We're excited to reveal the #WolfsonHistoryPrize 2025 shortlist, celebrating the finest historical non-fiction works from the past year. Congratulations to all the shortlisted authors! 👏📚 www.wolfsonhistoryprize.org.uk/2025-wolfson...

Interested in letter-writing in early medieval Britain? A three-year postdoc on @francescatinti.bsky.social’s and my project is now available. Apps close on 17th Oct. Let me know if you have any questions and please circulate! 🙂 jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Look what we have here then.

In Intriguing Furniture news: yesterday I visited Lichfield Cathedral and found a new 13 metre long table made from a 5000-year-old oak log discovered perfectly preserved in a peat bog in 2016. The cut planks took 9 months to dry out, losing 2 tonnes of weight in the process. Definitely haunted...

New email sign-off courtesy of original poetry in the India Gazette, 1823:

who called them "the Huns" and not "H from Steppes"

Some INCREDIBLE lines here. Hard to pick a favourite... www.jstor.org/stable/2638715

A huge moment -- Melvyn Bragg steps down from In Our Time after over a quarter of a century. What a programme and what a legacy! Just a model for how to make great, clever, engaging radio, and a twenty-seven-year experiment that proves there's a huge global audience for smart, scholarly programming.

Melvyn Bragg has been one of the last standard-bearers for a really important, and unfashionable, idea: that good conversation, between people who really know their stuff, on complex or difficult subjects, can be fantastic radio - and that the national broadcaster should do this. I hope it endures.

1. Modeling data does not a historical argument make. 2. Lefebvre might have written an early classic, but his sources are not the complete 'archive' of Great Fear rumors. 1/n

it's always nice to find yourself so accurately represented in media

Seeing a lot of critical responses from medievalists about this BBC 1066 thing. As an early modernist, just to say that I'm happy to confirm that medieval people were indeed covered in dirt all the time and did all sound like they were in the Wurzels.

I'm so angry about #KingAndConqueror because the exec producer says: 'there's an obscuring mist that allows you to take artistic license in a way that doesn't feel inauthentic or unethical, because there's only so much we can know. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/... 1/

How does language shape the borders of our contemporary world? 🗺️ Explore this new #OpenAccess volume to find out more about the (linguistic) construction of national, transnational, symbolic and gendered borders in Europe, Africa & the Americas: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

I've just seen someone say the Indian pronunciation of 'poem' used to be 'po-yum' because that's how the British say it. Obviously we don't, but did they and did we, or is this just a person being Wrong on the Internet? Probably the latter, but now I want to know!

Two billion for country-wide access to ChatGPT. Yearly budget of Arts and Humanities Research Council is little over two hundred million. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Bad news for those of us who use badgers as standards of measurement for manuscripts

We have a medieval PDRA role on the same project recruiting too.

A very exciting new John Locke find by @davidrarmitage.bsky.social now published in the @historicaljnl.bsky.social!

The National Archives is looking for an Early Modern Parliamentary Records Specialist. Pros: you'll get to work in the same department as me. Cons: you'll have to work in the same department as me. Details via the link. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOD893/r...

“What a strange thing! to be alive beneath cherry blossoms.” Kobayashi Issa [Tr. Robert Hass; a self-portrait by Issa] #poetry #writer

A number of Four Courts Press books can now be borrowed on archive.org. Four Courts is a key publisher of works on Irish history, and this means some out of print edited collections on early modern history are now more readily available. And you can read some of my articles there too! For example:

@gralefrit.bsky.social You have to see these! A friend of mine has been collating a series of images entitled "Things my students have written turned into Philomena Cunk quotes" and they're just glorious.

Today is the 47th anniversary of this clearly unimprovable photo, from a story so absurd that it shouldn’t be true, but is: the day a team of workers from British Waterways pulled the plug out of the Chesterfield Canal, and all the water emptied out

Fantastic find. Medieval slate initially scored for music and reused for accounts in Middle English (cost of ink, 2d; repair of King William’s painting, 1/ 2d). (Abbey gatehouse exhibition.)

... oh. oh no.

Fuck this, and fuck this government.

The University of Warwick has paid a lot of money, I'm guessing, for their internet banner ads on the Guardian and elsewhere. But they can't spell "curiosity". This isn't a US-UK variant. They just, genuinely, have a massive spelling error in their banner ads.

Well this is very interesting. And encouraging for the future?

you don't understand. as someone who isn't inherently good at art, stealing paintings from the museum is the *only* way i'm able to express myself creatively. i wouldn't be able to paint beautiful portraits. but by breaking into a museum and stealing the paintings, now i am

OMG PEOPLE! I have the BL hack of all BL hacks. Why didn't this occur to me before? It turns out the Wayback Machine has snapshots of MS metadata from the old Digitised Manuscripts site. I tried it for the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, in honor of his day, and lo! web.archive.org/web/20140305...

In the death registers of early modern Venice, marginalia often marks the cause of death: drawings of daggers for murders, for instance. In 1696, Giovanni Battista Rinaldi was killed by a dog. This is the drawing by his entry.

Black Sails, Borgen, Battlestar Galactica (2004), Blackadder, and – watch me make it begin with B – the BBC's Pride and Prejudice miniseries (1995).

Contributing to a 20% fall in admissions to university language and area studies courses in the past five years. Not at all good news.

tv commissioner. I'd commission and then - and this is important - not cancel the good shows

Delighted to have Matthew challenging my interpretations, (this is the *point* of history) to decide for yourselves pls tune in and pick up a copy of Victoria’s Secret from tomorrow!! lnk.to/victoriassec...

Happy 15th anniversary of the peak achievement of literary criticism, to all who celebrate

Someone on here compared AI produced material as "digital asbestos " which in a few decades' time we will have to work out how to eradicate from the fabric of research.

If you fancy pre-ordering the paperback of PAGANS, due Feb next year, Waterstones are offering 25% off with the discount code SUMMER25, valid from now until Thursday this week! www.waterstones.com/book/pagans/... #WPreorder #BookSky

With pride, joy and a great deal of nerves, I'd like to reveal the cover for my book 'Why Q Needs U'!, published by @bonnierbooksuk.bsky.social! I love the cover, with the endorsement from its first reviewer, who also called it "a wonderful achievement" and "just couldn't recommend it more highly".

Wake up babel new term of endearment for a linguist just dropped

well, this is it. The end of the last Tour de France to be aired on ITV. An actual end of an era.

Thanks to @eicathomefinn.bsky.social for notification of the death of Peter (P.J.) Marshall (1933-2025), a great historian of India and Empire, and a pioneering President of the Royal Historical Society. His last book is going to press so there is more of his work still to appreciate.

Okay so I have some massive news: This 👇👇👇 is Victoria’s Secret. Huge thanks to @hackblackburn.bsky.social for breaking this story, and if you want to scrutinise my evidence, preorder Victoria’s Secret NOW: linktr.ee/VictoriasSecretBook and tune into Channel 4 on Thursday July 31st @ 9 pm

I am SCREAMING

ok but more seriously what do I do if the site just doesn't work for me, either on laptop or on my phone, with multiple browsers?

You can’t even send pictures on DM here. Why do I have to verify my age??

*squints* I think the last line of this article is the key one...

Wow, it looks like they really want to rename the University of Warwick to 'Beyond' to which anyone reasonable would reply 'stop trying to make fetch happen, it's not going to happen'.