Nicholas Scott Baker

There are only three Star Wars films

Transkribus is the most popular tools for automatic text recognition of historical documents. By watching this webinar recording, you will learn how to upload documents to Transkribus, perform… Transkribus Webinar for Beginners (English)

Did you miss our beginners' webinar last week? The complete recording of our step-by-step introduction to Transkribus is now available on YouTube 👇

3 books on a shelf: Reformation in the Low Countries in English, Dutch and French

I'm very pleased to have all three versions of my book now out.
#reformationinthelowcountries

Cover of the book Trust and Mistrust in Premodern Europe and the Mediterranean, edited by Annabel Laura Hancock and Ian Forrest.

Just published from ARC Humanities Press: Trust and Mistrust in Premodern Europe and the Mediterranean.
Contributions range from 13th c. Tunis to my own contribution on "Trust and Time in Sixteenth-Century Italian Mediterranean Commerce," and include two great conceptual essays by the editors.

Cover of the book Trust and Mistrust in Premodern Europe and the Mediterranean, edited by Annabel Laura Hancock and Ian Forrest.

Just published from ARC Humanities Press: Trust and Mistrust in Premodern Europe and the Mediterranean.
Contributions range from 13th c. Tunis to my own contribution on "Trust and Time in Sixteenth-Century Italian Mediterranean Commerce," and include two great conceptual essays by the editors.

Small Worlds, Big Worlds: Medieval Mediterranean Perspectives | Mary Jaharis Center

CfP: Small Worlds, Big Worlds: Medieval Mediterranean Perspectives, Ninth International Conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, Instituto de Estudos Medievais (IEM) – NOVA, FCSH, Lisbon, June 22–26, 2026 maryjahariscenter.org/blog/small-w...

We are awarding FIVE tuition scholarships to RSA members who wish to attend the 2026 Digital Humanities Summer Institute on the campus of the Université de Montréal. Apply by November 19, 2025! www.rsa.org/news/712947/... #RenTwitter #earlymodern #scholarship #digitalhumanities

Italy 1200-1700 Seminar

On Thursday, 30 Oct 2025, 5:30pm London time (1:30pm New York/6:30pm Brussels), Alex Lee (NYU London) will speak about ‘Disability and Community: Healing Miracles and the Bianchi of 1399’.
Free! Online-via Zoom & IHR Senate House, London
To register: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Our jam-packed programme is ready to go! Keep reading for more ⬇️

Our summer 2025 volume has been published open access at doi.org/10.1553/medi...

Books. No cookie preferences. No cookies. No GDPR. No pop ups. No bots. No floating videos. No AI. No ads. No trackers. No misinformation. No fascist techbros. No distracting animations. No paywalls. No influencers. How good are these things? Books are frickin awesome

Head to "that Frankenstein place" on the hill. What could possibly go wrong?

Roman soldier's cavalry FACE MASK dating back 1,800 years is uncovered in Turkey, confirming the existence of the Roman Empire in the region By lan Randall For Mailonline 12:29 23 Nov 2021, updated 13:06 23 Nov 2021

I still think about this as one of the worst history headlines ever written—and show it to students to explore archaeology journalism. As if … thousands of years of writing and archaeology didn’t confirm that Asia Minor was, like, Roman at one point.

Renaissance Skin Book Launch — CEMS KCL Blog Book launch for Prof. Evelyn Welch's Renaissance Skin, hosted by King's Centre for Early Modern Studies.

Book launch October 23rd!

Join CEMS for the launch of Prof. @evelynwelch.bsky.social's Renaissance Skin. We'll be gathering in King's History department. Comments from Dr. @historyelaine.bsky.social and Dr. Paolo Savoia. Chaired by Dr. @hsmurphy.bsky.social.

kingsearlymodern.co.uk/events/renai...

The Black Italian Renaissance - Screening & Discussion Screening of the film The Black Italian Renaissance and discussion with Angelica Pesarini (Toronto), Kate Lowe (Warburg) and Francesca Priori (Milan)

The Black Italian Renaissance is a critically acclaimed documentary that examines the presence of Black people in the Italian Renaissance and their contribution to its development and significance.

Join us for a screening & discussion: warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

The Role of Images in Early Modern Botany This seminar brings together two experts on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plants. Zooming in on the dilemma of visualizing plants (or not), and how images could become part of epistemic methods w...

Join us in Rome or online for a seminar on plant illustrations on 6 November! 🪴🌻🌿

Through images of mandrakes and ferns, @fabribald.bsky.social and I will be discussing issues in the role of images in early modern botany.

www.biblhertz.it/events/43483...

