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Taormina, Sicily, September 2015
When I wrote on 17th May, teaching was finished and I’d been to three of my four conferences for the year, and there really should have been time for blogging, but somehow I have been at home only...
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An awful lot of numismatists in Sicily, I
The progress of this blog continues surreal. I returned from India yesterday, and am nearly three years overdue in writing the next post, about going to Sicily. Nothing loath, here goes, in an attempt...
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Site of a Byzantine Last Stand
Having thus celebrated some achievement, it’s time to go back into the past again this post and pick up the story of the 2015 trip to Sicily. As you may remember, I had got through my report of the...
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Medieval European Coinage update (Name in the Book Somewhere III)
I have time for only a short post this weekend, but happily, I was just asked a question here that can be answered in such a post, and which also fits into the pattern of alternating what we might call...
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From the Sources XV: Trading in nostalgia in 11th-century Pavia
Posting here with any regularity continues to be difficult; the gaps pretty much coincide with the arrival of marking, and last for as long as it does. None of this is reducing the queue of things I...
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All That Glitters, Experiment 6 and final
So, as just described, almost my first academic action of 2016 – for that is how far in the past we are for this post – was to head back to Birmingham, freshly remobilised, to pursue what was supposed...
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Framing the Late Antique and Early Medieval Economy, including X-rays
Since 2014 or 2015 there has been a large project running at Princeton University in the USA called Framing the Late Antique and Early Medieval Economy (acronymised to FLAME, rather than the more...
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Leeds International Medieval Congress 2016, reflected upon from a distance
Somehow Action Short of a Strike still looks a lot like a really hard week—the contract I’m working to doesn’t have fixed hours—so I find myself blogging very late on a Sunday. Both because of that and...
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Chronicle VI: October-December 2016
University and College Union pickets at the University of Leeds Well, just as with the last time I wrote one of these, we are still on strike again, so there is now time to write it. With the trip to...
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Hay, flax, chickens and cash
A University and College Union picket outside the University of Leeds on World Book Day, managing to pursue both causes at once, from the Leeds UCU Twitter feed Despite our still being on strike, it...
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Seminar CCXLVI: controversies in studying Carolingian coinage
As promised, the Bank Holiday bonus blog post is also about coins. I promise you only very minimal quantities of numismatics in the next post, but for now we’re still in my whirl of monetary study at...
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Globalizing Byzantium from Birmingham
The last thing I promised I’d write about from the quarter-slice of 2017 through which this blog’s backlog is presently proceeding was the 50th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, from 25th to 27th...
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Finding the Medieval in Rome I: ruins and cats
Given the state of things in the UK at the moment, and with the work to get ready for term very much upon me, it’s actually quite nice that my blog backlog means I can write about and remember happier...
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Finding the Medieval in Rome II: trying to be noticed in the Forum Romanum,...
When I was facing my crise de confiance of the other week, one of the sillier causes was that I had processed a bunch of photos of the Foro Romano from when I was there in late 2017, and I couldn’t...
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Missing Michael Matzke
While still not wanting to let this blog become an obituaries column, this is obviously not a good time in human history to ask people to stop dying. However, this is late news that only came to me...
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Finding the Medieval in Rome III: Emperor Hadrian, Defender of the Popes
Obviously, the subtitle of this post is not true. Not strictly. How could it be, after all, when Hadrian, ruler of the Roman Empire from 117 to 138 CE, and respected chief priest of it too, probably...
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Finding the Medieval in Rome IV: Teaching with the Crypta Balbi
I mentioned a little while back that when I started in post at the University of Leeds I inherited a late antique survey module for first-year undergraduates which, indeed, I still run. That module has...
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Finding the Medieval in Rome V: Fixing a Hole in a City Wall
This is the last of the Rome 2017 photo posts, and then as promised last week, some more properly academic content will at last materialise. But right now, I hope you can forgive some more photographic...
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Changing Ways to Read a Graph of Landlordship
A day early and about four years late still, here is this week’s post. While in the very last days of my previous bout of research leave, in late 2017 and early 2018, I was reading my way through the...
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Seminars CCXLVIII & CCXLIX: dismantling expectations about statehood from...
There has been a gap here, for which I apologise; the second of those family occasions I mentioned last post was to blame, but now I am back on deck, and for this week I want ceremonially to move my...
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From Ankara to al-Masāq in eighteen months or so
Right, let’s see about that post I promised. I promised some account of the conference which had taken me to Ankara in February 2018, but given that a decent part of it emerged as a journal issue about...
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Seminars CCLXVII & CCLXVIII: the Normans return to Leeds
As usual, apologies are owed to you, dear readers, for a long absence; sorry. We stopped working to contract at about the time all my marking came in, and the result of marking arriving was as usual...
View ArticleRulers who weren’t kings, discussed at Leeds
I have as usual to apologise for a gap in posting. I mentioned the Covid-19; then I was on holiday; and then I was late with a chapter submission that I finished, on overtime, yesterday. Much of this...
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The gilty heart of Venice
If you’ll permit me a return to medievalist holiday photographs – and, kind readers, you have never so far objected – then you may recall that I wrote two weeks ago of heading for Venice in July 2019....
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Imprint of an Ostrogothic Arian on Ravenna
We return now to my north-eastern Italian holiday of July 2019, the pictures from which I’ve been inflicting on you and intend to inflict on you for a few posts longer as well (though I do notice it’s...
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The Empire Strikes Back (in Ravenna)
I promised something more academic for this post than holiday photos, I know, although I hope that even my holiday photo posts have something educational going on in them. But when I did check...
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Venice II: Further Down and Further Out
After a post as heavy as the last as bonus content, I hope you’ll forgive me if the regular one is more medievalist tourism pictures. If that’s annoying, then you may be reassured to know that these...
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The lost reputation of King Hugh of Italy
As so often, I have to beg your forgiveness for a gap in posting. Family has become a much larger part of my life this year than usual, is probably the shortest way to put it, and they keep getting my...
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From the Sources XVII: more Pavians destroying important people’s houses
Rather than just drown you in pictures of symbol stones for the next few weeks, it seems wise to intersperse some other material, so let’s jump forward a bit to the month after I was back from that...
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Bad numbers by Karl-Ferdinand Werner
I’m not sure how true this is in this third decade of the twenty-first century, but if like me you were first learning about the Carolingian empire of Charlemagne and sons in the last decade of the...
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