I loved this piece in the newsletter, and what amazing riddles they wrote!
11.03.2026 09:26
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I loved this piece in the newsletter, and what amazing riddles they wrote!
The lower half of a manuscript page, featuring a marginal figure dragging a portion of text encircled with a rope into place.
A marginal figure drags an omitted portion of text into place in this copy of Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (Arundel MS 38).
Thanks so much, Mark!
Absolutely! Easily the most cited person in the book.
Menmuir, Rebecca. Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile. Classics after Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. Pp. xii, 250. $120.00. ISBN: 978-1-009-55392-6. Reviewed by Ralph Hexter University of California, Davis hexter@ucdavis.edu Medieval Responses to Ovid’s Exile is not merely a valuable contribution to the study of the medieval reception of the poetry Ovid wrote while relegated to Tomis on the Black Sea during the last decade of his life. It is itself an exemplary model of reception history. It balances breadth of coverage in Part I (“Responding to Exile”) with a focus on fourteenth-century England in Part II (“Becoming the Exile), indeed, on specific works by John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer considered against the backdrop of the troubled reign of Richard II. But it is not only in her analyses of the presence of the exiled Ovid in the works of the English poets where one finds specificity and new insights. Throughout, when Menmuir is...
Thrilled to receive a review of my book, Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile, in my inbox this morning! Ralph Hexter for The Medieval Review calls it an 'exemplary model of reception history'. 🤯
Thanks for coming - so great to see you!
It was all happening yesterday: we passed film crews shooting the new Slow Horses, London Fashion Week, even protest marches. But like Bruno, we made it to our destination 😎
Lincolnites in the big smoke! It was so fun to go on our Giordano Bruno walk on an almost sunny Saturday.
@lincoln.ox.ac.uk
Wait, doesn’t it literally say cyclists dismount on the sign? 😂
And everything has a wildly different soundtrack. Alexa play Aphex Twin I’m in the Barbican but queue up some Tallis immediately after
Say what you like about London (and I always do) but there’s nothing like walking through it. 90 min walk to destination? No problem if you’re passing 5 national landmarks and a Wren church a minute.
Thanks so much, Owen, means a lot that you read it! And sure, if anyone wants to put me in touch with Mark Gatiss that’d be grand 🤣
Hey! Yes. Feel free to send a message
Thanks, Jonathan!
‘No wonder I got drunk that night. I’d been Chaucer for a week!’
- my article on Kipling’s Dayspring Mishandled, his entertaining and peculiar account of a Chaucerian forgery, is out now with the Review of English Studies! I absolutely *loved* working on this.
academic.oup.com/res/advance-...
Bodleian MS Hatton 10, Statutes of England! digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/be50...
Prepping for the next few weeks of classes, which are my favourite of all to teach. Prep includes listening to medieval carols and attempting to enjoy them more than this medieval owl (who - hoo! - is the topic of another class).
Introducing the Famous Five: Cat, Mouse, Weasel, Mole and Hedgehog
BL Harley 3244; Bestiary;13th century; England; f.49v
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
CALL FOR PITCHES
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.
We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.
Details below!
CALL FOR PAPERS TEACHING WITH OVID Friday 12th - Saturday 13th June 2026 Multiple time zones* Online The International Ovidian Society and the Societas Ovidiana welcome proposals for papers (15-20 mins), panels (1 hr), or roundtables (1hr) for an online pedagogy symposium. We invite proposals on any aspect of teaching Ovid in the university or school classroom. Proposals might consider, but are not limited to the topics of: Classroom exercises based on Ovidian texts and themes (e.g. love; exile; epic; tragedy); Teaching with Ovidian intermediaries (e.g. medieval moralised Ovids; early modern translations); Using modern editions and/or translations in the classroom; Ovidian retellings in the classroom; Teaching with the material text, archives, or library resources; Language teaching with Ovid (e.g. Latin; medieval languages); Producing creative responses to Ovidian texts and ideas. The CFP deadline is Monday 16th February 2026. Please send abstracts of c. 200 words with a brief author bio to rebecca.menmuir@lincoln.ox.ac.uk. The symposium will be free to attend, but membership to the International Ovidian Society will be required. Visit https://ovidiansociety.org. *All are welcome to submit an abstract regardless of time zone: we will try to accommodate suitable times across the symposium.
CFP EXTENDED: Teaching with Ovid, an online pedagogy symposium. The new deadline for submissions is February 16th.
To all those who have submitted abstracts for the original deadline: many thanks, and we will be in touch soon!
I would love to see this list if possible! Great idea.
Thanks, Hannah!
