Thank you! It's as exciting as it is terrifying.
26.02.2026 18:30
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Thank you! It's as exciting as it is terrifying.
On one hand, exciting new body of work to engage with and bring into my own. On the other hand, what? How did I miss this? Am I bad at this?
A key problem with switching research directions after my comprehensive exams/prospectus-writing is that I'm continually reading theory articles and going "Wait this is what I'm trying to do! There's a name for it? And a comprehensive body of literature?"
It's exciting, but also humbling.
What a remarkably cool set of scholars gathered in one place!
Sorry to hear about the postponement, but looking forward to attending! And yes, I'd love a coffee - I'll message directly.
Back in Boston? I'm sorry to have missed your MIT talk yesterday!
Over 4,000 years old, the Bronze Age Glebe Cairn in Kilmartin Glen, Argyll, covers two stone cist burials.
The original cist, surrounded by two concentric stone circles, seems to have been for a woman. This individual was buried with jet or jet-like necklace beads and an Irish-style ceramic bowl.
Printed copy of "The Ancient Town of Leith", "A New Poem by Sir William Topaz McDonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah. No 21 Lothian Street, Edinburgh. VR. Copyright. All Rights Reserved. Composed May 1899". It is an original on yellowed paper, signed in pen by the author.
Look I know there's a lot of *waves hand* going on right now, but it's come to my attention that William "Worst Poet Ever" McGonagall composed in 1899 an elegy to "The Ancient Town of Leith" in his own, inimitable style. So if you care to gather round, I shall now retell it for the whole class 🧵🗣️🪑
Great new study on early medieval foodways, specifically a lack of fish in cooking pots! Glad it's not just our #ArchaeoFINS pots that lack 🐟! Implication with the human isotopes is that the Vikings adapted to local cuisine & left their fishy ways behind! doi.org/10.15184/aqy...
Legendary founder of NPR programming Bill Siemering is enjoying Zoom visiting with students so much that he's asked me to put a second call out. No honorarium necessary. Any takers?
(3) But the Democrat view is also bad: while it's fine for people at Princeton and Harvard to study Latin and Sanskrit, public higher education is about job training and $ ROI. There is no room for the idea that curiosity-driven inquiry is a good that should be supported by the public.
!!! a new manuscript was recently discovered written in the Syrian Monothelite community in the early 700s that describes the end of the Roman / Sassanian war *and the rise of Islam in the Levant!*
www.medievalists.net/2026/02/prev...
It is so important to keep hammering in this point. People always ask me why I would have to go visit archives - why not just look at a scan? Because they haven’t been scanned! And they are never going to be! There are millions & millions of pieces of paper in every archive.
Sounds like a compelling high-level character or villain! A story where the weaker party is forced to save their (actually pretty fine) god or patron from a plane-walking vengeance-driven divinity stealer sounds like a hell of a game
Ooh, the creeping doubt is great! I suppose the darker and more cynical route would also be to rebuke the patron, but adopt a "servant to no power" jadedness that takes them out of the world of paladinism or warlockism altogether
Weaker but still good, or powerful in the service of evil...
I love the idea that this could build to a mid-campaign climax where the player has to decide whether to Break Their Oath (a.k.a. their contract) and lose those abilities, but perhaps embrace a new Paladin oath, or to abandon their lofty ideals and fully submit to the power of their patron...
RIP unnamed medieval people buried at Lundin Links, you would have loved quick oats
What the Saxon calls sandwiches are here What kind are they?
Hand me over those moccasins They will not help you much They are like a singed cat
I shall take a mouthful of hot gruel with butter in it Go to your bed first
The gurnet is plentiful to-day It is not so plentiful as the dogfish
Some key topics covered in @fortrenn.bsky.social's 1949 Gaelic phrasebook
✅️ dirty forrin sandwiches
✅️ the unhelpfulness of moccasins
✅️ gruel/butter etiquette
✅️ gurnet v. dogfish
Hey, Bluesky history nerds! Who are your favorite pre-modern historians on here?
A meme from the format of several armored warriors putting their swords into the center of a table, with the three visible figures labeled "tollund man," "me," and "the picts." In the center of the table is the label "yum oatmeal."
We obviously know that they ate animals too from the zooarchaeology, but between this and the Prado and Noble paper which used phytoliths to look at Pictish foodways, it's really obvious that a large part of most people's diet really involved porridge. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Texts about/from the Iron Age/Early Medieval North: "They feasted on venison and cattle, or hunted the swift boar"
Repeated studies of actual last meals/recent diet: porridge porridge porridge
Keeping quite comfortably at the edge of both the archaeologists and classicists, as befits a medieval historian!
Fun Winter Olympic fact – all the stone for Olympic curling stones come from the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig.
Update on our archaeological excavations on St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and the first direct evidence linking the island to the Bronze Age tin trade.
www.cambridge.org/core/blog/20...
The absolute lambasting most medievalists could give Bede...
I promise not to seal post all day but I DO promise to use "no scrolling, just rolling" or a variation for the foreseeable future. 🦭 #SeaSky
If you haven’t seen it, there’s a cunning plan underway to refight the Battle of Hastings at a scale of 1 man = 1 miniature. This is the Peter’s Paperboys ‘Hastings 960’ project, using units of around 200-300 18mm minis to put 16,000 figures onto the gaming table in October 2026. #spreadthelard
