My review of Ayoush Lazikani’s ‘The Medieval Moon’, in the latest @historytoday.com

🏺 This review v much worth reading for fellow archaeologists. And I'd argue it's our work which both cranks & releases the tensions described: archaeology is how we learn more - as far as it is POSSIBLE - about what such places once meant, and a means to *engage with* them meaningfully now.

📕 #BookReview @michellecomber.bsky.social & Kieran O’Conor (ed.)'s 'People, prehistory and the past' is a collection of essays on prehistoric and medieval Ireland in honour of one of the foremost archaeologists of Irish prehistory, John Waddell 1/2 (£) doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

I just remembered the time when Ernest Rutherford’s cousin, a no-nonsense nun, told me she wasn’t at all impressed by his monkeying about with the atom

The Swordbrethren decided to send heavily armoured knights on horseback - the superweapon of the day - against lightly armed, highly mobile Balts on boggy ground, and found out the shortcomings of this strategy the hard way

Baltic Unity Day celebrates the joint victory of Balts from both Lithuania and Latvia at the Battle of Saule in 1236, when Baltic warriors annihilated the Livonian Swordbrethren (the few survivors of that crusading order had to merge with the Teutonic Knights afterwards) 🇱🇹🇱🇻

"Upon A White Horse is a moving, compelling, heart-achingly beautiful book." I'm grateful to Dr Francis Young for that kind remark, of course, but even more so for his deep and insightful engagement with the themes and ideas of my book.

Over on 'All Old Strange Things' I've written a new free-to-read post reflecting on @peteralanross.bsky.social's thought-provoking book 'Upon A White Horse': substack.com/home/post/p-...

“I am going to dedicate all of my previous and future work to Lithuania”, Čiurlionis declared in 1906. He simultaneously founded both modern Lithuania’s music and its visual art, and is reputed the greatest in both - an achievement perhaps unparalleled for any European artist #Ciurlionis150

Conferences offering either in-person or online attendance is so 2021, surely there should be a third option where you can just send an AI avatar who will say the sort of stuff you would have written in your paper if you'd written it yourself

Want to be a tour guide? Bury St Edmunds Tour Guides are offering opportunities to become White Badge (Cathedral) or Green Badge (the abbey and town) Tourist Guides in Bury St. Edmunds. Email Melanie Mills at [email protected] to whom applications are to be submitted by 10 October 2025.

I just played the role of the bishop in a confirmation rehearsal

Flashback to 1998 when I wrote a paper about John Wilbye in (bad) Lithuanian, I wish I still had this level of confidence in the language

But it's not burdensome anymore because everyone uses AI to write references these days, I suppose

I saw it a while back in Lincoln. It's so tiny and the work is so fine and precise that it has the feel of a scientific instrument, almost

It's also worth bearing in mind that if a book is well-known to be wrong about everything, it's almost inevitable it will become the focus of revisionist contrarianism further down the line. But no-one ever builds a contrarian historiography around a book that was OK but unoriginal...

It’s a paradox of reviewing books that the absolute worst review you can give is ‘This book was OK, but kind of like all the others’. But if you take a book apart as utterly wrong about everything, people will want to read it and define their own work against its glorious wrongness for years to come

I love these weird lil guys

So much this!

Liddington Camp, a 3 hectare hillfort above Swindon. The first occupation dates back to the 7th century BC, making it a late Bronze Age / early Iron Age hillfort.

Blackfriars Priory, Gloucester, dating to 1239. Was a Dominican House. Dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. Scriptorium a particularly rare survival. Restored 1960 & now an events space. Today, I was there for Gloucester History Festival #blackfriars #blackfriarsgloucester #dissolutionofthemonasteries

Make sure to wish a librarian a happy Gerald Ford Trapped in The Penn Library Elevator Day.

