Lookie lookie what's arriving next year: www.booktopia.com.au/human-ness-a...

Later this month we are hosting a new Book in the Spotlight. On Mon 24 Nov at 4PM CET Peter Van Nuffelen (Ghent) will present The Fragmentary Greek Chronicles after Eusebius, which he recently published with Lieve Van Hoof. Discussant will be @monica-berti.bsky.social (Leipzig)!

PLEASE DO NOT ASK STAFF WHERE DRACULA’S GRAVE IS THERE ISN’T ONE. Iconic sign from St Mary’s Church next to Whitby Abbey. I love that people think Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a real person/vampire who lived and died in Whitby.

Cat ready to pounce on Mouse BL Add 62925; the 'Rutland Psalter'; England, S. E.; c.1260; f.60r

To read Klawans' original piece, see: www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2025/5/...

In May, Jonathan Klawans published a piece in AJR calling for the retraction of published Dead Sea Scroll fragment forgeries. One volume has officially heeded his call: www.bloomsbury.com/us/gleanings...

Great talk and great conversation yesterday. In case you missed it, here is the recording! www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kH9...

Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

NEW BLOG online: Our recent VW-fellow Lipika Pelham writes about "The Vamp of Baghdad: How Jewish actresses shaped early 20th century Indian cinema" www.jewisharabiccultures.fak12.uni-muenchen.de/the-vamp-of-...

Wichtige Beobachtung, die in der #WissKomm zu wenig diskutiert wird: "Wenn nur noch der KI-Text als Antwort genutzt wird, wird also nicht mehr auf wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse, sondern auf Marketingtexte von Firmen zurückgegriffen. Damit wird Wissenschaftskommunikation ausgehebelt."

Wichtige Beobachtung, die in der #WissKomm zu wenig diskutiert wird: "Wenn nur noch der KI-Text als Antwort genutzt wird, wird also nicht mehr auf wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse, sondern auf Marketingtexte von Firmen zurückgegriffen. Damit wird Wissenschaftskommunikation ausgehebelt."

From my colleague Fabien Muller, whose translation of Porphyry's Letter to Anebo and Philosophy from Oracles will appear soon as the 2nd volume in the 4T series

A couple of weeks ago (10/20) at The Pearlsong book launch the amazing Jane Sheldon performed the piece she composed based on the text. She shares some of how it came to be here:

Temperatures are dropping, but nature's beauty doesn't stop to impress. Took this photo on my way to work this morning.

Hell NO! Stop this nonsense. Doctoral training did not change in nature because we got computers instead of typewriters and calculators. "As machines get better at data analysis and writing tasks, doctoral training must evolve to make the most of artificial-intelligence outputs." shorturl.at/fUQcm

Whenever you find yourself annoyed at someone spelling إن شاء الله as إنشاء الله, just remember people have been doing that at least since 1156 AH/1753 CE (the date of this manuscript of the al-Dani's Taysir).

disability, activism, marginalised identities, strong expert opinions, is an interesting and tiring aspect of AI fascism. Like sure mock my writing, mock my ethnicity, mock when I pass as Anglo, mock when I don't, but you're aware the companies won't stop & active damage knowledge production 2/n

I wasn't going to post this rant as I'm kind of sick of this & because of this, but I'm also I guess exhausted facing this often alone at home: the sniggering at women academics who have opinions even from other women, although often non-academics, and mostly from men on the dimensions of our 1/n

#NewPublication #ArabicBible #JudaeoArabic #BibleStudies brill.com/display/titl...

Same tradition, but some 6 to 7 centuries earlier. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS VLQ 9: digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/view/item/41...

Unusually lavish for a medical manuscript. Florence, BML, Plut. 73.16, f.181v and f.182r, c. 1250: tecabml.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/coll... #histmed #bookhistory #medievalsky

Die Geschichte der Fehldrucke der hebräischen Inschrift in Droste-Hülshoffs "Judenbuche" ist ja ellenlang. Aber dass die Inschrift auf dem Kopf gedruckt wurde, ist mir bisher noch nicht untergekommen:

Letzte Woche haben wir 5 Jahre #95vsWissZeitVG gefeiert. Viel hat sich seit 2020 & besonders seit #IchBinHanna geändert, nur ein paar spezielle Quatsch-Argumente für Befristung kommen immer wieder. Damit wir sie nicht ständig von vorn widerlegen müssen, hab ich das heute in #ArbeitInDerWiss gemacht!

Really exciting book news out of Norway. And while the article focusses on the sealskin binding, I'm even more excited by the fact that these neumes are not square, which suggests a date well before 1200.

Das Wörterbuch zu den griechisch-arabischen Übersetzungen des 9. Jhs. stellt eine echte Rarität dar: Es wurde vollständig per Hand geschrieben. M. Ullmann ist damit einer der letzten seiner Art, die ihre Werke handschriftlich verfassen und publizieren. www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/isbn_9783447...

Another reason to study Sībawayh: Not only are his linguistic descriptions completely alien to a western paradigm, but *also* what he actually describes as Arabic is extremely worth actually studying. It's much broader than the strict norms of Classical Arabic western scholars usually assume.

#NewPublication #Egyptology #ReligiousHistory www.brepols.net/products/978...

