Carin Ruff

Devoutly hoping this is it for this year.

@ihr.bsky.social @ies-sas.bsky.social @justincolson.bsky.social @adamchapman.bsky.social

Feeling more optimistic about having good energy for the first meeting of the course I'm *teaching* on Thursday.

Thanks to everyone for the well wishes.

Feeling significantly better today. I wish I knew what these episodes were, but am disinclined to investigate after so many decades. Anyway, I was alert through the 1st mtg of the course I'm taking on the intellectual foundations of the American Revolution.

Pleasingly meta to find some printed binding waste with a whole page of definitions of the word bind/binding. In a medical work by Leonart Fuchs, printed at Lyons in 1550 & bequeathed to @theulspeccoll.bsky.social in 1591 by Thomas Lorkyn, Regius Professor of Physic. N*.13.49(G).

The St Albans Processional: Music and Scribal Culture at Twelfth Century St Albans - 12/06/2026 19:30:00 Join us as a unique twelfth-century processional from the St Albans scriptorium is brought to life.

Very much looking forward to what will be a lovely way to tie up my time working so closely on such a fantastic MS. There will also be live chant performed by James Preston and Andrew Carwood, including a gorgeous farsed Christmas Epistle.

www.stalbanscathedral.org/Event/the-st...

For St. Chad's Day last year, we looked at the St. Chad Gospels and (downthread) features of Insular Half-uncial. The excellent Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral site is worth exploring: lichfield.ou.edu

The manuscript of the week is RIA MS 23 O 48(b), Liber Fergus Fergusiorum. The 15th century manuscript is of Connacht provenance and from the names of places mentioned, written in Co. Roscommon.

I wish activity trackers counted minutes of extroversion.

I can't figure out when I've had enough human contact to catch anything. Just as likely this is one of those things that just periodically flares up inside me.

I am not quite sick but I am so, so tired, just these last few days. I had an unually long run of good energy, right from late fall through snowcrete and everything, and then CRASH. Inconveniently just in time for the week when I start teaching one course and taking another. Boo hiss.

Updates downthread! 🧵👇

Oh, jeez, there's another one? I don't think I want to know, but I think I should probably be prepared with informed reviews of whatever it is in case my students ask.

That's enough to keep a varied timeline. News will poke through and I can go look up more if I want to, but I'm not seeing an endless stream of bad news and piling-on outrage all the time.

I find it's been hugely helpful to turn off reposts in my following feed (leaving on quote posts), so I don't see the same thing posted over and over again unless somebody has something to add. I also have a large and growing list of muted words.

Last year's thread for St. David's Day included a close look at ruling, catchwords, and corrections in a 14th-c. manuscript. See the thread at the link. #medievalsky

bsky.app/profile/cari...

Those Carthusians, tho...

This makes me crazed.

What is an Academic Field? Some Positive Reflections Hello! I received my PhD in Medieval History in May 2025 and am using my expertise to educate interested people in the Middle Ages and the process of creating history. Subscribing as either a free or ...

Things in the academic world (and elsewhere) are pretty grim currently. I wanted to write something a bit more positive, and personal, about what an academic field can be. Partially inspired by a moment of existential terror when I opened a journal and didn't recognize any of the names. #medievalsky

US-schooled, but mutatis mutandis, none. Very occasionally I asked my dad for help finding sources if I was doing something historical. Once for a paper I asked a friend's dad who was a seminary prof to explain something theological over the phone.

They're all over Colonial Village/North Portal, too. (Weirdly not so much in Shepherd Park.)

Dear Members of the Kansas Legislature, As bishop of the Central States Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I oversee 154 congregations and ministries across Kansas and Missouri. The participants in those ministries represent the wide variety of individuals who live in the Heart of America, and I feel a special responsibility to each of them. Some of my people are transgender, and the actions of the Kansas Legislature over the past few weeks have hurt, demeaned, and targeted this already maligned and vulnerablepopulation. These are precious children of God whom I love. Ultimately, the gospel of Jesus Christ is simply an invitation to love each other as God loves, and I write to tell you that in the passage and defense of SB 244, you have missed the mark in astonishing fashion. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” God announced to the prophet Jeremiah, and through Jeremiah to each of us. You have taken persons God knows and loves and negated their very existence. Every transgender person knows who they are much better than any outside observer (or DMV employee) ever will. For years, the state of Kansas allowed residents to change a gender marker if, after careful consideration, they knew it to be inaccurate. But because the political winds have shifted, members of your body decided to snatch that right away. The state then took the extraordinary measure of writing to some 1700 Kansans and telling them that their identity documents were immediately invalid. I hope you have been watching the anger and ridicule that is raining down upon our state from across the nation and the world because of this cruel and capricious action. I write to express outrage and also to appeal to your sense of decency. Transgender Kansans are not political tokens to be used and discarded. They are human beings, beloved of God. Please do the right thing and rescind this legislation immediately, before any more harm is done to the citizens you have sworn to serve.

"I write to tell you that in the passage and defense of SB 244, you have missed the mark in astonishing fashion...You have taken persons God knows and loves and negated their very existence." ⚓

From the Bishop of the Central States Synod of ELCA.

scontent-iad3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-...

A senior Beagle sitting in a green chair looking at me askance.

Lots of side-eye from Dolly about the smells I bought home.

Preserving the Craft: Baskerville’s typographic legacy lives on as punches go online for first time Hundreds of rare steel punches used to create the original Baskerville typeface have been digitised and made freely available online, allowing unprecedented insight into the work of one of Britain’s m...

Congratulations to my fabulous colleagues on the Small Performances project and the clever people at @camdiglib.bsky.social on launching the Baskerville Punches collection and associated RTI embedded viewer www.lib.cam.ac.uk/stories/bask...

Two beagle mix puppies looking at me, one standing on my leg, more at the edges of the picture.

Today I got to visit the puppies @srfrjulie.bsky.social has fostered from birth! Only a couple managed to be in frame and in focus, but there are LOTS. I am well nibbled.

Me when I'm talking to someone I don't like, thinking that I'm hiding it well.

HAPPENING NOW: Thousands of DC high schools students have walked out to demand ICE OUT of our communities. They’re gathering at the Lincoln Memorial in an incredible show of power and unity. #ICEout #endtheoccupation #stopcooperation

Reasonable attempt! I'd love somebody to make a straightforward handout, free of the long, inscrutable books on liturgy, laying out what all these abbreviated rubrics mean. I am not that person! Somebody must have done one for a course at some point.

Omelia lectionis euisdem, homily on the same lection.