Dr. Erika Graham-Goering

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

Whatever we calculate, the future in Iran now looks like Iraq or Libya, Bibi’s dream.

It’s so hard to imagine Iran, a modern built up country w huge dense cities, amazing architecture, great bookshops, trendy cafes & vibrant people, reduced to a Hollywood-movie “rubbles & ruins” war-torn country.

Palaeojackalope.

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

It's raining, which means it's officially the advent of slipping season here in Oslo—the wonderful few weeks where trying to get to work involves heavy-duty shoe spikes and every hill* means taking your life into your hands 🥳

*we have a lot of hills

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.

It does not.

It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.

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Fun game for the history nerds! Note that you’ll need to specify CE or BCE sometimes. I got within twenty years for nine out of ten but was out by a century for the other which I’m feeling slightly sheepish about.

when-was-this-war.web.app

I've had student name pairs before, it's such a nightmare 😂 (especially when I've had to figure out which one of them didn't submit an assignment...)

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names | Kalzumeus Software Classic essay about how software routinely bumbles human names.

This was an entertaining read from the perspective of both a historian doing quantitative work on people and a person who has lived in multiple countries!

It’s so common to come across the assertion that books were luxury objects exclusively for the elite in the Middle Ages that I want to guest curate a massive exhibition called “Meh-nuscripts: Books for the Many,” which features just workaday or unremarkable objects.

My general feeling is that every summary tool shortcuts the library shelf. In grad school there were few things I adored more than finding a book on the shelf bc I inevitably found six or seven other books on proximate shelves that I didn’t even know I needed! Process is the point!

Is it possible to write meaningful multiple-choice questions for university-level history? And if so, can anyone point me towards some good examples?

In terms of material objects, my petty research interests would very much like to have the seal of Duchess Jeanne of Brittany on her act of 29 November 1352 (because I think it was the first time she used a new design but I can't prove it!)

Duke Charles of Brittany learned that the enemy had captured the castle with his archives, and reportedly gave thanks to God for all he sends. Never have I so vehemently disagreed with someone I study 🤬

(On a documentary front, I do also long for the records of homages from the seneschalsy of Toulouse in 1389, for which we have only brief summaries...)

Oh noooo it's the worst when we can pinpoint what happened to a document! That would be a fantastic source to have for sure!

See it's so hard to pick just one 😂 (I'll be curious how many of these end up being "the parts we don't have" vs "thing that's entirely gone"!)

It's more of a challenge to assess what he was doing differently with this version when, basically, we don't know how the stories end!

A good question! Mainly because having half the text is almost more frustrating than having none of it 😂 But specifically, this version of the chronicle is rather radically rewritten compared to Froissart's earlier versions, so I really want to know what other changes he made in the later parts.

Verso manuscript page, densely written in a single block of text in a fifteenth-century hand; the watermark of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana overlies the image

If you could get back any one historical source that didn't make it (but which we know existed), what would it be?

I'm plumping for the second half of Book I of Froissart's Rome manuscript (here's the last folio of the first half), though there are several competitors on my wishlist

these have been good years for medievalists, first wondering if the pope will excommunicate the emperor and now watching the king have his brother locked up

Some people complain about their endless TBR pile, I'm more worried about my endless TBW pile, aka the growing list of pieces it would be super-fun to write except I have no time 😅

Your reminder that "prompts" are what you're giving a chatbot, not "instructions", because you're just pointing it in a certain direction and have no way at all of knowing what it's doing in its black box. (This is why they cannot be used in research because they have no verifiable methodology.)

Appel à contributions : French History, numéro spécial Les Valois (1328–1589) : Gouverner la France entre Moyen Âge et modernité
Date limite des propositions : 30 avril 2026

academic.oup.com/fh/pages/cal...

Who is afraid of the duc de Guise? Henri III and the beginning of the noble branch of the Catholic League in 1585 Abstract. In March 1585, the creation of the noble branch of the Catholic League and the Guise call to arms were prepared so secretly that Henri III was ta

Good morning! Have you seen our *brand new* issue? Featuring…

Michel de Waele on Henri III and the Catholic League

doi.org/10.1093/fh/c...

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Never got to meet her, sadly :/ (I did get to meet Peggy Brown, so half the classic team, at least!)

Excellent 😁 Take *that*, feudal pyramid!

An graph of an extremely tangled network of relationships drawn in pencil, the details don't really matter and are mostly illegible!

and here's how I drew the power relationships between the lords in just *one* set of villages 😂 I recognized a *ton* of the patterns you're asking about, though (patronage, networks, grace, justice, and legitimacy, etc.), so yes, it's a good way to think about how it worked even in earlier contexts!

and instead (as Ada's said here) as a whole range of practices that never really stood still. I work on the period after people like Reynolds say feudal relationships (used even in just the political sense) might have started to be codified,