Helen McKee

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In the tenth century a charm to control a bee swarm was added, upside down, in the margin of an earlier mss. It's one of the earliest Old High German texts. Tim Hertogh argues in recent article it was intended as an amulet to cut out & place in a hive - explaining the margins excised elsewhere.👇

a shot of a god botherer in a car, next to him on the passenger seat is a skull in an ornate box

'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.'
Photograph by Daniel Ibanez

Cat paw print in a red brick wall.

I’ve posted this before but the light was perfect today- a little Victorian cat paw in a brick at the front of the old Norfolk & Norwich Hospital. As this is on the front-facing corner of the main gates, the bricklayer quite clearly put it there on purpose, at a height where children would spot it.

On this date in 1892, #LucyMBoston was born.

Thank you, Lucy

My "I Will Trust In The Darkness" print against a starry photograph background - the print shows a painting of small wooden sail boat with a red Celtic cross on a white sail travelling into the horizon on a starry night. #SpéirGorm #SpéirGhorm #BlueskyArt #Art #Ireland #TraditionalArt #HandDrawn

An illustrated line from the Prayer Of St. Brendan The Navigator, who is said to have travelled from County Kerry in Ireland to America a thousand years before Columbus made his journey. Trust in the darkness. 🌌

Prints available here: www.ciaraioch.com/artprints/p/...

Bright starry sky at 6am and a robin singing in the garden 🐦✨ #TinyJoys

Meeting Room Royal Irish Aacademy, © KarenRIA - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76382878

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Codices Eximii Hibernenses

When he was Ollamh na Nua-Ghaeilge at @maynoothuniversity.ie, Ruairí Ó hUiginn initiated a conference series dedicated to the most important medieval and early modern manuscripts in the collection of the Royal Irish Academy (@ria.ie @rialibrary.bsky.social).
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cover of Deborah Hayden and Paul Russell (eds.), Grammatica, Gramadach and Gramadeg: Vernacular Grammar and Grammarians in Medieval Ireland and Wales [= Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 125], Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2016.

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Medical learning

Having originally studied the native grammatical tradition of medieval Ireland, Prof Deborah Hayden became intrigued by the overlap of grammar with medical learning in medieval Irish manuscripts. After joining the Department of Early Irish in 2015, Deborah received a @ria.ie…
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Egham Band Youth Project Christmas Concert 2025 Youth Brass Christmas Concert Starring St Jude's Year 4 Manorcroft Year 4 Thorpe Year 4 featuring EYB, ETB, SJB, TB, MB and The Egham Band Monday 8th December 7:30pm Free Entry St John's Church, Egham, TW20 gHL

🎺🎄 Fabulous evening at the Egham Youth Brass Project Xmas concert. The wonderful people who run this project give up so much time to introduce primary school kids to music, and the results are joyful!

We’re nominated for Research Project of the Year! 🎉 Vote for Words on the Wave and help us celebrate Ireland’s medieval heritage: 👉 https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/News/Vote-for-the-research-project-of-the-year #VoteNow #IrishHistory

We’re nominated for Research Project of the Year! 🎉
Vote for Words on the Wave and help us celebrate Ireland’s medieval heritage:
👉 www.museum.ie/en-IE/News/V...
#MedievalIreland #IrishArchaeology

A great crowd attending the Early Irish Research Seminar, 4 December 2025 © David Stifter.

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Research seminars and conferences

Dr Elizabeth Boyle established a series of three research seminars every semester in the Department of Early Irish as a forum for scholarly discourse and outreach in 2014. Since then, she and other colleagues have invited 66 scholars to speak in this series.
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Photo of a concert programme including Hark the Herald Angels Sing (for the audience to sing along with!). Plate with a mince pie in the foreground.

#Harkageddon — at the Egham Band Christmas concert, Addlestone Community Centre 🎄🎺

manuscript of the Annals of Ulster, TCD MS 1282 (H. 1. 8) f. 31v ©TCD

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Annals and Law

Dr Fangzhe Qiu worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the ChronHib project from 2015–20. His task was the digitisation of the Annals of Ulster, i.e., adding the annalistic entries for the years 554–950 into the CorPH database and analysing the word forms grammatically.
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Introduction to Handwriting in England c. 700-1700 Introduction to Handwriting in England c. 700-1700

Do you or your students work with English manuscripts? We have a summer school course for you👇 Book now for June 2026 in person in London. #MedievalSky #RenaissanceSky 📖✏️ #palaeography

ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...

