📣 Just a quick reminder that the MedRen 2026 Call for Papers deadline is 31 January! ⏳ Come to Warsaw 6-10 July 2026 for Med-Ren. Submit your proposal via the online form — link here and in comments. 👇 medren2026.uw.edu.pl/ninja-forms/...

Excited to have copies of Rick López’s new book *Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570-1914* for the first Five College Renaissance Seminar meeting on 10/23, when Rick will be in conversation with art historian Nicola Courtright.

DOGE has terminated all four of the NEH grants for the American Musicological Society. Our executive director writes: “As the chief operating officer for the American Musicological Society, a 91-year-old knowledge society committed to the study of music, history, and culture, I am resolved.” 1/2

Let’s talk about resistance after a conqueror takes power. Specifically let’s talk about this bendy yellow building, and what it shows us about the moment the Florentine Republic finally fell to its kleptocratic/proto-capitalist banking-fortune Medici conquerors 1/?

Making the most of the remainder of Winter term.

New review of the fabulous new album by my colleague Allison Monroe’s ensemble Trobár!

Shifting Baseline Syndrome is such a powerful term/concept for so many things (environment, politics, media, work/life balance…)

Arnaldus Alexander Durand Baro de Mazabrat, Design for an underwater suit, 1720. Ink on paper; 41.5 × 28.2 cm, Archivo General de Indias, Seville

On December 6th (4:30pm), the UMass Kinney Center and the School of Earth & Sustainability are co-sponsoring a talk at the Kinney Center with Annette Kehnel, author of The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability (2024) and Professor and Chair of Medieval History at University of Mannheim.

Getting things lined up for a productive week.

Learning Latin manually

Excited to attend and chair a panel session at this symposium (Reframing the Gaze: Maria Theresia Paradis, Blind Musicians, and Musical Culture Before & After Braille), which starts today at Mt Holyoke College and online. Tune in!

“In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Florence, one in five women lived behind the walls of an institution. The rule of the cloister: silence.” —Erin Maglaque

Look what arrived in the mail today! #medievalsky

Hearty congrats to all the AMS award winners, including several scholars for articles and books in medieval and early modern topics.

An introduction to @universalstc.bsky.social: an open access database of early modern print culture. To find out more visit our website: www.ustc.ac.uk

Jumped into Rogier van der Weyden’s portrait of Jean Gros during last weekend’s #AMS2024 meeting

The third & final meeting of this fall’s Five College Renaissance Seminar this Thursday features historian of medicine Alisha Rankin (Tufts Univ.)! “The Witches’ Brew: Potions & Poisons in Renaissance Europe” Thu 11/21 4:30PM @ Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at UMass Amherst