How to reconcile crusading and anticlerical sentiments in one humanist funeral oration: "Oh, if only Maximilian were still alive! He would have mustered such wide-ranging efforts that it would already be over with the rough neck of the Turks. [...]

The title of this book is 419 words long. Authors, become ungovernable.

#CallforApplications 📣 The GHIL awards a number of #scholarships to #postgraduate students, Habilitanden and #postdocs at German universities to enable them to carry out research in Britain. Scholarships are generally awarded for a period of up to three months. 📜 1/3

My job now is to go school to school, university to university trying to help them sort through the challenge of teaching in a world with AI and the first thing I recommend to improve the teaching of writing is cut the number of students per instructor in half. No one is going to do that, though.

Looking forward to teaching a short course on digital approaches to (medieval) history in the autumn. Does anyone have any favourite things they'd recommend the students read?

All of this is not to say that transcription software can't be useful, but that you actually need to know something about the context in which a document is produced. This is what historians specialize in. 9/?

For anyone interested in a just-the-documents-and-books focused study of Johannes Gutenberg, this new biography by Eric Marshall White for the Reaktion's "Medieval Lives" series is very good: bookshop.org/p/books/joha... #medievalsky #BookHistory

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

Yes! Humanities majors get jobs! Which is quite separate from humanities *departments* getting funding. We're under-funded for ideological reasons, alongside mistaken cultural assumptions about employability. But our majors get jobs! At a high rate! History is a *good* major, so is Classics!

A very interesting new article out in @enghistrev.bsky.social from Ingrid Rembold on the discourse around orphans, widows and protection in the Carolingian World. academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-...

Proofs!

In London for the afternoon, so decided to pay a visit to my 15th-century friends in the V&A - Mehmed II, Emperor Maximilian, and Mary of Burgundy.

And this is why Weistümer are the zaniest genre of primary source.

Heading west via one of Germany’s oldest cities: Trier. Of course it’s most famous for its Roman and late antique history. And sadly much of the medieval heritage was destroyed by bombs in WW2. But the dual cathedral/basilica complex is still amazing - the entry point of Gothic art into Germany.

I like it when German websites give you the options of Herr, Frau or Firma (Mr, Ms or Company), the three genders of capitalism

...and it's out! "‘People and Things Have Always Been Mixed Up’: Notes on the So-Called Global Middle Ages", my very short essay for the Journal of Medieval History's 50th-anniversary special issue, is now published; limited free access at the link below! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RAEXD...

The city hall and town square of Osnabrück - famous for being the site where the Peace of Westphalia was proclaimed in 1648. (My inner late medievalist is most drawn to the Gothic and “proto-Renaissance” design of the Rathaus itself - a stunning piece of late fifteenth-century architecture.)

Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.

“Jesus wept.” (John 11:35) Detail from an altarpiece depicting the raising of Lazarus, c. 1490. Diözesanmuseum Osnabrück.

I wonder what Margrave Albrecht “Achilles” of Brandenburg, haughtiest defender of noble privileges and conduct in the 15th-century Holy Roman Empire, would make of this.

Westphalia is a region I don’t know well, so Paderborn has been a revelation. Once a Carolingian palace settlement where Charlemagne and Pope Leo III conspired in 799, it is full of wonderful Romanesque and Gothic architecture iterated over the centuries under the patronage of its prince-bishops.

I’m in Bielefeld for a couple of weeks for a workshop with some brilliant colleagues to think about big questions of social and political change in the pre-modern world. Tangentially, I’m enjoying being at a university that still understands the value of open stacks - heaven for historians.

Schmalkalden: a well-preserved late medieval to early modern town nestled in the beautiful Thuringian forest. Once an exclave of Hessen (jointly ruled with the counts of Henneberg), it was the mid-point of early Protestantism and hence the founding site of the famous evangelical league of 1531.

'Emperor Charles V's titles: a comprehensive guide.'

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Finally read a 15th-century book in an original binding with the library chain that used to hold it to its shelf still attached. #medievalsky (Heavily annotated copy of the Sermones magistri Leonardi de Utino, 1490s. Forschungsbibliothek Gotha Ink. 87.)

History requires deep, extensive research a lot of that research will end up not being directly relevant. You won't know that until you get in it. Research isn't just pulling a doc with all the answers, it's finding connections, it's understanding what's *not* being said, it's knowing context.

