Guess who's book is published today 🥳 www.routledge.com/Thomas-Middl...

The P45 Data Collective Tabular Data Style Guide is now live! If you are a researcher, student, librarian, or instructor working with cultural data, this style guide is for you. data.post45.org/style-guide....

📜 New 'Will of the Month' blog over at @materialwills.bsky.social 👇 Read all about Mary Skelton's 'undutifull' son - cut off with only a shilling 🪙 @uoearchhist.bsky.social @uniofexeterhass.bsky.social @cemsexeter.bsky.social #history #skystorians #EarlyModern

In my latest post I talk a bit about how our increasingly individualistic relationship to media makes it harder to appreciate the nuance, complexity, and incompleteness of #history

She created the first bank for working class women | A clip from the new FT “The Story of Money” Podcast www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF1r...

Our book ”The Business of War in the Early Modern Baltic Sea Region, 1530-1765” is now available in print format as well! The digital version is available OpenAccess via @helsinkiupress.bsky.social : hup.fi/books/e/10.3...

📣 #CallforPapers 📣 Working on how Central and Eastern Europe participated in #EarlyModern global exchanges? Check the #CfP for the conference Global Connections – Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Modern World (ca. 1500-1800) 👉 loom.ly/68-mKyU ⏰ Submit your proposal by 15 June 2026

What does a medievalist do over the Pentecost break? A trip back in time, of course — this time to Moldova. This volume is the first of its kind, offering a multifaceted history of the Principality of Moldavia from its foundation to 1859. brill.com/edcollbook... #medievalsky #earlymodern

This looks like a promising talk. The notion of the "contractor state" is assumed by many to be a late medieval phenomenon that disappeared after the early 16th century, but this paper appears to counter that still lingering idea. #earlymodern

À l’occasion de l’entrée au Panthéon de Marc Bloch, le colloque "Marc Bloch à livre ouvert" honore sa mémoire et son œuvre. Rendez-vous le 10 juin @labnf.bsky.social sur le site François-Mitterrand : bnf.fr/fr/agenda/ma... @sorbonneparis1.bsky.social @ehess.fr @normalesup.bsky.social

Now that I've signed the contract, excited to share my first book "Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change" is forthcoming with @openbookpublish.bsky.social! Much more info about it on the publisher site here. www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

The countdown to the deadline begins! Submit your papers and proposals by JUNE 1 for the 102nd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America @medievalacademy.bsky.social, held at the University of Toronto, April 15-17, 2027. uoft.me/MAA2027

Recent publication: Abigail Agresta in @pastpresentsoc.bsky.social "Plague Correspondence, Rumour, and Mistrust in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon" academic.oup.com/past/article... #histmed #medstm #medievalsky

Quantifying the explosion of fake AI citations in the research literature--146,932 BS cites in papers from 2025 alone. Depressingly but unsurprisingly, social-science work had the most fake citations. Write-up of these results in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Married Women’s Wills in Late Medieval Britain and Ireland: A Comparative Approach" seminar by Prof Cordelia Beattie at the University of Genoa tomorrow 3pm Link: us06web.zoom.us/j/8406923405.... Passcode: 303126 #medievalsky @artandinequality.bsky.social

Having done much research on the Genoese merchant community in Tunis myself (although during a much later period, in the fifteenth century), I'm looking forward to reading this article by @susannahbain.bsky.social. And it's open-access too! #medievalsky doi.org/10.1080/0951...

Another beautiful evening in Toronto for our neighbourhood stroll...

I just found out that the great Sonny Rollins passed on Monday. He was a giant of twentieth-century music. Here is a video of clips from 1959, at the height of his power after an astonishing run of 16 albums from 1955–1958, all of which are masterpieces. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wu2...

The recently published "Eredità bizantine: la vita sociale di icone e reliquie Venezia e Genova tra medioevo e contemporaneità" by Lucrezia Sozzè, a study on the afterlife of Byzantine artistic objects that arrived in Venice and Genoa after 1453. www.lerma.it/libro/978889... #medieval #earlymodern

The Freakonomics radio people are re-upping their three-part series on Richard Feynman, one of the last century's greatest scientists. It's good stuff. (I'm briefly in an episode, but that's not why the programs are fun, or why learning about Feynman is worth your time.)

Am 27. Mai 1939 stirbt Joseph Roth. Stefan Zweig schreibt: „Erhalte ein Telegramm, dass mein alter und lieber Freund Joseph Roth in Paris gestorben ist, der wirklich der große Schriftsteller war, aber physisch zerstört durch das Hitlertum. Ich habe ihn wie einen Bruder geliebt.“

On June 11, I 'll be presenting my paper 'Institutional temporalities between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period' @cemskcl.bsky.social annual colloquium 'Periodizing the Early/Modern'. (full program kingsearlymodern.co.uk/events/cfp-p...) See you in London!

