I think you've completely misunderstood what they're doing. Their 'Literature' section simply aims to cite any sources that mentions *the actual MS under discussion*, and any other sources they have cited in the main description. Which is perfectly sensible, and standard in academic catalogues.

There is still time to apply for one of our 50+ Visiting Fellowships @bodleian.ox.ac.uk for the 2026-27 academic year! A vibrant interdisciplinary research centre in the heart of one of the world’s great libraries!

These stories always remind me of the time a 'scholar' 'discovered' a 'new' 'Shakespeare' poem by looking up 'Shakespeare' in the index of a catalogue of manuscripts. (Spoiler: It had been catalogued as *in the style of Shakespeare*, and other scholars agreed that it was *not* written by him).

'... faced with the unsourced waffle of a glorified autocorrect machine driven by who-knows-what politicised algorithms, drawing on suspicion of conventional authority in order to enshrine a new, entirely opaque authority, the only sane response is to give Wikipedia more money'

archive.ph/Rl6at#select... #WorsePMThanTruss?

MLGB is back!! Delighted that Medieval Libraries of Great Britain @bodleian.ox.ac.uk is now back online. We are also working had on plans for the next phase of the resource, enhancing & adding data & functionality. HUGE thanks to my colleagues for their hard & clever work mlgb.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Portland never stops being Portland.

New to me: a scribe using a piece of scrap parchment for pen-trials. Is he also using it to avoid smudging his newly-copied text, or is he using it to keep the main bifolium flat (as he is not using a knife for that purpose)? (Context here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommaso...)

This "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting: “If the Book of Kells was made in Pictland, this rewrites our understanding of early medieval Scotland.” www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

Another post about: "Why it’s time to leave Academia.edu" substack.com/home/post/p-... (In a word: enshittification) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshitt...

Anyone interested in medieval fakes should plan a trip to Paris. The Musée Cluny has a show from 7 Oct. to 11 Jan., www.musee-moyenage.fr/activites/pr... and the Archives nationales has one from 15 Oct. to 2 Feb.:

I could never really grasp how writing on medieval wax tablets would be legible, until a recent visit to the _Archives nationales_ in Paris: in this example, the stylus leaves a white trace in the black wax:

Just deleted my academia.edu account after 17 (!) years -- the company's exploitative new terms of use are outrageous, and it's a shame such a blatant commercial sell-out is able to operate under the .edu top-level domain. If you are still on academia.edu, please consider deleting your account too.

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

A few years ago I recognised a manuscript, now in the University of London's Senate House Library, as being included in the list of goods looted during the Nazi era: Le Répertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre 1939-1945. /..

Second Amendment activists in shock as Charlie Kirk shot instead of just schoolchildren

On the whole the Très Riches Heures exhibition at Chantilly is excellent, but some MSS are astonishingly badly displayed: #MrGrumpy

Ooh-- I wish I were there with you!

Being a doctor in the US in 2025 #Medsky

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

"leader of the seventh largest party in Oxfordshire" *This* is how headlines should be written.

The village of Dean has entered a lockdown for the imminent arrival of US vice-president JD Vance. All entrances to the village (between Chipping Norton and Charlbury) are closed to non-residents, with police stationed at every road and even footpath.

“GPT-5 is the first time that it feels like talking to an expert in any topic — a Ph.D.-level expert,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said.

If you want to download an image from the British Library website for use in a publication with a print-run of 30,000, they want to charge you £100,000 (+£2,000 VAT). That's £4 per copy. For a single image. I can't tell if that's for real, or if their new brand website is already broken.

Anyone who follows me who can read Irish Gaelic: can you identify this, please? I think it's a poem by Giolla Brighde Ó hEoghusa (aka Maelbrighte / Bonaventura O’Hussey / O'Hosey / Ó Hussey (d. 1614). (The MS also contains his poem for a friend who had fallen into heresy.)

Saw the Bodleian Library's new 'Treasured' exhibition yesterday. As well as world-class illuminated manuscripts (of course!), there are things like the telegram from the Titanic: "Require assistance; struck iceberg". But my favourites were the early photos of Victorians posing with their dogs :-)

I am very glad to have witnessed this wonderful donation this morning -- the Bodleian's weekly Friday Morning Coffee meetings are always of interest, but this was an especially delightful event!

