As a special treat for you all we are having class OUTSIDE for a little tour of Bologna’s medieval canals. On the way we’ll learn to spot where medieval city walls, or even bridges, used to be in modern cities; we’ll consider the every day elements of city life like laundry, bathing, and watering animals; and we’ll see that medieval city life was complex enough to necessitate things like municipal housing. There is still, somehow, some swearing. Check it out here. For more on cities in the medieval period, see: On the Agas map of London, medieval and early modern cities, and life On putting se ..read more

Pretend you are me – the nicest, cutest, sweetest person who deserves a relaxing little Sunday, where she just goofs and maybe reads a ghost book ever. Nice right? Well, I also will have to imagine it as well because unfortunately my Sunday was irrevocably disfigured by the rantings of an idiot on the internet, and I was forced to think about my job. Yes, that’s correct no one has suffered in the way that I do. Thank you for noticing. What can you do to help? Well you are going to have to look at this right here: Lotta words to say you are racist and bad in bed, but OK my guy! Now I am very so ..read more

Last week, I was having a nice little chat on BlueSky, my go-to site for chatting shit and avoiding work now that twitter is unusable, with some very nice people, and I was asked a thoughtful question about how we talk about the different eras of the Middle Ages. This made me realise that there are all sorts of weird technical aspects of history that you, my beloved readers, probably don’t know off the top of your heads and it would behoove me to take the time to explain them to you now and then. I mean, just so that I am not always yelling at you about more complex topics before you have a ba ..read more

It’s the commercial day of love, and you know what that means – it’s time to buy things to prove your emotions, or something. And look, we all know that Valentine’s Day is made up and has nothing to do with St Valentine. Did people sometimes pass love notes around St Valentine’s Day? Yes. I mean, at least from the fifteenth century onward. Did people buy chocolates and book restaurants? Not so much. Anyway, other people have written about the oldest Valentine and the commercialisation of a forgotten saint’s day and I don’t need to add to that. Instead, I thought I would talk a little about fan ..read more

Friends, since I made you all think about death recently I thought I would keep it light for you real quick and talk to you once again, about one of my favourite saints – the good St Margaret of Antioch. I was thinking about her recently because I was writing up something about your good friend and mine, Joan of Arc. See, Margaret was such a cool saint that even noted badass Joan looked up to her, and claimed that Margaret was one of the voices that spoke to her and told her to go out there and beat up some English people. My love for several English people, and currently location in the capit ..read more

Friends, I get angry sometimes. Yes, I know you are aware of that because this blog is, more or less, a catalogue of the various righteous indignations which I seize upon from time to time. Often this comes from seeing something silly in the wild and getting worked up about it, but this week it happened because I was talking to a colleague of mine, Prof. Philip Slavin, about the Black Death, as one does. We were discussing his work (as part of a large interdisciplinary team) looking at the likely place where yersinia pestis made its way off of rodents and on to people. They’ve done a bunch of ..read more

I am unbelievably shaken to be once again at the end of the year, and babes, for me it’s been a year of books. Firstly because, of course, my book The Once And Future Sex made its debut in the world. As I type this, it is in the process of being translated into several other languages, and is already out as Die Ideale Frau auf Deutsch. As a result, I spent a lot of this year thinking about and explaining it to people, which has been a real delight and privilege. Secondly, I read a lot of great books this year. Yes, I am completely aware of the fact that this is incredibly unsurprising, and alm ..read more

You know those little jokes that centre around a person with a PhD being on a plane, and someone asks for a doctor, and they say they aren’t that kind of doctor but the emergency involves their field of study? I love those. If you don’t know what I am rabbiting on about I mean these: Cute, right? Anyway I saw one such example online the other day, but I think it was something about African textiles or something? IDK it was cute and funny and I had a sensible chuckle, and then, dear readers, then I scrolled down into the comments (by accident!) and saw something very silly indeed, which ruined ..read more

So you know how a lot of the time my blogs are inspired by stuff I saw on twitter that made me angry? Well, because of all the incipient fascism I just haven’t been on twitter very much any more, which has been extremely good for the blood pressure. I do, however, be scrolling over on Insta, which as a general rule of thumb is a nice thing cuz I mostly get served socialist memes and then some cat videos. A+ stuff. No notes. However, because of the memes I like, occasionally I am served a miss and one such of those was this: The way I am pinching the bridge of my nose just looking at this thing ..read more

A ..read more