Next Wednesday 8th October, 12.30-1.30: Jiří Vnouček on "A Tale of Two Parchments" - insular and continental parchment preparation. In person: @bodleian.ox.ac.uk Weston Library, Lecture Theatre Or livestreamed. Free: book here visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/oct25/...

Here is a controversial - or maybe not so controversial? - #palaeography question: how did this scribe do the rolled tops on ascenders and the letter i? Was it by pushing the pen up and to the left, then down and to the right? Or were these additional downward strokes?

We're hiring for e-codices. The position is modest, but, hopefully it'll be the start of something big. www.unifr.ch/sp/en/open-p...

I recently finished cataloging the Arabic-script manuscripts of the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over 750 manuscripts in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Bosnian, free to view in the HMML Reading Room w3id.org/vhmml/readin...

Congratulations to our Leicester early medieval colleague, Professor Joanna Story (@insularmss.bsky.social), on being elected a Fellow of the British Academy!

And marvellous Jo Story @uniofleicester.bsky.social too: fantastic and so well-deserved. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/fellows/joan...

Our PI Prof. Joanna Story is one of the newly elected Fellows! Her work on early medieval Insular sources, including interdisciplinary approaches to text and material culture, continues to break new ground in the INSULAR project.

Update on Fragmentology (www.fragmentology.ms ): the journal's back online. Submissions at the moment can be made directly to [email protected]. In other news, Wesleyan UL has published their Ege "Oriental" leaves. We're always happy for help decolonizing them. fragmentarium.ms/overview/F-d...

The deadline for this job is this coming Monday!

And more decorated/illuminated letters to download and print and print for free, and then colour in. Good for children in the holidays, teachers who want a bit of a quiet time (!!), and adults who want to spend some time thinking only of what colours to use! www.patricialovett.com/mediaeval-de...

There's an exciting new 3-year job in Göttingen (Germany) available as part of our project! www.uni-goettingen.de/en/644546.ht... We need someone with experience in manuscript studies and early medieval Germanic vernaculars. Digital humanities skills an advantage! Deadline: 14 July. #palaeography

🧵 Is this a Dire wolf... 🤔? No... Our @erc.europa.eu Beasts to Craft team led by Élodie Lévêque uncovered the true identity of mysterious hairy covers on #medieval #Cistercian #manuscripts - they're ... 👇

3/5: The brilliance is in the details: neck rings show the calf's age, tension lines reveal stretching techniques, repair stitches identify different craftsmen's work, and even parasites tell us about animal health. Nothing is merely a "flaw" - everything is evidence!

2/5: What excites me most is how each parchment sheet reveals a complete narrative - from living animal to finished writing surface. The 346 calfskins used across three volumes preserve evidence of medieval animal husbandry, craft techniques, and workshop practices.

🧵 1/5: I'm THRILLED to see Jiří Vnouček's paper on the Hamburg Bible's parchment finally published with such stunning illustrations (73 in all)! This research shows how a careful reading of parchment tells a rich story of its creation. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

📕 I am glad to see that this volume to which your humble narrator contributed is finally out in Open Access. Enjoy! 🔗 punctumbooks.com/titles/the-a... #medievalsky

Woooohoooo! Blow the trumpets, drum the drums! Just got an advance copy of my new book! Drum those drums and blow trumpets blow, and pop that cork! It’s always exciting!!

Wie haben professionelle Schreiber im frühen Mittelalter neue Schriften gelernt und miteinander gearbeitet? Unsere Historikerin Anna Dorofeeva vom Institut für #DigitalHumanities untersucht dies an rund 850 Handschriften: www.campuspost.goettingen-campus.de/2025/01/21/a...

Yesterday listened to Prof Joanna Story's fascinating talk (thanks @ghilondon.bsky.social) about @insularmss.bsky.social ERC AdG Project on identifying provenance of Early Medieval insular-style manuscripts with #Biocodicology (protein & aDNA analysis) – much like the Nordic CODICUM ERC Project!

A great paper by Jo Story @insularmss.bsky.social at the @ghilondon.bsky.social last night, including a mention of Vienna cod. 15: a sixth-century copy of Livy, owned by an 8th-c. bishop 'of Dorestad'. bibliotheca-laureshamensis-digital.de/view/onb_cod...

Go and hear our Leicester colleague Jo Story @insularmss.bsky.social talk about insular manuscripts!

