August 2025 – Magistra et Mater
1 post published by magistraetmater during August 2025| Magistra et Mater
1 post published by magistraetmater during August 2025| Magistra et Mater
There’s been much recent scholarly interest in queenship, and this inevitably leads to the recurring historical question: what changed in medieval queenship and when? To answer this. it’s often use…| Magistra et Mater
1 post published by magistraetmater during July 2025| Magistra et Mater
Generic picture of speaker at IMC I had to cancel going to the International Medieval Congress 2025 in person at the last minute because of health problems, but I did at least get to attend virtual…| Magistra et Mater
1 post published by magistraetmater during June 2025| Magistra et Mater
My PhD supervisor and friend Janet (Jinty) Nelson died in October last year. There have been a lot of events to commemorate her, many of which I’ve taken part in. I’ve also written a ob…| Magistra et Mater
If, like me, you’ve spent a lot of your life in progressive/liberal circles, it’s easy to believe that any kind of authoritarianism is “unnatural”, alien to normal, healthy human behaviour. Sometim…| Magistra et Mater
Family forms Emmanuel Todd, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems (Blackwell, 1985, French original from 1983) was written a long time before the author became a promine…| Magistra et Mater
Note: this blog post was originally written for the Turbulent Priests project blog (https://turbulentpriests.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog/csi-carantania) in 2020. The translations have been slightly updated from that version. At some point in the mid-ninth century an auxiliary bishop called Osbald had a serious problem with a turbulent priest in Carantania (later the duchy of Carinthia in southern Austria […]| Magistra et Mater
I found this document in my files recently and thought it might be of historical interest to some of my readers: my successful application to the AHRB (the predecessor to the Arts and Humanities re…| Magistra et Mater
I’ve just been re-reading Kate Cooper, “Closely watched households: visibility, exposure and private power in the Roman domus”, Past and Present, 197 (2007), 3-33 (10.1093/pastj/gtm012). It made me…| Magistra et Mater
Professor Christopher Smith, the Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has been blogging a lot recently about research in the humanities and its funding. In a recent post he …| Magistra et Mater
There’s a recent briefing report out by the Royal Historical Society, The Value of History in UK Higher Education and Society. Its main focus is on the cuts being made to university history departm…| Magistra et Mater
