James T Palmer on the Early Middle Ages and Other Things
One of my ambitions for 2019 is to make some serious progress with a new project provisionally entitled Merovingian Worlds. And, I thought, a good way to make some progress would be have a semi-regular feature on Merovingian ‘things’. Books, jewellery, charters, relics – whatever. A good place to start, my thoughts continued, would be… Continue reading Merovingian Things 1: The Fredegar Manuscript
Yesterday I gave a short talk about my new project to the Late Antique Work In Progress seminar in the School of Classics at St Andrews. You can hear me burbling here: The two manuscripts I discuss are both available online if you want to play along: Bamberg, Msc.Patr. 61. Bern, MS 611. Some good… Continue reading Me Talking About Medieval ‘Science (& Belief)’
One of the many accepted assumptions about the end of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages is that Roman science died, suppressed by belief and ignorance until at best the twelfth century and the rise of ‘reason’.[1] There were a few exceptional figures capable of relatively sophisticated natural philosophy, notably Isidore of Seville and… Continue reading Early Medieval Science is Changing
In a fine article on Burckhardt's Cultural History of the Greeks, Glen Bowersock pointed out how so many of Burckhardt's insights into Late Antiquity, and among the comments in his magnificent Lectures on the Study of History, are also to be found in the works of Peter Brown.[1] Both of them scholars of prodigious erudition,… Continue reading Isidore, Burckhardt and Brown (Guest Blog by David Ganz)
A little reminder that there are a couple of things on early medieval apocalypse by me available for free online. First up, there is chapter three of Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2014) here - a wide-ranging chapter which covers Columbanus, Isidore of Seville, Julian of Toledo, Bede, and even the transmission of… Continue reading Medieval Apocalypse, Open Access
Yesterday I met THE Peter Brown. He was receiving an honorary degree from the University of St Andrews because he is quite simply one of the greatest historians of the last forty years. (The degree was bestowed on him by Sir Menzies Campbell and the other honorand was Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent… Continue reading Early Medieval Futures
