Across the water in Edinburgh, the postgraduates have decided to hold an unusual postgraduate conference on the Seventh Century next year. Full details here. To break the mould, and to get people talking in a way which might actually be beneficial and interdisciplinary, there will be more of a sense of collaboration than at many conferences. They also hope to get together people working on subjects from Britain to Byzantium and the Near East. The seventh century has often been good for this kind of thing, being as it is the chronological focus point of the Pirenne Thesis and the last phase of Peter Brown’s Late Antiquity. Hopefully the colloquium can contribute positively to the study of the period, and help rescue it from being considered, in the opinion of one prominent professor, ‘the armpit of history’.