28 December is the #fourthdayofChristmas, and the Feast of the #HolyInnocents. Here is an #illuminated initial from a #song for #InnocentsDay, from a #15thCentury #Antiphonal commissioned for the monastery of San Sisto in Piacenza in 1475. #BostonPublicLIbrary #earlymusic #renaissance #otd

At what is the face in the lower margin looking? 🤔 Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 38(366); Anonymus, Expositio octo priorum Epistolarum S. Pauli; 10th century (second half, about 960-965); Einsiedeln; f.11r (www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/...)

Blissfully relaxed Boxing Day morning, watching tits visit the bird feeder opposite the kitchen window while I read @drmjwarren.bsky.social wonderful ‘The Cuckoo’s Lea’ 🐦🐦🐦

A breathtaking graphic meditation on the Christmas miracle, Nativity at Night by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, is my favorite painting for the season – oil on oak panel, circa 1490. Small in size, measuring 34 × 25.3 cm, it is vast in its implications. Currently on display at the National Gallery, London.

🌲2️⃣4️⃣🎁 Rétglu etir rind We, the staff of Maynooth’s Department of Early Irish, want to bring the relevance of medieval Ireland and its culture closer to audiences in Ireland (and beyond) by disseminating our work beyond academia, for example through appearances in TV documentaries and radio shows. 📖

Every Christmas Eve I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from this: Follow flight SANTA25 from Rovaniemi to Rovaniemi with Plane Finder planefinder.net/flight/numbe...

I love the Canterbury Tabby, and imagine her as a sister of my own gentle, green-eyed and very literary tabby …

🌲2️⃣3️⃣🎁 Medieval Irish History Podcast The staff in the @maynoothuniversity.ie Department of Early Irish have a lot of experience when it comes to the public dissemination of their research, but none more so than Dr Niamh Wycherley. As part of her @researchireland.ie Pathway Grant, she started… 📖

🌲2️⃣2️⃣🎁 Irish manuscript culture Dr Chantal Kobel is a leading scholar of the material culture of medieval and early modern Irish manuscripts. Having held positions in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies @scs-dias.bsky.social for seven years, she has been teaching Irish palaeography and… 📖

🌲2️⃣1️⃣🎁 OPal+ As a spin-off of the OG(H)AM project, our Glasgow colleague Prof Katherine Forsyth secured AHRC @ukri.org follow-on funding for the Digital Humanities study of the neglected palaeography of ogam. Even though strictly speaking a Glasgow project, Maynooth researchers played a central… 📖

Wishing everyone a blessed Winter Solstice. Kercado chambered tomb, near Carnac, Brittany. Built c. 5,200 BCE, its entrance was oriented toward the rising sun on the Winter Solstice. 📷 June, 2023

Rare footage of St Paul’s Cathedral testing its giant flamethrower

The complete Bayeux Tapestry has finally been released and proves that Bishop Odo had absolutely nothing to do with the illegal Norman invasion of England.

🌲2️⃣0️⃣🎁 Cisalpine Celtic literacy Dr Corinna Salomon (Vienna) is an expert on ancient, pre-Roman writing systems in northern Italy (e.g., www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLwT...). She investigated the origin of the runes and contributed to Thesaurus Inscriptionum Raeticarum (tir.univie.ac.at/wiki/). 📖

AI-assisted writing in 1716. #skystorians

🌲1️⃣9️⃣🎁 DiⒶgnostic On 31 August 2023, the very last day of my sabbatical year 2022/3, I was informed by the IRC (@researchireland.ie) of the award of an Advanced Laureate Award for ‘DiⒶgnostic – Tracing Diatopic Variation in a Corpus of Old Irish’. This four-year project started in December 2023. 📖

The #WinterSolstice livestream link is now available Join us on 21 Dec @ 8:40 am to witness the solstice sunrise live from inside the #Newgrange chamber, weather permitting. Save the link now and be part of this extraordinary moment. 🔗www.gov.ie/solstice#WinterSolstice#Newgrange#ShareTheSolstice

Interesting! I hadn’t heard of this before. The “Fasti Guidizzolenses”, a fragment of a Roman calendar that happily preserves a festival dedicated to Gaulish goddess Epona on 18 December. Epona may have been a favorite of the Roman cavalry due to her association with horses 🐎

Brent Nongbri on "A Late Example of the Biblical Majuscule":

🌲1️⃣8️⃣🎁 Now You’re Talking… Old Irish Francesco Felici came from Italy to Maynooth in 2018 to pursue a PhD at the Department of Early Irish. Francesco is an avid learner and teacher of a wide range of languages, but he wanted to crown his life-long linguistic obsession with studying Old Irish. 📖

Here's a video I took of the interior of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in #Ravenna. It gives you a good sense of what it's like to view the amazing mosaics on site--the saints procession, the Palatium, and the christological panels. 📹🇮🇹 flic.kr/p/2q1qpPn #photography #travel #LateAntiquity 🏺 AncientBlueSky

This is what persistence looks like. Rejoining Erasmus+ shows that change is possible when people keep pushing for it, and it strengthens the case for going further in rebuilding our relationship with Europe.

