Ed Roberts

Great Friday afternoon read! Even more intriguing is the suggestion the Astronomer may have been Rudolf of Bourges...

Looking forward to this lecture next week!

Name in Print XVII This one is a little late to the party, although in my defence that’s because it’s one of the oddest publication experiences I’ve ever had. Still, I am pleased to announce that my…

New Name In Print post on the blog: my latest article is an important study of tenth-century Normandy and the micropolities it came from; but shepherding it into print was a bit of a weird time:

salutemmundo.wordpress.com/2025/12/03/n...

The HE Ballot failed, now what? If you’re reading this it is because today the UCU’s 2025 national ballot over pay and conditions in universities has failed. The last time…

Unfortunately the HE 2025 ballot failed at 39% turnout. I have written about why and about what desperately needs to change in UCU's national structures off the back of this result. Some HEC members need to chi up and understand their role in all this, and how disconnected they are from members.

And here is the table of contents: our topics range from multilingualism in chancery documents to medieval work and Syriac historiography (doi.org/10.1553/medi...)

The Common Good: Military Service as Community Organisation in the Carolingian World The Carolingian empire under Charlemagne (768–814) and Louis the Pious (814– 840) was a polity deeply shaped by war, or, more specifically, the organisation of warfare. Taking the – for its time – ...

Did you ever wonder how the Early Medieval state worked? (And what it was ...?) - Here is my take on it. doi.org/10.1080/0304...

Congratulations! 🎉

Ipsissima verba? The limits of shorthand under the Roman empire Earlier Middle Ages Seminar- Session 4

We are back at @ihr.bsky.social this week on Wednesday, 26 Nov, 5.30pm, in Wolfson Room NB02, where we welcome Ella Kirsh (Cambridge) to speak on "Ipsissima verba? The limits of shorthand under the Roman empire". All welcome, but please register in advance here! www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Cover of the book 'Priests, Books, and Compilatory Practices in the Carolingian Period'

Can't get enough of local priests? I hope not, because my book 'Pastoral Works. Priests, Books, and Compilatory Practices in the Carolingian Period' has just been published by Brepols (doi.org/10.1484/M.US...). You can read the book's introduction on my website (libripendis.eu/posts/26past...).

And the news is... We're recruiting! Applications are now open for our 2026 @leverhulme.ac.uk Doctoral Scholarships. So, if you want to study at PhD level pre-modern handwritten cultures and the organisation of knowledge and power within them, do investigate our refreshed website.

Applications invited for the Society's Centenary PhD Fellowships, 2026-27 - RHS Applications are now invited for the Royal Historical Society’s Centenary PhD Fellowships to support postgraduate historians to complete a doctorate. Two Fellowships, of six months each, are offered f...

Applications are now invited for the Society's 2026-27 Centenary PhD Fellowships for early career historians completing a doctorate bit.ly/48pWB72

Fellowships provide support of £8500 per award for 6 months and are held jointly with @ihr.bsky.social. Closing date: 31 January 2026 #Skystorians

This looks terrific. Congratulations!

Front cover for the new entry in Manchester Medieval Sources, Law, Society and Political Culture in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany.

It’s publication day for Law, Society and Political Culture in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany! At last, the key sources from the Holy Roman Empire - laws, treaties, and polemics - are available in English translation. #medievalsky #earlymodern

manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526165893/

The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care? The widespread indifference to the British Library's crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity

Good to see the problems facing our colleagues @britishlibrary.bsky.social being raised here by @hetanshah.bsky.social (of @britishacademy.bsky.social). If this had happened in France it would be considered a national problem to be urgently addressed! www.cityam.com/the-british-...

In association with the @ghilondon.bsky.social - the GHS is pleased to invite papers for the 2026 'Medieval Germany Workshop'

Workshop date: 29 May 2026
Submissions due: 15 February 2026

www.germanhistorysoc...

Looking forward to this next week - a terrific line-up!

Domesday at the IHR - On History IHR Fellow, Chris Lewis, writes about new publication, 'Making Domesday'.

New #OnHistory blog, IHR Fellow Chris Lewis writes about new publication, "Making Domesday: Intelligent Power in Conquered England" by Stephen Baxter, Julia Crick, and C. P. Lewis, and Domesday scholarship in the IHR.
blog.history.ac.uk/2025/10/dome...

Screenshot from the DigiZeitschriften website announcing its closure on 31 December 2025

Sad to see that the DigiZeitschriften is shutting down at the end of this year. I've used this for many years for journals such as Deutsches Archiv... will DA be available anywhere else online? @monumenta.bsky.social

Compulsory team teaching on every module is perhaps the biggest ever threat to the quality of teaching in UK universities.

It causes chaos on the ground for timetabling, ruins course coherence and turns lecturers into permanent supply teachers. It is pedagogically incoherent… 1/

Wider engagement on this disaster-by almost all media, government but also universities themselves-has been self-indicting for the last two years. No one does indeed seem to care about our national library.

Image of front cover of BICS Journal Issue, Orosius Through the Ages

Image of Table of Contents of BICS Special Issue Orosius Through the Ages

The Special Issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Orosius Through the Ages, is out!!

Co-edited with Elisabeth Manzo & Cameron Wachowich, on the boil since 2019, we're so pleased with the final output. Both Dr M. & Dr W. have completed their PhDs since then too!

Local Priests in the Latin West, 900–1050 Cambridge Core - European Studies - Local Priests in the Latin West, 900–1050

Five years, four authors, one book. Out now (fully open access), our new book on local priests in the tenth century 🌟 www.cambridge.org/core/books/l... @jbwaagmeester.bsky.social

I think you can also see this problem in the recent appearance of numerous poli-sci books discovering that the Middle Ages are an interesting topic for European state formation. Jonathan Lyon's comments on this are worth a read: scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/ind...

Agreed. History has an image problem: it's not considered 'scientific' enough, so basically anyone who studies things that happened in the past can 'do' history.

New on History for Atheists: my long awaited and rather long critical review of Alice Roberts' new book *Domination*:
historyforatheists.com/2025/10/revi...

Screenshot of the Viabundus website.

A neat tool I just came across: Viabundus, a digital road map of northern Europe 1350-1650, that lets you calculate contemporary travel routes/times. In 1500, going Amiens → Köln by horse took almost 7 days and 13 toll payments.

#medievalsky

www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/handelsstras...

Thanks Laury - that was a great Friday afternoon read!

Ottonian Notions of imperium and the Byzantine Empire This study re-examines the Ottonian Empire’s self-conception and its relationship with its eastern counterpart in the context of the empire’s re-establishment in the West. Building on earlier Roman, B...

Here comes another open access article, "Ottonian Notions of imperium and the Byzantine Empire", published in "Frühmittelalterliche Studien" 59.1 www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

New offers from big five ‘still too costly’ for UK universities ‘Significant’ number of institutions predicted to drop deals with main scholarly imprints, leaving journal access much reduced

'New proposals by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Sage were sent to universities this week after their initial offers were decisively rejected by institutions in a sector-wide consultation run by Jisc,...negotiating jointly with Universities UK on behalf of universities.' 1/3

I am reading the Labour Education whitepaper and it is absolutely awful on universities. It's going to take a "10-minute read" of an article to set out why. But the "vision" set out in it for HE is frankly horrendous, and is remarkably anti-growth for a government so obsessed with it.