Aside from the possible financial strains, I was in desperate need of something to do to break up the monotony, something to plan for in-between filling out mindless Excel spreadsheets that would never be looked at by anybody. So I said yes to running the class, though at this point, I was unsure how it would, or could fit in with my research. I said screw it, and told myself the money would be useful for commuting costs, even if my current contract wasn’t terminated. I hadn’t realised that what I gained would be so, so much more than money.

The class, Exploring London, was to be run weekly in two hour sessions, with a two hour lecture one week, followed by a trip out the following week, to, you guessed it, explore London! I had completely free reign over what I would be teaching; the previous tutor left me no handover notes, so I’d need to develop the term’s themes, write the lectures and organise the visits for each session from scratch, each different from the last. I’d be teaching students who were described as ‘mature learners’, most over the age of fifty, and was told they were enthusiastic and excited to have me on board.

Initially I wasn’t too worried. I’d taught before, on a well-known online-only tutoring platform that operates from the UK, teaching both A-level and GCSE History, Classical Civilisation and English Literature. I started this as a necessity to pay my rent whilst I was a student in Durham, alongside working as a tour guide for the castle, occasionally putting in a shift at the college toastie bar, and running a jewellery business from my bedroom. Whilst initially I was grateful to get a good rating on this platform from parents and students, being nominated for platform-wide awards, and getting to work with some amazing students (some of whom went on to study history at University, despite never thinking they would), the commission that was paid to the platform was obscenely high, and eventually tutors were being treated so poorly across the system that I left as soon as I was able.

All this to say, I’ve worked with quite a variety of parents, teachers, and kids who were at different abilities when it came to critical thinking, source interpretation, and reasoned questioning. At the same time, teaching adults would be different, and I knew this. Despite being told I had never taught students (of any age) who were simply interested in learning for the sake of it, where there were no real stakes in terms of producing a specific grade, and this produced a different dynamic entirely.

For our first few sessions, I was mostly trying to get to know everyone’s names and figure out the dynamics of the group. There were around fourteen in total, but this number fluctuated between terms depending on other commitments the group might have had, with fewer attending in the summer months so they could attend sports, or care for grandchildren and other family members. There were probably three different women called Janet, and another two both called Jane, most of whom went by different variations of the name, which made learning them all the more challenging for someone who is already terrible at learning names, but they gave me a lot of grace, thank goodness.

Throughout the first term, we explored the concept ‘Hidden London’ (creative, I know). I attempted to get at the histories that we’re less likely to consider, the stories untold and how they might relate to our understanding of a particular space, law code, individual, or episode within history. I opened with Liverpool Street Station, the busiest train station in the UK, and one of the most iconic for those entering London from the east of England. Any time my family and I visited London, we’d be going through Liverpool Street. My grandfather had worked in an office nearby, which he pointed out to me once when we walked past when I was a young child. The nearby Spitalfields Market was my first introduction to London’s street food and vintage scenes before it became even more gentrified in the early 2020s. What I hadn’t appreciated, though, was the amount of destruction required to construct Liverpool Street Station when it was first built in the 1880s.

Back during London’s greatest periods of growth in the mid to late 19th century, new train stations were required to transport commuters from London’s wealthy suburbs, and further afield, into the capital for both work and leisure. When it came time to build a line into east London, many commuters weren’t fans of being dropped off at the original terminus for the Great Eastern Railway, Bishopsgate, right in the middle of Shoreditch, an area famed for high crime rates and poverty, and one of the poorest slums in London. For the sake of these wealthy commuters, lands previously occupied by Bethlem Royal Hospital were compulsorily purchased and 7,000 people, mostly tenants, were evicted and displaced in order to build the new line. This destruction is not apparent when you stand in the terminus hall today, nor are the stories of the families who were evicted from their homes.

These were the kinds of stories that I wanted to focus on - the slightly uncomfortable where human progress could be admired, with an equal sense of horror at the violence and indifference that we can be capable of. Though mostly focused on the medieval and early modern periods (as this is my strong suit), we covered a variety of topics and places, from the sites of public executions in London throughout the Middle Ages, the construction of the Tube networks, repositories of knowledge and the foundations of the British Library, we covered periods between around 50 AD up to the modern day.

Whilst we did stick to central London mostly, we eventually made it out all the way west to Barking Abbey, the site of one of the most important abbeys in England pre-Reformation for female learning and as a site of royal patronage, and home to the burials of saints Æthelburgh (or Ethelburga), Hildelith, and Wulfhilda. The abbey was one of the later targets of the Reformation, likely since it had been such an important site of royal and noble favour. The site is now a public park that can be explored, along with a few maps showing the layout of where the cloisters, library, and abbey would have been. The burials of their saints are marked at the altar with three plain grave stones.

Some other highlights from the programme include the visit we made to the London Mithraeum, the Temple of Mithras that has been conserved and reconstructed by Bloomberg, where we had some interesting discussions about the role of large corporations in heritage spaces (I have a post on this brewing eventually, I hope), but also a walking tour of the East End dedicated to the women who lived, worked and died there. This was done with a focus on the victims of Jack the Ripper to highlight the similarities of the women who slipped through the cracks of the Victorian benefit system (if it can even be called that), by discussing the workhouses, the epidemics of alcoholism, typhus, cholera and male violence that meant that many of these women struggled intensely to get the help they needed.

Towards the end of May, we discussed Henrietta Howard and her construction of Marble Hill House, which she used as a refuge from Georgian courtly life, and provided a symbolic escape from her husband Charles’ abuse. Marble Hill is now owned by English Heritage and its house and grounds are open to the public to visit for the majority of the year, and I cannot recommend visiting more highly if you happen to be in the area. We also visited the British Museum to visit the fakes and forgeries on display there; this was a bit of a favourite topic of mine, as we went to see the so-called ‘Mexican crystal skull’ that had been paraded as an important Aztec spiritual artefact and sold to the British Museum in the late 19th century. In reality, it was made just decades prior to its sale, with quartz from Brazil, rotary tools from Germany, and a story dreamt up by a Frenchman, Eugene Boban.

I’d like to say that it was my programme of events that made the sessions as enjoyable as they were, but I have to be honest here; the success of this class was not down to me. Every single one of my learners was kind, friendly, and genuinely curious about what we were learning, an attribute I wasn’t entirely used to from my previous teaching experiences. Having worked as a teaching assistant in a classroom filled with eleven year olds for a time, I was used to having to work hard (sometimes very hard) for my students’ attention and engagement. Yet here, when I asked probing questions, and they were willing to answered immediately, it was almost a shock.

I’m very aware this is not always a normal experience when teaching. These conversations are difficult, as they should be. We were able to discuss gentrification in local communities, question and probe the role of slavery in major British institutions, of colonialism and the pervasiveness of its thought and its manifestation in jewellery, art and architecture, question what role violence serves within our societies and in state violence, the benefits system and the importance of the preservation of the natural world whilst also being sensitive to the needs of a growing community. We never jumped straight into these discussions, either; these questions emerged naturally as a result of the historical stories I navigated the class through. They were a scaffold for these talks, and not the whole point. Many times, my students didn’t agree with me, nor with each other, but by placing their experiences at the centre, we were able to gain understanding that I don’t believe either one of us could have alone.

What this class demonstrated to me very quickly is that history allows the discussion of these difficult questions by those who might not immediately have the language to do so outside of this framework. Also, that being aware of the history that surrounds us is an instinctive longing for many, which cannot always be accessed. It is a privilege to understand the world around us through this lens. The need to tell stories and to learn about our past in a way that can make sense of our present is a critical human need, a desire, that so many of us desperately need to fulfil. This class served that purpose for many of my students, who did not necessarily study history either at university or in school, but wanted to access and understand the spaces and stories that surrounded them every day, a right we all deserve.

The fact that I could provide access to this for a year, even if I can’t continue this class into the coming academic year, was an immense privilege. If I have made one person see a building, a name in the historical record, a piece of graffiti differently, I like to think that I’ve done my job well.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research journey, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, for all, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

To mark such a milestone, I felt it was only fitting that the namesake of this particular Substack, the inimitable M.R. James, received a dedicated post, touching aspects of his life, but particularly the work that introduced me to him, his ‘Casting of the Runes’, his work cataloguing early medieval manuscripts, and why early medievalists are still reliant upon him, even today.

Today, Montague Rhodes James is probably best known in popular culture for his collections of ghost stories. His gothic tales of scholars haunted by cursed runes, inspired by the inhabitants of his own Cambridge University and the landscapes of East Anglia became Christmas storytime staples for many. He published 4 volumes of these short stories throughout the course of his lifetime, which were wildly popular and are still widely read today, their notoriety reinforced thanks to readings produced for the BBC in the 1970s. They loom large in the popular imaginations of researchers even today, especially as the nights start to shorten as we enter the darker, colder months in which the long afternoons and evenings that we spend in reading rooms, libraries and surrounded by old books don’t feel all too dissimilar to the protagonists within James’ works, often researchers, librarians and academics themselves. It’s no wonder that u/sunnywiltshire observed on the r/darkacademia subreddit that ‘there’s hardly anything more dark academia’ than M.R. James’s ghost stories.

My first introduction to James came during my Master’s course, when my palaeography teacher gave us homework to read his ‘Casting the Runes’. In this tale, an occultist and academic named Karswell takes revenge on scholars who reject his papers from publication by murdering them. (I mean, I know we all dislike reviewer 2, but even this is a bit much). Karswell doesn’t just stab or poison them and be done with it though, that would be far too easy. Instead, he places a curse upon them by discreetly handing them strips of paper, written in indecipherable runic writing. The protagonist Dunning, a researcher at the British Library, is given one of these strips of runes after rejecting one of Karswell’s papers, which he must return before the curse can take effect and kill him too. He manages to do so, and soon after Karswell receives the paper, he is struck by a falling stone from the Church of Saint-Vulfran and is killed instantly. Proof that academic jealousy and vengeance can only get you so far.

These ghost stories are the most recognisable feature of James’ popular legacy, however, he was a notable academic in his own right. Amongst manuscript scholars, James is a titan, with no bibliography complete without his view at least being considered. His writings on medieval manuscripts throughout the archives and libraries of the Cambridge colleges is, without question, some of the most important and foundational work on these sources, critical to our understanding of the early medieval book. His identifications of a manuscript’s provenance have guided and influenced many a scholar needing clarity on a source’s identity; though some of James’ initial assertions may have now rejected by later generations palaeographers, his work provides a thorough and grounded starting point for the manuscript historian from which to build. Most of his work was still being reprinted in the late 2000s, and he is still cited as a major authority today.

I myself am reliant on James’ catalogues of Cambridge manuscripts for much of the construction of my own corpus of evidence for my PhD thesis. At the moment, I am in the process of building a database of early medieval manuscripts facsimiled in the eighteenth century and tracking how they were perceived throughout time. Part of this requires an extensive review of James’ comments, though they may be rare, on the state of a manuscript’s conservation. These are critical insights into how these texts were perceived a century ago, and how they might have physically changed since. I particularly enjoyed reading his frustrations towards later medieval and early modern librarians who rebound some of the earliest medieval items within their collections and extensively trimmed the pages; he described Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 057 (Abingdon Benedictine Collection with Martyrology) as being ‘mutilated with the binder’s plough’. Looking at the manuscript in question, it’s not hard to see why.

The cataloguing work that James undertook would result in work that was extensive and descriptive, which would shape medievalists’ interactions with manuscripts for generations. He had an appreciation for what he he valued as ‘quality’ craftsmanship and script execution, and could be rather derogatory to manuscripts that he deemed ugly or unsightly. I’ve been told that during his cataloguing work, he was possibly the only man to have ever viewed every single manuscript in the Cambridge college and university libraries. Whilst Humfrey Wanley catalogued all the early medieval manuscripts he could get his hands on, James catalogued nearly all of them, regardless of age. His personal, hands-on experience with these manuscripts could not be substituted for reading catalogues and scholarship about them to understand their materiality, and this amount of exposure makes his work insightful in a way that so many modern scholars, often working from digital facsimiles, who might be unable to feel the parchment and leatherbound tomes beneath their own fingers, struggle to. Before I started getting my hands on manuscripts in person, I was one of them.

James was a traditionalist in virtually all senses. Born to evangelical Anglican parents and living most of his early life in the Rectory at Great Livermere, Suffolk, he attended Temple Grove School as a boarder, a noted boys’ preparatory school. Following this, he was educated at Eton College, the largest boarding school in England and possibly most notorious, before completing his undergraduate degree at King’s College, Cambridge, then teaching as don and eventually provost there. Later, he would serve as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and as provost of his former Eton College until 1936, when he passed away.

Whilst he was not overtly vocal regarding his politics, later in life he rejected communism in his letters and opposed Irish nationalism, especially speaking out regarding the Irish Home Rule movement. He was the epitome of the quintessentially English early twentieth century Oxbridge and Etonian academic; raised and nurtured in what can only be described as a male-centric world, privileged to encounter only societal and scholarly elites from his childhood right up until his death. It is no wonder, then, that he was described by his friend Arthur Benson (Master of Magdelene College, Cambridge, essayist, and poet) as being ‘against modernity and progress’.

James is not necessarily a man to be idolised, per se. I certainly try not to. Figures of the past cannot be placed into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ boxes, they exist in the grey, in the liminal in-between. There’s much about James that gives me pause, but his recognition of the magic contained within manuscripts and their study? That’s universal, and it’s why I label myself an ‘appreciator’. His life as a medievalist scholar and academic, interactions with the antiquarian world, schoolmaster and provost of some of the most elite academic institutions within England served as both direct influences and inspirations for the stories that he would write, opening up the world of academia to that of the supernatural.

To me, James’ ‘Casting the Runes’ demonstrates that, for all his ghost stories’ are lauded to be grounded in a more gritty realism, away from the overtly supernatural themes of Victorian horror, James understood the genuine magic that medieval manuscripts, and particularly scripts, held, even for those who worked with them in the most clinical fashions. There is something truly special about holding a manuscript whose transcriptions you’ve studied, whose plates you’ve pored over, finally, in your own two hands, of holding the weight of the sources of centuries’ worth of scholarship, the shrinking of the time that separates an early medieval scribe and you, the reader, as you examine the parchment that they annotated, translated, transcribed, illuminated.

These words and decorations were not just superfluous, they functioned as a living manifestation of the Word. The teachings they carried influenced the designs, scripts, inks, parchment quality, every material choice that went into its production. James’ work serves to guide us through the beginnings of this world, and it’s for that reason I’ll always be an appreciator.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research journey, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

I’d presented this paper before, at the Boundaries, Borders and Barriers, Real and Imagined, in the medieval world conference in Oxford back in April, so I wasn’t exactly terrified of presenting the content, but of the sheer amount of networking and opportunity that I had available to me in the short span of four days. Leeds is a behemoth in the medieval scholar’s calendar; with about twenty sessions running in parallel at any one time in the day, how on earth would it be possible for me to genuinely engage with everything that I needed to? To take every opportunity afforded to me? It was also, still, only my second ever time presenting a paper, so those nerves were still somewhat present, no matter how much I tried to convince myself they weren’t.

I’m very lucky to have travelled up to Leeds in a large group of other Cambridge and London students also in attendance who were able to both show me around and give me advice when it came to both the layout of the full conference, but also guidance on the day-to-day stuff. What sorts of things should I skip if I’m too exhausted to go to every single paper session? Where’s the best place to go for lunch so I won’t spent all of my money in one go? When’s the craft fair on? Is it worth attending all of the keynote lectures? What about the drinks receptions? And possibly most importantly, when is the best time to head to the book fair to get my reservations in before all the good ones were taken?

Despite me wandering in (what felt like) cluelessly into the largest conference on medieval studies in the world, the paper itself went as well as it possibly could have done. We didn’t have the largest of audiences, but hey, a panel on material approaches to the office liturgy is perhaps a tad niche, and that’s okay. It meant that the folks who did come were genuinely interested in what we had to say, and the questions session afterwards went fantastically; I think about half of the audience had a chance to ask something, which is a decent ratio, in my books. I was approached afterwards to discuss the potential of publishing the work in a journal, too, which is probably the first time I’ve really sat down and appreciated that even my failures can be done relatively well.

I heard so many wonderful papers this week that I really could not pick too many out, unfortunately, but what has been wonderful to see is the growing mainstream understanding and appreciation of materiality and heritage science within manuscript studies. The groundbreaking work being undertaken by the teams on the INSULAR project (Oxford, University of Goettingen, Trinity College Dublin), CODICUM project (University of Bergen, University of Helsinki, University of Southern Denmark, University of Copenhagen, The Swedish National Archives and Royal Danish Library) and Hidden in Plain Sight teams (Queen Mary and Cambridge University Libraries) have created truly interdisciplinary teams of historians, palaeographers, art historians, heritage scientists, conservators and archivists, and are unveiling so many important revelations about how manuscripts were made, moved, and interacted with throughout their lifetimes. It is genuinely such a wonderful time to be a historian of the book.

Despite the highs of day 1, I was struggling on Tuesday with an illness, so I mostly holed myself up in my room, escaping only briefly to attend breakfast and the beginnings of a panel on material manuscript studies and heritage science. I learned the hard way that if you push yourself too much then you will just break, so I hid myself away to eat some fruit and drink a lot of tea. (It helped that this was provided free for delegates, and you best believe I drank so much lemon and ginger that day). Conferences aren’t just physically exhausting though, they have a real ability to drain your social battery beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. To be clear, I enjoyed every moment I was at Leeds. I also could not attend many of the more ‘fun’ events that I wanted to because I was running on so little energy. No birds of prey exhibition for me, I had to recharge myself before I went to the INSULAR panel! Because, you know, critical for my understanding of my understanding of the discipline.

The IMC is truly unique compared to other conferences I’ve attended, either to speak or as a guest. Whenever I asked for help from any of the team, apologising ‘if it was a stupid question, this is my first time at Leeds’, I was never met with frustration, but a ‘it’s your first time here? Welcome!’. It is astonishing how quickly this put me at ease. Nothing was too difficult, there was nothing that couldn’t be solved without their input. Whereas at other conferences I felt I was learning by watching others around me and quietly following their lead, I was able to mostly pick up information by myself, and was able to ask for help whenever I needed it. If you’re nervous about attending Leeds for the first time, I hope I can provide some reassurance that, at least in my experience, there are so many people on hand who can help you if you need it.