🌲1️⃣7️⃣🎁 LEIGHEAS Prof Deborah Hayden’s research into the history of medieval and early modern Irish medicine continues with her second @researchireland.ie Laureate Award ‘LEIGHEAS – Language, Education and Medical Learning in the Premodern Gaelic World’ 2022. The aim of LEIGHEAS (Irish for ‘remedy’… 📖

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🌲1️⃣6️⃣🎁 Power and Patronage Dr Niamh Wycherley interests lie in the church history, the history of women in medieval Ireland, & patterns of patronage. After having received the @nuimerrionsq.bsky.social Publication Prize in History 2017 for ‘The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland’, Niamh won… 📖

#DigiBodAdvent returns after an illness-enforced hiatus with the lovely uncial Acts of the Apostles in MS. Selden Supra 30. This manuscript had its 15 minutes of fame back in 2022 (www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022...) but we only digitized it in 2025 - so it makes this year's list!

🌲1️⃣5️⃣🎁 Latinate Inscriptions Following her 2006 PhD in Maynooth (an edition of the tales about Mongán mac Fíachnai), Dr Nora White became one of the leading scholar in Ireland for ogam inscriptions. She was the main person behind the development of the Ogham in 3D website (ogham.celt.dias.ie/)... 📖

On the Third Sunday of Advent, we light three candles - perfect occasion to share the oldest preserved candles found north of the Alps. The candles were made from beeswax around 1,400 years ago. They were found in the early #medieval burial site in Oberflacht. The damp...🧵1/2 📷 me

A seasonal post up on the "Critical Star Trek Studies" substack: latestartrek.substack.com/p/the-star-t...

🌲1️⃣4️⃣🎁 Fierce Appetites Dr Elizabeth Boyle took a sabbatical year in 2020/1. Her break coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic and she used the year to reflect upon her life and to interweave her personal reminiscences with academic writing about medieval Ireland for a wider readership. 📖

#BBCRadio3 playing one of my favourite pieces of Christmas music as I make weekend pikelets 🎶 #tinyjoys classical.music.apple.com/gb/work/mich...

🌲1️⃣3️⃣🎁 OG(H)AM The next major international project, short title OG(H)AM, resulted directly from the Digital Gaelic project, again jointly funded by @ukri.org and the IRC (@researchireland.ie). Starting from a collaboration between Dr Nora White (Maynooth) and Prof Katherine Forsyth (Glasgow),… 📖

🌲1️⃣2️⃣🎁 Ancient Celtic languages The Maynooth Department of Early Irish is not only known for its academic expertise in the cultural heritage of medieval Ireland. My other huge interest for more than 30 years has been the ancient Celtic languages of the Continent (Lepontic, Gaulish, Celtiberian). 📖

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In the tenth century a charm to control a bee swarm was added, upside down, in the margin of an earlier mss. It's one of the earliest Old High German texts. Tim Hertogh argues in recent article it was intended as an amulet to cut out & place in a hive - explaining the margins excised elsewhere.👇

'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.' Photograph by Daniel Ibanez

I’ve posted this before but the light was perfect today- a little Victorian cat paw in a brick at the front of the old Norfolk & Norwich Hospital. As this is on the front-facing corner of the main gates, the bricklayer quite clearly put it there on purpose, at a height where children would spot it.

On this date in 1892, #LucyMBoston was born. Thank you, Lucy

An illustrated line from the Prayer Of St. Brendan The Navigator, who is said to have travelled from County Kerry in Ireland to America a thousand years before Columbus made his journey. Trust in the darkness. 🌌 Prints available here: www.ciaraioch.com/artprints/p/...

Bright starry sky at 6am and a robin singing in the garden 🐦✨ #TinyJoys

🌲🔟🎁 Codices Eximii Hibernenses When he was Ollamh na Nua-Ghaeilge at @maynoothuniversity.ie, Ruairí Ó hUiginn initiated a conference series dedicated to the most important medieval and early modern manuscripts in the collection of the Royal Irish Academy (@ria.ie @rialibrary.bsky.social). 📖

🌲9️⃣🎁 Medical learning Having originally studied the native grammatical tradition of medieval Ireland, Prof Deborah Hayden became intrigued by the overlap of grammar with medical learning in medieval Irish manuscripts. After joining the Department of Early Irish in 2015, Deborah received a @ria.ie… 📖

🎺🎄 Fabulous evening at the Egham Youth Brass Project Xmas concert. The wonderful people who run this project give up so much time to introduce primary school kids to music, and the results are joyful!

We’re nominated for Research Project of the Year! 🎉 Vote for Words on the Wave and help us celebrate Ireland’s medieval heritage: 👉 www.museum.ie/en-IE/News/V... #MedievalIreland #IrishArchaeology

🌲8️⃣🎁 Research seminars and conferences Dr Elizabeth Boyle established a series of three research seminars every semester in the Department of Early Irish as a forum for scholarly discourse and outreach in 2014. Since then, she and other colleagues have invited 66 scholars to speak in this series. 📖

#Harkageddon — at the Egham Band Christmas concert, Addlestone Community Centre 🎄🎺

🌲7️⃣🎁 Annals and Law Dr Fangzhe Qiu worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the ChronHib project from 2015–20. His task was the digitisation of the Annals of Ulster, i.e., adding the annalistic entries for the years 554–950 into the CorPH database and analysing the word forms grammatically. 📖

Do you or your students work with English manuscripts? We have a summer school course for you👇 Book now for June 2026 in person in London. #MedievalSky #RenaissanceSky 📖✏️ #palaeography ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...