Gabriele Passabì

This is (also) what happens when one stops making assumptions about a text and, especially, about who may have written it.

The serpent head of the Oseberg Viking ship, carved in 820, and shown for the first time to the public in the Oslo Historical Museum

There is much to look forward to in the next issue of @parergon.bsky.social. I'm keeping my eyes peeled.

🧪Hold on to your urine flasks, there are only a few weeks left to visit Curious Cures!

📍 Open until 6 December 2025 at the University Library
🔗Book your FREE ticket: https://loom.ly/kVqsPRY

Music by Vlad Bakutov from Pixabay

The golden age of diversity and democracy in Oz.

Merci beaucoup ! J'en suis sûr ! 😁

Looks like an exciting read from @puc-ed.bsky.social. The Colloque de Cerisy always gathers stellar scholarship, and this book seems like it’s going to be a banger. Can’t wait to dive in.
#medievalsky

Book Launch: Local Priests in the Latin West, 900-1050 Earlier Middle Ages Seminar- Session 3

📣 Next week we are delighted to host a book launch for Local Priests in the Latin West, 900-1050, by Alice Hicklin, Steffen Patzold, @jbwaagmeester.bsky.social & @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social, who will be joined by John Arnold, Julia Barrow & Conrad Leyser. Weds 19 Nov, 5.30pm, King's. All welcome!

A Roman emperor grovelling to a Persian king: the message behind a new statue in Tehran The statue, titled Kneeling Before Iran, shows the emperor grovelling before Persian king Shapur I. Where did this imagery come from? And why now?

Here is an example of what a politics of temporality looks like in practice and why it is relevant today. It's fascinating that modern Iranian nationalism, which once suppressed its pre-Islamic past, now celebrates the pagan king Shapur I as a national symbol.

theconversation.com/a-roman-empe...

The Humanities as Canary: Understanding this Crisis Now - The Scholarly Kitchen The Humanities have always been the canary in the coal mine of the full knowledge industry. What information can help us understand this crisis and its implications?

@kawulf.bsky.social wrote this piece in April. But if you haven't read it yet, take some time to do so now: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/04/02/t...

Spent the morning at @theul.bsky.social with this remarkable volume from 12 c. Worcester. A fine example of medieval knowledge aggeagation for the community. It also comes with impressive decorations, which is always a plus.

Still, on the off chance it’s ever confirmed that Vlad III the Impaler truly is buried in Naples, let’s just hope no one gets the bright idea to open the tomb. You never know 🧛‍♀️

while this is more fascinating than historically reliable, genuine research has been done across Italy, Romania, and Estonia. Ironically, it’s the fiction of Dracula that seems to have encouraged cross-border and multidisciplinary scholarship about the historical figure of Vlad III Tepes.

The latest claim of deciphering the slab has appeared in "Vlad, Where Are You? Clues from the La Nova Codex of Naples (2025)", a volume edited by Giovanni Reale, director of the Santa Maria la Nova complex, and published by the local press La Valle del Tempo www.librerianeapolis.it/libri/saggi/...

La «tomba di Dracula» a Napoli: ecco cosa si è scoperto su una misteriosa iscrizione La storia è nota. Nel 2014, come raccontò in esclusiva «Il Mattino», un gruppo di ricercatori individuò nel sepolcro del nobile Mattia Ferrillo, all'interno...

Plenty of issues here. Vlad III isn’t known to have had a daughter. More problematically, none of this has appeared in peer-reviewed journals. The slab is real enough. But its first alleged “reinterpretation” appeared in a 2014 newspaper article for Il Mattino. www.ilmattino.it/napoli/cultu...

According to their translation, one passage reads: “To him who was twice slain by his enemies and honoured as a martyr. The ruler of the Wallachs, Vlad the Pious, went in peace, ever praising God in the place where he is buried”.

A reported breakthrough came in 2025, when Romanian historian Mircea Cosma and linguist Christian Tufan announced to have cracked the code. According to them, the inscription features a multilayered code with three linguistic levels. The one in Byzantine Greek apparently conveys a coherent message.

Attempts at deciphering the slab have been made since the 1920s. The most recent (serious) study (Palma, 2023) found that the glyphs drew from Old Slavonic, Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Carian scripts. His results produced some coherent snippets in Latin and Hungarian but no full translation.

And yet, the iconography of the Ferrillo monument is unusual for southern Italy. Even more unusual is a curious marble slab in the sixteenth-century Turbolo Chapel of the same church, which on the right-hand side bears an inscription that has yet to be deciphered.

This interpretation is essentially linked to the undocumented claim that Vlad III had a daughter or niece, Maria Balšić, who was secretly sent to Naples as a child by her father to escape persecution. She was later adopted by Italian nobility and married to Matteo Ferrillo.

Such a reading of the relief on the sepulchre has sparked the theory that the funerary monument may not hold Count Ferrillo’s mortal remains at all, but those of Vlad III himself, potentially hiding his final resting place in plain sight.

Inside, the funerary monument of Count Matteo Ferrillo (15 c.) features unusual symbolism. It includes a dragon helm reminiscent of the Order of the Dragon (associated with Vlad’s father) and two sphinxes, the symbol of Thebes, which should intriguingly resonate with the Romanian Țepeș, Impaler.

Existing since the mid 13 c., originally as a Franciscan convent, the Church of Santa Maria La Nova in Naples is now an outstanding example of Neapolitan late Renaissance sacred architecture.

So… I just learned that the Vlad III Țepeș, also known to later legend as Dracula, may be buried in Naples, Italy.
1) Is this true or clickbait?
2) Should I be worried for Neapolitans?
A short🧵 between history and fiction.

What a piece. One of the best proofs that Cato was right when he said 'Rem tene verba sequentur'.

Also, next time they tell me that AI must be integrated into literally everything, I'll say that this is a "bathetically unscholarly corporate-sponsored piece of risible chaff".

We're delighted to digitally contribute to @theul.bsky.social Curious Cures project

Curator James Freeman highlights some of way Middle English medical writings have survived to us:
specialcollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk?p=30906

One more month to catch the physcial exhibition, do not miss it!

Proofs done. Book imminent. Panic level: yes.

Detail of the "Glasses Apostle" painting in the altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen, Germany. Painted by Conrad von Soest in 1403, the painting is considered to be among the oldest depictions of eyeglasses north of the Alps

Nothing to see here? Well, this is a slow moving 🧵 for #skystorians and others about #eyeglasses of the past, about how to read in the past, where to buy eyeglasses, and how to do with them in general. The hashtag is #HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Let's roll.

Can something be equally exciting and terrifying to watch? Yes.