What really struck me throughout the week, though, is that it is truly astonishing how much having institutional backing for conference attendance benefits you. I had considered attending Leeds out of my own pocket last year (before I was officially registered as a Cambridge student) and debated signing up as a vendor to sell my medieval themed jewellery just to get my foot in the door, but decided against it when I considered the logistics and the expense. But now, with a department and university affiliation listed on my lanyard (and critically, the money agreed to allow me to purchase my train tickets and reimburse my registration costs), you automatically have a network to which you are ascribed, people you know who can help guide you through these early stages as a researcher. I’m so immensely grateful for that.

Having been on the other side for about two years between the end of my MA and my PhD beginning, I seriously appreciate the opportunities given to me now I have an institutional affiliation. Research is infinitely harder when you have very little library access, or an identifiable ‘group’ of scholars to whom you can associate with. It’s not even about working on exactly the same work, it’s about knowing there’s always someone you can run to the supermarket to grab a meal deal with on your lunch break. Whilst humanities students don’t necessarily have formal laboratories or groups in the same way STEM does, our networks still absolutely exist. They manifest in less formal (and often less tangible) ways than the incredibly long lists of co-authors that get attached to experiment publications, sometimes via long email chains, becoming mutuals on social media, or in introductions over coffee or drinks receptions, but they’re very real, and I was seriously lacking them when I was in the in-between period as a postgrad.

So the formal association with a specific group of researchers, even if it was just my department, felt like a real relief to me this summer. This time last year, I was living in a limbo, a forthcoming student who couldn’t afford to spend half of my paycheck on a ticket to Leeds for the weekend. I watched mutuals attend via social media, and I’m not ashamed to admit I was jealous back then. Why wouldn’t I be? They were living my dream at The Big Medieval Conference! I wanted to be there too! I was desperate, by that point, to be back in the field again. Having spent nearly two years feeling an indescribable ache to be back with the books, and being so close to it but not quite there yet was painful, but now I am here? I’m trying to appreciate every second, every opportunity that I’ve been offered, regardless of the amount of admin that now awaits me this week. I have so many emails to send to so many people.

Over the course of this year, I’ve realised that working in academia, and the access to the communities that build our collective understanding of the medieval period, is of such high value to me in terms of my personal fulfilment. Will I manage to get myself a position here full time with the way that higher education is shaping up in the UK? Likely not, but it’s worth a try, if the opportunity presents itself. Even if I only make it to a few more IMCs, they’ll all be worth it, even just for the sake of the curly fries available in the Old Bar.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research journey, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

The work I’ve undertaken over the past month or so has been fundamental for my thesis, but I can’t share much of it here just yet, since I haven’t even written it up for my supervisor, and I’m hoping that some of it will become research papers or key parts of the thesis. However, what I can do is talk to you about the archives I visited and the manuscripts I explored over the past month, which took me right from the eighth to the eighteenth century. Don’t even talk to me about research scope.

One of my most important manuscripts for my current work is held in the archives at Longleat House, the family home of the Marquess of Bath, Humfrey Wanley’s Book of Specimens. The manuscript consists of a collection of facsimiles that Wanley made of several critically important manuscripts, some of which are now extensively damaged or no longer exist (no thanks to you, Ashburnham House fire). I was incredibly grateful to the archivists in charge of the Longleat manuscripts for waiving their research fees (usually £80 plus VAT per day of archival research) owing to my status as a PhD student, and to my aunt, who offered to use some of her annual leave to drive me down to Wiltshire.

Longleat is probably most well-known in the UK for its safari park, but I wasn’t about to waste any of my time amongst the lions and giraffes, no matter how much fun it would have been (and I definitely don’t think my college would have allowed me to expense that). Instead, I was informed to head to the tradesmen’s entrance, to ring their giant doorbell and wait to be buzzed in. After signing my name into their contractor’s book, I was met by the archivist who led through the servants’ quarters, up in a lift with sliding metal grilles, through the apartments of the former Marquess to the very top floor of the house, where the reading room had been set up for researchers. I was told that this had been quite a busy period for the archival team; when I asked how many readers they’re getting at the moment, the response was “about one per week!”. Compared to the numbers of readers in and out of the Manuscript Reading Room I’ve become used to at the British Library, I have to admit I had to struggle not to giggle.

I have never worked in a reading room quite as beautiful as Longleat’s - there truly is something about being surrounded by period furniture in one of the grandest of Elizabethan houses, viewing intermittent hail, rain, and sunshine through the windows. It made the gravity of my work feel more apparent than it might usually compared to when I work from a digitised manuscript at my desk in the office, constructed in 2005. Whilst I can’t share all my findings with you here, some of my research has been shared in some conferences at the British Library recently, and hopefully I’ll be able to talk a little more about it by the end of July. I am itching to write about it in more depth.

When the reading rooms finally closed for the day, the archivist was initially going to me out of the house via the same servants’ passages that we’d entered through, but then paused, turned to me, and said,

“Do you want to go the fancy route?”

Of course I said yes.

I was then taken down what Longleat calls its ‘kings and queens staircase’, a staircase lined with portraits of previous English monarchs and their spouses. These kinds of portraits were common in large houses like Longleat, as a way of showing your reverence and acknowledgement of the legitimacy of royalty’s past, and many were commissioned as part of a large set. We then got a view of the Great Hall from the top of the Minstrel’s Gallery, which I’m told is rarely available for the public to explore, before descending down the grand staircase. As a child being taken around historic houses by my parents I had dreamed of days like this; I’d always wanted to see behind the closed doors, even if they just ended up being store cupboards filled with archival boxes, I wanted to know exactly what these houses were hiding. That was quite a special afternoon, for so many reasons. It was quite a wonderful two days.

After some slightly frantic meetings with my supervisor about what I’d seen at Longleat, it was then time for the heatwave at the end of June that saw the temperatures in the UK reach over 35 degrees Celsius. I deliberated cancelling my travel plans for my next archival visit, but, thanks to the advance singles that I had purchased and the changes to National Rail’s refund rules, I didn’t have any choice but to travel on the Tuesday at the beginning of the week, the first day of the extreme heat weather warning. I was to visit the Northamptonshire Record Office to examine an early precursor to my eighteenth century facsimiles, a large collection of medieval charter facsimiles in Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals. Whilst some images had been reproduced and printed in the 1950s by Lewis and Stenton, the work had not been digitised, making it critical that I went to examine the manuscript in person. Despite the heat, I’m very glad I did.

Hatton’s Book of Seals is a vast tome, filled with over 500 facsimiles executed on over 120 parchment folios and measuring at 46.5 x 36 cm in an austere Victorian leather binding, it is made to impose, and impose it did, mostly on my back muscles. I struggled to physically move the book at points in the day. Most of the facsimiles were completed just before the outbreak of the English Civil War, in an attempt to preserve medieval charters that protected the rights of the gentry that would be at risk if Cromwell and the Parliamentarians gained power. Of course, these fears were realised, and as a result, the Book of Seals contains many charters that now no longer exist, either having been destroyed or lost in the nearly 400 years since the book was created.

The sheer size of the book and the level detail of the charter facsimiles, many executed in vivid colour and full script reproduction, meant that it attracted a bit of attention from other researchers in the reading room. I was aware I was an odd one out; most other people who were working there were completing local research or travelling from Cambridge or Peterborough for research in their local history societies. A number came over to ask me about my work, and what I was doing, which is understandable when you looked at the sheer size of the thing. When the reading rooms closed for lunch, we sat together to eat our pre-packed sandwiches and chat about our research. Before long, we were discussing the provenance of the items within the British Museum, the ethical and technical problems with AI in research, and the role of the cost of living crisis on young people in the UK. We joked that this was one of the reasons women gossips have been derided throughout history.

It wasn’t just the other researchers who were wonderful though, the whole team at Northampton Archives were excellent from the moment I arrived. They assisted me with queries about my manuscript’s binding, and once the reading rooms closed, one of the assistants even offered to drive me to the station so I could avoid walking in the peak heat of the day, which I accepted gladly. Now, perhaps it is not the best idea to get into a stranger’s car, but given the heat of the day and the work I’d done with her over the course of the day, I decided it was a risk I was willing to take, and I’ll be damned if the air con wasn’t worth it.

I’ve also been in and out of the British Library a few times this month too, for a conference on the fragments of the Cotton Genesis and where some of my work (albeit a very small portion!) was showcased. This was also where I received my first ‘official’ acknowledgement of my work, and reminded me of the potential of the work that I’m currently doing. I’ve also been in the manuscript reading room quite a bit, mostly to explore some more notebooks owned by early modern antiquarians who were developing the field of ‘Saxonist’ studies, but also eventually to view some microfilm of a manuscript whose digital facsimile is not yet back online following the library’s recovery from a cyber attack in 2023. During this recent spell of exceedingly hot weather, the air conditioning in the British Library has been an absolute god send.

I’m very lucky so much of the material I need for my work has found its way here, as I really would struggle if much of it was spread throughout the country. Again, I can’t share too much of what I found here just yet, but I did find some rather charming drawings and scribbles from Humfrey Wanley, from when he was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at the grammar school in Coventry, asserting, like many of us did in our favourite notebooks, that it was ‘His Book’. It’s moments like this that connect me to the humanity of who I work on, more than most, and a reminder that you can doodle throughout school and still be recognised by posterity with your portrait hanging in the British Library.

We’re coming to the end of my manuscript road trip, a little closer to home this time. Last week, I had my first visit to the Parker Library, to view one of their most restricted manuscripts, the surviving portion of the Cotton-Corpus Gospels, written in the eighth century. Despite using the Parker’s reference collection a few times, I had never used their manuscripts, mostly because they have excellent digital facsimiles available online for research, but since I was measuring the accuracy of eighteenth century facsimiles that required direct material comparison, this was the first time I had a real and important case to view the manuscript in person. I had viewed the burned fragments of the British Library portion of the text earlier this year, so there was something incredibly humbling about being given access to this text. This would easily be the oldest manuscript I have ever touched.

It is also probably the most valuable manuscript that I have yet been entrusted to work with, and the librarian shows appropriate reverence and care. She talked me through the new conservation binding, demonstrating how it opens, closes, and what the book wants to do, because they truly can have minds of their own. I had been slightly nervous about handling it, despite holding manuscripts of about the same age and in much worse physical condition from the Fitzwilliam collections, but there is something about having studied a manuscript for months and then having it in front of you that heightens the gravitas of that moment, so I was grateful to be introduced so well to a manuscript of whom I’d learned so much. It was another afternoon of new revelations, and not just due to its New Testament contents.

And so my manuscript road trip comes not to an end, but a slow meander over the next month. We’re certainly not done just yet; it’s going to be a continual summer of movement, even if that’s mostly between my flat, the Cambridge University Library and King’s Cross, which I seem to be haunting like a spectre at the moment. In August, I’ll be travelling through Germany and back via Paris to attend a summer school, and towards September, I have a few more appointments booked with some cathedral libraries to view some wonderful early psalters to compare with some of Elizabeth Elstob’s work, who was producing beautifully accurate and delicate facsimile about the same time as Humfrey Wanley, so I can’t rest up completely. I’ve also got Latin to revise and another chapter draft to write, as soon as I can bring myself to sit down and make it happen. We’ll get there though, we always do.

Whilst the travel is certainly physically tiring (especially in these heatwaves), I have never been more intellectually stimulated than I have within the past month. I know it’ll take forever to write up everything I’ve seen, and longer to truly understand their place within my work, but more than anything, I’m starting to see that larger picture, which is a wonderful moment for any researcher. Some rather exciting write-ups will be coming as soon as I’ve got that figured out, but for the time being, these photographs will have to suffice, because that’s the best I can offer for the moment. (And to be fair, some of them are photographs of the Cotton-Corpus Gospels, so it really could be worse).

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

I have also been approached and asked to contribute to a meeting session with Google AI senior executives to demonstrate ‘how I use AI in my research’, which I had to turn down, because I don’t. I offered to speak to these executives about how I have had to change and adapt my research processes as a result of the web becoming more and more reliant upon AI to produce search results. They were not interested, as they wished to see demonstrations of how AI was being used in research. It is very clear that the tech billionaires who are continuing to inflate such an immense economic bubble are not inclined to discuss the very real limitations of their technologies, even when they themselves are having to reassess their trajectories in the light of spiralling economic and environmental costs.

Even aside from these concerns, I would still have similar criticisms of the topic of today’s discussion, specifically, the emerging trend of generated AI influencers spreading across social media producing ‘history’ content. These ‘time travellers’ are becoming increasingly popular across YouTube and short form content such as Instagram Reels and TikTok, and mainstream media has not quite reckoned with the damage that this can (and does) do to both to the public’s understanding of history, and the role that it plays in the current attention econmy.

The most popular of these new channels is Chloe VS History, which features Chloe, an AI generated influencer, travelling through different historical periods such as the launch of the Titanic, early modern London and ancient Rome, occasionally interacting with the ‘people’ that she meets and even attempts to warn them of upcoming disasters, such as the iceberg that would eventually claim the lives of over 1,200 people. “Chloe’s” videos are presented in a vlogging POV format, blending her seemlessly into the endless Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts scroll. Chloe isn’t the only AI generated history influencer, not by a long shot. “Chloe’s” success has inspired a number of copycats, such as Esmetimetravels and Janella Through Time as well as others who have similar names, aesthetics and topics for their content.

Whilst many viewers seem to be aware that they are witnessing AI generated imagery, the only one to explicitly state it was so was Chloe VS History’s account, with the channel description reading that it is “Powered by PAI Pro from @utopaistudios”. It is worth noting that all the presenters chosen to be generated for these history channels are conventionally attractive white women, presented and monetised on channels that are owned and operated by men. The vast majority of their videos contain numerous and blatant historical inaccuracies, anachronisms and direct appeals to the viewer’s emotions, placing their vloggers into deliberately volatile situations (both physically and emotionally), for them to experience history first hand. Many of their channel banners advertise the fact that they are showcasing “real history” through these AI generated women.

However, one of the more concerning videos I came across was not actually from Chloe VS History, but from Janella Through Time. “Janella”’s latest and most popular vlog features her visiting Jerusalem in 30AD and… meeting Jesus, or at least, a very Western looking Jesus, though he does have a beard and a slight tan. He certainly doesn’t look especially Middle-Eastern. During this video blog, Janella speaks to an AI generated simulation of Jesus, who then speaks direct to Janella’s video camera to her viewers at home to share a message:

“I know what you are carrying right now. I know what you are afraid of. I know that you think that you are too broken to be fixed and what you believe cannot be forgiven. It can. You are going to be okay.”

- Part of a speech from AI generated Jesus (a sentence I never thought I’d have to write)

A quick look at the comments demonstrates that viewers of this video are developing deep, personal connections with this content, describing “tears when Jesus took the camera”, that this is a reminder “that the Lord is with me no matter what”. Again, many viewers seems to be clear that this is AI generated content, that this is not actually Jesus speaking, but a generated representation of what he would or could say to those who are suffering, and yet, this does not matter. Other comments praise the content for having used AI “educationally”, despite the fact that I imagine a large number of classical historians, Bible scholars, archaeologists (and probably Christians, in all honesty) would have serious issues with the “historical” content presented by “Janella”.

Janella Through Time’s channel has not quite garnered the virality of Chloe VS History as yet, but it follows a similar pattern of banking on and developing highly emotional responses from their audiences, leading to high levels of engagement. Despite a series of (vetted) historical content creators calling out a series of factual inaccuracies present within “Chloe’s” work, presented with peer-reviewed research and citations of primary sources, the creator of Chloe VS History, Johnathan Laramy, was presented with a World Influencers and Bloggers award (WIBA) this year. Only three historical vlogs have been published so far on the Chloe VS History channel, but the hype surrounding this generated influencer is high.

In fact, when historians with experience and knowledge produce content fact checking the content on the Chloe VS History account, many comments from other social media users criticised them, calling it “not that deep”, some of whom tell them to “leave Chloe alone”, seemingly frustrated that a male historian was critiquing the female generated time traveller. It does not, seemingly, matter that Chloe is not real, that she is a collection of pixels generated in an order best suited to gamify social media’s algorithms, many individuals who are invested in Chloe’s adventures through space and time seem to hold a genuine emotional connection with this generated influencer and feel the need to defend “her”.

The Guardian recently published a piece discussing this new world of generated AI influencers, which did little to outline the genuine criticisms that historians have of this content, noting more humorous inaccuracies, such as background characters in some Roman historical content being generated wearing sunglasses, and the fact that some critics simply label it “AI slop”, due to it being produced by GenAI models. In fact, the only historian quoted is one who is heavily in favour of the potential that generated history influencers have in reaching the masses:

“In one sense, there’s absolutely nothing new about it… They’re in a very long tradition. I put it in the same bracket as something like Horrible Histories, these things that popularise history and make it engaging and funny and immersive…

Creative people could work really well with academic historians and people doing primary research – so not just regurgitating stuff, but really thinking and rethinking about the past.”2

- Adam Smith, Edward Orsborn Professor of United States Politics & Political History at the University of Oxford

There is a lot to address here. Whilst I can’t speak to all of it, I’d like to discuss a couple of assumptions that Smith makes throughout some of these quotes. (I’d have quoted more of him, but I would have run out of both time and my own patience).

First of all, I grew up watching Horrible Histories on the BBC. It won a large number of awards during its initial five-season run (including a BAFTA for comedy, the first ever children’s show to do so), and has been credited with encouraging and developing an interest in history a huge number of the older Generation Z. Whilst there’s certain elements that have aged poorly (actors routinely performing brownface in the earliest seasons, for example), the work and research that went into the show’s production has been (I would argue) nearly unmatched since when it comes to creating popular history for children. The books that preceded them, written by Terry Deary in the 1990s, were critical in introducing difficult and complex historical ideas to a younger generation, such as the violence that accompanied the expansions of the British Empire, the role of women such as Mary Seacole in the nursing movement in the Crimean War, and the socio-economic realities of periods such as the industrial revolution.