So obvious

De fluvio Memela Lituaniae ('On the River Nemunas of Lithuania') is a Latin poem of 1553 in elegiac couplets by the Kraków scholar Adam Schröther, about his friend's journey down the Nemunas (translated into Lithuanian in 2019)

I’m intrigued by the practice of calling years after verses from the Tanakh in this inscription from the Torah reading desk of the Great Synagogue of Vilna, recovered by archaeologists in 2019 (one of the few surviving artefacts from the building)

My review of Lindy Brady’s ‘Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland’ has just been published in @irishhiststudies.bsky.social: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 📚

Only just noticed we made the US President watch redcoats in c18th uniforms #trolling

Next Thursday I will be in the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University speaking about Scoto-Lithuanian Latin epic to the dozen or so other people in the world who find it interesting 🇱🇹⚔️

One of the curious Merrivale stone rows on Dartmoor; two of them separated by a leat. More here Merrivale Rows - Stone Rows, Cist, Cairn and Cairn Circle - Dartmoor, Devon share.google/cw6nefrKafse...

Today I have been exploring Birmingham ahead of the @indexers.bsky.social #SICONF25 conference which starts tomorrow. My first stop was the Library of Birmingham, including a visit to the rooftop terrace and a meander round the book rotunda indoors. Good start to a book-focused weekend.

TIL Vilnius has a French bookshop. At least, I presume it's an actual French bookshop and they don't just use the term ‘French bookshop’ as a euphemism for smut

Today, at long last, is publication day for @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social's Cultural History of Magic. I contributed a chapter to the volume on the Enlightenment, which features a case study on the prosecution and decriminalisation of magical acts in Lithuania www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cultural-...

Just to clarify this was not me

If we were serious about bringing the House of Lords into the 21st century we would confer the title of Edgelord as an actual rank of the peerage, perhaps intermediate between the ranks of Viscount and Baron

The longlist for the 2025 Historical Writers Association Nonfiction Crown is out (I was one of the judges), featuring 12 of this year's finest history books 📚

A personification of the Heavens holding the orbs of the Sun and Moon, from Jan Skarbek's Mars Gloriosus (1674)

I thought I had all my ducks in a row for getting to next week's conference abroad... and then it dawned on me that I hadn't actually written the paper I'm supposed to be presenting.

So the DFS sale really has been going on as long as we thought

One curiosity I saw today was this ‘goddess’ at Braunston-in-Rutland (which to my mind is obviously a medieval grotesque, designed to be viewed from above), which is reputedly pagan and so now attracts offerings of coins

Some glories of Rutland churches, seen today

When I was in primary school our teacher introduced us to the concept of still life and told us we could draw anything that caught our attention, and I became fascinated by a latch and spent the whole afternoon meticulously depicting every aspect of it

Good post today! Folklore: a journey through the past and present by @odavies9.bsky.social and @cerihoulbrook.bsky.social just gotta work out when I can get it signed! Chonk has commandered it already

I love @peteralanross.bsky.social's description of Basil Brown as ‘A person in whom passion manifested as caution, and love as patience.’

The published report on the Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery excavated at Lackford in 2015-16 is now available from East Anglian Archaeology: eaareports.org.uk/publication/...

I’ve just begun a pre-application process where it takes more than a year for the organisation in question to determine if applicants are eligible to apply. In the same way we need to recover an appreciation for slow food, there’s also an admirable art to slow bureaucracy

If government becomes less competent the larger and more complex it is, will expanding government actually *feel* like shrinking it, because it will become correspondingly less effective? And does shrinking government make it more effective, and therefore result in what feels like bigger government?

Has anyone ever written an alternative history novel where the Wessex Culture survived into modern times and Stonehenge and all the other megalithic sites were continuously active for millennia, further developed as sacred sites, and ultimately augmented with technology?

Today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (from Hrabanus Maurus, De laudibus sanctae crucis)

John Leland, antiquary, chaplain & librarian to Henry VIII, pioneer of English local history & bibliography, born #OTD 1502; his records of antiquities & monastic libraries informed Camden’s Britannia. @bodleian.ox.ac.uk | Burgerbibliothek Bern