Dr Eleanor Smith

Person dressed as a knight with a trans flag and a cape with a trans flag shield that says “Trans Knights are human Knights”

This absolute icon at Canterbury Pride 🩷🤍🩵

Book cover for "Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain, 1707-1819: True Britons and Celtic Empires". Cover shoes a painting of a Welshman with a gilded leek in his wide-brimmed black hat, warming a (seemingly alcoholic...) drink at a candle flame

My book, "Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain" (or "True Britons and Celtic Empires", if you'd prefer) is now AVAILABLE FOR HARDBACK PREORDER

Your library needs more about bardic antislavery, imperial complicity, and druids with telescopes, no?

boydellandbrewer.com/978183765195...

The text, from the Welsh Law of Hywel Dda, concerns the rights of the bakeress. 🍰

The eighth additional officer of the court (and second of only three female officers), she was entitled to “a cake from every type of flour which was baked” and to protection for “as far as she may throw her spatula”.

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Just got my copy of the most recent issue of the North American Journal of Celtic Studies, which includes my article on Welsh books in the Huntington Library, L.A.

Available to read (with sub) here
muse.jhu.edu/pub/30/artic...

Diolch i’r golygyddion a’r darllenwyr am y cyngor a’r cymorth!

9 square biscuits decorated with illustrations from medieval manuscripts, including Reynard the Fox, a dog, a knight fighting a snail, a peacock, a hedgehog, a bat, and a fish. The set features shades of rich russet red, cobalt blue, gold, brown, turquoise, and green. Some biscuits include small sections of blackletter calligraphy.

One more bookish set for good measure.

These biscuits are inspired by the weird and wonderful world of medieval illustration.

Cambridge University exhibition reveals medieval medical cures A new exhibition shows the bizarre recipes untrained practitioners concocted to help people.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
On now at the Cambridge University Library!

Two copies of the book Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages

Hello friend

www.aup.nl/en/book/9789...

Cartoon with an ogham stone in the foreground with “ogma ⁊ sons ogham carvers our work is cutting edge” on the front and ogham on the right edge. A roundhouse is in the background with three stones piled in front and a small fire visible inside. A fence is behind the roundhouse with a small bird perched on one post and two other birds flying in the distance.

Ogma’s ogham workshop, cutting edge since c. 700

Marginal comment

Marginal notes from past readers are something I miss in ebooks, for all their convenience.

And this is one of the underestimated effects of increasing AI use.

What ChatGPT spews out is mangled out of actual sources, but without any understanding or clarity.

At the same time, it stuffs access to that material because the servers are overburdened.

History of North Wales at risk of being buried by 'unprecedented' plan More than 1,000 people are already backing efforts to reverse the proposal

More than 1,000 people are already backing efforts to reverse the proposal

Museum display recreating a Saxon burial, with a notice reading: For your safety, please do not touch the items in the Saxon burial or attempt to climb into the grave. (Red House Museum, Christchurch)

If M.R. James wrote safety signage

My article on "Old Irish Healing Charms and Protective Spells" is now openly accessible online on the @brepols.net website at:
www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1...

Bob Berkhofer announcing the winner of the 2025 Otto Gründler Book Prize: Rory Naismith. Congratulations @rorynaismith.bsky.social !!

Cover of Memory and Nation

Are you attending @kzooicms.bsky.social this week?

Stop by the Waldo Library today for Katharine K. Olson's paper!

Discover more of Katharine’s writing in her upcoming co-edited title 'Memory and Nation': www.uwp.co.uk/book/memory-...

#MedievalSky #KzooICMS #KZoo2025 #ICMS2025

1/5 Delighted to announce a new collaboration with Kilkenny Mile Museum to digitise the Liber Primus Kilkenniensis, Kilkenny’s oldest civic record. 📜 #LiberPrimus #Digitisation @dias.ie @scs-dias.bsky.social #DIASdiscovers #IrishManuscripts

These posts are getting more and more belated on my part, but tomorrow I'm speaking at the ASNC Research Seminar at 5 pm! If you're in the area, come by to see a lot of examples of medieval handwriting and a lot of speculation about them by me.