Horrible Histories, is, without a doubt, populist history, and I am not arguing that it is not. However, considering each detail was aggressively fact checked wherever possible by their assistant producer, Greg Jenner (now host of the ‘We’re Not So Different’ BBC Sounds podcast), corrected later when possible, costumes based on contemporary research and primary source materials, I believe that some anachronisms can be forgiven, especially when it is designed as an introduction to the topic for children aged between eight to twelve. The sheer amount of research and commitment to presentation in a manner that both appreciates and rsepects its audience’s developing brains, whilst combined with genuinely well written comedy and musical parody, is one of the reasons the show is still held in such high esteem by historians and history teachers of my generation today.

It’s why I particularly resent the fact that Smith compares Horrible Histories to generated content such as Chloe VS History. Smith seems to suggest that creatives don’t already work with historians, when some of the most important and impactful research already comes from the blending of disciplines. Historians worked with scientists in order to determine that it was Yersinia pestis which was responsible for the devastation caused by the Black Death, with experimental archaeologists to construct the Anglo-Saxon village of West Stow in order to better understand early medieval building practices. Book historians work with parchment makers and book binders to understand how the medieval book was made, constructed and written.

Any historian worth their salt is very aware that, without the creative industries and interdisciplinary work , the academic humanities (and especially their outreach) would suffer tremendously. In my line of research, I work with historians, librarians, archivists, linguists, liturgists, musicians, photographers, calligraphers, parchment makers, artists of every kind. Without them, and specifically, their humanity, my work would be significantly poorer for it. They offer practical experience and genuine human insights into my work, grounded in smell, taste, touch, that cannot simply be derived from a large language model. To suggest that historians ‘could work really well’ with creatives, as if they’re not already doing so, is both disingenuous and totally factually inaccurate.

But whilst the advent of social media has allowed for the generation and spreading of false historical content, it has also allowed for contemporary researchers to be more visible than ever before. Here on Substack, and host historical book clubs and create genuine community and fantastic, accessible research guides. produces beginner friendly and wonderfully contextualised worksheets for those wanting to learn historical languages, many of which I have used myself (though my Latin is still poor, it clearly just means I need a bit more practice). I have learnt so much from ’s work on historical colour and pigments, which, as a book historian, I am obsessed by. produces truly excellent articles on Byzantine history which have proved foundational for my understanding of an era which I was never taught. writes work that is both incisive and current, rectifying historical imbalances of the gendered narrative of history.

is also doing the painstaking work of constructing a list of vetted historical professionals that she’s circulating for recommendation, and I urge you to head over there and sign up if you are a historian with credentials (including independent researchers, your voice is just as valid!) or keep an eye on who she recommends. The vast majority of academics that I know and speak to are both very aware of the dangers that these generated AI historical accounts are creating, and are willing to step up to the mark to fill the knowledge gaps they are leaving in their wake. And so many of these are available for free, for anyone to read.

It is so clear that there are so many wonderful history researchers creating genuinely fantastic content out there that we simply do not actually need to use AI to fill this gap, because there is no gap. History in the public domain has never been more accessible if you know where to look, but for those who have not engaged with history, say, since high school, the algorithm is predisposed to favour and promote the types of content that Laramy’s Chloe VS History channel creates and publishes. History does need to be more accessible, and on first glance, Chloe VS History might appear a silver bullet to get audiences engaged. But real history is more challenging, contradictory, and rigorous than the image of the just-Westernised-enough-Jesus generated perfectly to pander to big tech’s algorithms, driven by emotionally heightened engagement from the viewers it was designed to ensnare.

Generated history content like these channels actively discourages the very kinds of critical thinking that the discipline teaches, of engagement with what history genuinely entails. It masquerades as democratisation, presenting history to the masses, but in reality is subject to the problems and pressures associated with an economic system that rewards view count and potential for monetisation, and not the truth. I am not saying that we should neglect to try and create immersive, engaging art inspired by history, in fact, that is the last thing I would wish to argue.

But any interpretation of history, in whatever form, cannot be immune to criticism, and deserves scrutiny, especially when it is generated specifically to garner engagement within the late capitalist system, so reliant on clicks and engagement, monetised by watch-time, not accuracy. Whilst bad and inaccurate history has always existed, the format, creation and methods via which this new trend of AI history content is presented is more damaging both cognitively and environmentally, with its focus on emotional drives making criticism more challenging for genuine historians to combat, despite clear and blatant inaccuracies.

Importantly, I don’t believe that those who might have enjoyed AI generated history content should be shamed for it, however little I can relate to them for doing so. It was unfortunately only a matter of time before AI generated history influencers started appearing on our feeds; this is not a unique trend, it is a symptom of the late stage capitalist attention economy. Instead, we need to meet folks where they are at, and support them wherever possible to engage in their history on a more critical level.

I’m not saying that we can fight this machine entirely, but we can encourage engagement with history in a more meaningful and rewarding way. We can invite our friends to visit your local museums, libraries and archives. Donate to them, if you can. Challenge yourself to attend an exhibition, or learn about a place or period that you’ve never engaged with before. Speak to volunteers, upon whose backs the heritage industry, especially in the UK, is so dependent. Read books, blogs and articles by real historians. Leave them a comment, ask them a question. Most of us are very happy to drop you a message and give you a recommendation if we have the time. Regardless of how or where GenAI history develops, I am confident that history written by real people will continue to endure, thanks to its role in sustaining community.

History has always been produced by, and for, humans, as we continue to understand and reinterpret our pasts in new lights. It is an ever-evolving discussion spanning generations and millennia, which GenAI cannot replicate or adequately reconstruct, only ever regurgitate. Rejecting it now and embracing our community of living, breathing, imperfect, yet real historians is one of the most important steps we can take to keep the ‘human’ in ‘humanities’ alive.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth-century. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

Welcome to the PhDiaries, a series for me to talk frankly about life as a postgraduate history researcher. I hope it is as cathartic for other postgrads to read as it is for me to write.

I don’t think it would come as a shock to anyone who’s followed my blog for the past few months that I have been struggling with imposter syndrome since I arrived at Cambridge. Getting over the fact that I deserved to be here and that I wasn’t actually stealing taxpayer money was quite the jump, but I was thrown back into the hole very quickly once I had realised my first project was unviable. I’m not going to go on about it again (I’ve written enough about that) but it was pretty devastating. I considered dropping out several times, convinced I simply was not good enough for this, probably one of the most Academically Challenging of all Academically Challenging environments.

However, within three months, I had developed a whole new, different project with my supervisory team, spent more time in the manuscripts reading room in the British Library than I care to admit, got very frustrated with the current standards of digitised microfilm, wrote up 10,000 words for my registration piece, and submitted it alongside a giant appendix which included some very dodgy Latin translations. I had to put aside my perfectionism quickly, because it did not need to be perfect, it just needed to be done. I was exhausted, but it was done.

First year PhD students are technically not full students yet; officially they are still on probation until they prove that they can actually do the research work they are required to. In order to pass onto the full track, they have to go through an end of year viva where a sample piece of work is submitted and reviewed by their advisor and another examiner, and they defend the decisions they made, discuss potential for future research and discuss progress throughout the year. In some universities, this process is called promotion, in others, confirmation, but in Cambridge, it’s known as registration, as you are registering for the doctorate. If passed, students won’t be examined again until they hand in the full thesis, in just over two year’s time. In my case, I was assessed by our head of graduate studies and our head of department, so I was perhaps more nervous than I might originally have been.

Despite being advised that this was going to be quite a relaxed meeting (these first year vivas are usually completed in under an hour) I still reread my whole submitted work about three times, noting down each typo, each minute point that I now disagreed with or could now elaborate further on, with explanations for each should they come up. I couldn’t seem to stop my heart from pounding violently in the hour or so before the meeting began; it didn’t help that this was day one of the UK’s most recent heatwave and that my viva had been scheduled for 4pm on a Friday (a practice I firmly believe should be illegal, to be quite honest).

It turns out, dear readers, that when folks say “it’s going to be fine”, they do actually mean that and most of the time they’re not lying in order to make you feel better. My viva was more akin to a supervisory meeting, just with different people, who wanted to understand where the full thesis was headed. The first thing that was said was “just so you know, we are minded to pass you”, which really did do wonders for the nerves. There were no issues with my manuscript or history work; the only real cause for concern that was brought up was my Latin translations (which I already knew were dodgy at best). Whilst I had grasped the basics, I need to improve quite quickly in order to properly access some more significant historic source materials within my corpus.

This I knew going into the viva; given how quickly I’d had to turn my project around, I really had neglected my language learning, to the detriment of my appendix, and for which I apologised profusely, but wanted to include to demonstrate that I did do something with A Different Language, even if it was very poorly executed. I’ve been offered more personalised support here, and Latin’s going to be my main focus for the next few months, especially over summer, before I attend a palaeography summer school, which I hope should help to kill two birds with one stone. I left the viva, not feeling really awful for having bad Latin, but knowing where to go, what to do, and in need of a long, deep sleep.

I have found myself enjoying my research and, weirdly, the administration associated with it, immensely more of late. In fact, it seemed to become infinitely easier the moment that my registration report was handed in, with new avenues and questions appearing near constantly, with my poor laptop’s open tabs struggling to keep up with all of my ongoing trains of thought. I’ve planned three different research trips, and am feeling quite poor after spending quite a lot of money before my expenses are paid back. Currently I’m listening to lots of early Fleetwood Mac (at the moment I’m hooked on Mystery to Me), which somehow lets me type faster than usual when I’m composing emails or filling in forms, but also gets me on the verge of tears on the trains between London and Cambridge as I remember, now more than I ever have in the past year, that this is why I do what I do. The constant curiosity and need to answer more and more questions, but each one answered springs forth, hydra-esque another three, or four.

The week following the completion of my registration viva, I took some much needed time off, encoruaged both by my supervisor and advisor, who told me it was probably a good idea to take my foot off the gas for a minute and catch a breath or two. I left my laptop behind, went to the Cambridge Beer Festival (where they had, frustratingly, run out of mead by the time I arrived), saw a friend for her birthday, sweltered in the heatwave, got bitten by about a thousand midges whilst paddling on a lake, and consumed a huge number of ice creams. The thing is that the avenues my research has opened have been so interesting that I’d have come back to work much sooner if I hadn’t managed to catch my partner’s cold and been confined to the sofa for three days. Boo him.

All this being said, I think that my work-life balance has been slowly improving this year, even as I feel I’ve been working more intensely than I have for months. I am still taking on far too much outside of what is supposed to be my full-time job, which makes it hard for me to get some proper do nothing rest in, but all things will come with time. I’m gradually reducing some of my current responsibilities, attempting to work smarter, not harder, in my remaining ones. To be clear, this doesn’t mean using ChatGPT to draft my emails for me or any of that nonsense but things like reminding myself that perfectionism should not be the enemy of good, that completion is more important.

Over the next few months, I’ll be launching myself back into Latin, prepping for some more conferences (if you happen to be attending IMC Leeds 2026, feel free to drop me a line!) and travelling around the south of England to see a bunch of wonderful manuscripts. Whilst I can’t share many of them with you (photography permissions are not always granted), I will be writing extensively about them. I’ve been pondering writing a piece on the differences between examining digital facsimiles and the real thing; whilst I’m a big advocate for digitisation, it often serves to replicate or create new issues of accessibility experienced when accessing the original. For now, however, you’ll find me deep in some rabbit holes about the cost of engraving plates used by antiquarians for publication in the eighteenth century.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth-century. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

The problem of eyeskip (where you end up copying the same line from your exemplar twice accidentally) is more real than I had given these scribes credit for, too. You can see in my image copying Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 27 that I make this precise mistake on line 7, starting to repeat the line I’d just completed. I also have a lack of awareness of space on the page; in my first example, I run out of room on the right handside, and my letters become cramped as I attempt to make them fit. My general ductus is clearly stilted, nervous and tentative, with many mistakes as a result. Clearly, my calligraphy skills at the moment are limited and quite honestly, I don’t think a scriptorium would be hiring me anytime soon if I don’t practice extensively, but it hasn’t stopped me from having a fantastic time and singing its praises as a research technique for palaeographers, but especially those (like me!) interested in the process of creating and producing manuscript facsimiles.

Before the advent of high-resolution photography, any copies of manuscripts that were circulated amongst scholars who might be unable (or unwilling) to travel to see the original manuscript needed to be hand-drawn, either via tracing directly from the exemplar, or by careful, meticulous copying. This required both a careful eye and extended access to the materials required, not always easy when many manuscripts were held in private collections, unwilling to open their doors to just anyone. Humfrey Wanley, a noted scholar and palaeographer, struggled hard to get access to the contents of the Cotton library for his own work and the work he was required to undertake for George Hickes’ catalogue, mostly due to jealousy towards him from the library keeper, Thomas Smith.1

However, unusual arrangements did exist; two of the earliest “Saxonist” scholars, the siblings Elizabeth and William Elstob, were allowed to borrow Rochester Cathedral’s Textus Roffensis (Rochester Cathedral Library MS A.3.5) for William’s work producing an edition of the Anglo-Saxon laws.2 During this time, Elizabeth Elstob made calligraphic facsimiles of parts of the manuscript that would help further her brother’s work, before the manuscript was requested to be returned by Rochester Cathedral after the siblings had held onto it for four years.3 Four years! I like to think the Cathedral genuinely forgot that they had lent it out, and had to contact the Elstobs in a wild panic when they realised.

The choices that are made by facsimilists when producing a facsimile are much like those made by language translators when, say, preparing a critical edition of a text. What elements should stay? What can safely be left behind without detracting from the essence of the exemplar before them? And who gets to decide what that essence of the original truly is? More often than not, replication of a manuscript exemplar focuses on the textual content, its letter forms and decoration, rather than the materials it is constructed from.

However, at age 17, Humfrey Wanley purchased a large notebook where he would construct his very first facsimiles, now London, British Library Harley MS 7505.4 In the same manner as a medieval scribe, he ruled each page for calligraphic aid, and, interestingly, decides to use parchment as his writing support, instead of paper. I like to imagine that the young Wanley thought of himself as a medieval monk as he copied out rolls and rolls of bastard secretary as he taught himself as much as he could from the manuscripts that he could find, working every spare minute outside of his draper’s apprenticeship (which he would eventually abandon for his scholarly pursuits, eventually gaining a place at Oxford). It seems that scholars like Wanley and the Elstob sibings understood the importance of this practice based research just as much, if not more, than many scholars today.

Back in Wanley’s day it was much easier to get hold of parchment. Whilst paper was becoming increasingly the default, and the printing press had spent nearly two-hundred years revolutionising the ways in which information was spread in the early modern period, there were those who did care about the “lost art” of handwriting and penmanship. The belief that genuine calligraphic ability was capitalised upon by artists and calligraphers, who produced exsquisite copy books full of examples of their talent, to sell to (usually) elderly gentleman clientele, such as Samuel Pepys, who collected hundreds for a large scrapbook for him to show his friends. Whilst many of these were completed on paper, the parchment trade was reduced, but still in demand during the early modern period. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, the number of full-time parchment markers in the UK had reduced to around fifty. This has now shrunk to just one.

Today, the production of parchment and vellum making is listed as a critically endangered craft in the UK by the charity Heritage Crafts, with just two full time employees and one apprentice currently in training.5 All documented parchment markers were trained are currently employed by William Cowleys, widely cited as the final remaining parchment producer in the UK, however, some backyard pachment producers do exist here; I know for a fact that my medieval palaeography supervisor did an experiment in making his own parchment in his backgarden, for example (I’m still unsure how his wife felt about that one), but I’m unaware of any documented efforts to list and record more serious amateur parchment makers.

However, if you did want to get your hand on some parchment, it’s not impossible, yet. William Cowleys sells a range of items from whole animal skins right down to sample packs of parchment for those unsure of their needs just yet at £32 including postage. However, sales can’t be completed on their website, you must either phone them or email them to place an order. I have currently not heard back from them yet, but I can only imagine a job which requires so much in the way of manual labour can make it quite challenging to get to your emails in a timely fashion without getting your computer covered in bits of membrane.

I’ve also come across an independent seller called LeofricDesigns on Etsy also sells parchment made from goat skins starting from £5.50 per sheet, depending on the size. It appears that they also create goatskin drums which they also sell on Etsy, and have been doing this for nine years on the site, with excellent reviews of their work from both musicians and bookbinders who use LeofricDesigns’ work for their artistry. It’s funny how certain communities are united over the need for specific materials sometimes.

It is understandable that the demand for parchment has decreased so drastically since the turn of the century. The idea of using animal skins as a writing support is, for many, rather uncomfortable, both from an animal welfare and cost perspective. The Houses of Parliament used to record all of its laws on vellum, but decided to make the transition to archival paper instead as a cost-cutting measure in 2016. William Cowleys, understandably, was not best pleased with this decision.6 Yet, there are qualities that vellum has that paper simply does not, one of those particularly being the longevity of its lifespan as a material. So many manuscripts would simply not have survived to the present day if they were written on any material other than parchment. As an artistic medium, too, parchment is praised for its versatility and its uniqueness, as written about and photographed by Diane Sotherland, showing how transparent vellum can be used to produce paintings that almost appear as if they are floating above the surface of the page.7

Indeed, there does appear to be some real, intrinsic value to reproducing medieval art and manuscripts using its original tools, methods and materials. The famous “Mappa Mundi” from Hereford Cathedral was recreated on a skin from William Cowleys for an English Heritage commission, and the piece now hangs in Dover Cathedral (apparently, the largest calf-skin they had ever produced for any project). And the effort the parchment makers and artists had put in really did make a difference to the viewing experience. When I visited in late summer last year, I spent at least twenty minutes staring at it and its details, realising excitedly that they had actually used parchment for the piece, and gold for the illumination. Hung in a recreation of a medieval nobleman’s bedroom, filled with the colours and textures that aimed to replicate the original, a facsimile like this which pays homage to the materials and methods of its medieval craftsmen, in my opinion, draws you in more than and photorealistic copy ever could, especially in a space this special.

Where does this leave me and my humble attempts at reproducing Insular hands? I’ve been convinced of the need to attempt to make some facsimiles on parchment, even if just to better understand the material experience for medieval scribes. I’m not going to be buying whole skins anytime soon (unfortunately the UKRI stipend budget doesn’t quite stretch that far) I’ll be ordering some parchment from as many different UK based sellers and producers as I can find (the list currently stands at two!), and trying to create some more calligraphic facsimiles for my research. I’ll do my best to document the process here on Substack. One day, I hope to go even further, making iron gall ink from original medieval recipes. We know that early modern antiquarians such as the Elstobs and Humfrey Wanley were interested in this too, copying out these recipes and potentially attempting them themselves at some point. It is really wonderful to imagine generations of early modernists making the same discoveries through these processes.

