Duncan Hardy

I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.

Front cover of Charles West's Europe in the Eleventh Century

Chapeau to @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social for his wonderful new book which has just arrived, an amazingly global and ecumenical volume, in all senses! Beautifully produced by OUP (and before publication day!?).

A spur to others!

Cambridge University, Assistant Professor in Medieval German Studies | MEMOs Medieval German Studies, Cambridge University (UK)

Cambridge University, Assistant Professor in Medieval German Studies:

memorients.com/news/cambrid...

Give it a few years 😊 Our scholarly conversations play out at glacial pace!

In fact, if you're lucky enough to get to the stage of writing Book 2, you feel more intellectually generous towards the scholars (some long dead!) with whom you were in - sometimes excessively critical - conversation in Book 1 (as it's all about proving yourself, while Book 2 can be more relaxed).

Agree. In the best case, it's even a bit like having a reasonable conversation with other scholars who tried to have a reasonable conversation with the old self that was doing the screaming.

Manuscript image of a cannon-master (Buchsenmeister) firing a bombard at a building, while in the upper left a handheld firearm is set off by an armoured foot soldier.

By the mid-fifteenth century, gunpowder weapons (both bombards and arquebuses) were so widespread in German-speaking Europe that they might be casually illustrated in a manuscript on completely unrelated topics.

Hans Vintler, Blumen der Tugend (1469). Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, Chart A 594.

I too prefer the text over the video, and over the podcast for that matter. I can read much faster than I can watch or listen. But then I'm a 20th-century fossil in an increasingly post-literate culture.

I’m torn, because on the one hand this could finally end enormous gen ed classes full of students who see them as a box checking exercise and make no effort to learn anything. On the other hand, those gen ed classes are often the final defense against the full elimination of humanities departments.

Given how many students are blatantly having AI LLMs write their essays for them, it will also complete the transformation of the corporate university into a pointless farce: AI-written essays will be graded by AI feedback generators, and humans can 100% avoid any of that pesky intellectual effort.

P.S. If you re-read my post, I was literally saying that it was *never* the case that "Excellent" people always found jobs.

I put it in quotation marks for a reason 😉 And I didn't intend to diminish the difficulty in the 70s and 80s, when many fantastic scholars couldn't find permanent posts. It is statistically undeniable, though, that the 1960s and again the 1990s were an easier time for humanities PhDs.

This was never true, even in the "golden age" of the mid- to late twentieth century. The fact that anyone could assert this after almost two decades of a non-existent academic job "market" in the wake of the global financial crisis beggars belief.

[...] For if the Turks could be subdued beneath the yoke of Christendom merely by the Pope’s tithes, then long ago they would have been vanquished without sword or spear. At last Germany shows sense, sending back the apostolic legate with an empty stomach."

(Ioannes Brassicanus, 1519)

O si viveret Maximilianus. Tam promiscua sese instruxisset opera, ut actum esset iam de crudo Turcarum collo. Nam si Romani pontificis decimationibus sub christianismi iugum Turcae mitti possent, iamdudum essent sine gladio et hasta devicti. Germania tandem sapit vacuo ventre legatum remittens apostolicum.

How to reconcile crusading and anticlerical sentiments in one humanist funeral oration:

"Oh, if only Maximilian were still alive! He would have mustered such wide-ranging efforts that it would already be over with the rough neck of the Turks. [...]

(I understand you wouldn't be visiting as a tourist, but the point is that immigration officers in Florida are keen not to put people off visiting - visitors are the lifeblood of the state.)

I'm a UK citizen living in Florida. What's happening is frightening, but it's worth keeping in mind that hundreds of thousands of non-US citizens enter the US every day without any problems. I've seen huge queues of British people being waved through at Orlando airport this year (FL likes tourists).

Honestly, neither is especially common. I get the sense that they're more a shorthand used in secondary sources than a popular medieval concept.

"Christianitas" or "res publica Christiana" (Christendom) is what I mostly see in my (late medieval) sources.

"We have a $50 million deficit [created by deliberate higher ed budget cuts and executive mismanagement] and salaries are our biggest expense, so we have no choice but to lay off faculty."

-> *proceeds to lay off dozens of humanists on $70k and hire dozens of engineers on $250k*

100% this. The only silver lining to having an overwhelming workload and far too many students per faculty is that the alternative is being a university where enrollment is dropping, which is now a certain prelude to the wholesale axing of humanities departments and tenured faculty.

The title of this book is 419 words long. Authors, become ungovernable.

#CallforApplications 📣

The GHIL awards a number of #scholarships to #postgraduate students, Habilitanden and #postdocs at German universities to enable them to carry out research in Britain. Scholarships are generally awarded for a period of up to three months. 📜
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That was a frightening time to be living in East-Central Florida. We were very fortunate that it veered north in the end. The images from Abaco were heartbreaking.

My job now is to go school to school, university to university trying to help them sort through the challenge of teaching in a world with AI and the first thing I recommend to improve the teaching of writing is cut the number of students per instructor in half. No one is going to do that, though.

Looking forward to teaching a short course on digital approaches to (medieval) history in the autumn. Does anyone have any favourite things they'd recommend the students read?

All of this is not to say that transcription software can't be useful, but that you actually need to know something about the context in which a document is produced. This is what historians specialize in. 9/?

Me holding my copy of Eric Marshall White's book, "Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books"

For anyone interested in a just-the-documents-and-books focused study of Johannes Gutenberg, this new biography by Eric Marshall White for the Reaktion's "Medieval Lives" series is very good: bookshop.org/p/books/joha... #medievalsky #BookHistory

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview.
cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

Yes! Humanities majors get jobs!

Which is quite separate from humanities *departments* getting funding. We're under-funded for ideological reasons, alongside mistaken cultural assumptions about employability.

But our majors get jobs! At a high rate! History is a *good* major, so is Classics!