And thanks Rudyard, of course 😂
Excerpt from article: I found him, for instance, one week-end, in his toolshed-scullery, boiling a brew of slimy barks which were, if mixed with oak-galls, vitriol and wine, to become an ink-powder. We boiled it till the Monday, and it turned into an adhesive stronger than birdlime, and entangled us both. (p. 509) Compare with Castorley describing the results of his test on the manuscript: ‘I took a wash, for analysis, from a blot in one corner … and I got the actual ink of the period! It’s a practically eternal stuff compounded on – I’ve forgotten his name for the minute – the scribe at Bury St Edmunds, of course! – hawthorn bark and wine. Anyhow, on his formula.’ (p. 511)
I went down lots of rabbit holes on this one, but none so fun as chatting with @saracharles.bsky.social about hawthorn ink - which she then went and made/tested!
‘No wonder I got drunk that night. I’d been Chaucer for a week!’
- my article on Kipling’s Dayspring Mishandled, his entertaining and peculiar account of a Chaucerian forgery, is out now with the Review of English Studies! I absolutely *loved* working on this.
academic.oup.com/res/advance-...
Median Aevum: Uncovering Wycliffite Manuscript ‘Standardisation’ with Quantitative Codicology By Paul Cooley and Jessica Hind The study of medieval manuscripts has, in recent years, incorporated more quantitative and statistical methods. This approach, known as quantitative codicology, can highlight trends in large manuscript collections that are difficult to identify without digital processing. A digital project within the Bodleian Libraries, Enabling Digital Research on Manuscript Catalogue Data, makes medieval manuscript catalogues newly accessible as tabular data. This study utilises the work of this project to approach the 11,000-strong collection of medieval manuscripts in Oxford libraries, including the Bodleian and college libraries. We identify a group of statistically average medieval manuscripts – those that possess the modal average of seven criteria and could therefore be said to represent an average category. We begin by justifying each of our seven criteria for assessment. Our results, however, return an unexpected pattern: an unusually large proportion of Wycliffite manuscripts is represented in the data, which, via binomial distribution, proves statistically significant. Thus, we suggest that quantitative approaches to codicology may support the notion, otherwise difficult to qualify, of a ‘standardised’Wycliffite manuscript type. While we consider the pitfalls of a quantitative approach, we suggest overall that statistical study can offer insights into the big data associated with large collections – in this instance, putting forward a tentative case for a ‘standardised’Wycliffite scheme.
Unbelievably proud of two @lincoln.ox.ac.uk undergraduate English students, Jess and Paul, whose research into @bodleian.ox.ac.uk manuscripts has been published today! Using quantitative codicology, they seek to find the Bodleian's most 'average' manuscript...
bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress....
In putting the issue together, Jacqueline Burek and I wanted to think about classical reception as messy, non-linear, and so 'entangled', as we propose in the Introduction - and explored and challenged in Hiatt's Response. Check it out - Open Access.
Just published! Our special issue of JOLCEL (@relicsresearch.bsky.social), 'Tangling with the Classics: Rethinking Reception in the Middle Ages'.
Feat @maryhitchman.bsky.social, Paul Vinhage, @ivowolsing.bsky.social, Philippa Byrne, Ramani Chandramohan & Alfred Hiatt
jolcel.ugent.be/issue/26787/...
The London Lasagne implies that sometime after digging up prehistory, you’ll get another bit of Victorian and Edwardian
CALL FOR PAPERS TEACHING WITH OVID Friday 12th - Saturday 13th June 2026 Multiple time zones* Online The International Ovidian Society and the Societas Ovidiana welcome proposals for papers (15-20 mins), panels (1 hr), or roundtables (1hr) for an online pedagogy symposium. We invite proposals on any aspect of teaching Ovid in the university or school classroom. Proposals might consider, but are not limited to the topics of: Classroom exercises based on Ovidian texts and themes (e.g. love; exile; epic; tragedy); Teaching with Ovidian intermediaries (e.g. medieval moralised Ovids; early modern translations); Using modern editions and/or translations in the classroom; Ovidian retellings in the classroom; Teaching with the material text, archives, or library resources; Language teaching with Ovid (e.g. Latin; medieval languages); Producing creative responses to Ovidian texts and ideas. The CFP deadline is Monday 16th February 2026. Please send abstracts of c. 200 words with a brief author bio to rebecca.menmuir@lincoln.ox.ac.uk. The symposium will be free to attend, but membership to the International Ovidian Society will be required. Visit https://ovidiansociety.org. *All are welcome to submit an abstract regardless of time zone: we will try to accommodate suitable times across the symposium.
CFP EXTENDED: Teaching with Ovid, an online pedagogy symposium. The new deadline for submissions is February 16th.
To all those who have submitted abstracts for the original deadline: many thanks, and we will be in touch soon!