As a short aside, I noted that my review of affordable stationery has ended up doing far better than I expected, so I feel I should follow up with a medieval manuscript themed successor. Which calligraphiy nibs are the best for Insular half-uncial? I’ll give you all the gossip very soon. For now, if you are a budding or experienced palaeographer, but have never made an attempt to recreate these scribal patterns, I highly recommend giving it a go someday soon. You never know what you might learn.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth-century. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

Welcome to the PhDiaries, a series for me to talk frankly about life as a postgraduate history researcher. I hope it is as cathartic for other postgrads to read as it is for me to write.

What a month the past few weeks have been. I was running around so much preparing to give my first paper at a conference, but especially my paperwork for registration (the moment where I pass my “probationary” period and eventually progress onto the “official” PhD track) that I didn’t have much time to stop and think. I was been holed up in libraries and archives and had my nose in my books, hardly able to allow myself to head outside for fear of not getting quite enough work done in time. Honestly with the amount of work we’ve had on, I think I saw the staff of the British Library manuscript reading room more than I saw my partner.

This was, funnily enough, not great for my head. I’d been sleeping worse than usual, convinced that any moment I spent not working was time wasted. Every time I sat myself down to rest, I panicked, telling myself that I should be doing more, and then, too tired to work, I sat starting at my laptop, filled with guilt that I actually couldn’t do anything, didn’t rest either, and so the cycle continued.

I’ve tried to keep to a relatively strict 9-5 throughout the PhD so far, and it has worked some of the time, but I’m really not good at treating myself with the respect and dignity that I would give to others in my position. They deserve the rest, but me? I need to get this draft completed, so I will simply not stop until I’ve edited the next paragraph. And actually, edited that reference. And double checked the quotations from that letter. And so I go on until I’m shattered.

Really, what I was doing was robbing myself of the energy that I could have the next day. It simply wasn’t productive, because it means I needed to take much longer breaks when I (inevitably) burnt out! It’s almost as if the experts were right about this! Don’t get me wrong, I adore my work. I didn’t think it would be possible to be so excited to open my laptop in the mornings, knowing I have another tangent to explore, another rabbit hole to lose myself in. The humanities is the most fulfilling place to work, but that really does not mean you cannot burn yourself out, regardless of how much you might love it.

Amongst the research for my registration period, I’d also been preparing to give a paper at a conference in Oxford. This would be the first I’d ever given; I’d never presented one during my Masters, mostly because I was in Durham and getting down to London was expensive, but also because I didn’t have the confidence to do so. I wasn’t convinced that the research and conclusions I was drawing were of enough significance that anyone else would want to hear them; ultimately, I did believe that I was good, but not good enough to stand up and talk to a room full of experts about what I’d found. But given I was now embarking on a PhD, I knew that conferences were a right of passage. Regardless of my confidence (or lack of it), I was going to have to give these talks eventually.

This imposter syndrome led to a huge amount of stress and perfectionism when it came to writing and developing my presentation, but when I arrived in Oxford the day prior for some events, I was greeted by a wonderful group of academics, early career researchers and postgraduates, all supportive, kind, and incredibly friendly, whose work I devoured over the course of the two days we were there. By the time it came to give my paper, my embarrassment had nearly vanished, filled instead with a nervous excitement. The presentation went as well as it could possibly have gone, I received some great questions and the following pub trips led to the beginnings of a development of a (spoof) conference on medieval spoons. All I’m going to say is, watch this space. It turns out, if you give yourself the opportunity, you can and will rise to it.

At the same time, I was preparing for a meeting with my supervisor to go through all my draft content before I submit it for the registration. The draft I’d sent over (with profuse apologies) wasn’t complete; it had no conclusion yet, no plates inserted (mostly because it was “select” material at the British Library, so no photographs allowed), and no thread to tie some key sections together, because I still wasn’t sure on the phrasing. I was so embarrassed that it wasn’t done yet that I nearly didn’t send it over at all, but I was told that the work so far was excellent. Granted, there were some typos I hadn’t noticed, a definition I needed to clarify, some conventions regarding the naming of specific Latin sources I wasn’t aware of, but according to him, it was very strong.

Given how much I’d been stressing about it, I was a bit overwhelmed by this. I had been so close to this research for such a long time that I’d been unable to see the wood from the trees, and, combined with my perfectionism, I couldn’t see that the work I’d done was not just adequate, but actually, quite good. Following the call, I was exhausted, physically and emotionally from the whole week. I decided, finally, that I would finish early on Friday afternoon, to do some of my hobbies I’d been neglecting over the past few weeks whilst my partner was away visiting family.

I saw a trend a while ago of people making lifestyle content often captioned “enjoying my rent” and so that’s precisely what I did. I prepped lunches for next week, with those fancy Bold Bean Co chickpeas I usually don’t purchase because they’re just a bit out of my price range, but were on offer this week. What can I say, I know how to go crazy on a weekend. I had a bath, watched some TV, played some Animal Crossing (my Happy Home Academy score is currently abysmal and my town is filled with weeds) and started up making some decorations for the wedding. Even if it’s a long way off and we don’t even have a date confirmed yet, I wanted to get started on them anyway; I’m going for a jewel toned colour palette, with the main decorations being elaborate origami stars, strung absolutely everywhere. Think late 60s-early 70s medieval revival with lots of paper ephemera.

In the evening, I made pizza dough with my breadmaker, topped it with a homemade sauce, mozzerella, chorizo and red onion, and ate it with a gin and tonic sat on my balcony, where I’ve recently been growing salad and herbs. I don’t use this space often enough, but the past few weeks I’ve been drawn to it more and more. It’s small, with a very low wall (it’s definitely not within regulation and we’re definitely not supposed to use it), but it’s got space enough for a small table and chairs and several pots for plants I attempt to grow.

Sunday was a day spent doing odd jobs. I had buttons on a cardigan and holes in a dress I wanted to fix up, and I finally repotted some plants I’d been meaning to for a couple of weeks, including some mint I propagated from a packet bought from the supermarket, and, given the roots are happy in their new home and it grows well, I’m excited to add it to some cocktails or salads. I framed some artwork I’d bought in Japan, and reread my journal I’d written whilst out there. Now, I’m sat in a (relatively) clean flat, with a fridge filled with lunches for the week, new art on our walls, my favourite dress ready to wear again, and a big jug of iced tea, which I will almost certainly drink in less than a day.

Whilst it’s been productive in terms of things done, it’s also been grounding. I think many humanities students are familiar with the notion of our research taking over our lives, and in many ways, that’s true. I’ll read or see something, and immediately wonder how it might be applied to my work. I speak about the antiquarians I research to my friends as if I know them personally, because in many cases, I feel like I do; I certainly spend more time with them than my actual friends sometimes.

Taking the time to actually switch off with not just sleeping, but what is often referred to as active rest, is so, so critical. Not to switch off from research per se, or to escape it. Whether we like it or not, our work follows us, shapes our outlook on life, changes and challenges the ways in which we live, at least, I know it does for me. My flat is filled with postcards and photographs of medieval manuscripts, of the visits my partner and I took to Northumberland castles, our bookshelves overflowing with Old English poetry, Shakespeare, Tolkein. But taking a moment to use my hands to knead dough, clean, stitch, water, mend, fold, wash, or make food from scratch, helps to regulate my nervous system immensely. I don’t do this in a tradwifey way (my partner cooks from scratch just as much, if not more, than I do), but because I care deeply about having the knowledge to maintain my possessions, not overpaying for food and getting the endorphins that come from doing it myself where I can.

So what did I learn from all this? I have energy again, not just physically, but creatively too. I have lots of chickpea pasta salads in the fridge waiting for my lunches this week that actually taste pretty good. My plants look happier. My flat looks nicer thanks to those Japanese woodblocks. I’ve got my favourite dress ready to wear again. But most of all, I got excited to come back to work again on Monday. I wasn’t filled with as much guilt as before, and I know what I need to do and where I need to go.

Perfectionism sucks and drains my lifeforce sometimes. Here’s a quick TLDR:

• Conferences are scary but your work is important. Share it. Shout about it. Someone is listening, and someone cares.

• You can and should finish work at 5pm. The work will be there tomorrow. It is quite literally not going anywhere.

• More often than not, watching What We Do In The Shadows whilst doing some origami can be very enjoyable. Give it a shot.

• Regardless of what your inner voices are attempting to tell you, you’re probably doing far better than you think.

I shall attempt to remember these for myself when moments like this month will inevitably come again, that sometimes, you do just need to close the laptop, step outside and touch some grass for that stress to fade. In this one specific instance, the internet trolls might have been right.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth-century. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

It is a highly unique skill, in that it requires you to work with the primary sources in order to complete a transcription, ideally in person, though a well digitised copy is an invaluable tool for a historian working at a distance. Tools like Mirador viewer can be used for appropriately compliant manuscripts if they are compliant with iiif (International Image Interoperability Framework) standardisation, to allow you to compare multiple manuscripts at the same time. (If you are interested in learning how to use digital tools like this, let me know, and I can develop a guide!).

A skilled palaeographer can, simply from the characteristics of an individual’s handwriting, tell you when and where a text was produced, whether this individual’s handwriting is typical of the period or not, and in some very rare cases, identify the exact person who was writing that document, depending on the hand’s style and form. Reading these works requires the palaeographer to learn new alphabetical systems, often alien to their own, shapes of letters and understand the complex world of suspensions and contractions that early writers used as methods of abbreviation, which can be highly contentious.

Listed below are an assortment of different guides that can be freely accessed online to help palaeographers, both old and new, to improve their skills in transcription, with a small description of how to use them and the quirks they come along with. I hope that this resource might be helpful for aspiring or established palaeographers, or for anyone currently nurturing an interest in historical script!

A note- my focus for this guide is on primarily Western European scripts, predominantly those used in Ireland and Britain, as this is where my expertise lies, so I can only apologise for these shortcomings. I am not an expert, nor have I even really encountered much palaeography outside of the Latin West, so unfortunately, I cannot give any guidance in other areas, such as Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese or Arabic palaeography, amongst others. However, HMML School does have introductions to Syriac and Arabic palaeography, linked here!

Latin Palaeography c.500-1500 (HMML School)

This is one of the best places to start if you’re looking to get a full overview of palaeography from Late Antiquity up until the Humanist scholars of the 15th century, but especially for book hands (i.e. the most formal scripts used by scribes, and from which other, more informal hands, are derived). Filled with historical information about the contexts in which these scripts were produced, accompanied with guidance on ligatures for specific hands, this course utilises a large number of high quality, digitised manuscripts that can be examined in high definition.

In addition, you can explore the HMML’s virtual reading room, with curated manuscript collections for additional palaeographic practice. For those who value interactivity and high quality digitisation of manuscripts they work from, I’d recommend starting with this course first.

Latin Palaeography from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Vatican Library)

Covering the same scope as the HMML palaeography course, the Vatican Library’s palaeography course provides in depth historical background for each script, in addition a valuable introduction to the physical components of the medieval book, important contextual information for any historian or palaeographer. It is particularly useful for those wishing to study or compare scripts outside of England, such as Caroline, Visigothic and Merovingian scripts, though it does contain information on Insular hands too.

It should be noted that this is a primarily historical course, rather than an interactive one with guided exercises, like the HMML school or Cambridge University’s English handwriting course, but nonetheless it is a highly valuable resource which draws upon examples taken from the digitised manuscript resources from the Vatican Library.

Latin Palaeography 1086-1500 (The National Archives)

A self-guided tutorial, this course from the National Archives focuses specifically on medieval documents written in Latin in England between 1086-1500. It uses in-house examples (such as the Little Domesday Book) with links to other resources from the National Archives available for you to practice on. They also have a large number of PDFs that can be printed out and examined in A3 size for those who prefer working with paper or want to be able to write all over their medieval charters (I’m one of these!).

I should note that this is an archived resource, but many of the links continue to work, providing further reading and a helpful glossary of legal terms if you’re unsure what kind of document you might be looking at. The once interactive activities can be accessed and downloaded as a PDF, much like those available with their medieval Latin course. This resource is best for those wishing to work with legal and bureaucratic documents, like wills, Parliamentary records or court documents, such as those found in the National Archives.

English Handwriting 1500-1700: an online course (University of Cambridge)

This course consists of a set of transcriptions that slowly ascend in difficulty as yo make your way through. It doesn’t just provide digitised images and a transcription alongside, but guidance for transcription convention, and useful pointers about how a manuscript tradition needs to be considered and reflected within the creation of a printed edition.

Excellent for those needing to work with texts produced between 1500-1700, each digitised image that you use has historical contexts available at the click of a button, as well as full transcriptions produced in a semi-diplomatic format for you to check your work. Whilst the technology is a bit dated and somewhat janky (especially when doing the quiz sections), the course content itself is solid. Highly recommended if (like me!) you need to work with English antiquarian papers for your research.

Looking for more manuscripts to practice with?

Historians are indebted to the work of digital conservators and archivists who create digital copies of manuscripts so they can be examined by scholars and enthusiasts all over the world. I’m curating a list digitised manuscripts, organised by script type, which can be used for transcription practice. This will be published soon and linked here, but if you’re really excited to get started, here’s a list of institutions and links to their digitised collections. Happy manuscript hunting!

• Collections of Cambridge Digital Libraries

• Durham Priory Library Recreated: Durham Cathedral

• Parker Library on the Web: Corpus Christi, Cambridge

• Western Medieval Manuscripts: Digital Bodleian

• English Medieval Manuscripts: University of Manchester

• Western Medieval Manuscripts: British Library, London

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth-century. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

When I was in my second year of university, I handwrote all of the notes that I was reading for my essays and my main project at the end of the year (including all of my article and book reading). Whilst I cannot feasibly recommend handwriting all of your notes as a legitimate strategy for learning at university (it took me far too long to complete and was nowhere near as streamlined as the notetaking systems that I use now) I don’t think its a coincidence that I received the best grades of my undergraduate degree that year. Writing by hand cements knowledge in our heads in a way that copying and pasting from articles into a junkyard notes page simply can’t replicate.

Whilst I can’t feasibly continue to write my PhD notes by hand (it would take me far, far too long to do so unfortunately) I still like to handwrite wherever possible, especially for things that need to stick. Unfortunately I am not the most natural language learner, and therefore handwriting my notes helps me significantly. I can visualise, colour code and lay out tables in a way I could do digitally in a Word document, but feels more finicky and doesn’t stay in my longer term memory nearly as long. There really is something that sticks about analogue methods when it comes to our learning processes.

Quality stationery has always made me happy in a way that is quite difficult to describe to those who are happy with grabbing a free ballpoint from a conference or a work event and calling it a day. My partner, for example, cannot understand my love of Japanese gel pens, but for me, working with an unco-operative or leaky pen will make my day immeasurably worse. To be clear, I don’t judge you if you’re this person. I don’t know if I’m just very, very picky about my pen choices, or if there really is something to be said for the quality of writing implements and their impact upon our enjoyment of the learning experience. After all, we’re supposed to enjoy eating food more if the cutlery are of higher quality, so why should the same not be said for pens and paper?

So, I thought I’d take you on a quick tour of my desk, rucksack and pencilcase - because I genuinely believe that quality paper and pens will actively assist your academic work if you, too, are constantly frustrated by leaky ballpoint pens which explode in your bag every so often. Enjoy my slightly too in-depth ramble, and if you have any mechanical pencil recommendations, I’m currently on the hunt for a good one, so please do drop them below.

I should clarify that I am not sponsored to say any of this; these are all my genuine opinions about the stationery I work with and have bought with my own money. I care very deeply about good quality stationery and would never want to make a quick couple of quid out of shilling something I couldn’t care less about and hadn’t tested myself.

Writing Implements

• Muji 0.38mm Gel Ink Ballpoint Pens - no surprises here for the gel pen enthusiasts amongst us, these pens are affordable (I think £1.95 last I checked, or £10.95 for a pack of 10) and fast drying. There’s a reason they’re legendary within the stationery world, they are excellent. I use these for virtually everything, predomiantly the black and the red for translating Latin passages and annotating the grammar forms, just because they’re so versatile and reliable.

• Pilot G-Tec-C4 0.4mm- a tad more expensive than I would usually buy; I bought a G-Tec-C4 after reading many recommendations and reviews about how good they are. I do enjoy using it, but whilst it’s a decent writing experience, I struggle with the ink pooling on the nib, meaning that smudging is much more common with than with the Muji 0.38. I’m unsure if it’s just me writing improperly, but I’m not quite sure it’s worth the price increase from the Muji pens. However, I have found they work much better with higher quality & more absorbent cotton paper, so perhaps my paper choices just aren’t up to par.

• Zebra Sarasa R 0.4mm - a more affordable 0.4mm pen compared to the Pilot G-Tecs, I like the range of colours available in the Sarasa range; the forest green really does look lovely when I’m writing out my Latin translations. I tried the 0.4mm after not getting on very well with the Sarasa R 0.5mm, but somehow I think the quality is worse. The colours are slightly more muted, and whilst the ink pools less than the 0.5s, it issometimes almost hesitant to come out of the pen, which often looks inconsistent on the page. Unfortunately I don’t see myself repurchasing them, which is a shame.

• Pilot Juice Up 0.3mm - purchased on a trip I took to Japan this year, the Juice Ups are very satisfying to work with compared to the G-Tec-C4. I enjoy how sleek they are, and they are far less likely to smudge as the ink doesn’t pool nearly as much as the G-Tec. My only gripe is that they’re just a tiny bit too thin to write with, but quite honestly I can deal with that. I also only bought one of them, and I really should have bought a pack of ten, as I could have bought them much cheaper on my trip out to Japan this month. You live and you learn.

• Zebra Mildliners - these went a bit viral in March 2020 over lockdown and I fully bought into the hype, purchasing a set of 24 when I saw them advertised for a good price. I was not expecting them to be as good as they are; the colours are understated but fun compared to regular highlighters, and the ink only runs if water gets on it (don’t ask me how I know). I’ve even used them for drawing and sketching in my travel sketchbook when I could only bring a small pencil case whilst travelling and they hold up decently in a pinch.