Zotero for Android is now available! www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-... Anyone not already using Zotero on their desktop/laptop to manage bibliographical references should give it a try. I've tried many packages over the decades, but Zotero is by far the best, and is Free and Open Source. [...]

The BL has acquired five medieval manuscripts from Longleat: blogs.bl.uk/digitisedman... They are digitized with IIIF (e.g. here iiif.bl.uk/uv/#?manifes...), but I cannot find catalogue descriptions of them; could someone point me in the right direction?

And finally, the BL. Expectations are already at rock bottom for what we hope is a temporary implementation. As with the BAV, you can only track folios by keeping the thumbnail pane open. But since they prohibit downloads, because they hate their users, if I want to show you an image, +

Art historians - it looks like the Getty Provenance Index, one of our most indispensable tools, has become almost unusable thanks to a new update. Our best hope is they retain the old version. www.arthistorynews.com/articles/870...

I have been to most of the OMMG meetings since they started, and they're always interesting. (Including a wonderful one this evening, looking at some of Merton College's finest illuminated MSS). They are friendly, relaxed, informal, gatherings.

I was briefly excited to see this coming up at a small auction house with an estimate of £40-£80 ... auctions.bennettanddykes.co.uk/auctions/923...

Just back from an excellent day's symposium at the Bodleian, about their newly acquired manuscript from the library of Duke Humfrey Here's the programme for the day: visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/mar25/...

There's always something interesting at the Bodleian's Friday Morning Coffee meeting! Today: a performance of a scene from a medieval Last Judgement Play + 15th-cent. Apocalypse block-books. (Open to anyone with a Bodleian card; coffee and tea from 10:30; 10-minute presentation from about 10:45.)

How low will the 'CNN Business Fear & Greed Index' drop? edition.cnn.com/markets/fear...

I'm reading the autobiography of art historian and museum director John Pope-Hennessy (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Po...) and have just encountered this interesting passage: #palaeography #arthistory

Books designed to be read only by human eyes are different from books designed to be read by machines, which is why Google will tell you that the phrase “shake my booty” can be found in an 1863 English translation of Don Quixote.

donald trump: I made transgender mice illegal. and changed the name of the usa to trump town. [loud 14 minute fart] I also sent vlady putin a drawing of us holding hands. billionaire owned media: President Trump Gave Powerful Speech With Little To No Farting

you’re fired. wait you’re rehired. email us a list of things you’ve done today wait forget it you’re fired again. come back your job was important. you’re fired. or hired. come in to the office. wait the office has no computers go home. we are the department of government efficiency.

"the products of fifteenth-century penmanship suggest a posse of porcupines" Palaeographical description should be like this more often.

"truthiness prevails over truth ... claims are judged plausible not because of evidence or logic but because of vibes" thesphinxblog.com/2025/02/25/t... I'd never really thought of this before: The problem is not so much that AI produces unreliable crap, the problem is that people believe the crap.

Massive #medievalsky manuscript find in the SBB-PKB: a copy of Ranulf Higden's 'Petagogicum'—a work hitherto presumed lost—produced near the time of its composition and perhaps under Ranulf's personal supervision (according to the article). Congrats to all involved! www.spkmagazin.de/2025/der-moe...

So one of the things that I think is lost on AI proponents is what I call the card catalog effect, a thing I shouldn’t call it because a lot of people probably have no experience with a card catalog.

Two newly-recognised MSS from the library of Duke Humfrey: One has been acquired by the Bodleian, and will be formally presented to the world at a symposium on 21 March: visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/mar25/... [1/2]

Maybe I am late to the game, but I've just seen that there are now firm dates for the exhibition of the currently-disbound Très riches heures at Chantilly: 7 June to 5 October chateaudechantilly.fr/en/evenement...

Oops 😬

Yesterday I looked at Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 795, written at Oxford in 1435. It has a feature I've never seen before. Instead of simple leaf signatures such as 'ai', 'aij', 'aiij', etc. it numbers the leaves and quires explicitly, e.g. '1.fo.1.q.', '2.fo.1.q.', '3.fo.1.q.' [thread]

I've just received a copy of the latest Brochure from Jörn Günther Rare Books: more than 40 items, many of which are truly wonderful!

Another example of the Bodleian's annotated open-shelf books; this still-useful catalogue of MSS was printed from 1694-1698, despite the 1697 date on the title-page. In many libraries this would be a Special Collections item kept in secure storage, not an open-shelf reference book!