iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Join me next year at the #SSCLE conference in Porto, from 29 June-3 July 2025. Do please share this #CFP with anyone who studies the Later Crusades (post-1291) and would like to share their research with an enthusiastic and perceptive audience. #skystorians #medievalsky #earlymodernsky

Recent decades have seen significant advances in our understanding of the later crusades (post-1291). This session aims to showcase the latest research on this fascinating topic.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers exploring new perspectives on the later crusades. Topics are not limited to, but might include:
Diplomacy and statecraft Crusading and Reformation Logistics, financing, recruitment, and volunteerism
Crusading in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltic, and Iberia Crusades against ‘heretics’ Intellectual history of crusading
Submit your paper title, abstract
(250 words) and a brief biography to charlotte.gauthier.2017@live.rhul.ac.uk by 25 October 2025.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Setting up Moodle for my digital history class this term and considering what to do for an assignment on the week I talk about AI slop and fake historical records. I've settled on a bibliography assignment. Use your favourite AI to generate a bibliography, then verify the references.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

On this, the final weekend before what’s shaping up to be a brutal term, I’m in Hammersmith on a sort of pilgrimage.

Sign for the Dove pub, which gave its name to the Dove Press next door

Blue plaque for Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson on Dove Cottage

One of William Morris’s presses at Kelmscott House

Blue plaque for Emery Walker on his Hammersmith Terrace house

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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

A poem from this morning.

Humanities

Who needs history?
Literature? Languages?
Art? Philosophy?

These can only help
you to better understand
our humanity.

Best to let machines
read your books. And write your books.
Do your art for you.

You will never need
to think. Never need to learn.
You’ll learn to like it.

And when the end comes
you’ll have never burdened down
your soul with any growth.

Someone selling this
sees profit in destroying
your humanity.

-- John Wyatt Greenlee

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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

ACADEMIC READING ALREADY COMES WITH A SUMMARY IT IS CALLED THE ABSTRACT

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

Sod’s Law of Research Days: As soon as you request the manuscripts you want to see at the library hours away from your home, several different people will email you wanting to set up urgent meetings for that very same day.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

My Saturday project is doing a bit of conservation work on two 17th-century carved panels I’ve just acquired (rather cheaply, I may add). Treated them for woodworm just in case, and now comes the polishing.

A foliage carved oak panel sitting on a piece of brown paper, with a small can of Renaissance Wax on top.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

All the most interesting stuff about the Tudors comes from their interaction with the Habsburgs. There, I said it.

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John McCafferty @jdmccafferty.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

22 July 1456: A thanksgiving service for the deliverance of Belgrade from the Turks held #otd at St. Frideswide's #Oxford - now Christ Church (Diliff)

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

It’s now live! I’ve been working on this Peasants’ War project with some fabulous colleagues from @ox.ac.uk and @royalholloway.bsky.social over the past year+ and we’re delighted to share the fruits of our research.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

The last bits are falling into place on the Peasants’ War project. It feels a bit odd that phase 1 is almost done. But - huzzah! - follow-on funding will now enable us to follow up the monasteries project with research on castles in the PW. If you’re in Bristol tomorrow come say hi!

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

Went to the National Gallery yesterday to experience the re-hang in the Sainsbury Wing. Came across this… interesting… potted history of the Reformation. Not quite sure it rises to the level of 1066 And All That.

In 1517 the Roman Catholic Church was in crisis. The German monk and Professor Martin Luther condemned the sale of indulgences, which reduced punishment for sins and were a major source of income for the Church. Reformers in Northern Europe denounced Church corruption and challenged the power of the clergy. They demanded that everyone should be able to read and interpret the Bible in translation. Religious and political conflicts followed across Europe, and resulted in the division of Western Christianity into Catholic and Protestant Churches.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Very much looking forward to talking about our @germanpeasantswar.bsky.social project at the SRS conference next week. See you in Bristol, if you’ll be there!

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Using AI to “read” literature implies that literary style is ancillary to some informational substance. It’s just simply not. Style is intrinsic to story: how a story is told is inextricable from the story itself. I have never got on with Dickens’ style, but this misses the point by a mile.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

I didn't take much convincing to sign up to this fabulous-looking conference. Tyndale's Antwerp is (for me) John Hackett's Antwerp. Wolsey's right-hand man was negotiating payment of a crusade subvention whilst simultaneously tasked with intercepting Tyndale's Bible before it reached England.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

A certain well-known ebook database has added an AI-powered "Research Assistant" to its interface. No thank you. Apologies for incinerating half a tree to generate a single inane point about Duns Scotus. My "Research Assistant" was meant to summarise a wide-ranging chapter about Scholasticism. 🤷‍♀️

The interface of said "Research Assistant"

The key takeaway from a broad introduction to Scholastic theology in the High Middle Ages is apparently a fairly narrow and disputable point about Duns Scotus.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Today at the @cemskcl.bsky.social conference I learned that ghosts are a Jesuit conspiracy. They stick candles on crabs, then release them into graveyards to convince the unwary of the doctrine of Purgatory. (Either that or they’re just chaps dressed up in bedsheets.)

