if you would like to read about early modern hammocks, it's publication day for the article the brilliant @marcynorton.bsky.social and I wrote about them! (open access) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Hivernal. Time for more more tea and blankets

LEGO Star Trek TNG!! www.lego.com/en-ca/produc... Spot (😍😺) is included on the crew! Guinan is holding... Romulan ale?

Bright November sky

This Toronto side street has emptied of Halloween trick-or-treaters right around first pitch time

Halloween is the perfect time to learn more about Canada's first documented 'demon possession' case. Check out this interview with Mairi Cowan about her book The Possession of Barbe Hallay.

Happy Halloween from the Wren Library, our Halloween Bat is courageously looking into this spooky hood. mss-cat.trin.cam.ac.uk/Manuscript/B... f182v

Autumnal ravine morning

Delighted to share the Call for Papers for a special issue of French Historical Studies on the theme "European-Indigenous Relations in the French Americas" (to be co-edited by Scott Berthelette and myself) CFP and submission guidelines can be found here: read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo...

CBC Ideas is replaying the episode about my research on the case of witchcraft and demonic possession in 17th-century New France! Fun listening for spooky season! 👿🧙 👻https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/quebec-demon-possession-witchcraft-in-1660-1.6685584

The Jesuit Archives are offering a new $2500 grant focused on Indigenous researchers investigating Indigenous topics. This is a very rich archive with much Indigenous language material. archivesjesuites.ca/en/indigenou...

Good morning from a floofy house panther

If you're just jumping on the Blue Jays bandwagon, don't worry - making sense of our complicated world is what we do here at the Museum! We've put together a one-page guide of everything you need to know to avoid sounding like a fairweather fan over the next month. #LetsGoBlueJays

Spent the afternoon pulling apart @historianmairi.bsky.social's article on foodways in New France for my students to use as the basis of their first secondary source analysis. I think they came out with a better idea of what it means when I ask "how did they use the sources to make the argument."

🎶 It's the faaaat beariest tiiiiime of the yeeeeeaaar! 🎶 Happy #FatBearWeek to all who celebrate this abundantly wholesome time explore.org/fat-bear-week

The autumn equinox is here in the northern hemisphere, meaning that the new season has officially begun. This woodblock print by Hiroshige captures the colours and feeling of autumn beautifully. 🍁 Maple Trees at Mama, Utagawa Hiroshige 1 (1797 - 1858) , 1857. EAX.4362

Happy Autumnal Equinox with lessons from the Royal Museums Greenwich: www.rmg.co.uk/stories/time...

Read "Sanctity, Solitude, and Society in Early Canada: The Life of Jeanne LeBer, Recluse of Ville-Marie (1662–1714)" by CMS Alumna, Laura Moncion, in 'The Catholic Historical Review', Volume 111, Number 3. muse.jhu.edu/pub/16/artic...

Dear #MedievalSky & #SkyStorians, could you help, please? I am looking for depictions of orcas from before 1700 I already know: Olaus Magnus, Sebastian Münster, Pierre Belon, Guillaume Rondelet, Conrad Gessner, as well as the ones on bestiary.ca (s. pic) & the mural in Greifswald Thanks in advance!

This tree showing its back-to-school colours at the University of Toronto @utm.utoronto.ca @utoronto.ca

I love that one of the BBC's most popular podcasts among the under-35s is the one where a rotating cast of three academics sit around Melvyn Bragg to discuss their niche areas of research. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Happy Back-to-School to all who celebrate

Happy Labour Day and Happy September, whatever your labour of the month. (Here, gathering and treading grapes from Fitzwilliam Museum MS 1058-1975 Flanders, c. 1510-1520)

OOOOOOOOH, news of our third Jenny Wormald Lecture has dropped just in time for the weekend. Are you excited? See more information below: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/scottish-h...

This is not in any way an ominous prelude to a newly released ancient horror in the hood, right?

