As I posted a couple of months ago, the British Library’s exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War is now open, and will be until February. The Library has the world’s largest collection of manuscripts from pre-Conquest England, but these are paired with high-prestige manuscripts loaned by other institutions, and with other objects such as jewellery,…
Category: Cultural connections
BL blogpost: Wynflæd and the price of fashion
There is a new post on the British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts Blog today, by my colleague Alison Hudson, to which I have contributed. It’s on a text which I have written about here before, the will of Wynflæd, the earliest surviving will by an English woman. Wynflæd and the price of fashion
‘That change sank into my heart’s root’: Hoccleve’s Complaint
I am rather fond of Stephen Fry, and have enjoyed his books, film and TV work very much, but in one of his books he wrote something that is guaranteed to raise the hackles of many a medievalist. The one in question is The Ode Less Travelled, an introduction to writing poetry. In the chapter…
Egyptian Days and Ayurvedic Man: medical cultural connections
One of the advantages of working in central London is the sheer number of interesting exhibitions and other events going on all around me. The other day I wandered into the Wellcome Collection to see if they had anything interesting to see, and was rewarded with a free exhibition called Ayurvedic Man: Encounters with Indian…
Silk and spices, pepper and peacocks
A while ago, in my post on fruit, I mentioned that the word ‘peach’ entered England in the Anglo-Saxon period, even if the fruit itself probably didn’t. The word is ultimately derived from persicum malum, Persian apple, indicating that the fruit entered Europe via Iran. This is the trouble with writing about Anglo-Saxon medical works…
The things we leave behind
So we are in December now! Apologies for the late blogpost: I have big changes coming up (good ones), including a house move, so I have been furiously sorting and packing a lot of stuff. In particular, I have a lot of books, most of which will be going into storage courtesy of a kind…
Caroline and hiragana: learning to write
As I wrote in a recent post, I currently have less time for blogging due to an impending book deadline. Which is why it is complete foolishness that I have taken up learning a completely new language. Well, sort of. What happened was that, having heard good things about it, I signed up to Duolingo…
In the Seven Sleepers’ den
There must have been many people who have come across this line from John Donne’s seventeenth-century poem and wondered who the Seven Sleepers might have been – or why the poet might have snorted there. The second question has a quick answer: it simply means ‘snored’. But who were the Seven Sleepers? In June last…
Adam, agate and amulets: a medieval general knowledge quiz
What is the connection between Adam’s navel and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s left ear? This was the first question that was asked in the first episode of the long-running British comedy quiz QI, which has been producing one series for each letter of the alphabet since the A-series in 2003. Of course, the whole point…
Viking: Rediscover the Legend, Yorkshire Museum – a review
I live within a short walk of a museum mostly dedicated to local history and archaeology. Of course, this is in York, which has played a significant part in several crucial events in English and British history. The Romans had a military base here; it was an important site for the Anglo-Saxon church; it was…
For the Wynn 