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…

Thinking of Syria in Anglo-Saxon England

It was the summer of my first year as a PhD student.  I had just finished work on a chapter of my thesis, and was looking to move into another area of study; but I couldn’t really think where to go next, except that I wanted to look back to an earlier period of time and…