Notebooks and paper

• Midori MD Paper A5 Notebook (grid layout) - I spent a bit of money on this when I visited Choosing Keeping, a beautifully curated (and appropriately rather expensive) stationery shop near Seven Dials in London that has been popular online recently, but I’m fairly sure you can get it cheaper elsewhere. It lies flat, making writing on both sides of the paper all that much easier. It’s the perfect “neat” but practical notebook in which I’m currently using to draw out my Latin grammar tables and record example translations for each grammatical construction; I often find that the nicer the paper, the more likely I am to use it, so if I hate Latin, ergo I should use a higher quality notebook that makes the experience as enjoyable as possible.

• About Blanks notebooks - I own two notebooks from About Blanks (one as a present from my brother, and one I bought for myself at the beginning of my MA in Medieval and Early Modern studies) and I adore them both. About Blanks takes old hardback books and upcycles them into notebooks which utilise the original covers; they only make them with blank pages, but I’m a big fan of these for writing meeting notes and mindmapping, or using as a general all-purpose journal. More than anything, I love the way they look on my desk shelf; they are just gorgeous. At £20 each, they’re certainly not the cheapest notebook option, but you get a lot of pages for your money, so I’d recommend one as a treat, or as a present for a fellow bibliophile.

• Handmade travel journal - I made this as a present to myself when I started my PhD at Cambridge. I’d looked at the likes of the beautiful journals made by PaperRepublic and Louise Carmen and couldn’t justify the price (well really, my monthly income decided that for me), so after searching for some tutorials online, I thought I’d have a go at making one myself. I already owned a leather punch, so I purchased some vegetable tanned leather in an olive green and some elastic cord, and it was finished within an hour. Whilst it’s certainly not as refined as one you could purchase from an atelier, I’m very happy with it for the £30 I paid for the leather and the cord. I now keep my rough notes from classes I take in here - this is very much my “on the go” notebook that I now feel rather vulnerable without.

• ‘Blank Book’ A6 Notebook - I only acquired this very recently as a gift from a wonderful friend of mine; she used a foil pen to draw a picture of me on horseback as a medieval knight (needless to say, I nearly cried when she gave it to me). I’ve not had the chance to use it yet, but I’m anticipating it’ll be used for meeting notes and jottings for when I’m out and about, and can’t bring my larger notebooks with me.

Sundries/other bits and bobs

• Oxfam pencil case - this was purchased on sale from Oxfam probably three years ago now; I regularly haunt their sale sections just after Christmas (it’s how I bought one of their handmade blockprint cushions I’d been eyeing for a couple of months for a whole £3. I felt like I’d scammed them somehow). I’m a big fan of block printed fabric so it’s distinctive enough to know it’s mine, and it’s the perfect size to bring to the office or to travel.

• MT washi tape - for when I like to journal, I adore using washi tapes to both secure items down and to add a splash of colour, and MT’s range of tapes is wonderfully varied and relatively affordable.

• Muji cat post-it-notes - are these practically very difficult to write on? Yes. They are honestly quite infuriating. There is not enough space for any actually important writing to take place. Are they also very cute and do they make my day immeasurably better? Yes. They are post-it-notes in the shape of cats. Next question.

• “Bede” bear from Durham Cathedral - a reminder of my academic roots that perches inside my ASNC mug and lives on my desk in the graduate study room, Bede bear is quite possibly the best study mascot an early medievalist could want. I dress him according to the season; he has been wearing a bobble hat for the cooler months, but now spring is upon us, perhaps I will buy him some tiny sunglasses when the summer comes around.

  

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

Welcome to the PhDiaries, a series for me to talk frankly about life as a postgraduate history researcher. I hope it is as cathartic for other postgrads to read as it is for me to write.

It has been far too long since a PhDiaries update, and for that, I can only apologise. Whilst I’d hoped to write one of these every month, unfortunately, this wasn’t possible with the way life shaped up at the beginning of this year. TLDR: it has been a very intense period of learning, personal and professional growth, and whilst it has all been very exciting, it has been quite hard to distill into one bite-sized update. So instead, here is quite a large one.

The darkness of the more recent winter months, especially January, was somewhat exacerbated by the fact the problems I’d been having with my research just before Christmas. Right before the holidays began, I realised that I had to completely scrap my project and start a brand new one, all over again. You read that correctly. Not just rework, not just refresh or tweak, not just shift focus, a whole new beginning. Of course, I didn’t do this because I wanted to, I did this because I needed to.

I’d been having an absolute nightmare with my methodology for weeks at this point. It was experimential, untested on this source material, and despite being convinced of its merits about six months previously, I was struggling more and more to see how it could possibly work on my corpus of evidence. After booking a visit to see a copy of Aelfric’s Homilies in the Wren Library at Trinity College, I thought this might be my last chance to give it a shot, to make it work. When the manuscript arrived at my desk and I flicked through, making my notes diligently on my laptop, I paused for a moment. I stared at it for about a minute with tears in my eyes as the realisation finally fell, conclusively, into place.

It’s not going to work.

I left the library in a state of disconnect, knowing that I couldn’t continue on this work, that it was simply a dead end, but it didn’t hit me properly until after Christmas passed. This revelation sent me spiralling for quite a while. I’d only just started to feel a bit more at home in Cambridge, but the project I’d designed over a year ago, that I’d worked so hard on, that I have been told would work by the creator of the methodology itself, just wouldn’t? And I had to start again, from scratch? I had been desperate for this one last opportunity, despite my instincts starting to chirp up near daily towards the end, telling me that there were no pros, only cons, that I knew the method was too simplistic for what I wanted to do, and the workarounds too convoluted.

So when I finally had to admit this failure to myself to say that I was devastated was an understatement; I was completely shattered. I felt like a total fraud. I’d been given funding for a project that didn’t work, despite me truly believing that it could, that it would. Shouldn’t I have seen this sooner? To be honest, I briefly contemplated dropping out of the PhD altogether. I kept asking myself- how on earth could I justify staying at Cambridge, of all places, if I hadn’t seen the warning signs sooner?

What kind of scholar did this failure make me?

It took about three weeks to get back on my feet, whilst I struggled to motivate myself to do anything. I felt more disconnected from academia than ever before, and one of the only ways in which I could connect was to criticise it and divorce myself from it further, which is partially why I wrote “On becoming an academic nomad”. I was struggling to see a path forward; I felt as if I was reading around in circles, having vague ideas and abstract thoughts that never seemed to go anywhere. I knew I had to design a new project, but I had no idea where to even begin. I’d poured so much into this initial idea, and now my confidence was depleted to near record lows. What I needed was direction and motivation, and so I finally organised meetings with my advisor and supervisor, somehow completely convinced they would tell me I was a total disappointment, that I should pack up my bags and submit an apology for wasting their time and the government’s money. To my surprise, they weren’t worried at all.

My supervisor reminded me that this was a sign that I’d actually done good work in the first term - I had known when I started that the method needed refining, I attempted to refine it, and it proved the methodology unworkable. That the methodology did not work was not a failure of mine, per se. I was just testing it, and it didn’t work in this context. What would have been worse would be if I’d continued to push when it was clear to me that it became unworkable. Whilst it felt like failure, this was in fact progression. Yes, it did mean that I would required to design a new project from scratch, but the work I’d already done was still valuable to the field, because publishing or promoting it meant that this other method’s legitimacy could be officially challenged. This was, ultimately, good.

Now, we’ve together designed a brand new project which has much more viability than the previous one. The focus has shifted quite dramatically from where I started, though I’m still ensuring that manuscripts and their materiality are my focus. I’ll no longer be studying early medieval liturgical manuscripts, but the production of facsimiles of early medieval texts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. You may have seen my more recent posts have taken a shift away from directly talking about early medieval history towards the perceptions of the early medieval period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and I’m very excited to keep sharing overviews of my research with you all. (If you’ve missed them, my two latest posts give some overviews of the history of the discipline of palaeography and the scholar Humfrey Wanley, linked below!)

I thought this shift towards something so new would make me feel uncomfortable, and in many ways, it does, but it turns out that this work has made me feel much freer than I ever did before. No longer am I trying desperately to fit a square peg into a round hole with methods that are just too convoluted for what I was attempting to measure, but I have a project that I can see a clear pathway for, where I am no longer stumbling blindly. I am treading a road of scholarship that has been travelled before, but on a slightly longer, possibly more meandering route, if I were to use a slightly convoluted metaphor to describe where I currently am.

My scholarly ego took a real hit this term, I think understandably, but it’s been one of the biggest reminders of why research is so necessary, and the importance of failure within that process. I like to think I’ve come back to my new project much stronger; I am so much more confident now, thanks both to my supervision team being wonderful, and the fact I can feel progress happening each day. Each new manuscript examined, each facsimile description translated, moves me on just a little more towards an understanding of where I need to go next, and building a much larger picture of these antiquarian scholars I’m studying. It helps, too, significantly that I have training specifically as a historian, and so there are far fewer methodological skills I need to get myself up to speed with, but it does mean I will need to learn my Latin grammar tables much more quickly than I’d previously anticipated. (If anyone has any tips on the classicising tendencies of seventeenth and eighteenth century antiquarian scholars, I am all ears!).

Aside from the absolute nightmare of the project revamp, there has been some more exciting things going on in my life, too. I have had a slight history of letting my work define my self-worth and my happiness, but I’ve been making real attempts to seperate my work and my life as far as I can, to remind myself that I do actually exist as a person outside of medieval studies (however much I cherish it). I celebrated my 25th birthday by visiting Ely Cathedral to see the former shrine of St. Etheldreda, buying a new book (currently I’m a big fan of translated Neopolitan novels) drinking some locally produced cider and eating one of the most elaborate sandwiches in a restaurant that had been converted into a dining space from a medieval cellar. As my younger brother said as we walked in to grab a table, “this is the most ‘Olive’ restaurant I’ve ever been into.”

I’ve tried to make sure I’ve not been leaving my hobbies behind, either. Whilst I’ve not been making as much jewellery as I might like to, I’ve had other things to keep me busy. I’ve been learning to knit since the beginning of the PhD, and have now finished my first larger wearable piece, a tank top in olive green Shetland wool, which I’m planning to wear during my first conference at the end of April. (I rather like the idea of tracking my PhD progress via knitwear produced).

Even more excitingly, my partner and I visited Japan for two weeks at the end of February. We visited the “big three”, Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, with a short stop in Hakone, a popular spa town where we stayed in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn. I’d told myself that I would get some writing done on the plane home, but eventually I didn’t end up bringing it with me, mostly because my partner was worried about me bringing work on holiday with me (and he’s right, I absolutely would have stressed myself out about writing some work up whilst we were supposed to be enjoying ourselves). I am so glad that I didn’t.

We visited a ridiculous number of castles, museums, shrines and temples (as well as the National Archives in Tokyo); I had only taken a single module in modern Japanese history whilst I was an undergraduate so to completely immerse myself in the culture and history of a place I had so little understanding of felt liberating. Also, I was totally enamoured by the functional (and affordable) public transport; it truly put Greater Anglia and LNER to shame. Despite this, we somehow managed to walk at least 20k steps every day for two weeks, which might have left my feet a little scarred, but the views from the top of all the pagodas we visited were worth the aches and flights climbed.

I drank an obscene amount of green and oolong tea and spent hours wandering through expansive stationery shops and the Toji temple antique market; you better believe that I’ll be writing up a post reviewing the stationery that I purchased whilst I was out there. Initially I wasn’t sure if this was something that my audience would be interested in, and then I realised, it’s predominantly made up of graduate students. Of course I’ll be doing the stationery review; I feel like we’re uniquely qualified to write on such matters.

It was, to be quite honest, the holiday of a lifetime, not least because, on a dark and rainy evening whilst we were staying in Hakone, my partner asked me to marry him, and after many tears, I said yes. We are now in the slightly giddy and blissful stages of early wedding planning, the fun bit where we can curate Pinterest boards and collages before it gets actually stressful and we inevitably create at least three different spreadsheets to track our deposits and guest dietary requirements.

It has been quite a wild few months to begin 2026, to say the least.

I feel I’ve learned so much about myself, who I am, what’s important to me going forward for both my PhD and beyond, which can only stand me in good stead. I can’t say every other PhDiaries update will be quite as momentous as this one (restarting the entire PhD project again and gaining a fiance is quite hard to beat) but I’m hoping to be much more consistent going forward. I need a bit of quiet to get my head down, to prepare for my first conference at the end of April, my first year review in mid-May and writing my paper for the International Medieval Conference in Leeds in July. (If you happen to be going, I’d love to say hi!).

See you next month, with the hope that I won’t be stressing too hard about that first year review in a few short weeks’ time, but we can’t make promises.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth-century. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea if you would like (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

In the 1960s, those crystal skulls were proven to not be ancient artefacts as the antiques dealer Eugene Boban had declared (which the British Museum acquisition team believed), but were instead produced with modern high powered rotary wheels, likely in Germany, created specifically to sell on under the guise of a genuine artefact.1 Another one of our groups completed a study on the more modern story of the notorious Salvador Mundi, exploring the lines drawn between authenticity and restoration, and the creation of an aura of legitimacy by Christies’, which capitalised on the scholarly debates surrounding the painting. Arguments over the authenticity of the painting, sold in August 2017 for $450.3 million, are still ongoing. Clearly, fakes and forgeries were on our mind that summer.

The motivations behind the creation of a forgery and the decision to either attack or to defend an artefact of contested or dubious origin is a direct mirror to our own personal motivations and beliefs. What is chosen to be faked or forged demonstrates much about what a society values, what it seeks to emulate, and asks potentially uncomfortable questions about what “authenticity” means. The notion of authenticity is constructed by trusted individuals and institutions, which non-specialist audiences rely upon for accurate information. The production of the crystal skull, and the British Museum’s subsequent acquisiton of it due to their inability to determine that it was a fake, speak to the importance of a creation of a mythos in this transaction. It requires a constructed semblance of authenticity in order to make a sale, which trades off an imagined past that confirm our pre-existing biases and notions about certain groups and cultures, regardless of truth.

The notion of the reasons why fakes and forgeries exist (and the process of uncovering of them) is, itself, an interesting topic of historical study, if potentially devastating for institutions that might be implicated in a forgery scandal. It serves as a chink in the scholarly armour; it seems ridiculous that bastions of legitimacy and scholarship like the British Museum could be duped into acquiring forgeries in place of the real deal, and so cases may often generate substantial public interest. Indeed, the British Museum itself has leaned into this, with an international touring exhibition coming up in 2031 that explicitly focuses on “The art of imitation” (with its crystal skull promoted front and centre), and previously having held exhibitions that outlined the fakes in its collection.2

This notion of authenticity, how it is created, developed, maintained, is something that historians have pondered for years. Moving to the realm of manuscript studies, understanding and recognising when a document was faked or forged was critical. Various methods have been used throughout history to prevent tampering with private letters, the use of chirographs, wax seals and cryptography have, throughout history, been used as a method to either prevent fraud, prove autehentic documentation or prevent others from accessing a letter’s contents.

Establishing the authenticity of a document was especially important in the history of notable and powerful institutions, which often relied on historical documentation to prove that their grants of land given by a monarch, say, five hundred years previously, were authentic. The possibility that these were documents that could be forged was not an uncommon concern, and throughout the seventeenth century, a number of French historians in Humanist circles began to raised significant concerns about the legitimacy of some of these medieval charters.3

Many were right to be concerned; between the 10th-12th centuries, there was a large number of charters forged by monastic houses in order to benefit themselves and their communities. This is a well-known and studied phenomenon; the Abbey of Saint-Denis specifically used forged and altered documentation to assert their right to monastic freedom and a reduction of interference from diocesian authority, specifically the bishopric of Paris, by asserting its direct connections with the Papacy, therefore bypassing any middlemen.4

A scholar and monk living in France named Jean Mabillon saw these accusations of forgeries and was seemingly alarmed. Mabillon was concerned, yes, that a number of historic documents from historic could have been faked, but owing to his position as a Benedictine monk, he was largely inclined to argue that the documents that upheld his monastic institutions were legitimate. Mabillon was specifically concerned with Daniel von Papenbroeck’s accusations that a collection of early Merovingian charters which recorded lands and gifts given to the Benedictines of Oeren near Trier had been faked.

“The very same people who examine this kind of document allege that false, suspect and interpolated [material] is scattered about within then, and while they are intent on distinguishing such material, they sometimes also rashly annul trust in [documents] of unquestioned veracity… it is necessary to investigate how widely this evil [i.e. forgery of documents] extends.”

J. Mabillon, De re Diplomatica, p. 1.

He was, however, rightly concerned that accusations of forgery were being, perhaps, too liberally distribtuted, but wanted to create a methodology which would enable the clear identification of forgeries and fakes in order to end scholarly speculation.5 As a result, Mabillon produced the monumental De re Diplomatica, which has been argued to be the foundational document of the palaeographic discipline.

This study, which Mabillon believed was “a new kind of antiquarian art”, used not just the text, but the material form of a manuscript, such as its physical composition, art and decoration, contextual information that accompanied it, and (most importantly) the characteristics of its handwriting, to determine whether a document was legitimate. By copying out facsimiles and samples of datable documents, along with descriptions of their scripts, Mabillon essentially produced a guidebook with which to navigate manuscripts and determine their authenticity.

Mabillon’s approach to proving authenticity via the study of the forms of handwriting would go on to inspire many others in the field, such as George Hickes, who produced Institutiones Grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae et Moeso-Gothicae (1689), and Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus (1703-5), two founding documents of the study of Anglo-Saxon and Old English studies. He also inspired Humfrey Wanley, the librarian of the Harley collection which would go on to become one of the founding collections of the British Library (for a short introduction to Wanley and his work, you can read my latest post, linked below!).