Everything is horrible about this, but my personal punctum is this little tidbit that isn’t even on the topic itself. A) the whole point of our profession is to sift through lots of material, that’s how you find topics and b) this is patently untrue, as any actual historian knows!

Part of the problem here is that ‘popular history’ hacks keep writing about the same old stuff, so of course the source-base is saturated. How about writing about something new for a change, where you have to do some serious primary research?

It’s often claimed that diplomatic - the study of documentary forms and protocols - began with Mabillon in the 17th century. Here, however, is a template for a letter to a pope from the 1430s. #medievalsky (Forschungsbibliothek Gotha Chart. B 445 fol. 108v-108r)

I wonder how Hermann von Salza (1165-1239), zealous crusader to the Holy Land and the Baltic and leading mediator in the bitter dispute between the papacy and Emperor Frederick II, would feel about his name being given to a budget hotel. (Bad Langensalza, Thuringia)

The figures of Emperor Charles IV and his wife Elisabeth of Pomerania on a balcony overlooking the southern facade of the Marienkirche, Mühlhausen. Built in the 1360s, they reminded the burghers of the imperial city of their distant overlord - the purveyor of their urban privileges. #medievalsky

East German historians didn’t hesitate to use the “f-word” (“feudalistisch”!) #medievalsky (Sign from 1951 on Thomas Müntzer’s erstwhile home in Mühlhausen.)

A stunning copy of the Chronica Hungarorum printed in Augsburg in 1488, complete with its original binding and contemporaneous coloured woodcuts. #medievalsky Forschungsbibliothek Gotha Mon.typ 1488 4o 5.

Erfurt has some 25 medieval churches - the most of any city in Germany. This is the legacy of its status as a university town full of clergy (the “Rome of the North”). I managed to visit about half of them today.

Das #SealOfTheDay ist das Siegel der Stadt Schaffhausen an einer Urkunde aus dem Jahr 1408, #HHStA AUR 18938. Ist der Widder nicht formidabel?

The 500th anniversary of the Peasants’ War is being taken very seriously indeed in Thuringia. Exhibition posters everywhere.

A rare mid-15th-century calf leather manuscript binding that is still in relatively good condition - complete with holes where a metal cover was once affixed (you can see the impression it left on the leather) and the remains of a clasp for holding it shut. (Forschungsbibliothek Gotha Chart. B 61)

First manicule of the day (pointing, pointedly, at the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt” - “convictus autem et familiaritas contemptum parit”…)

For the next month I’ll be a visiting fellow with the wonderful scholarly community at the Forschungszentrum Gotha, working with 15th-century materials in the beautiful ducal library in Schloss Friedenstein. If you’re in the vicinity of Thuringia, I’ll be talking about my project on 17 June.

A great pedagogy tip. The main problem for medievalists is that we can only assign sources that have been translated into English - and those (popular sourcebook series, the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, etc.) have mostly already been fed into AI training data.

Just translated an extract from the founding charter of the University of Freiburg (1457), and now I'm tempted to send it to my university president with the suggestion that it be the tagline for our new strategic plan (instead of the consultants' one: "Leveraging synergies to unleash innovation").

AI people genuinely think research is just “looking stuff up in a dictionary or encyclopedia” and “sorting a spreadsheet”. This is because they have never actually done any real research.

There’s another medieval university parallel in this context, with the opposite outcome. In 1409 the king of Bohemia, in collusion with Czech scholars, enabled the expulsion of all German professors and students from the university of Prague. The university never recovered its former prestige. 1/

thinking again about how unwelcome and inappropriate it is to find our jobs now also supposed to comprise counselor and border guard… as well as teacher, manager, researcher, editor, writer, fixer. these things are not compatible! the conflicts of interest are not resolvable!

📌Colloque 📍1525. 500 ans après la Guerre des Paysans: approches actuelles et perspectives franco-allemandes📍 👥org. Pierre Monnet @ehess.fr @crh.ehess.fr #AHLoMA, Klaus Oschema et Christine Zabel @dhi-paris.fr 📅23-24 juin 2025 ▶️ crh.ehess.fr/index.php?10... ▶️ www.dhi-paris.fr/home.html