Great to have spotted Writing St Guthlac out in the wild in its natural habitat, the Boydell & Brewer stand at the Leeds IMC Book Fair 🌱

So Guthlac and I are on the train down to Bham today for a Q&A in front of students and colleagues as part of an English Dept book celebration - thanks to Jimmy Packham for the invitation Looking forward to talking about flat landscapes, textual pilgrimage and radically longitudinal studies 😃

Some good news! My book is now listed on the Boydell & Brewer website. Out in May, available to pre-order from March. An overview and contents list here: boydellandbrewer.com/book/writing...

Some work-related betwixtmas news: our co-written essay on 'speculative' futures for Old English teaching & learning is out now in the Jan 2026 Issue of Speculum 📝 I particularly liked the close where we imagine how a communicative approach to OE might prove fruitful beyond the academy 🤔💭

Ft. me talking about medieval pilgrimage as an analogue for the wellbeing benefits of walking both in the Romantic period and today: the more physically arduous the pilgrimage, the greater the spiritual rewards - especially so when served with a side portion of communitas 🤝

It was great last week to get to see the first screening of our film from the Walking for Wellbeing project ('Around Morecambe Bay with William Wordsworth') at the Kendal Mountain Book Festival 🎬

📢 I've had a great time this year, working on a range of impact projects both within and without the academy 🧵

back frm @themamoconf.bsky.social & inspired by 🌟 LOCAL MEDIEDVALISMS with co-pannelists @maiablumberg.bsky.social & @linseyhunter.bsky.social 🌟public interp of MA w/ @emilyrobinson.bsky.social & @krmaude.bsky.social 🌟 practical resistance to far-right MA use @menysnoweballes.bsky.social

A packed & satisfying day of giving historical walking tours to secondary school students around #Lancaster 👣 but finally on the train heading to @themamoconf.bsky.social - looking forward to attending the oldest conference fully dedicated to medieval reception! 😃

A Tudor manuscript of a medieval poem collected by 18th antiquaries which ended up in a medieval university - a thrilling tale of medieval culture & its reception 😃 Thanks to @bobmaclean.bsky.social & the ASC team for facilitating 💫 /fin 🧵

It was the the elaborate initials (famously hiding an acrostic revealing the author's name, John Clerk of Whalley) and marginalia from later readers which occupied my attention this week 📝 2/3 🧵

A delight this week to make the aquaintance of this 1540s ms (Glasgow UL Hunter 388), the single surviving witness to the ME alliterative Romance, The Destruction of Troy (c. 1400), as part of my visiting fellowship at the University of Glasgow Library 📚 1/3 🧵

📢 Pub. day for my latest piece of research, looking at women who played knights & pages in 1910s-1920s historical pageants and their likely influence on Radlyffe Hall's 'Well of Loneliness' (1928), with its gallant girl-boy chevaliers, heritage closets, cropped hairstyles & dreamy Romance loci ✨️😃

Ok I'lll bite. While my main discipline is EngLit, my current museum edu/outreach role means I'm also a Public Historian. Here I am just after giving a talk on medieval women to visitors. Should have ironed my shirt & added a tie in case @bbcnews came knocking looking for a #typicalhistorian

And the details on the project itself...😇

The UK uni sector crisis continues, but I'm really pleased to have been awarded a Glasgow Library Visiting Fellowship which means I will be spending June pouring over a fantastic manuscript & getting to finally write an article on a Middle English alliterative poem local to #Lancashire 😀

📢 academics w/ trade books: Now that my monograph is more or less out the way, I'm going to crack on w/ a plan I've had for a trade book on landscapes & saints. Any hints & tips? Publishers / agents to be recommended? 📝👀 📸 fog for vibes #skystorians

This evening at my local service of Nine Lessons and Carols, thinking of shepherds 'NIHTWÆCCAN HEALDENDE OFER HEORA HEORDA' or in a translation we are more used to, 'keeping watch over their flocks at night' 🐑🌙⭐️ 📸 Christ Church, Lancaster & folio 75 of the Bath OE Gospels #oldenglish #translation

I'm stateside and into medievalism so BEHOLD the Huguenot Church (1844) of Charlestown SC built for the protestant migrant / refugee community who arrived here from Catholic Fr in the 1690s ⛪️ With the pink plaster, spires and palm trees its giving neomedievalist whimsy 🌴💫

Well I've booted up Bluesky again to see what the craic is here, thanks for all the follows You all might as well have my latest research update The ms of WRITING ST GUTHLAC is just now on the last proof read before being sent off to the publishers :)

After this morning's advent reading, I'm charmed to discover one #OldEnglish gospel translator imagined John the Baptist eating not 'locusts and wild honey' but 'gærstappa' and 'wudu hunig' 🥰 ('grasshoppers and honey of the woods') 🦗🍯✨ Images of the Bath Abbey Gospel courtesy of Parker Library