On to the 10th century! This is Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.20 dex.3. Not the most carefully written, but colorful! portail.biblissima.fr/en/ark:/4309...

Today is the feast of Sylvia, mother of Gregory the Great. Here she is in w/her husband flanking their son in a 12c MS. What a rosy-cheeked family! I'm intrigued by those prickings across the top. 🧵 👇 with more MSS of John the Deacon's Life of Gregory, from the 9th century to the 15th. #medievalsky

How was the year 2000 imagined in 1900? A colleague sent this link to a collection of past futures images via an exhibition she visited. The first one of the edtech book grinder and automated learning system remains relevant as ever! publicdomainreview.org/collection/a...

This little manuscript contains a treatise on cosmography that describes and illustrates the Ptolemaic model of a spherical earth at the center of the concentric spheres of the universe, and includes diagrams of eclipses and an astrolabe (UPenn LJS 26) #medievalsky 🔗: https://bit.ly/41EAKFa

It's true: I wrote a book. And what's more, the book is done and soon you'll be able to own a copy. And what's more more, if you want a hard copy you can order one for 50% off now, with the code SAR50. And if you want it digitally, it'll be open access! www.arc-humanities.org/978180270163...

Debby Banham, Claire Burridge, Lea Olsan eds. Early Medieval Medicine in Context: Transmission, Translation and Transformation - Boydell & Brewer, November 2025 boydellandbrewer.com/book/early-m...

Five years, four authors, one book. Out now (fully open access), our new book on local priests in the tenth century 🌟 www.cambridge.org/core/books/l... @jbwaagmeester.bsky.social

Oh wow, major work of interest to #MedievalSky #GlobalMiddleAges #EnvironmentalHistory. A new special issue devoted to "Environmental Challenges in Premodern Eurasian and Mediterranean Narratives": journals.uio.no/JAIS/article.... Kudos to the editors for bringing this work so quickly into print!

Back in the 12th century, French sculptor Gislebertus carved this angel as (s)he appears to the three Magi as they dream, waking one with the delicate touch of a finger, and pointing her other forefinger toward the Bethlehem star (Cathedral of St Lazare, Autun)

For our next talk, we are thrilled to welcome Sonja Drimmer (UMass Amherst) for a talk titled: “Optics: Heraldry and the Preprint History of Print.” Monday, November 3 at 5:15 PM Eastern — 6th floor of Penn's Van Pelt Library (and on Zoom). As always, full details at: pennmaterialtexts.org

@acbm.bsky.social Just picked up my copy of Adam Bremer-McCollum’s The Pearlsong - what a beautiful edition for one of the most famous Syriac texts! Looking forward reading it.

Final reminder to submit an abstract by tomorrow for our apocryphal Christian literature conference at UVA this spring! Come join us! www.nasscal.com/meetings/

Das KI-Versprechen entwickelt sich mehr und mehr nicht nur zu einem ökologischen Desaster, sondern zu einem sozialen Angriff auf Arbeitsvermögen, das systematisch entwertet wird, auf individuelle und soziale Lernprozesse und Verhältnisse, bei gleichzeitiger … /1

Anyone who has ever had their work stolen or devalued is likely to be critical of "AI", because it is a system of stealing and devaluing the work of others. This excellent piece shows that criticism of "AI" requires an awareness of this. It must be leveraged against the narrative of inevitabilty.

#NewPublication #OpenAccess Teresa Bernheimer: Retracing the Reception of Greek Ideas on the Rainbow: Transformations in Pre-Modern Hebrew and Arabic Sources

#NewPublication #OpenAccess Vevian Zaki: The Life and Legacy of Tūmā al-Ṣafī ibn al-Ṣāʼigh: A Coptic Scribe in the Turbulent Mamluk Times

Anyone who has ever had their work stolen or devalued is likely to be critical of "AI", because it is a system of stealing and devaluing the work of others. This excellent piece shows that criticism of "AI" requires an awareness of this. It must be leveraged against the narrative of inevitabilty.

We need a critique of AI in academic publishing. Following my decision not to sign an AI addendum to my contract with Cambridge University Press, I wrote this short essay which is now out in the Dublin Review of Books. 👇 drb.ie/move-over-fo...

GenAut seminar recording | Chance Bonar •Onesimus: Apostle and Martyr in Eastern Mediterranean Literature• www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmnUReJ23W8 The program: genaut.univie.ac.at/?page_id=671

In the next TeTra seminar which will take place next Thursday 6 November at 4PM CET Ellen Muehlberger (Michigan) will speak about the voice of Mary of Egypt. If you are not yet on our mailing list, please register with @andyhilkens.bsky.social to receive the Zoom link.

Qur'an Manuscript Folio https://clevelandart.org/art/1933.483.a

"these arrangements are not 'partnerships' or 'collaborations' but contracts that bring profit and publicity to AI firms, while making universities complicit in the continued empowerment of tech oligarchy and expansion of their 'AI Empire' (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian, 2023; Adams, 2024; Hao, 2025)"

I love hearing languages I don't know. I love hearing languages I do know and don't get to speak a lot, but I also love it when I hear people speaking something I can't even name. I try not to be weird about it and listen without staring. Language is just so fascinating, the way it works, the differ