Indeed, almost certainly due to his exposure to Mabillon’s work, Wanley was very interested in attempting to prove or disprove the authenticity of a collection of Anglo-Saxon charters in the Cottonian collection. He wrote to the librarian, Dr Thomas Smith, asking (rather unusually) to be sent this book of Saxon charters from the Cotton Library so that he might study it in Oxford, writing that he:

“will endeavour to find out whether there be any counterfeits amongst them, or if they be all genuine…This I would prove from the Wording and Form of the Charters, from the Accounts of Time, and from the Hand-Writing.”6

Thomas Smith, known to be a rather difficult character to work with by his contemporaries, was rather affronted by this assumption that he wouldn’t be able to tell whether the documents that he was responsible for were fakes or not, and refused Wanley’s request to see the manuscripts several times, before ultimately cutting off their communications altogether.7

Ultimately, even with a more refined scholarly method with which to approach manuscripts to determine their authenticity, their study still requires a hands-on, and unrestricted approach to the manuscript document itself, which proved a barrier for the younger Wanley, who was reliant upon his connections in the antiquarian world in order to advance his research. Co-operation and the unrestricted sharing of information was critical for the advancement of the field, and when individuals like Smith, either out of a sense of jealousy for other scholars or protectiveness over the library within his care, refused to do so, he caused significant frustration amongst the scholarly community.

Ultimately, individuals like Mabillon were critical in the development of manuscript studies, because of its open approach. Mabillon’s recognition of the importance of visual study and willingness to copy out or trace segments and samples of scripts, including alphabets, allowed scholars who might never have the chance to see these manuscripts in person to study them, and identify similar hands in manuscript libraries they themselves had access to. I like to think of this as one of the earliest forms of open access scholarship.

Whilst accessing these manuscripts was, back then, a case of knowing the right people and the right connections, today, many manuscripts have not just had very accurate facsimiles made of them, but they have been digitised and are available online for study anywhere in the world. Furthermore, the establishment of iiif (International Image Interoperability Framework) standardisation and creation of open access tools such as the Mirador Viewer allow for manuscripts from across institutions to be studied alongside one another, digitally, for the very first time. I can only imagine what Mabillon and Wanley would have to say if they could see what tools are available to medieval scholars in the twenty-first century.

Although early antiquarians did not always manage to accurately identify and date each of the cases they came across, their methodologies and focus on the importance of visual comparison, created the foundations of what we would understand today as palaeography, and have shaped the future for digital palaeographic studies.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on perceptions of early-medieval Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how the field of early medieval history was developed in the seventeenth-century. If you’re interested in learning more and following my postgraduate research, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

The British Library as an institution didn’t exist as a seperate entity from the British Museum until the 1970s, when an Act of Parliament was passed to seperate the two officially. This meant building an entirely new space for the vastly expanding book and media collections, and after plans to knock down a bunch of Bloomsbury in order to have the site be closer to the British Museum was vehemently rejected, a site near King’s Cross St Pancras was chosen. The new building, opened in 1998, would hold vast stores of books underneath its piazza flooring with space for the collection to continue to grow.

The British Library is a legal deposit library, which means it receives a copy of any book published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. There are other legal deposit libraries too, the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland, the University Library at Cambridge, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the library at Trinity College Dublin, but the British Library is the only one that is automatically entitled to a copy of every book published. This process of retaining books and knowledge for future generations, in a publicly accessible space, is one that we might take somewhat for granted in the modern age. Historically, scholarly libraries existed for elites and were curated by them (even more so than they might be today), and as such, reflected their personal research interests, or at least, the interest of the librarians they employed. One of these librarians was named Humfrey Wanley.

Humfrey Wanley was formerly an apprentice to a draper working in Coventry, but, like so many of us who gave up potentially more secure job opportunities to pursue our passion for research, he broke off his stable apprenticeship in order to commit himself to the study of medieval manuscripts. And we can only thank God that he did, because Wanley was to become instrumental in the make-up of one of the foundational collections of the British Library, the Harley collection. After making a name for himself as an adept palaeographer (one who could read historical handwriting, or “ancient hands”, as Wanley called them, not that the term “palaeographer” even existed back when he was alive), Wanley was taken on at Oxford as a “commoner” at St Edmund Hall, but eventually moved to University College, upon being persuaded to do so by the master there.

After his talents for both recognising and copying ancient scripts became known more widely, Wanley was able to secure a job working as an assistant in the Bodleian, earning approximately £12 per year (the equivalent of roughly £2,200 today according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, described as mere “pocket money” by Simon Keynes. It seems that low wages for curatorial and library staff are sadly nothing new).

In this role, he was able to deploy his experience as a palaeographer in full force, creating catalogues of the manuscripts in their collection and presenting ideas about the presentation of manuscripts to visitors; whilst few of his dreams came to fruition, his cataloguing expertise allowed his recommendation by George Hickes to Sir Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, for employment as a librarian. Hickes’ recommendation letter has often been quoted to demonstrate unique Wanley’s talent as a palaeographer:

“This gentleman is Mr. Wanley of whom I spoke to you. He has the best skill in ancient hands and MSS. of any man not only of this, but, I believe, of any former age.”1

As Harley’s librarian, he was responsible for the care of his vast manuscript and printed book collection, as well as facilitating the requests of other scholars who wished to view the items in the collection. Whilst employed by Harley, he created one of the first catalogues of his collection, which is still widely used by scholars today as an exemplar to live up to; the palaeographer Neil Ker stated in his own catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts that Wanley’s “catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts is a book which scholars will continue to use, or neglect at their peril”.2 As the gentleman scholars of the eighteenth century relied on Wanley’s curatorial and scholarly expertise to guide them through Harley’s collection, so does the historian of the modern day.

Wanley was not just responsible for the care and upkeep of the collection, but also oversaw and helped to direct its quite significant expansion. A savvy collector on behalf of his master, he often managed to procure manuscripts for cheap when collectors passed away by offering them package deals to take entire collections off of their hands. He tried and failed to persuade Durham Cathedral to sell their collection of manuscripts to him, lamenting of the seperation between him and those manuscripts held in such “a remote corner of the Kingdom”.3 Jackson argues that this attitude, “tasteless” though it might be, might demonstrate Wanley saw the Harley collection as a “public resource”.4

It is, however, worth considering who that public was that Wanley wished to deliver access to. At this point, most of these scholars accessing the Harley collection would have been wealthy men educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, with relatively easy access to London, where the collection was held. Wright recognises that Harley’s library was only public in that it was available for consultation from well-known scholars, and for them to gain access, they were required to work with Wanley as their intermediary.5

Wanley’s and his contemporaries’ tireless work to consolidate a collection of manuscripts in the south of England, collecting examples of manuscripts of interest not just from England but also Europe (despite never leaving the country) likely had lasting ramifications on the ways in which scholarly activity, funding, and job security materialises in the modern day for early medieval historians. (There is a reason, for example, why the Lindisfarne Gospels resides in London and not in its native Northumbria).

There is so much more that could be said about Wanley and his quirks as a librarian, cataloguer and palaeographer, but I want to briefly touch on his conservationist approach, which was remarkably modern for the period in which he lived. Whilst he clearly cared and valued higher status manuscripts more than fragments or those without rich decoration more, Wanley still recognised their historical importance, regardless of their supposed lack of aesthetic merit. In a letter to Samuel Palmer, a merchant based in Cyprus, Wanley writes:

“If a Greek book is torn, or other wise in bad condition, do not reject it. Even Fragments may be welcome, to us, who know how to render them useful.”6

Wanley was unusual in his unwillingness to tear up or desecrate books in order to obtain samples of attractive text or images, like later Victorian collectors might have done. Instead, he created what he referred to as his “Book of Specimens”, near perfect facsimile copies of parts of manuscripts that he saw in various libraries throughout Cambridge, Oxford and London. Copying first a piece of text to give an example of the script type, he then created an alphabet with examples of the script used throughout the rest of the manuscript, including important pieces of display text. This is an invaluable resource for early medieval manuscript historians, especially in cases where the manuscript that Wanley was copying from is no longer extant today, such as manuscripts either damaged or destroyed in the Cotton fire of 1731.7

As his creation of his Book of Specimens and his persistence in purchasing manuscripts for his master Robert Harley demonstrates, Wanley saw clear value in having a large collection of manuscripts based in one place, in order to allow for increased comparison and scholarly progression in the consolidation of the fields of palaeography and early medieval studies. His talent for recognising ancient scribal hands and creating facsimile of them for scholarly study was recognised by virtually all he worked with, but did attract significant jealousy from his contemporaries, especially early in his career with Thomas Smith, the librarian of the Cottonian Collection.8

Following Wanley’s death, the Harley family needed someone to replace Wanley as the librarian for their vast collection, and ideally someone who could continue with the first rate cataloguing work that Wanley had been completing of the manuscripts in their care. Edward Bacon wrote to the current Earl of Oxford, recommending another librarian (Andrew Matte) for the vacant post, but stating bluntly:

“As for his learning he has never made it his profession, but I believe he has enough for a librarian; and as for skill in manuscripts […] you must never expect to find one equal to Wanley.”9

Indeed, there are some who would argue that we have never found an equal to Wanley, before or since.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on early-medieval spirituality in Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how texts interacted with constructed sacred space. If you’re interested in learning more about this wonderful period of history and following my postgraduate research journey, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

When I applied for my PhD programmes in late 2024, it was largely from a place of desperation, a final hail Mary. It was the last opportunity to apply for an individual project under the original AHRC rules, before entry became even more restricted by another drastic cut in funding. As a result, I wasn’t going to be picky about where I applied, as long as there was an opportunity for funding available, regardless of where it was in the country. In academic circles, you have no real choice but to follow the money when it is dangled in front of you, so when I was offered a funded place at Cambridge, I accepted it instantly.

I knew that sorting a commute to Cambridge would be a bit of a problem when I initially applied. My partner and I had moved in together 2 years ago into a flat in south-west London in order to be closer to his university where he is completing a PhD in nuclear physics and to allow me to commute into the city centre. Our system wasn’t always perfect, but it provided the stability that we both needed to lean on for both our working and personal lives. However, when the offer did come through, we realised our lives would have to change quite significantly to accommodate both my studies and ensure that we could still stay living together. Whatever happened, we were adamant that we wanted to commit to living with one another, if we could.

So my master plan was made. During term time, I would live for half of the week in Cambridgeshire, since I’m lucky that I have family who live half an hour away from the University who I can stay with when I need to work on site, and for the rest of the week, I would come back to our home in London, cracking on with all of the readings, admin and language learning that I can do remotely. I wasn’t worried, initially, because I was determined not to be. I needed to follow this opportunity, to take on whatever I could, so I could seize everything possible that could allow me to secure a foothold on one of the slipperiest career ladders that currently exists in the UK job market.

I’ve adapted to working anywhere I can. On days when I need to stay late in the middle of the city, I’ll steal a night on a friend’s sofa or in their spare room so I can attend a graduate seminar, or I’ll run to the station, rucksack flying, so I can catch the last fast train into London, so I can fall asleep in my own bed. My work pattern has become scattered and fragmented, with an article or two read on a bus as I balance my laptop on my knees, Latin grammar and manuscript transcriptions scribbled in notebooks whilst on the fast train from King’s Cross, emails sent and received at my dad’s kitchen table, blog posts written reliant on a coffee shop’s free WiFi. I don’t know what an eight hour work day looks like; sometimes I work ten hours, some days four, depending on when and where the time (and the table) comes.

Despite the fact I have managed to shift my working patterns as best I can, honestly, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t miss the stability, the predictability, that came with my old 9am-5pm job. I feel guilty for missing it, for wanting to come home at a normal, respectable time, when the supermarket is still open so I can grab a bag of salad and a pint of milk we might be missing, help to cook dinner and hang up the washing, take a leisurely bath or shower and just rest, properly, before work starts again the next day. I want to read a book somewhere other than the stops between Vauxhall and King’s Cross, attempting to focus but failing as the Victoria Line shrieks so loud that my headphones can’t mask it any longer. I want to be less reliant on Sainsbury’s meal deals and have time to bake more homemade biscuits, to be organised enough to have my lunches prepped in advance again.

Most of all though, I feel a profound sadness that I can’t come home to my partner every night any longer, and a guilt for leaving him. Sometimes I truly long for my old work-life balance. Sometimes I dread the fact that I have to leave my partner, still asleep in bed, early on a Monday morning to catch the fast train, to go another week where I only live in the flat that I pay for, in the home that I helped to create, for a measly 3 nights out of the week, because of my career ambitions, my desire, my need, if you like, to continue my academic studies.

This constant movement stings more as a child of divorced parents, to be honest. It wasn’t the most amicable split, but I am immensely lucky that both my parents love and care for us kids equally fiercely, so we would spend alternate weeks with them as there was no “primary” custodial parent. It meant, however, that my life was split between two spaces for over ten years, so when I moved into my flat with my partner and unpacked all of my books onto a single bookshelf, I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried for my fourteen-year-old self. To have my life centred in a single, physical space that I could call mine meant more than teenage Olive could have ever dreamed. Going back to splitting my life in two again feels like a return to 2016, living out of my rucksack and cursing myself as I realise that, yet again, I have forgotten my toothbrush. Somehow, even with ten years of practice, I still haven’t got the hang of remembering to pack my washbag in advance yet.

Academics will be very aware of the “two-body problem”. Essentially, if you as an academic happen to be in a committed relationship with someone who is also an academic, it is likely that you might struggle immensely to find fulfilment in both your work and personal lives. More often than not, if you choose to commit to living together, one of you will need to make sacrifices for the other’s career. If you choose to both pursue your own career paths, you may need to live apart for an undetermined period of time before one of you secures a coveted permanent(!) contract. You may need to move abroad, either together, or seperately. You may need to put off buying a house, having children, living near family, in order to focus on your work. You may need to commit to having no permanent roots in your community, being prepared to jump at the next pot of funding or job opportunity, wherever it might take you, and be ready to pack those bags to move yet again.

To be quite honest, this has been turning me away from the academic job market quicker than I thought it might. Somehow I thought that I’d slot back into this lifestyle more easily, but it’s making me more and more sceptical about the consequences of a potential choice to pursue academia longer term. How on earth is the volatile nature of the chasing of postdoctorate positions all over the country (or the world, realistically) suitable for supporting a fulfilling and plentiful life? What if you choose to have children? If you want to purchase a home and set yourself up for life? If you don’t have generational wealth or family to lean back on if something does go horribly wrong?

Do these reservations mean that I won’t try to prise those doors open later down the line? Probably not. I’ve dreamed of working at a university for a long, long time, craved that validation of my work and my identity as a researcher, but I have been left feeling quite uneasy. I’ve been wondering if academia doesn’t want me quite as much as I want it. It’s led to some new considerations - what do I really, truly, want in life? What will bring me true fulfillment? Where do I want to be in five years’ time, when I’ve secured my doctorate (God willing)?

I’ve realised that it is a simple word, stability. I dream of a house with a shared office with my partner. Two desks, side by side. Lots of natural light streaming through big windows and thick curtains for the winter months. We’d both have secure jobs, ideally. Maybe in academia, but as long as we’re working in something fulfilling, featuring research, writing, output that I can be proud of, I’d be happy. We’d be living in a house we owned, or with a mortgage we could reasonably pay each month, with some money left over to save for our future. I’d like to have time to volunteer in my local community, working a garden, a food bank, running an educational class. It would be nice to consider the possibility of having children. I really, really, do not want to be moving house every year, two years, because our jobs demand it of us, and we are too nervous to say no, enough.

To be honest, these dreams of stability feel quite at odds with the academic job market. I do, truly, hope this changes, sooner rather than later, but anyone in higher education or anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention to the state of it knows that the university sector in the UK is struggling hard at the moment. Stories of redundancies, both forced and voluntary, abound. Closures of courses, regardless of their merit, standing, student feedback or merit, are commonplace as a costcutting procedure. Everyone is being forced to do more with less, as it is made clearer and clearer that in this late capitalist hellscape, the machine must keep churning, the line must go up and to the right, regardless of the impact that it will have on students, on learning, on research, on staff. Is this the field I really want to enter into, even if working here has been my dream for so long?

I’m not saying that I won’t give academia a shot. If I’m being honest with myself, of course I will. Who knows, maybe it might work out eventually, the right opportunity might just pop up at the right time; it did for my PhD funding, after all. But, on the off chance that it does, I will not be setting myself on fire to keep my institution warm, purely for the love of the work. I cannot, and will not, lose sight of my life outside of the office, of the archives and of the reading rooms, of what makes me me beyond my paid work. I will also, probably most importantly, join a union.

If you’re interested in reading more about my reflections of life as a PhD student, I have an ongoing monthly series entitled “The PhDiaries” (classic, I know). I try to be frank and candid wherever I can, because god knows we have enough #inspo content about how perfect our lives are on social media sometimes. The last installment is linked below:

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on early-medieval spirituality in Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how texts interacted with constructed sacred space. If you’re interested in learning more about this wonderful period of history and following my postgraduate research journey, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea (in lieu of buying me a coffee!). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

Given the amount of exploring I’ve done as part of this job, I’d share a selection of curated recommendations for those who might come to the capital seeking early medieval sites and artefacts, including both the greatest hits and some that you might not have considered or have been aware of. I’ve included a couple of recommendations just beyond London too, if you happen to be in a position to travel, since there is unfortunately very little that survives from the early medieval period that is still extant in London thanks to its continual occupation and development over the centuries. In the future, I hope to do a much larger UK wide tourist’s guide to early medieval sites too.

For all sites, prices of admission (if applicable) and rough travel times have been included, as well as the nearest rail/Tube station, amenities on site or nearby, and a short introduction to the history of the location, as well as any other notable features to be aware of. If you have any other recommendations or thoughts on the places suggested, please do drop them in the comments below for others to consider!

I should note that the vast majority of sites I’ve listed are free to visit, but do encourage donations where possible. If you can, please do donate, even if it’s just some loose change, the purchase of a guidebook, something from the gift shop or a cup of coffee. The heritage sector and museums in the UK are currently struggling significantly to keep doors open due to cumulative years’ worth of funding cuts by central and local governments, and subsequently rely on visitor donations and volunteer work to keep the industry running and their sites accessible to all. This is something I’ve witnessed firsthand working as a tour guide both in Durham and in London; your donations really do mean the world of difference!

All Hallows-by-the Tower

Admission: free (donations encouraged)

Nearest Tube station: Tower Hill.

Amenities: small gift shop. Adjoining cafe (not affiliated with All-Hallows) with toilets.