Get your free ticket now to join us in person or via Zoom: www.ghil.ac.uk/event.... #insularmanuscripts #manuscripts #earlymedieval #medievalhistory 5/5

on libraries of the Reformation and Thirty Years War. This talk introduces a new multidisciplinary research project – INSULAR – focused on these manuscripts and their historical context in German-speaking lands. 📜 The lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL. 4/5

This distribution reflects both the establishment of monasteries in Francia by clerics from the Irish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the seventh and eighth centuries, which imported books from the islands and where scribes learned to make books in insular fashion, as well as the destructive impact 3/5

There survive today about 850 manuscripts or fragments written in Insular scripts between the years c.650 and 900 CE. Of these, about 45 per cent are in libraries in Germany with a further 10 per cent in Switzerland or Austria. 2/5

Your chance to listen to the latest research on what English and Irish scribes were up to on the continent in the early Middle Ages, from the @insularmss.bsky.social project

How to work in a medieval French archive... "Ne cherchez pas dans le champ de recherche" ("Do not use SEARCH in the SEARCH box...")

Just hot off the press! New article reflecting on palaeographic terminology 😜 "La denominada escritura visigótica semicursiva: propuesta terminológica y metodológica" revistascientificas.us.es/index.php/HI...

One of the reasons for a sloping board, apart from avoiding back pain from crouching over, is control of the ink in a quill. Writing flat, the ink flows out too easily and results in imprecise letter strokes, at a slope, the ink is released from the quill only when pressure is put on the tip.

It's great to see the wonderful @insularmss.bsky.social #ERC project here! Insular Manuscripts in the Age of Charlemagne Expecting great things when 📜 and 🧬 are being led by historians.

Some weeks ago a colleague asked me if I could check whether two Visigothic script codices could have been copied by the same scribe: a Petrus...

On the program for today: finish revising chapter 2 of the book I’m writing - on advertisement posters from writing businesses and bookshops, 1350-1600. Some are a meter tall! Read more here if you are interested: https://buff.ly/3ACta3L.

I have been talking about it for ages - and now it is finally out *Orthrus: an AI-powered, cloud-ready, and open-source hybrid approach for metaproteomics* www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here’s DigitalKer. Thanks to Eren Yurek, Charlotte Cao & Cesta. This is a good (v. time-consuming) start; fun visualisations suggest new ways to see the manuscripts. Neil Ker’s essays & notes are real insights. It’s just a *start*. Please send thoughts & comments to me 😊 digitalker.stanford.edu

Exciting news! @ERC_Research grants #ERCAdG to INSULAR MSS in the Age of Charlemagne (€2.5m). Our team includes @litteracarolina.mastodon.online & partners in libraries & universities across Europe incl. @ercb2c @brad_dan @CharlotteDenoel @LieveWatteeuw @bodleianlibs @BLMedieval

Exciting news! @ERC_Research grants #ERCAdG to INSULAR MSS in the Age of Charlemagne (€2.5m). Our team includes @litteracarolina.mastodon.online & partners in libraries & universities across Europe incl. @ercb2c @brad_dan @CharlotteDenoel @LieveWatteeuw @bodleianlibs @BLMedieval

The wonderful Salaberga Psalter [Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS Hamilton 553] is now online: http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0001B96A00000000 – Enjoy!

Hear @Helen_Gittos on ‘Christianity before Conversion’ on 28 Oct, 5pm for the 40th annual lecture at All Saints’ Church, Brixworth – the largest extant pre-Conquest church in England, built c. 800. All welcome!

The Guardian view on the Eadburg writings: the long lost female authors of English https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/02/the-guardian-view-on-the-eadburg-writings-the-long-lost-female-authors-of-english?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Eadburg is found! @bodleianlibs by Jess Hodgkinson @HyPIRUoL & #ArchiOx with imaging specialists @FactumFound Women in the Margins: Eadburg and Bodleian Library MS Selden Supra 30...

Where was Mercian spoken? Find out by joining us in the 8th-C Mercian church at Brixworth, Northants on Sat 29th October @ 5pm (cake @ 3:30) for Dr Christine Rauer's Brixworth Lecture. @UoLMedieval @StAndrewsSAIMS @HyPIRUoL @historyleic @BrixworthChurch

As an earlier Charles once said. Actually it was Alcuin of York, writing in the voice of Charlemagne. From the epitaph of Pope Hadrian I, d. 795. Still in Rome, in the portico of St Peter's basilica. Rex not yet Imperator. #medievaltwitter

What’s going on here #medievaltwitter? Did he tread in something? One shoe off, one shoe on. And socks and dogbreath. Doodle in the Echternach Sacramentary BnF Lat. 9433, fo 1r, late 9thC. (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8479011k/f9.item.zoom)

The Tiberius Bede, fo. 60v. Was it made in the south of England in the early ninth century, or perhaps in Wensleydale? http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_tiberius_c_ii_f060v #InsularMSS @BLMedieval @aardman @HyPIRUoL

Ecgbeorht goes North: BBC News - Galloway Viking-age treasure: Egbert revealed as name of one owner https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-49905258