iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Brilliant, thank you so much! I've been staring at this for so long but now I can see it. The scribe was obviously having an off day...I sympathize

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Can anyone help with a passage from this will of 1450? Reading from "Et sinon..." in the top right corner. I'm getting stuck with "bonorum meorum in consilium? et p[ro?]vebil[?]" and then "post decessum predicte Margarete mancione mea nemi[?]detur?" Any suggestions very welcome!

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Fantastic! Many congratulations!

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

haha I actually already dug up the thread you did on where to eat in Leeds from a few years ago on Twitter - off to Bundobust right now!

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

incredibly, this is not even top five in the dumbest things I have done

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

live footage of me realizing that Leeds IMC is in fact, next week

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

reading the 1732 parliamentary report on the Cotton library fire, and I know it was a monumental loss to scholarship and tragedy for human knowledge etc etc but this is just objectively funny

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

Thank you! So pleased you liked it.

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

This is a wonderful piece of writing

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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 14/05/2025

‘𝘈𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘦, 𝘌𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥, with its orotund comma, has been carefully designed to compete for the attention of uncles who like history.’ @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social on popular history and its peccadilloes. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Thanks so much Emily! Are you at QM on Thurs? Maybe see you there!

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Thanks Sonja! I so enjoyed thinking it through with you. Can't wait to work on our Doodles Are Important article again at some point... 🙏

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

And special thanks to @greenleejw.bsky.social for doing such a great job with the images

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

- I wrote the first draft of this in 2021 😭 - It was rejected by two journals 😭😭 - Many people read it and made it better: @erinmaglaque.bsky.social; @emilybaughan.bsky.social; @samwetherell.bsky.social; @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social; Chris Millard, Alexis Becker, and others

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Emily Baughan @emilybaughan.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

if you were listening to Stravinsky last night on Radio 3 then you might have landed abruptly into me discussing placentas, diazepam, and the labour of neonatal care www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

bbc.co.uk

The Essay - New Generation Thinkers 2024 - Birth Stories - BBC Sounds

From 'lying in' to bedside cots: Emily Baughan traces childbirth changes.

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

pfft, this so-called artisan bakery doesn't even keep the assize of bread

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

[heckling from the back] Do Whigs and Hunters!

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Papa L Bad Gi he can't pronounce th so "the" is rendered as Le in speech, and just "L" in writing not sure whether to be proud in the Anglo Norman or sad in the Middle English

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Fancy a real paleography challenge? Try the deranged hieroglyphs of a para-literate 4yo

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

tonight Ru i'll be serving up some of that Greg Anderson realness, sashaying the radical alterity of the ontologies of past life-worlds

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

You seem committed to misreading this in a particular way, so I'm going to sign off at this point. Have a good weekend!

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

I mean it sounds like we agree in broad outline, but to quibble a little (since I was quite deliberate about this!): I didn't actually club Ambler's book with the others. The next sentence says, "And this is before we get to the cottage industry..."; i.e., that that is a distinct phenomenon...

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

I don't know or care to know whether or not the authors are themselves hypocrites. But I think it's indicative of the implicit politics of this kind of popular history-writing that it accommodates such a contradiction

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

That's a mischaracterization of what I wrote, which is that their "aim as high you can" sentiment sits uneasily with their interest in (and implicit endorsement of) hereditary privilege

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

What I specifically said is that the title of Ambler's book (have a look at that cover) are clearly designed with GoT in mind. The book itself is fine -- much better written than the one I reviewed -- but not without its limitations (as reviews of it in academic journals noted too)

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Helen Gittos @helengittos.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

'Edward III liked to dress up as a bird. In 1348, at a tournament in Bury St Edmunds, he revealed himself as a gleaming pheasant with copper-pipe wings and real feathers.' Blisteringly eloquent from @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

lrb.co.uk

Tom Johnson · Who plucked the little dog? Kingship and its Discontents

The things that made a medieval king effective also wreaked havoc on government. Good kings took up too much room: when...

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Emily Baughan @emilybaughan.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

we're a non-profit, shoestring-budget, parent-led setting. if *we* can't survive the childcare funding crisis, then few will. 1/3 of settings have closed since 2020 and truly by 2030 unless something changes there'll be almost none left

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

thanks Tess, so pleased you enjoyed it!

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

thank you so much! I really appreciate it. You were very much one of the people whose work -- insofar as it shows how political history can be so much more than just good and bad kings -- I was thinking with when writing the piece, so I'm delighted that it resonated

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Any photoshop whizzes out there who can help me with some basic image processing for an article? I want to take the graininess out of some high-contrast monochrome photos of a manuscript Can offer a bit of money for services rendered. DM me if you're interested

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

if only some anthropologists would write about kinship

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

picturing you as the grinning bat on the poster while you say this 😅

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

wait, Marcel Mauss was Emile Durkheim's nephew?!

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

The "famous sand blow" of 1668! High winds carried sand from warrens at Lakenheath into the Little Ouse, blocking it for navigation. Obviously this is all from Mark Bailey's brilliant book, "A Marginal Economy"

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

A desert in the middle of early-modern England: the Brecklands of northwestern Suffolk. In 1677, John Evelyn wrote that "the Travelling Sands...have so damaged the country, rolling from place to place, and like the sands in the Deserts of Libya, quite overwhelmed some gentlemen's whole estates"

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Dr Laura Flannigan @lflannigan17.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Happy New Year! I for one received a lovely belated Christmas gift in the form of my new article, out now on First View for Continuity and Change. It's even available Open Access for all to read: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Final revisions submitted! Coming (not that) soon to P&P, an article that launches the central ideas of my current book project... (happy to share the draft for anyone interested)

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Tom Johnson @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

An archivist with a sense of humor: the HMSPO mark stamped on this charter in the space that had been left for an illuminated capital in 1463 and never filled in

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

I'll be teaching at the California Rare Book School next summer. If you'd like an intro to medieval manuscripts, please consider applying. And if you know anyone who would be interested, please spread the word. www.calrbs.org/introduction...

calrbs.org

Introduction to European Medieval Manuscripts (2025) – CalRBS

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