Some early moderns dressed in sheets with torches, pretending to be the deceased James VI/I.

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German Peasants’ War - As It Happened @germanpeasantswar.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

#OTD in the German Peasants' War Monday, 5 June 1525 (Pfingstmontag) Peasants threaten the Töß convent outside Winterthur. The clever diplomacy of the city council and the Töß nuns manages to steer the angry crowd into getting drunk instead. The peasants return home the next morning. #histsky

The peasants storm Töß, from a copy of Heinrich Bullinger's Reformation Chronicle

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

I think it’s jolly rude to send unsolicited auction catalogues to impecunious scholars who cannot purchase All The Old Books.

An auction catalogue advertising “a sixth selection of 16th and 17th century English books from the Fox Pointe Manor library”

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Putting the finishing touches on some slides for tomorrow’s @cemskcl.bsky.social colloquium on early modern war narratives. It’s a great joy to return to the crusader I call ‘Bob’, whose story has been the jumping off point for so many fascinating lines of research since I first ‘met’ him in 2018.

A PowerPoint slide showing a battle between Matthias Corvinus and some Ottomans, with the title of my presentation - ‘“Scutum inde gero”: Truth, memory, and self-promotion in an early modern war poem’ - superimposed.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

Sod’s Law of Academic Writing: Five minutes before the library closes, you will inevitably be making rapid progress on a difficult paragraph - which it is then necessary to abandon mid-thought.

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John McCafferty @jdmccafferty.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

25 May 1570: The Papal Bull Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating Elizabeth I, is nailed to the door of the Bishop of #London #otd (NPG)

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

This will be an exceptional colloquium, and you should all come - especially if you want to hear about one of the most cringeworthy (but still fascinating) neo-Latin war poems ever. @cemskcl.bsky.social have outdone themselves. Hope to see you all there. kingsearlymodern.co.uk/events/lamen...

kingsearlymodern.co.uk

Early Modern War Narratives - Annual CEMS Colloquium — CEMS KCL Blog

Join CEMS for our annual colloquium. This year's theme is early modern war narratives. Keynote: Prof. Andrew Hopper and Dr. Ismini Pells.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

This is probably the most ambiguous episode in Warham’s career. After presiding over the submission of the clergy, Warham seems to have changed his mind - and prepared for martyrdom by drafting a speech against Henry’s reforms. But why? Historians have differed widely.

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Dr Francis Young @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

Drink too much of this and you’ll be seized by the desire to found a diocesan seminary and zealously maintain records of confessions and communions in your parish

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

I’ll be giving a paper at this colloquium on early modern war narratives. If you’re into the later crusades, wannabe-humanist poetry, or the history of emotions, there will be something for you in it. (The other speakers look fab as well!) Hope to see some of you there!

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

For those who love history and/or spectacle and fancy robes, a conclave is the gift that keeps on giving. (I’m mostly here for the robes, myself.)

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

It all went down in the Peasants' War 500 years ago today.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

This is highly impressive, in its way, but still nowhere near the hijinks that some of the medieval (legitimate) popes got up to. Still, golf clap for this antipope trying to get into the spirit of things. (Do read the thread, which only gets better - or worse, depending on your perspective.)

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Ward Q. Normal (he/him) @wardqnormal.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

The reason for the season:

A picture of a package of Marshmallow Peeps, but Photoshopped to say "Pepys." The peeps visible through the packaging are wearing curly old-style wigs. The package explains that it contains "10 diarists."

Here's the deal: I only know two things about Samuel Pepys:
1. His name is pronounced like "peeps"
2. He was a famous diarist.

That's the only motivation I needed to make this stupid thing as an Easter joke, and I will post it every year on Easter until long after the joke has worn off.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

And so he was, in a manner of speaking. (His boss shouldn’t get off scot free, though obviously under interrogation one is going to blame the king’s advisors rather than the king.)

