Writing on my Mind
In this newsletter
Hello
Latest blog post
Writing about medieval women
British Library
History tid-bits
Hello
Hello to you all once again. I feel like I’ve been saying this all year, but I can’t believe we already have a new month upon us. This entire year seems to have vanished in a blink of an eye, and in the UK the clocks have turned back, officially heralding Autumn which has made a grand entrance with big storms. It also reminds me that I am only a few months away from my next book deadline, which is a big kick to my procrastination!
Latest Blog Post
I haven’t had a chance to publish another blog post yet since my fabulous bees of Childeric I. I do, however, have a post up my sleeves which I hope to get published in the next week or so once I’ve restarted my posts on social media, so as my loyal newsletter subscribers I’ll give you a sneak peek at the topic: the witch trials of Trier. Now, I know that you think the time of year has probably influenced this topic, but I actually wrote this post all the way back in summer and just have been too swept off my feet to find the time to edit and schedule it! Do keep your eye out, though, as the trials were the biggest that happened in Europe so it should make for an interesting read if you have not heard of them.
Writing About Medieval Women
As I mentioned in my introduction, the deadline for my illustrated history book is just the other side of the New Year. I’ve written my draft chapter for noble and royal women, and am now starting to think about images as I pull together research to begin putting pen to paper for the rest of the book. It really has been an interesting challenge to write this book, simultaneously enjoying the broader topic in comparison to my tightly-focused previous books, whilst moaning about the limited word count and wanting to fit everything I have to say in!
The great thing, though, has been widening my lens to the rest of Europe. The nature of my studies and area of expertise is very much Western European women in the medieval period, with a particular focus on England and France. But I’ve always had glimpses of other amazing medieval women in other countries. Now I get to bring them in too which means I am also learning as I go along. One women I just had to pull in to the royal chapter was Jadwiga of Poland, who I wrote about years ago on my blog and was the first female monarch of Poland. It’s definitely been fun and eye-opening, and I hope you all enjoy the final product! I’m also looking for suggestions of depictions of women in medieval art to include in the book, so if you have any make sure you let me know…
British Library
It doesn’t quite count as historical news, which is why I put it in its own section, but given I conduct so much of my research at the British Library I had to include this in my newsletter. Since the 28th October, they have been experiencing a “major technology outage” and “cyber incident” which has affected most of their service both at their London and Boston Spa sites. Their website has been down, as well as their phone lines and WiFi, and this has had the knock on effects of them severely limiting their reading room service to paper catalogues and very limited item retrieval. Considering just how huge this outage has been, that it has affected both sites and that it has gone on for so many days, it certainly appears like this must have been a huge co-ordinated cyber attack of some kind. This seems confirmed by their announcement that they are currently working with the National Cyber Security Centre of the UK. As their website isn’t working, you can keep an eye out for updates on their socials!
History Tid-Bits
Just the one piece of history this time round, as I haven’t really been on socials lately to keep up-to-date with discoveries going on, but a good one for medieval history fans! Speaking of the British Library, just before their outage they announced that they were going to be making their entire collection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works available digitally. After an impressive 2.5 year project, they have uploaded 25,000 images of his manuscripts, of which they hold more than 60 - the largest surviving collection of his work. Chaucer is a legendary name in medieval history, and is often considered the father of English poetry, being one of the first writers to write widely in English rather than in Latin or French as was common at the English court at the time. You can read more about the project in this Guardian article.
As always, thank you for reading, and until next time.
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