Sagas and Sovereignty in Kalaallit Nunaat, Grænland, and Red, White, and Blueland by Basil Arnould Price

New work from me in The Sundial, all about Greenland and imperial fantasies, old and new.

to mark trans history week, I want to showcase some of the best recent work that's been published in medieval and early modern trans studies; most of it is open access, so you can freely download and read it without access to an institutional library. 🏳️‍⚧️🧵

Today marks the start of #TransHistoryWeek, a new initiative by @wearequeeraf.com 🏳️‍🌈

This year we've launched our new QUEER & TRANS HISTORIES series - and we want your proposals!

Ed. by Matt Cook, Jennifer V Evans & @psimonetto.bsky.social

#TransRights #TransHistories

I’m mid cleaning this up again after a small technical glitch and close to 2000 signatures from just UK academics! Would be great to get over that line before it’s published…

This strikes me as a very clear examination of the situation we’re in. I hope people know that it is also very evident to students within the system!

Why the weasel testicles? Cambridge show explains medieval medicine Exhibition aims to help visitors get inside the minds that thought mercury and roasted apples would cure lice

"Curious Cures, opening on Saturday at Cambridge University Library, is the culmination of a project to digitise and catalogue more than 180 manuscripts, mostly dating from the 14th or 15th centuries, that contain recipes for medical treatments ..." #MedievalSky

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Centre-field of a fifteenth-century retable featuring the life of Mary Magdalen. The centre-field image depicts the Magdalen seated, dressed in a long red robe over a green kirtle. Her auburn hair flows in rivulets down her shoulders. She wears a white turban-like headgear with a jewel in front. In her right hand she is holding up the alabaster jar that is her main attribute - held between thumb and index finger - and her left hand is pressing a book against her left knee. The book has a red cover and the cover is kept together with a clasp. She looks angrily into the air.

Mary Magdalen is so done with your shit.

[Anonymous Flemish-Spanish artist; Museo de Salamanca]

A black and white illustration of the a bearded figure with animal-like ears and horns, with rings decorating the horns, and bearing the inscription 'CERNVNNOS'

In our new research blog, @rhyskamjones.bsky.social tells the story of how Thomas Pennant brought Horned Gods to Welsh Hillsides

Read on for witchcraft, Reformation martyrdom, and the enlightenment's unintended consequences

curioustravellers.ac.uk/horned-gods-...

"A Female Parish Clerk?!" Until the 20thC parish clerks and churchwardens were almost always men. But a few women broke with that convention, like Mary Flint, female parish clerk of Caldecote, Herts

In 2022 I wrote about 'female parish clerks' from the late 1700s to the early 1900s for @friendlesschurches.bsky.social.
While some saw it as 'unseemly and unbecoming to appoint a female to such an office', many of these women were highly respected in their local communities. #WomensHistoryMonth

Image of a Welsh poem in the bottom margin of NLW, Peniarth MS 1, fol. 28r. A translation of the poem below this reads: “May the highest lord, lord with a glimmering golden sword/ protect our goods for a short while and protect our people/ against false English and Irish and against the wrath of butchers/ and against a clamour and enchantment and against wolves and thieves/ against that one yonder who is evil, against rabid dogs/ against sheet lightning and thunder and against bad crwth-players/ and against the barren darkness of the Devil and against the poetry of Wiliam Siôn”

A poem composed early in the 16th century in a margin of the Black Book of Carmarthen begs God for protection from a series of enemies, including the English and the Irish, but the worst of all is saved for last: kerdd Wiliam Sion ‘the poetry of Wiliam Siôn’

#WorldPoetryDay

Read a nice little blog on the Bonnacon today so thought I’d share.
If you have never before heard of this mythical creature who attacked with its farts and poo then…enjoy

blogs.getty.edu/iris/the-bon...

Never Trust Any Work of History Over the Age of Fifty!: Or, Please Stop Citing Edward Gibbon to Try to Win Arguments on the Internet When I first began marking undergraduate essays, I noticed a curious phenomenon in the footnotes. In place of the cutting-edge reading list that I had painstakingly assembled, all accessible either…

This week on the blog, I court controversy by suggesting that our understanding of history has in fact improved over the decades #history #academia

salutemmundo.wordpress.com/2025/03/20/n...

I could not be more proud that my article on Elizabeth Elstob, precarity, scholarship, teaching, women's time, and having toast for dinner has now been published in this special issue on 'Precarity.' This one was personal and meant a lot to me.
academic.oup.com/english/arti...