Join @amandajsummers.bsky.social and I at RSA in Philly next year! Send us your abstracts by July 31st 🥳

May's Document of the Month explores a surprising phenomenon among the Cairo Geniza documents: Muslim blessings for the prophet Muḥammad in mercantile letters sent by C12th Jewish traders. Read Alan Elbaum's piece now on our project website: bit.ly/DotMMay26 #medievalsky #cairogeniza #documents

A beautiful day for an after-school walk with my daughter! (as usual, Kew Gardens)

On today's @cfrcradio.bsky.social Dark Glasses we mark tomorrow's centenary of the birth of Miles Davis with a rapid trip through his career from the Birth of the Cool sessions via the 1st and 2nd quintets, Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew, and all the way up to the late Davis of Tutu in the 80s. Tune in!

‘Freeports and bonded warehouses, free-trade zones and forged bills of lading, under-invoicing and over-invoicing: all these things provide opportunities to camouflage the flow of illicit money.’ John Lanchester on money laundering. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This will be a lot of fun to decipher by taking rubbings (or whatever they do these days). E.g. the story beginning “Quadam vice quaedam rustica dixit puero quod eum lupo dare vellet nisi diceret…” Unless he said what? Speak, history! #toilethumour #medievalLatin

The Kew Williams House, a regular waymark on our evening walks. I find it quite interesting that it housed the park caretaker and his family into the 1990s.

Newest addition to the 2nd Plague Pandemic bibliography: Susan Einbinder's edition & translation of a Hebrew text from the 1340s, showing a practicing physician wrestling w/ a swiftly lethal disease amid an unfolding pandemic. #histmed #EpiSky #MedievalSky www.arc-humanities.org/978180270397...

I've been staring at this for hours & am still dumbstruck that this is decipherable. I bow down to the great skill of our colleagues who work w/ 15thC texts. But I remain glad that I get to retreat to the comfort of my 11th & 12thC caroline minuscule. #MedievalSky

8000 fragments! Congratulations, @fragmentarium.bsky.social! Folks, PLEASE survey your early modern bindings and share what you find. #fragmentology

I look forward to reading this Heather! #earlymodern

Historians like Sergej Karpov (and others) have often marveled at the precision of Genoese notaries when indicating time and place of enactment compared to notaries from other cities... this contract is a perfect example! Source: ASGe, NA 653, series II, nr. 40, dated 1441-02-22 #medievalsky

Got to enjoy a masterful inaugural lecture by @jillburke.bsky.social last night. She looked at historical documents through their key ingredients: paper (through flax); ink (oak gall wasps); quills (from geese); and thought (through Da Vinci’s cat doodle). Fantastic.

Introduce yourself with 10 bands/musicians you've seen live DD Jackson Brad Mehldau Fred Anderson Ken Vandermark Wilco Alejandro Escovedo Mekons Pavement Joe McPhee Anthony Braxton

Check it out! My @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social interview with Denise Davidson @cornellupress.bsky.social Surviving #Revolution: #Bourgeois Lives and Letters. #skystorians #EarlyModern #HistFrance #BookSky 📚💙 newbooksnetwork.com/surviving-re...

Love it when a court scribe is feeling a little extra. #earlymodern #skystorians

My favourite pianist @bradmehldau1.bsky.social on the musically illiterate journalists and music critics at the @newyorktimeshaiku.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/bradmehl...

While sitting on the front porch, I noticed someone spying on me...

This is an excellent style guide for anyone working with datasets (of all sized) in the humanities. #digitalhumanities #dh

This is a very interesting interview with Dieter Rübsamen, the founder of the invaluable RI-OPAC bibliographic database, by far the most extensive database on the Middle Ages. Hard to believe that it's almost 25 years old!

New open access publication! "Der Aufstand der Sachsen 1073-1075", ed. Arnd Reitemeier www.wallstein-open-library.de/978383536014...

It's the 80th anniversary of Louis Slotin's "Demon core" accident. Stephen has a very nice thread here. Here are just a few things that I've stumbled across that are not very well known...

Michael Whitby. Single-handedly channeling the rage every editor of a collective volume has ever felt throughout generations.

Medievalists who were on the internet in the last milennium may remember the wonderful resources shared in the first medieval listservs, long before digitized anything. My very favorite was Carl Berkhout's bibliography on modern Anglo-Saxonists, from the 16th to the 20th centuries. #medievalsky 🧵

Glad to share this open-access article, based on the Tawney Lecture that I had the honour to deliver in 2025 Economic inequality and social mobility in preindustrial societies: What we know, what we don't (but should) know - The Economic History Review onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Venice and the Mongols by Nicola Di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici is now available worldwide! Discover a global history of commercial and cultural exchange between two great powers of the medieval age. Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... #History

it's striking that, in our effort to make sense of AI, we turn far more readily to the fiction of Frank Herbert -- who imagined a future in which human beings had fought a war to destroy thinking machines in order to preserve their humanity -- than to Isaac Asimov -- who left a substantial body 1/