommendations? I am drawing a blank here. #EarlyModern

This is important. As we face these unprecedented times in British Higher Education, with a huge swathe of jobs likely to go, remember to reach out for help before and after the redundancy meetings. There's a huge amount of practical advice and experience out there. 👇

Probably the most amusing email I ever received: A clearly automated email offering to turn my "recent paper Welcome" (the foreword of our latest journal issue 🤪) into a web experience. The supposedly personal PS is pretty legendary. 😂🤣

Team teaching this afternoon with Stefan Visnjevac on this afternoon's final lecture on our History of the Supernatural module. Also a shout out to @janmachielsen.bsky.social who couldn't be with us today but is a huge part of the module and ensuring happy students. Such a fun module to teach.

Last class of the semester: one student told me my #earlymodern #hextag module was her favourite of the year, another said it was a highlight of her time at Cardiff. A lovely reminder that the jobs matters. If only our institutions valued us even half as much as our students do.

Are you interested in #EarlyModern #history? Did you know there are at least 15 active hash tags and 42 starter packs here on BlueSky for you to explore? Check out this thread 🤓

Ugh. This email really beggars belief. Obviously only heterosexual men rent cars and for the sole purpose of impressing their female other half. 🙄

Freelance work is coming in for the summer with people's research fund pots needing using up; so do contact me via www.joanneedge.co.uk sooner rather than later for your archive/transcription/editing needs! #MedievalSky #EarlyModern

"his prose is self-consciously metatheatrical—by turns, poetic, playful, incisive and laugh-out-loud funny. ... an author who knows how to bring a reader along with him, welcoming the uninitiated ... and offering the right amount of exposition at the right time." Thank you @extispex.bsky.social!

Reposting this with a few hashtags to try and catch more interest! #earlymodern #skystorians #16thc #premodern #bookhistory #materialculture #RenRef #Reformation #medievalsky #medieval

I am available for book reviews! Got shelves to fill :) #MedievalSky #EarlyModern

Fate saw fit to bestow the ultimate academic honour upon me: Introduced myself to someone at a conference, who replied "oh, I've read one of your articles" and then topped it up with "I liked that it was about how rural people weren't stupid" - perfect summary of pretty much my entire research 🎉

New article in 'Transactions of the Royal Historical Society'. 'Louis XIV’s Attitude to the Chinese Rites Controversy': bit.ly/47NYgmk Dr Sean Heath offers an exploration of ecclesiastical policy in the making under the Sun King. Sean's article is now freely available Open Access #Skystorians 1/2

This is basically the plot of Erasmus's colloquy "A Pilgrimage for Religion's Sake." #reformazing

oooooo! This will be such an exciting Masterclass to participate in. Run, don't walk, #earlymodern #SkyStorians in Nordic countries, if you're a PhD student yourself or have PhD students who should apply.

#earlymodern does anyone have access to the mysteriously almost invisible William Halstead’s Shakespeare as Spoken vol 4 . I’m interested in 19 th century cuts to All’s Well but can’t ask interlibrary loans for it unless I have page references

I'm hoping to propose a panel for the SCS on the 1570s, that most pivotal decade in the later Reformation. If you're interested in joining me, send me a DM. #reformazing