IES: LIPS & LRBS Winter School | 2026

Can’t get to London for summer school? In Jan we are running online courses. Forget the cold by exploring medieval manuscripts. Classes are small so book now! 👇
@ies-sas.bsky.social @warburginstitute.bsky.social @senatehouselib.bsky.social @ihr.bsky.social #MedievalSky
ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

Unlocking the Islamic Literary Heritage: An Intensive Practical Introduction to Arabic Manuscripts Unlocking the Islamic Literary Heritage: An Intensive Practical Introduction to Arabic Manuscripts

New for 2026, we’re running an intensive short course on Arabic manuscripts! Ideal for those wanting to get to grips with Arabic sources. In person, in London. 📖👇 @ies-sas.bsky.social @soasuni.bsky.social @soaslibrary.bsky.social

ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...

Introduction to Palaeography and Manuscript Studies This course introduces students to key skills for the study of medieval manuscripts, from the making of parchment to reading text and imagery

We’ll be running our introduction to manuscript studies again in June 2026. There’s an early bird discount if you book this month, but if students are interested please encourage them to book early as this course has limited places 👇 📚📖✏️💻
ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...

logo of the ChronHib project (Chronologicon Hibernicum – A Probabilistic Chronological Framework for Dating Early Irish Language Developments and Literature (H2020 ERC-CoG-2014 Project 647351).

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ChronHib

2015 was a turning point for me and the Department of Early Irish. After years of applying, with the invaluable support of @muresearch.bsky.social, I was awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (@erc.europa.eu) for Chronologicum Hibernicum (ChronHib); full title…
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Agree — thin card is ideal. I like having a range of different designs available (my two favourite classes of bookmarks are the Manderley ones and little paper ones from Battersea with photographs of cats).

Love love LOVE the bookmarks! Can’t have too many bookmarks!

The St Gall Priscian Glosses database, © Pádraic Moran, Rijcklof Hofman, Bernhard Baier 2023.

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Glosses, glosses, parallel glosses…

Dr Bernhard Bauer’s academic career has been very diverse. After an MPhil. in Vienna, editing Old Breton glosses, while simultaneously creating a lexical database of the St Gall glosses (www.stgallpriscian.ie/forms), he first came to Maynooth in 2012/3…
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Daniel Watson, Philosophy in Early Medieval Ireland: Nature, Hierarchy and Inspiration, PhD thesis, Maynooth 2018.

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PhDs

Elizabeth Boyle’s research has attracted many talented postgraduate students to do their PhDs in Maynooth. Daniel Watson (Canada) wrote an extensive study of “Philosophy in Early Medieval Ireland”. Daniel was a Hume Scholar at @maynoothuniversity.ie; after graduating in 2019, his PhD…
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Introduction to Making Medieval Manuscripts (Practice Based) This course introduces students to the complicated and messy processes of production through which pre-modern manuscripts were created

Booking is now open for Making Medieval Manuscripts! A practice-based course where we make ink, cut quills, illuminate, make pigments and bookbind, using #medieval techniques and materials. We also explore early medieval art. No experience necessary! #bookhistory ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...

Canterbury in Winter by Ernest Uden.

Tabby cat by Rachel Stribbling.

Bookshop by William Oxer

The Second Window. Once upon a time, there was a green-eyed Tabby Cat who ran a bookshop by the Christ Church gate of Canterbury Cathedral. It was a marvellous place, four stories high, with treasures on every shelf & free buttered toast, plum cake & hot sweet tea for all who visited.

© Royal Irish Academy, Irish Script on Screen, RIA MS 23 N 10, p. 90, a Middle Irish poem on idolatry.

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Church history and Christian learning

In 2013, Dr Elizabeth Boyle joined the Department of Early Irish. One of her chief interests is the religious, cultural and literary history of early medieval Ireland (7ᵗʰ–12ᵗʰ centuries), that is the homilies, law, theological and philosophical texts,…
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Are you bored of advent calendars yet? I hope not, because I'll be highlighting 25 of the amazing medieval manuscripts added to Digital Bodleian @bodleian.ox.ac.uk this year. #DigiBodAdvent

As a little treat for you, here's an #ArabicBible Advent calendar 🧵. Every day I'll post a verse from the Christmas story from one of the oldest Arabic Gospel lectionaries, Sinai ar. 71, dated 897 CE (and a few other texts in between).

The First Window. It is Skábma, Polar Night, and in the darkness, we see a flicker of light inside a lávvu tent, settled on the banks of the frozen river Njávdámjohka. The lávvu belongs to the Newcomer, his fur as white as the drifts of snow, his eyes the colour of Baltic resin. He is singing a litany, a mapping of the vast Arctic skies. As the blue smoke rises, he calls the names of every star. And he watches those ancient pierce-lights trace the Eternal hunt, and the race of the reindeer calves and the flight of a million birds, and so absorbed is he, that fierce red sparks from the fire singe his tail and he turns and jumps and runs outside, and the sky is caught and illuminated with the fox-fire of another year, of every year and of no years at all.

#OldFoxAdventCalendar