Initially built on the orders of the Abbey of Barking, All-Hallows lays claim for being the oldest church in the city of London, founded in 675 AD. The church is believed to have possibly been founded by St Ethelburga, the sister of St Erkenwald, who served as the Bishop of London. While the initial church of All-Hallows that was constructed in the late seventh century is now no longer standing, its prominent position by the Tower of London has given it a rich and colourful history worth visiting beyond its early medieval connections, providing temporary burial for some famous individuals executed at the Tower, including Sir Thomas More and John Fisher.

It has an excellent crypt museum (and you know how much I love a crypt!) which displays a huge number of artefacts discovered at the site or kept by the church, including an entire section of preserved Roman mosaic flooring, as the site was initially a domestic house before the church was constructed there. (Note, however, that the crypt is not wheelchair accessible). Don’t miss the early medieval segments of stone crosses on display there, or the opportunity to talk to the friendly guides and volunteers; they are truly a wealth of knowledge and very welcoming. Bear in mind when visiting that this is a working church, so it is worth being mindful that some visitors may wish to use the space for quiet reflection when you visit.

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of the Bishopric of London, you can also visit Fulham Palace, initially granted to Erkenwald when he was installed as bishop. The site was held by the bishops of London for over 1000 years before management was passed to the Fulham Palace Trust, and is now a freely accessible historical site.

Treasures Gallery, The British Library

Admission price: free (permanent exhibition)

Nearest station: King’s Cross St Pancras (accessible via National Rail, Circle, Victoria, Northern lines).

Amenities: cafe, toilets, wheelchair access, gift shop.

Whilst there are some truly astonishing manuscripts and papers on display in the Treasures gallery at the British Library (think the First Folios of Shakespeare, orginal lyrics by the Beatles, that sort of thing), for me it is the Lindisfarne Gospels (image 2 above) that is the real star of the show here. An incredible survival and a beautiful document created at the scriptorium on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in the early 8th century, the Gospels are a testament to the ingenuity, craftsmanship and artistic abilities of the monks living on the island.

The Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the most important early medieval manuscripts that survives today, and the ability to view them in person, even if behind glass, is a rare one. The Gospels have been on tour a few times, mostly to the north (specifically Durham) and most recently to an exhibition in the Laing Gallery in Newcastle, but mostly reside permanently at the British Library. In order to showcase the beauty of the Gospels to visitors, the pages are regularly turned, so that repeat visitors might see a new page each time they visit (the carpet and “incipit” pages are some of the most beautiful and exciting to view, but all pages demonstrate an incredible level of preciscion, artistry and beauty, even just in the execution of the script.

The British Library’s Treasures gallery is available to view, for free, permanently, but the library regularly holds limited, paid exhibitions that are well worth a visit. In 2024-5, they ran an exceptional exhibition Medieval Women, In Their Own Words (seen in one of the images), so it is really worth checking if you’re interested in any of their limited runs. On a side note, the gift shop is an excellent spot to purchase presents for the bibliophiles in your life, too.

Barking Abbey

Admission price: free

Nearest Tube station: Barking (National Rail and District Line)

Amenities: wheelchair access. Local cafes nearby.

Barking was originally established as a double monastery in the seventh century, and subsequently became one of the most important and culturally significant sites for female learning in England. One of the most important and significant victims of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, little remains of the once grand abbey, but excavations throughout the 20th century have revealed the outlines of the cloister and other abbey buildings, including the sites of the interred remains of three of the abbey’s saints.

The site has been opened as a park that is accessible for the public to explore, with some signage explaining the finds of the excacvations, reconstructions of the buildings, and history of the abbey. Not quite as glamourous as some of the rest of this list, but it is a rather astonishing

There is no visitor centre here or guides to speak of, nor cafes or toilets. However, if you’re in the area looking for good value tea and coffee, I highly recommend Coffee Talks (34 London Rd, Barking IG11 8AG), around a 10 minute walk from the abbey ruins, which saved myself and my tour group from getting completely soaked when we visited in November 2025. (Their hot chocolate is excellent and very good value).

Want to explore early medieval London with me?

If you happen to live in South-west London and are looking for an opportunity to explore historical London in a friendly group setting, when why not join me on the Exploring London course that I run?

We explore all periods of history (though I do tend to focus on the medieval period a bit more heavily!) and visit a huge number of historical locations throughout London. All sites we visit are free entry, so the only fees you’ll pay for the course (which runs for 12 weeks for each term) is the course fee, which goes directly to supporting the adult education provisions in the borough of Kingston-upon-Thames.

Our group of learners is incredibly friendly and welcoming, and we would love to have you here learning with us. You can book onto the course here for the Spring term and here for the Summer term (starting 17th April). It runs on Fridays between 10.30am-1pm depending on the week, with breaks for Easter and Summer holidays, coinciding with the school term. If you have any questions about the course, you can email adult.education@kingston.gov.uk, or drop me a message.

The British Museum

Admission price: free

Nearest Tube stations: Holborn (Piccadily, Circle Lines) and Tottenham Court Road

Amenities: cafe, toilets, wheelchair access, gift shop.

The British Museum is one of the most iconic and well visited tourist spots in London, and whilst it’s potentially questionable how “British” much of the museum actually is (thanks to the number of items acquired dubiously and oftentimes violently throughout Britain’s colonial past), there are some genuinely important finds from the early medieval period on display here, uncovered on home turf. The finds from the archaeological dig at Sutton Hoo that completely redefined our perceptions of the “Dark Ages” are displayed in Room 41, including the famous Sutton Hoo helmet, Great Buckle and purse lid.

These are some of the most important and significant early medieval artefacts uncovered in Britain, and they are a must visit if you’re in London looking for early medieval history. The whole gallery is filled with multiple other incredible artefacts that you should see too, including the Lewis Chessmen in the next room over, and the beautiful Desborough Necklace. If you would like to read more about early medieval necklaces in early medieval society, I’ve written a short piece which references the Desborough Necklace here:

Speaking from personal experience, the British Museum is best visited when you’ve booked tickets in advance in order to beat the queues, which can get especially lengthy in school holidays. Try and go for a day during term time, ideally on a weekday, if you have the capacity to do so. The nearby Bloomsbury Square Gardens is also a great place for an outdoor picnic if you’d like to avoid scrambling for chairs whilst you’re inside the museum itself, which can get quite busy.

The Guildhall, Kingston-upon-Thames

Admission price: free

Nearest station: Kingston-upon-Thames (National Rail)

Amenities: wheelchair accessible. Local cafes nearby.

A bit of a rogue addition but I feel it’s worth a spot here since it’s local to me! Kingston-upon-Thames was a site of great importance to early medieval kings, especially Aethelstan and his descendants, who were crowned here. Situated on the Thames waterway, Kingston (or cyninges tun, the tun of the cyning) was well placed to connect the king with religious sites further up the river (such as the monastery at Cookham) and further down river to central London and beyond.

Whilst very little of the early medieval kings’ presence can be felt in much of Kingston today, the Guildhall in Kingston has the famous Coronation Stone located just outside its entrance. The stone came from the ruins of St Marys Chapel, next to All Saint’s Church in the marketplace. Upon its collapse in the 18th century, the stone was recovered from the ruins, and rumours abound that this was the very stone upon which these early medieval kings were crowned. Whether it is true is another question, but it’s certainly a good story.

If you come along to Kingston, it’s worth also visiting All Saint’s Church in the market square. The church standing today was constructed in the 12th century, but has some fragments of Saxon stone crosses from when the original church stood. Since 2025 marked the 1100th anniversary of Aethelstan’s coronation in Kingston, local artists created embroideries for the church commemorating the event, which are currently on display there.

Pyx Chamber and Chapter House, Westminster Abbey

Admission price: free for English Heritage members. For the whole abbey, tickets must be purchased at £31 for adults and £28 for concessions/students.

Nearest station: Kingston-upon-Thames (National Rail)

Amenities: some short steps required to access the Chapter House. Cafe inside the abbey with toilet for customers, gift shop.

The original Westminster Abbey was constructed in the 7th century, dedicated to St Peter, and in 1045 was reconstructed during the reign of Edward the Confessor. It was in this Saxon cathedral that William the Conqueror was crowned on Christmas day in 1066, but the present abbey is of Norman construction. The Pyx chamber was constructed throughout the 11th century, and is the oldest part of the Abbey to survive today. The Chapter House was constructed in the 13th century under Henry III. It was used for the meetings of the Benedictine monks who lived and worked in the Abbey, and features some astonishing surviving wall paintings. It also held the Domesday book for a time!

The Pyx Chamber and Chapter House can be accessed for free by members of English Heritage, via accessing the Abbey through Dean’s Yard. However, if you aren’t an English Heritage member or if you’d like to see the rest of the Abbey in addition to the Pyx Chamber and Chapter House, you’ll need to purchase a ticket, at £31 for adults and £28 for concessions or students. You can upgrade these tickets to an annual ticket at no additional cost, and this allows you to visit the Abbey two more times within a year for free. Your ticket aso includes a multi-media guide.

Trips beyond London

Given just how built up London has become, quite a lot of the former early medieval city is now completely inaccessible to us or has been lost, so I’ve listed some of my favourite early medieval tourist spots you can visit outside relatively easily from the capital. Most are relatively easily accessible by rail, though if car transportation is required, it is noted in the description.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Admission price: free

Nearest station: Oxford (National Rail)

Amenities: cafe, toilets, wheelchair access, gift shop.

One of the most iconic early medieval artefacts (aside from the Sutton Hoo helmet), the Alfred Jewel, is displayed at the Ashmolean, in Gallery 41, (England 400–1600), alongside the Minster Lovell Jewel, both of which may have been used as pointers (or æstels) to aid in the reading of contemporary manuscripts. Alfred wrote a preface to his translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s book Pastoral Care, stating that he:

“will send a copy to every bishop’s see in my kingdom, and in each book there is an aestel of 50 mancusses and I command, in God’s name, that no man take the staff from the book, nor the book from the church.”

The existence of these beautiful artefacts indicates the exclusivity and status to which literacy was held in the early medieval period, but also contributes to our understanding of high status craftsmanship. The cloisenne work on the Alfred Jewel is a similar technique and style to that used in many of the Sutton Hoo finds, for example. A side note, a piece based on the Alfred Jewel was made for the BBC comedy series Detectorists, which I highly recommend.

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

Admission price: free

Nearest station: Cambridge (National Rail)

Amenities: wheelchair access limited to ground floor (lift currently broken), gift shop

Are you desperate to see one of those famous pectoral crosses but just can’t bring yourself to get on a train all the way up to Durham Cathedral to see the one buried with St Cuthbert? Worry not, because the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge holds the famous Trumpington Cross, a wonderful example of an early medieval pectoral cross, right here in the south of England! Discovered in a rare bed burial of a teenage girl, the cross differs slightly from the other known pectoral crosses, in that it may have been worn on a pendant, attached to a cord that has not survived.

This is just one of the many artefacts in the museum, which holds a collection of astonishing variety and breadth, which makes it worth a visit aside from the Trumpington bed burial artefacts. The museum is located roughly a 20 minute walk away from the railway station, or parking is available in the Grand Arcade opposite. The nearest public toilets are in the Grand Arcade.

If you’re planning to be in town, it’s worth also seeing if the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College is open for a tour. The Parker holds some of the most important manuscripts in early medieval scholarship, some of which are on display in the library itself. Tours can be booked on EventBrite here. Note however that the Parker Library is not wheelchair accessible.

St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury

Admission price: £9 for adults, £5 for children when purchased from the English Heritage website. Free for English Heritage members.

Nearest station: Canterbury (National Rail), or approx 1 hr 30 mins from London by car.

Amenities: picnic area, gift shop, (mostly) wheelchair accessible, toilets.

One of the most iconic sites for those interested in early medieval church history, St Augustine’s Abbey is named for Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert Aethelberht and the people of Kent to Christianity. In 598, Augustine was given the site to construct a monastery, which ran continuously until the dissolution of the monasteries in England in 1538. The site experienced several remodels and reconstructions in line with several church reforms, but following the dissolution, the buildings started to fall into disrepair, with the ruins only being actively conserved from the 19th century.

Now, the site is cared for by English Heritage, and maintains a museum telling the story of the abbey and its working life, with some former abbey buildings still used by the King’s School, Canterbury. It feels wrong to just single out St Augustine’s Abbey here, as the whole of the Canterbury World Heritage site is worth your visit if you’re a historical tourist. If you visit for the day, take the time to wander Canterbury’s medieval streets and visit the famous Cathedral (see myself and my dad in image 2, when I was exploring Kent as a possible PhD location!).

Accessible via the speedy HS1 line from St Pancras, visiting Canterbury from London is exceptionally quick, especially given the abbey ruins are only around a 10 minute walk from the train station.

Ely Cathedral, Ely

Admission price: £14 for adults, free for children under 16 (when accompanying a paying adult) and any students studying in Cambridgeshire, with valid student ID.

Nearest station: Ely (National Rail), or approx 1 hour 45 mins from London by car.

Amenities: cafe, gift shop, wheelchair access, toilets

Ely Cathedral is an incredible survival of some of England’s most beautiful monastic buildings. The original monastery was founded by St Etheldreda in 673 AD, after leaving her husband, Egfrith of Northumbria, when he attempted to renege on his promise to allow Etheldreda to maintain a vow of chastity despite their marriage. Whilst her shrine was destroyed during the Reformation, Etheldreda’s legacy at Ely continues to be felt. The Cathedral was refounded as a Benedictine community in the 10th century and the present Cathedral building was constructed in the 11th century, following the Norman Conquest.

Ticket prices to access the cathedral aren’t the cheapest compared to some other sites, but they can be upgraded to annual tickets, which get you access to the cathedral for a full year at no additional cost, so it’s not bad value if you intend to come back in the future. However, it should be noted that visitors’ tickets and purchases make up a huge proportion of the money the cathedral needs to run (up to £10,000 per day), so your money is genuinely helping these amazing sites keep the lights on and running. Also, it is worth bearing in mind that entry to additional experiences, such as the Octagon Tower tour and Stained Glass Museum will need to be purchased in addition to the admission ticket (£11 and £6.50 respectively).

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on early-medieval spirituality in Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how texts interacted with constructed sacred space. If you’re interested in learning more about this wonderful period of history and following my postgraduate research journey, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea (in lieu of buying me a coffee). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the sheer scale of what is lost to time as a historian. Any early medieval historian, regardless of what they might specifically study, will have encountered the issues of a lack of source material in some format. It is one of the first limitations of the study that we address, often via lengthy acknowledgements at the beginning of book chapters, articles and monographs about our (sometimes paltry) surviving corpus of evidence compared to what we know existed, but will likely never be able to access.

When studying the book culture of the early medieval Insular world, the decimation of the source material over the course of more than a milennia is vital background understanding for interpreting any work produced in the field, and even what we do have can sometimes be more than a little misleading once its contemporary context is considered. For example, one of the very few contemporary images that we have from the early medieval period that depicts a scholar using a library is the portrait of Ezra, from the notorious Codex Amiatinus. Made at the scriptorium of Wearmouth-Jarrow, it is considered the best preserved codex that preserves the Vulgate text of the Bible and was transported to Europe as a gift for Pope Gregory II. Thanks to the death of Ceolfrith en route to Rome, who had been accompanying the codex, the book never made it to its intended recipient.

The image displays what is known as an armarium, a cupboard specifically designed to store books, however, it has been argued by Michael Lapidge that this image cannot be representative of how the Anglo-Saxons stored their tomes. If Lapidge’s estimates are correct, and that each library in the Insular world held (approximately) 60 manuscripts in total, then it would be much more likely that these libraries would have stored their manuscripts in book chests instead, and that this image is potentially based off a continential, possibly Italian, exemplar that scribes and painters at Wearmouth-Jarrow were working from.1 Images like these, whilst contemporary, may not demonstrate an accurate portrayal of Anglo-Saxon book culture.

So, what did an early medieval library look like? We know that the older the book, the more likely it is to have suffered irreperable damage, or complete loss, meaning that many early medieval texts that would have made up the libraries of scholars such as Bede have vanished from history.2 Lapidge’s The Anglo-Saxon Library attempts to reconstruct the early medieval library, by using book lists and citations written in other books that have survived the ages, to create lists of books that authors at specific centres would have been aware of and would likely have had access to in order to support the creation of their work. However, Lapidge does not consider liturgical books (that is, books directly associated with church usage) as part of the early medieval library, which eliminates a huge amount of his potential evidence, a decision which I find short-sighted.3

It is not unreasonable to assume that, especially in smaller institutions, liturgical books may likely have been stored in the same places that non-liturgical books would have been kept. Book lists of the period also indicate that the compilers did not distinguish between liturgical and non-liturgical books when compiling their lists owned by a particular library. (This is without even going into detail over the question of where a liturgical versus a non-liturgical book can even be defined, or questioning the assumption Lapidge makes that “every church” could be expected to have owned the same ones).

Even accounting for his dismissal of liturgical books, Lapidge’s work makes it abundantly clear just how much material we have lost from these early libraries, and just how few we can identify as having belonged to a specific institution. For example, we know of a paltry few books that were, definitively, either owned by the library or produced at the scriptorium in Wearmouth-Jarrow. This is primarily since, in many cases, palaeographic evidence may be able to match just a few books to an assigned site of production since a reliable known exemplar is required for others to follow.4 This is made even more challenging by the fact that there are so few cases of an of an early medieval text block surviving in its original binding.5 It may not be that the library at Jarrow has “vanished”, but that we are not reliably able to assign a book to Jarrow at present, but it is possible that advances in bioarchaeology of parchment may be able to start to rewrite some of these lost narratives.6 How then, were so many of these books lost?

It is not always recognised that many books from the early medieval period were not lost, but were destroyed intentionally. Many older manuscripts, especially liturgical books, which were either out of fashion or out of date, would have been subject to decommissioning and recycling into new books; indeed, entire economies in the middle ages existed to facilitate the destruction and recycling of old books into the new.7 The older texts would be turned into pastedowns or binding strips that were used to increase the strength of the new book, and so their words became inadvertently preserved, only to be discovered later by archivists and conservators. Occasionally, this might be the only way in which certain texts survive, for example, in certain cases of Icelandic liturgical fragments.