Volunteers are welcome to join the project to help in the transcription! All volunteers will be named as co-editors, whether you contribute a line or multiple pages. For more info, contact the project lead, Aaron Allen, on [email protected] #palaeography #Orkney

Our medieval offerings for #InternationalDogDay: 1. Dog leaps over an initial in Ms Bodl 264. 2.'Drop it!': a dog with a rabbit in its mouth runs away from its owner. MS Bodl 264. 3. Dog jousts a monkey MS Douce 131. 4. Lapdog sits by their ailing mistress MS. Douce 195.

Why are museums full of artifacts and stories from the past? Why don’t museums include things from the future? These are questions everyone has, not just me, Donald J Trump. I have been to a museum even once and, more important, understand how linear time works www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Good of @nichecanada.bsky.social to share this again. It's a story I discovered that I'd like to see more widely known

We need to offer counter-narratives to the reductions to humanities that many institutions are undertaking, and equip our colleagues across institutions with evidence that the myths being deployed to reduce our fields are not based in fact. futurelostarchive.beehiiv.com/p/the-myth-o...

What an absolutely fabulous issue of Intersections! Cowan's essay is on p.37, and worth reading, but it is preceded by a smorgasbord of good reading on "appeals" in Canadian history. What a fascinating array of stories were summoned up by that "prompt"!

"Yes, Students Should Still be Writing Essays in an Age of AI." I am grateful that the @cndhistassoc.bsky.social has reprinted an essay that I wrote for @thestar.com. Full text available at: cha-shc.ca/wp-content/u... Excerpts below.

We're Hiring! The Department of Classics and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto invite applications for a full-time, tenure-stream position in Late Antiquity. www.medieval.utoronto.ca/news/were-hi...

Happy #InternationalCatDay to all cats internationally from this floofy little house panther

My book is alive (online)!

Revised #CFP for the annual meeting of the Atlantic Medieval and Early Modern Group (AMEMG), October 24-25, 2025, in Moncton, NB. Jointly hosted by the Université de Moncton and Crandall University. Propose a paper, poster, or panel! Please help spread the word! amemg.digitalearlymodern.com

Today we’ve turned a new illuminated page in the Irish Gospels of St Gall (Cod. Sang. 51). Explore the beauty of cross-carpets and Chi-Rhos in our latest blog, then see them in person at Words on the Wave 📍 National Museum of Ireland – Kildare Street 🔗 www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collec...

Thank you, Borealia team @earlycanada.bsky.social ! Your work has made important contributions to early Canadian history, and it has been a pleasure to learn from you over the years.

POSTDOC OPPORTUNITY! @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social are advertising a full-time 6-month postdoc position to work with Andrew Dunning on redeveloping the Medieval Libraries of Great Britain project as a sustainable, open-access digital resource for manuscript studies. 🖊️ Apply by 14 July

My daughter made muffins, and they look like little British iron age houses

Proud of this Pride: joy in defiance of repression www.bbc.com/news/article...

Um, what? I did not request or authorize that "an AI" "create" "a podcast" of my article. I signed up to academia [dot] edu so that my research could be shared more freely, but not in this creepy form. Time to delete my account.

'You never know what you might find in an archive. I went looking for demons, and I found a Scottish nun.' Look back at our blog post by Mairi Cowan, whose article from @batw.bsky.social ‬was recently made Open Access! #BATW2025 edin.ac/40iusKG

Happy Solstice with some scientific explanation from Royal Observatory Greenwich www.rmg.co.uk/stories/time...

Another day of telling people about my YouTube channel & them getting very excited about demonic possession in New France and also Space Archaeology! People are very nice to me about this little project and that makes me happy! @drspacejunk.bsky.social @historianmairi.bsky.social

A countenance more in sleepiness than in anger

Showy clematis on a morning of fresh rain

News update from the NLS. Finding historic place names now easier than ever. Our new Finding Placenames guide can help! The guide has millions of searchable place names, each of which are linked to a location on our historic maps. Placenames - Map images - National Library of Scotland

The stunning delicacy