I promised something more substantial and so here it is, a note about a paper of late May 2021 that is, I think, still interesting stuff. Two levels of background you need: first, that what with our seminar series at the University of Leeds being forced online like everything else we did in that time of pandemic, the then-Director of the Institute of Medieval Studies, Dr Alaric Hall, took the chance to broaden our reach a bit, both in terms of nationality of speakers and of topics of discussion, which is how on 25th May we were hearing from Dr Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga, then and now at the Un ..read more

I’m sorry to come back in this new year of 2024 only to announce a stop, but, January has really hit hard. Quite apart from publication deadlines set as if maliciously to coincide with the beginning of teaching – the worst bit of which is that I set at least one of them – there has also been a loss in my family, which entailed a long drive to and from a deathbed, after which the car dramatically failed its MOT, and now there’s still the geographically distant but temporally imminent funeral to go to, involving coordinating bits of the family who normally don’t speak to each other, plus which ..read more

When I promised you a post this weekend it hadn’t, I admit, fully dawned on me that that would be the New Year’s weekend. But I was ready, ready to give you a report on an interesting paper about Bishop John of Nikiu and the chronicle he wrote that is one of our earliest sources for the Islamic conquest of Egypt… and then I left the notes at home, so now that will have to be next week’s. Instead, let’s inaugurate 2024 by having a go at an erstwhile minister of government! So, I stubbed this to write in May 2021 when Jo Johnson, brother of our lately-demitted Prime Minister whom one of my forei ..read more

Happy end of the Latin calendar year to you all! (And if it hadn’t occurred to you that the timing of our winter break was a medieval legacy, I’m here to help.1) Since preparations for the festival press upon me as doubtless also many of you, I hope you’ll forgive the lack of a substantive post this week. I’ll be back next week! And may you all also enjoy a good break and thankyou for reading. 1. Don’t believe me, check out Carl Philipp Emanuel Nothaft, "From Sukkot to Saturnalia: The Attack on Christmas in Sixteenth-Century Chronological Scholarship" in Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 72 ..read more

First I should apologise for a late post; last weekend was very full of family business and I didn’t have a post even started before Sunday night, and then once I had, I realised I’d written the text for a post ahead of the one I’d meant. So that should speed things up this weekend, but what I meant to report first on was this online seminar, which actually fits well with the last post even though the timing was mostly a coincidence. On 28th April 2021 the Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds and the Leeds Law School at Leeds Beckett University jointly played virtual ho ..read more

The window behind which I was having the thoughts which begin this post is the uppermost leftermost gable in the building on the left of the neo-classical one, all of this being the Queen’s College, Oxford, and borrowed from their website I think this story begins in Oxford, although it doesn’t stay there long. At the time I was teaching in Oxford the History syllabus’s foundation was two sets of "papers", one in British History, covering the sceptred isles of my birth (in theory; in practice, really just England unless someone made special efforts to include the Home Nations) and one in Gen ..read more

The first time I blogged about one of Steffen Patzold’s papers, he later told me, it came as rather a shock to him when one of his students pointed it out to him. The episode threw me into a temporary tiz about whether I should in fact be writing up these semi-public events, whether it was like tweeting a conference paper (then a hot controversy) and so on, and although I decided in the end to carry on on the same basis, still, now that I find myself wanting to write up another of Steffen’s papers I still pause. I hope that two things will keep him happy with this post; firstly, that this happ ..read more

So here is, as they say, a thing. You know I do frontiers, obviously, and you may also be aware that there are more essay volumes by medievalists or including medievalists on frontiers, in which there is usually no explicit comparison between cases except by the volume editors, than anyone should ever have to deal with.1 Back in 2021 I was finally making my way through one of these that had been on my reading lists since early in my doctorate, Walter Pohl’s, Ian Wood’s and Helmut Reimitz’s The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians.2 I didn’t think as much of this ..read more

As promised, this week I want to do a bit more old-style seminar reporting. I’m not getting out to seminars the way I once did, and wasn’t even in early 2021, our current point in my backlog, but sometimes if you’re in the right place the seminars come to you, and sometimes Leeds is that place… Heidelberg Universitätsbibliothek Cod. Pal. Grace. 18 fol. 96v, showing "Isaac" Tzetzes offering his Scholia in Lycophronis to Christ, this misnamed 13th-century depiction being the only one there is of our next subject In the first instance that was slightly less surprising because the speaker was Dr ..read more

I can already see that my blogging plans for this week are going to fall by the wayside, so I thought I should at least offer an explanation. It’s basically the one of the title: at some point over the summer, perhaps emboldened by the union-mandated freedom from marking, I started thinking about things like Rethinking the Medieval Frontier again and getting in touch with colleagues elsewhere and so on. And this is always risky, because the likelihood is, as we have noted here, that doing that will get you asked to give a paper. In recent years I have been saying ‘no’ to such requests, yea eve ..read more