Book cover in with hot pink background, title reversed out of lavender block. At top center is an early modern botanical drawing of two bulb plants.

Epistemic Practices and Plant Classification in Premodern European Botanical Knowledge: An Interdisciplinary Treatment
Edited By @fabribald.bsky.social

is now available in the new warehouse -
www.routledge.com/Epistemic-Pr...

The ebook is on sale for US $42.74

Netflix may have gone a bit far in its promo if the new series. But I’m glad to learn there’s a new series coming!

I love a good heist film (Hudson Hawk is my guilty secret!), and I agree the reality here seems far more prosaic. But I was still imagining the film in my head when I read the news this morning.

‘Decision to do this secretly is surprising’: NGV returns painting lost in Nazi era to Jewish family The museum has declined to answer key questions about the decision to return the artwork, prompting the New York-based researcher who uncovered the story to challenge the NGV’s handling of the case

Good see the NGV doing the right thing again.
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Mapping from Mexico: New Narratives for the History of Cartography

Today, free online registration from the Newberry in Chicago

When Knowledge is Free, What are Professors For? Higher Education Must Stop Competing with AI on Information and Start Teaching What Machines Can’t Do

I mean the "premium skills" for "an AI-saturated world"--"verification of sources, contextual decision-making, ethical reasoning under ambiguity, and accountability for real-world outcomes"--sound like what a liberal-arts education has always focused on.
www.forbes.com/sites/shanno...

When Knowledge is Free, What are Professors For? Higher Education Must Stop Competing with AI on Information and Start Teaching What Machines Can’t Do

This is not as dire as some make it out to be. But it does seem fundamentally to misunderstand university teaching. I don't think anyone actually teaching has seen it as content delivery for decades, if ever. University teaching has always been applied teaching.
www.forbes.com/sites/shanno...

Cover of Gregorio Dati, La Sfera/The Globe. Cosmology, Science, and Geography in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean, ed. Carrie Beneš, Laura Ingallinella, Laura Morreale, Caterina Agostini, Winston Black, Elena Brizio, and Monica Keene. It shows a fifteenth-century manuscript diagram of the earth surrounded by the four elements and the moon, rendered in brilliant blues, reds, and greens.

New book! So pleased to get my author copies of our edition, translation, and study of Gregorio Dati's "La Sfera", a fifteenth-century Florentine poem on cosmology and geography.
This was the brainchild of the unstoppable Carrie Beneš.
It's profusely illustrated and will be great for students.

‘Like losing a friend’: farewell to Marc Maron’s pioneering podcast WTF After 16 years and almost 1,700 episodes, Maron is ending his show – which changed the face of podcasting. No wonder it’s sparking an outpouring of sadness

Another brilliant tribute to Marc Maron and WTF. It's heartening to see how many other people's lives he touched. I was traveling all day yesterday so I have not listened to the final episode yet. That bitter-sweet treat awaits on tomorrow morning's walk.
www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Call for Papers📣: Gender, Violence and the Early Moderns. Join us in Florence. We look forward to hosting you in May 2026😎☀️ @eui-history.bsky.social #skystorians #academicsky #earlymodern

Lecturer in the History of Early Modern Europe and the World at King's College London Discover an exciting academic career path as a Lecturer in the History of Early Modern Europe and the World at jobs.ac.uk. Don't miss out on this job opportunity - apply today!

AN #EARLYMODERN POST!! They still exist! And a lovely one at that, for five years and with the brilliant people at KCL who have turned that place in quite the hub of exciting early modern research.

Run, don’t walk.

Cover of the book The Word made Flesh: Lutheran Bodies, 1600-1720 by Karin Sennefelt. The over image shows an etching of a young woman in a dress but bare foot flying through the air during a lightning storm.

The Word made Flesh is out today! I've not seen it in the flesh myself yet, but this is a happy day after many years of work.
#EarlyModern #medhist #histmed #bodyhistory

Classical music, always and only. Probably not the first thing you thought of when I said classical music, but something more contemporary. Stephen Glass maybe.

‘A perfectly calibrated Swiss watch of cringe’: why Fawlty Towers remains the greatest ever sitcom, 50 years on It’s the 50th anniversary of the comedy that’s so foundational for TV as a medium, it’s the Beatles for the small screen. Five decades later, John Cleese and Connie Booth’s show is still unmatched

The greatest comedy for television, by the proverbial country mile.
"while television may have evolved since 1975, Fawlty Towers was born fully formed. It still lives in a world of its own."
www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...