Readers and Fools

I'm lucky enough to have been spending this summer as a visiting scholar at the Großbritannien-Zentrum (Centre for British Studies), which is part of Berlin’s Humboldt University. Two months of this period was funded by the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst/ German Academic Exchange Service) as part of a project looking at reader responses to Sebastian…

The ‘post-truth’ Nibelungenlied

The phrase, ‘we live in a post-truth society’ has become so well-worn over the past year that perhaps, when we hear it, we no longer think through its implications. But powerful figures having a loose relationship with the truth is hardly a new phenomenon. This blog post isn’t meant to develop a theory of post-truth society…

Aachen Cathedral (and associated thoughts)

Two weeks ago I moved to Berlin with my husband. We are planning to be here until August, while I work on a project part-funded by the DAAD, during which time I will be a postdoctoral researcher at the Großbritannien-Zentrum, part of the Humboldt University. We decided to drive from Oxford to Berlin, stopping in…

Teaching the Codex II

After the success of the last colloquium, there will be another Teaching the Codex colloquium with panels focusing on art history, music in manuscripts, continental and anglophone approaches to manuscript studies, and manuscripts and outreach. For more details see the Teaching the Codex website. There has been a bit of a gap in blog posts here,…

Fortunatus: A German view of Italians in London

I promised a sequel to my last post, in which I looked at what the Libelle of Englyshe Polyce has to say about English attitudes to foreign merchants operating in the country in the late Middle Ages. This time, I’m looking at how those relationships feed into a non-English view of the situation by offering you…