Ruth Brown

Recent conservation work & a new exhibition at Chantilly has a elicited a wave of new scholarship on the Très Riches Heures - just in time for writing my new 1st yr lectures! A perfect case study for investigating a multiplicity of identities & society in France c.1416 ✨Some light reading awaits!✨☺️📖

A bridge with repairs in concrete marked out with red arrows

The unimpacted side of the bridge with original stone facade

The repaired side of the bridge, with later concrete piers inserted to repair the wartime damage

Some conflict archaeology spotted on our Far Horizons archaeology tour. Repairs to the bridge at the W.B. Yeats home of Thoor Ballylee, Galway, carried out after it was blown by Anti-Treaty forces during the Civil War. They preserve a "ghost" of that wartime damage (marked with red arrows).

Late Medieval Shipboard Artillery on a Northern European Carvel: Gribshunden (1495) We present the artillery of a well-preserved late medieval Danish-Norwegian carvel warship, Gribshunden. Probably built in the Netherlands in 1484, the ship served King Hans until sinking in June 1...

Online article about the #artillery aboard the #Gribshunden www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Battle of Lepanto, October 1571. Of course it all happened in neat rows, like any good battle. As envisioned by Giorgio Vasari in the Sala Regia, Vatican. It's his birthday.

The glimmer of gold, arms, and armor. Very imperial still-life, mid-1640s, by young Willem Kalf. He died on this day in 1693.

York Museums Trust CC BY-SA 4.0

Cover of a book entitled "Gendered Reputations and Aristocratic Partnership: Re-Presenting the Breton Civil War from the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries" by Erika Graham-Goering, published by Arc Humanities Press in the series Gender and Power in the Premodern World. The cover image has a medieval manuscript illustration with a nobleman and noblewoman side-by-side on the left, receiving the salutes of a crowd of fancily-dressed people, all in fifteenth-century fashion.

My new minigraph on gender, joint leadership, and the historiographical invention of a war can now be freely downloaded here! library.oapen.org/handle/20.50...

Cataloguing the Campbell charters A new project is underway to examine an important collection of charters and rolls housed at the British Library. The Campbell charters are being catalogued as part of the British Library’s Hidden Col...

A post on my latest cataloguing project: the Campbell Charters, which include a collection of grants from Scotland's kings and a roll for calculating dice probabilities. #medievalsky

blogs.bl.uk/digitisedman...

A charter with two seals and featuring the autograph signatures of Henry VIII, Thomas Wolsey and John Daunce.

In June 1513, Henry VIII launched an invasion of France, attempting to reclaim lost English lands.

Today's blogpost by @rorymaclellan.bsky.social looks at three documents which shine a light on the preparations for this campaign and the supply of armour for Henry's troops.

t.co/rYaeYw6Jbq

for a drink and a snack.
Opening hours:
- Until 30 September: Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm
- 1 Oct – 31 March: Wednesday to Sunday, 10:30am to 2:30pm
Image Pontefract Castle (Wakefield Museums and Castles) @wflibraries.bsky.social @wfdhistsoc.bsky.social @wakefieldmuseums.bsky.social

Warship wrecked in 1703 near Kent is more complete than expected - BBC News Archaeologists say the wreck site "remains high risk" as moving sand exposes the wooden vessel.

#ProtectedWreck Northumberland makes the News again. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... #NavalHistory #Archaeology

British warship sunk in 1703 storm gives up its secrets three centuries on Archaeologists in race to study HMS Northumberland as shifting sands expose part of well-preserved wreck

British warship sunk in 1703 storm gives up its secrets three centuries on www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

From Finnish Shores: A Journey into Irish-American History with Damian Shiels In his third appearance on Irish Stew , historian Dr. Damian Shiels joins Martin Nutty for a wide-ranging and thought-provoking conversation. Now living in Finland,…

It’s been 3 years since we last hosted Damian Shiels and much has changed:

- New country: Finland
- New podcast: Transatlantic
- New book: Green & Blue

On all major #podcast platforms or at the link 👇

www.irishstewpodcast.com/from-finnish...

#IrishHistory #IrishAmerica #SpéirGhorm

The indigenous versus foreign origins of West Africa’s pre-colonial architecture. Architecture is an aspect of culture that mediates between man and his environment, and it has been one of the first of the arts to adopt new materials and techniques.

“Previous research on West African architecture often stressed the foreign influences of its more complex forms,
But recent studies have shown that West African construction styles were products of endogenous developments unique to the region.”
www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-indege...

Osbert Goldhawk- I can just see Sean Bean in the new Netflix series...

Carpaccio?

Victorian cannon gets new lease of life at historic site A Victorian cannon used as a bollard to moor ships at Portland Port has been given a new lease of life in the restoration of a historic site.

#Portland: Good lord- a 64 pd RML re-used as a mooring post…New life in a fort now! Worth going through all three pictures www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/2533776...

Help us celebrate Yorkshire Day and step back in time this Friday, 1 August 2025, at 12.30pm, as we discover the secrets of one of Yorkshire’s most fascinating market towns. Join us for a lively stroll through Pontefract. A formidable castle,

The Cloisters Collection, 1932

Roundel with Saint Barbara or Saint Catherine Thrown into Prison https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471072

In case anyone is interested, the national tour of the relics of St Columba, St Andrew and St Margaret of Scotland arrives at St Mary's, Ipswich on Wednesday. Mass 7pm. They move on to Clacton on Thursday.

Here's St Margaret and St Andrew by Harry Clarke, 1923, in Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow.

The blackbirds beat me to the first ripe fig- but too high for me anyway, but at least there are plums for our visitors breakfast tomorrow.

I was brought up in a tenement- there was a drying green and each of the 6 flats was allocated a day to use it.

Why an archbishop's severed head is stored in a church in Suffolk The skull of Simon of Sudbury is on display in a church more than 600 years after his savage death.

The head of Simon of Sudbury, kept at St. Gregory's Church, Sudbury, Suffolk. Sudbury who was Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered in the Peasants Revolt in 1381. 👇
BBC News - Why an archbishop's severed head is stored in a church in Suffolk - BBC News
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Have you ever had a dream about Queen Victoria? Making a
@BBCRadio4 doc about the life of her mind and her life in our minds. If she inhabits your unconscious, let me know.

Guest Post: Othon and the Templars by John Marshall Guest Post: John Marshall looks into the links between Othon de Grandson, Edward I's loyal knight, and the Knights Templar

Guest Post: John Marshall highlights the links between Edward I's loyal knight, Othon de Grandson, and the Knights Templar

With all these heatwaves, and now the downpours, I have no idea when anything here will ripen, but at least the plums are beginning to colour up.

And a gunner is more likely to be firing cannon than a handgun

Yes- and it looks more like a trunnion sticking up than a firing mechanism.

I think that's a cannon on a carriage rather than a musket.

English village fete, 1560s-style. A lot less festive than Flemish ones, if I may say so! Am sure Joris Hoefnagel of Antwerp was thinking the same when he painted this. Today is his day.