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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

I’m sorry but if your students use AI to write papers and you use AI to grade them zero school is happening. You are running together on a hamster wheel

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Harry Wallop @harrywallop.co.uk · 03/04/2025

I am one of the authors whom Meta stole (sorry, ‘scraped’) from, by using their books to train Libgen. So I’m biased. But this from @mscaitlinmoran.bsky.social is👌

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German Peasants’ War - As It Happened @germanpeasantswar.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

#OTD in the German Peasants’ War: Sunday, 2 April 1525 The citizens and peasants of Jettingen attack the monastery at Wettenhausen. They empty the cellars and ransack the library. #earlymodern #skystorians

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

I was rather grumpy this morning at having to get up to teach a class after a long and tiring week away at a conference. Then my students (a different class) surprised me with a bouquet and a lovely card. I’m very grateful for them - the students as well as the flowers.

A bouquet of oranger gerbera daisies, purple and yellow and green mums, and an orange rose sitting on a desk.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

Our team has had an excellent day at the German Peasants’ War conference in Freiburg. Do follow us for more Peasants’ War attacks as they happened exactly 500 years ago. (If Thomas Müntzer had BlueSky, he totally would have live-blogged the war.)

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

From this week we’ll be live-posting the German Peasants’ War as it happened. Today is the 500th anniversary of the peasant attacks on the monasteries of Mergentheim. Follow @germanpeasantswar.bsky.social for more.

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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 22/03/2025

This made me cheer. It gets directly at a problem I’ve often noticed: people don’t fundamentally understand what a historian *does*.

Ethical: There is a particular paradox that makes Al essentially useless as a tool for studying history. The entire point of what we do as historians is to look for untold stories...elements of the history of mankind that are novel and unexpected. There is a fundamental epistemological disjuncture between what PhD-holding historians do and what ChatGPT and its ilk do: the former meticulously, purposefully, and rigorously comb through a mountain of human-curated documents looking
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for revealing details that diverge from the baseline, offer indications of cultural shift, or elements humanity embedded in seemingly mundane activities; the latter processes terabytes of machine-harvested data in order to predict what will be the most likely next token in a string, and when these tokens are words they may or may not result in a grammatically coherent sentence.

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Working Classicists @workingclassicists.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

Once again loving this interpretation of Caesar’s last words #IdesofMarch 🗡️

a picture of a book text. The text says "Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek 'Kai su, teknon' (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin 'Et tu, Brute'. It literally means 'You too, child', but what Caesar may have intended by the words isnt clear. Tempest cites 'an important article' by James Russell (1980) 'that has often been overlooked'. Russel points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggest that Caesar's putative last words were not 'the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had treated like a son' but more along the lines of 'See you in hell, punk'.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Arrived at work today to find this card and gift on my desk from a group I taught last term at theological college. Well that’s made my day!

A card saying “Dear Charlotte, Thank you so much for your wonderful and inspiring classes in church history. I hope you enjoy this book on Julian of Norwich. The book brings history and spiritual practice together.” Also a book, ‘All Shall be Well: Visions of Julian of Norwich’ by Emma Pennington.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

I'm modestly optimistic that it's going to be a good day. Our research team just got the news that we've received funding for phase 2 of our project, and I'm sitting down to finally (!!) finish and submit an article I started ages ago. Let's do the heck out of this.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

I’ve immensely enjoyed teaching mature students. They want to be there, they’re not afraid to contribute to classroom conversations, and they often care more about genuinely learning from the assignments than they do about obtaining a good mark by any means necessary. More mature students please.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

I'm so excited about a #digitalhumanities project on the German Peasants' War that my colleagues and I are debuting at the @srsrensoc.bsky.social conference in July, in time for the 500th anniversary of the conflict. If you're interested in early modern religious conflict, I hope to see you there!

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

If the Vicar of Bray was henchman to a serial murderer, he’d be Richard Rich.

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

So looking forward to teaching a special subject on 20th-c church history next term. I've decided on the theme of 'disenchantment and re-enchantment'. How have churches (esp Anglican and RC) responded to the crises of modernity? We'll start by reading poetry: Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Charlotte Gauthier @faraiunvers.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Re-reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time in about 15 years, and like a journey on Shadowfax it’s flying by. I’m very taken with this handsome cloth-bound four-volume set with nice substantial paper. It’s a small thing but makes such a difference to the experience.

The cover of Return of the King, showing Tolkien’s original design of the Eye of Sauron encircled by the Ring verse in Elvish script, and at the top the ring of Gandalf, Narya, set in opposition against it.

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Dr Robin Douglas @robincdouglas.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Very relevant since the new American defence secretary has a Crusader tattoo... New podcast episode: Dr Charlotte Gauthier - The Crusades and the Far Right On the misuse of the Crusades by modern extremists religionoffthebeatentrack.substack.com/p/the-crusad... www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8rH...

religionoffthebeatentrack.substack.com

The Crusades and the Far Right

Dr Charlotte Gauthier

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