There are of course many other means by which books have vanished throughout the centuries, often as a result of large, systematic changes that impacted the ways in which the church, the primary producer of manuscripts, operated. It is well known that a huge number of manuscripts in England were lost due to the sweeping religious changes made during the Reformation; books deemed “too Catholic” would likely be one of the targets of those subject to destruction, especially liturgical books. However, contemporary antiquarians and collectors were aware of the scale and importance of many of the books held at the great libraries and institutions of monasticism and set about saving them from their doom.

One such collector was Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1559-1575. Parker was however, in the context of his fervert Protestantism, determined to demonstrate that the church in England had always been independent from the church in Rome, and this became his driving motivation for collection of historical manuscripts.

The collection that Parker compiled included the likes of the St Augustine Gospels, a near priceless artefact believed to have been brought by St Augustine on his mission to evangelise to Æthelberht of Kent in 597, a copy of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and Version A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Essentially, very, very important books that provide critical cornerstones of the field of early medieval research. Despite Parker’s motivations skewing the types of material that he was able to save (and his adaptations to some of the texts that he collected), without him, the field of early medieval history would be on significantly weaker grounding than it currently is today. His collection of manuscripts eventually became the Parker library, bequeathed to and housed at his former college, Corpus Christi, Cambridge.8

Even manuscripts saved from destruction have suffered losses in other ways. Parker, and other antiquarians from the early modern period right into the twentieth century, often liked to rebind their manuscripts to achieve a consistent aesthetic on their shelves. However, this would result in the loss of the original bindings, as these were discarded or recycled when the rebinding was complete, and potentially the manuscript’s original pastedowns or endleaves. In many cases, the impressions of manuscripts that we view in reading rooms today might heavily skewed by the aesthetic choices of these early modern antiquarians, which we as historians would do well to remember.

There has been immense progress made between the Reformation and today when it comes to conservation and professionalisation of archival systems, but it should be remembered that books are still intensely vulnerable objects in heritage collections. From flooding to fires (including the famous Cotton fire that destroyed a huge number of priceless early medieval manuscripts), there are many ways in which books can be lost or damaged, even if their importance has been consistently recognised throughout the ages.

The need for standardised conservation procedures were made evident during the flooding of the River Arno in 1966, causing a huge amount of damage to the city of Florence. This included many museums’ artworks (including the Uffizi), rare book and antique dealers, churches and cathedrals, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze, and many, many more.9 Whilst there was an immense outpouring of support for the city from libraries, museums and archives throughout the world, during the aftermath, it was clear that the processes of disaster conservation needed to be reorganised and streamlined, leading to the creation of a nine-step procedure in order to treat water, oil and mud damaged books.10

As a result of the Florence floods, there was a drastic advancement in the professionalisation of preservation and conservation as disciplines, designed to both forsee and mitigate future potential disasters. Whilst there had been an increasing understanding of the importance of documenting conservation and preservation practices from the 19th century, it was only after the Florence floods that documentation became far more standardised.11 Understanding previous treatment that a book might have gone through is difficult unless it has accompanying documentation, and conservation work that might have been undertaken by a manuscript’s owners prior to the 1960s was likely not recorded.

Treatments and conservation work can vary greatly depending on an institution’s goals and objectives, and in the case of the MacClean Collection held by the Fitzwilliam Museum, the owners’ objectives appeared to be to ensure that a manuscript was presented in the most grandiose way possible, and “restore” the textblock to its original state of presentation.12 This resulted in the manuscript being vigorously scrubbed of any dirt, likely bleached, and then rebound with custom covers. Whether or not it is a conservator’s job to restore or maintain an item is a decision that is dependent on the goals of the stakeholders at play, but most often the money and resources available to an institution. Intervention is nearly always kept to a minimum in order to preserve an item from outside harm, and occasionally, from itself, if it has been rebound in acidic bindings that can cause deterioration. In some cases, however, intervention is critical, especially in cases where the object is at risk after coming into contact with biohazards.

Before starting my PhD project, I had no idea that there were so many different kinds of mould that could infect a book. Mould can be a serious problem for conservation teams, both in terms of treating it now, but also dealing with previous conservators’ treatments if they might have damaged the book in any way, but regardless, removal of potential viable conidia is critical if a book is to be preserved.13 Upon my viewing of the Trinity Gospels at the Wren Library at Trinity College, I was warned that the page had been scrubbed viciously, the pages may have even been bleached, due to the damage that the manuscript had suffered due to mould, or potentially to remove dirt and grime deposited by previous users. It’s clearer on some pages more than others, but it’s quite evident upon viewing (and touching) that the book has been cleaned hard, though ghostly spore marks still remain on the page.

Given the number of ways and means that we can and do lose books, it seems almost a miracle that any have survived the ages to tell their tales at all. It is certainly a wonder to behold a tenth century gospel book when you hold it with your own hands, irrespective of the fact that the binding might be a nineteenth century vanity project.

Yet, even with the professionalisation of the discipline of conservation however, heritage collections are still under significant threat today. One of the major concerns added to lists of potential damage to heritage collections in previous decades is that of neglect, caused by the lack of cultivation and maintenance of collections and the nurturing or preservation of industry knowledge, often due to a lack of funding available to heritage institutions.14 UK readers will no doubt be familiar with the fact that funding available to archives and museums has been drastically reduced since the austerity programmes introduced by various Conservative led governments, alongside a general decimation in funding for arts and humanities programmes more widely.

Museums and galleries are having to do much more with less, in terms of staff, preservation and conservation, money, and outreach programmes, meaning that, for many, the ability to engage and think critically about our heritage and history will become more and more distant, trending more and more elite. The fragility of these texts, both in terms of their physical states and the reduction of accesses to them, is a stark warning to us to invest in our heritage industries, lest we allow these miraculous survivals to fade into obscurity once more.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My research focuses on early-medieval spirituality in Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how texts interacted with constructed sacred space. If you’re interested in learning more about this wonderful period of history and following my postgraduate research journey, I’d be delighted to welcome you here.

All of my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea (in lieu of buying me a coffee). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

Welcome to the PhDiaries, a series for me to talk frankly about life as a postgraduate history researcher. I hope it is as cathartic for other postgrads to read as it is for me to write.

Teaching has wrapped up for my first ever term as a PhD student, and whilst I’ll still be working up until the week of Christmas, I’ve started to let myself wind down, just a little. I’m letting myself work from home a little more than I might usually, take breaks between readings and methodology writings, maybe finish a little early to have an afternoon with friends in the city. I can feel that my body and my mind need the rest, yet I’m struggling to see where the term has vanished to. I feel like I arrived in Cambridge last week, blinked twice, and it’s suddenly Advent; I haven’t been attending the festive dinners and carol services (mostly because I just don’t seem to have the time to spare) so I feel a little as if this year’s holiday season has snuck up on me somewhat.

Part of me was freaking out that I haven’t done enough during the past eight weeks. Sometimes I’ll overhear other students (more often than not, MPhils and undergraduates rather than other PhD students) chatting about just how much work they were doing and how late they’re staying up to get it all done, and I would feel very strange (and somewhat guilty) for clocking out at 5pm, sometimes a bit earlier, sometimes a bit later depending on the day.

I’d been feeling uncomfortable for letting my project find its feet, for taking time to review and break down the methodology I’ll be using. Given my project is, by its nature, very exploratory, this hasn’t exactly been the easiest to do, and it’s taken time to realise exactly what classes I need to take, and the places I need to go to get the information I need. Still, it doesn’t make you feel fantastic when you’re trying to get out of a workaholic mindset if you keep interacting with those who seem to be taking pride in their late night work and the subsequent lack of sleep.

One of the things I’m grateful for is the number of layers of support you can access as a student at Cambridge and I told myself early on that I should take advantage of this wherever I could, especially given my tendencies to overwork myself I had as a Master’s student. I had a chat with my college tutor to discuss some of these anxieties and she reminded me that working ridiculously late isn’t and shouldn’t be normal behaviour, especially for PhD students (this project is a marathon, not a sprint, remember!), and that if I did end up working well beyond normal hours, well, that work isn’t going to be of particularly good quality anyway, so why should I? My internal perfectionist let out a long and protracted sigh of relief; sometimes, you really do just need to hear the bleedin’ obvious from someone else.

It does feel lovely to say that I’m a student at Cambridge, but I still feel a bit like a fraud when I say it, because I don’t feel like I’ve ever actually integrated properly into college life. Given I actually live a bit of a way from the city centre (as in, need to catch a train to get home), I struggle to attend events or socials run by my college as they’re often well outside of work hours, by which time I’m trying to sort dinner or take some much-needed rest. I have become somewhat reliant on reading articles and books on public transport, on buses that are so shaken by the quite frankly ludicrous number of potholes in the road that I’m fairly sure my spine has come slightly loose over the course of the past 2 months.

Don’t get me wrong, I love living with my family and having increased physical space and separation from my work, but occasionally it stings, this made up notion that I will never be a proper Cambridge student. I know that’s not true, and I’ll be making more of an effort to get over my nerves and head some more of the dinners and postgraduate socials next term, because God knows its nice to have something to look forward to at the end of a long day staring at manuscript catalogues in the Fitzwilliam reading room, and I think I’ve been studying alone far too often.

I’ve been reflecting on the fact that humanities PhDs (and studies in general) are rather strange, solitary and all-consuming, in that they can and do require extensive work to be done alone in libraries, reading rooms and archives, as opposed to STEM, which by its very nature is required to be more collaborative; you can’t exactly build and operate a nuclear beam by yourself. Humanities students don’t join labs, in many cases, we’re lucky if we get a postgraduate office space to work in, so we’re often relegated to doing our collaboration over coffee catchups, or more formal introductions made by your supervisor after lectures or seminars. However, we do have an enourmous amount of infrastructure that works tirelessly in order to support our work.

The librarians, archivists, curators and collections managers, not to even speak of academic colleagues are a veritable gold mine of knowledge and are nearly always willing to help and assist in anyway they can. Sometimes I forget the importance of that collaboration, the very human need to get together and talk things through or to attempt to find answers via a different disciplinary strand. Idolisation of the lone scholar working tirelessly by themselves with no input from others, is ridiculous and unhealthy, and we need to rely upon this infrastructure and be thankful for it wherever we possibly can.

The work I do requires collaboration with archivists and conservators in particular, who, contrary to popular ideas about being stuffy and overly protective of their books and artefacts, are often some of the most excited to work with historians and open up the expertise of their discipline to others. As soon as I got over my nerves of approaching people and sending out a couple of cold emails, the horizon for my research expanded beyond anything I’d previously envisaged- I’m sure glad I learned my lesson on this now, rather than later.

Probably most importantly, I’ve realised I need to get into the habit of remiding myself what I have actually achieved and how far I’ve come, sometimes daily, to make it clear that I have made more progress than I realised. For example, I’ve got a solid start on my report that I’ll be presenting at the end of my first year, as I’ve been focusing on writing up my methodology. I might not have written as much as I’d like yet, but it’s been a good and solid start. I’ve got a database of manuscripts to trawl through; a month ago I had none. I’ve started a new job working to deliver history workshops with my local council, I’ve made good working relationships with my colleagues and made some wonderful friends.

Probably most excitingly for me, my Latin has improved drastically more than I was expecting, and whilst the work for the classes each week is still intense, I’m strangely looking foward to having time over the holidays to refine and consolidate my grammar so my translations can be less luck and vibes-based, shall we say. Okay, maybe this is a bit dramatic, but my grammar definitely deserves to have more time taken over it.

Despite not getting up at 5am and working all through my lunch breaks, I know that I’ve progressed more than I thought, given the first term is nearly always a rocky one. (In fact, if you haven’t had a slightly rocky start to a PhD in some way, shape or form, or questioned whether you deserved to be there or if you were actually incredibly stupid, I’d be concerned about you). Whilst I might be able to recognise this a little better with the benefit of hindsight, I have always been a self-doubter regardless of what I’ve been able to achieve throughout my life, and this manifested particularly in the weekly Latin quizzes our professor would make us sit during our Monday classes.

They would set me off into a spiral about how little I seemed to know and when I would forget or guess an answer, I would leave apology notes for my professor when I filled them out (the people pleaser part of me is still dying a long, slow death unfortunately). Last week I was particularly freaked since I had barely had time to revise the rules for how adjectives work before taking the test, and I had to make a series of educated guesses, leaving a rather self-depricating “I know these aren’t right!” by way of apology.

When she handed my test back this week, she’d left me a reply, “you know more than you think”. I had to sit with myself for a moment to reflect just how fast the term has been moving and how I haven’t let myself really stop for a moment, to breathe and recognise what I’ve actually achieved, to reflect on what I do know. I have a feeling that I need to take this advice a bit more seriously from now on.

Receiving that note made me do a little reflection over the past week - to wonder if I could speak to the Olive of 2 months ago, what would I say to her? What did she need to know the most? I came up with this little list to conclude this post (and serve as a little TLDR):

1. Introduce yourself to people, even if you’re nervous about making a fool of yourself. Chances are, most other people in that room are just as nervous as you are.

2. Don’t try and learn 2 languages in one term. It’s not going to happen because you’re not a natural linguist, and you have far too much on your plate already. Give yourself a break, they’ll come in time.

3. Get outside wherever you can. Take breaks to just walk if you need to; you are in a beautiful city whose landscapes have inspired and taught thousands before you. Let your mind put the pieces together unconciously.

4. You do know more than you think you do right now, and even if you think you don’t, you’ll learn quickly. That is the entire reason you are here.

A note on forthcoming work: I’m not sure if I’ll get to writing another of these reflections before the New Year, but I’m working on a couple more historical pieces for the blog in the meantime, including a guide to Anglo-Saxon London, the extent of early medieval literacy and (eventually) a short biography of this blog’s namesake M.R. James, focusing on his work cataloguing the manuscripts within Cambridge libraries and his impact on medieval studies today. I do hope you enjoy them as much as I have done writing them.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My work focuses on early-medieval spirituality in Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how texts interacted with constructed sacred space. If you’re interested in learning more about this wonderful period of history, this is the blog for you.

All my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea (in lieu of buying me a coffee). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!

The figure opposite, however, is in much worse condition. Much of the detail of the background on the left-hand side is missing, and the poor fellow no longer has any eyes. Therefore we are somewhat reliant on our imagination to fill in the details of this individual, but his closeness to Saint Cuthbert reveals that he can only be Saint Oswald, the first King of a united Northumbria, and a favourite of Bede, buried only a short distance away from this painting in the chapel. From where Oswald is painted, he could almost be watching over the tomb of the man who immortalised him into memory (if he had any eyes left to see, that is).

Oswald of Northumbria enjoyed a huge amount of popularity in the medieval period after his death as the subject of a saintly cult. His relics were dispersed throughout Europe, with his head eventually interred in the shrine of Saint Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral. It is this association in death (rather than life, as Cuthbert was only made bishop 40 years after Oswald’s death, and the two likely never even met) that often leads to their being depicted together (or, at least, Cuthbert is regularly depicted holding Oswald’s severed head).

Yet today, Oswald seems to be a somewhat forgotten figure in the public consciousness. Though his cult may have flourished as far away as Slovenia, there seems to be far less recognition of Oswald than there is of his much more popular grave-mate, Saint Cuthbert. His is the only name on the shrine door at Durham Cathedral, it is Cuthbert who gives his name to Saint Cuthbert’s college of Durham University, it is Cuthbert’s cross that serves as one of the unofficial symbols for the North East, and it is Cuthbert whose name you will hear if you ask pilgrims who they are coming to visit in the Cathedral.

It was only ever my dissertation supervisor and palaeography professor who seemed to be aware that, aside from Cuthbert and Bede, a third saint was buried in the Cathedral. Now I know others were probably aware that Oswald existed during my time studying at Durham, but he certainly didn’t seem to be as deeply held in the public conciousness as Cuthbert, only ever in the minds of the few early medievalists who were interested in local saints’ cults. Whilst parishes and streets are named after him, most only ever referred to the two saints in the Cathedral, rather than three. Oswald seemed to quietly fade into the background despite his immense popularity in the medieval period, allowing Cuthbert to take centre stage as the iconic saint of Northumbria. So who was Saint Oswald?

The son of Æthelthrith of Bernicia and Acha of Deira, Oswald was born into a turbulent political landscape, a time during which being born a relative of a king could instantly place a target on your back. His father Æthelthrith had been a powerful king, and ruled over both the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, the two constituent kingdoms that would become the Kingdom of Northumbria. However, upon Æthelthrith’s death at the hands of Raedwald of East Anglia at the Battle of the River Idle, Oswald’s future was suddenly uncertain. He and his brother were forced into exile when his uncle, Edwin, ascended the thrones once ruled by his father. Edwin was eventually killed at the Battle of Hatfield Chase by Penda of Mercia, and Northumbria fell apart into its constituent kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira once again.

Bede tells us that, whilst living in the northern kingdom of Dál Riata, in an area we now call Scotland, Oswald was converted to Christianity.1 It is clear that he must have been a gifted warrior, defeating Cadwallon ad Capfan of Gwynedd at the Battle of Heavenfield, near modern day Hexham, as retribution for Cadwallon’s slaying of Oswald’s brother, Eanfrith.2 Before the battle, Oswald is said to have erected a cross and encouraged his men to pray before it, and that night, received a vision from Saint Columba, who informed him that the Northumbrians would be victorious.3

Following Heavenfield, Oswald oversaw a period of Northumbrian dominance over many of the kingdoms of his contemporaries. He acted as the baptisimal sponsor to the king of the West Saxons and married his daughter, Kyneburga, and may have controlled the area around Edinburgh, as well as the Kingdom of Lindsey.4 Oswald also worked hard to establish the increased authority of Christianity throughout Northumbria, establishing an episcopal see at the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, tasking the bishop Aidan with the running of the see and completing missionary work in the kingdom.5 This work towards the spreading of the Word is likely one of the most important reasons why Bede’s portrayal of Oswald is so favourable.

Oswald’s overlordship seemingly could not hold, however, as he was eventually killed at the Battle of Maserfield in either 641 or 642, when fighting against King Penda of Mercia and their allies in the Kingdom of Gwynedd. It is traditionally hypothesised that the battle was fought at Oswestry in Shropshire, which would have been situated within the borders of the Kingdom of Gwynedd in the mid-7th century. If this was the case, then it could imply that Oswald may have been the attacker, attempting to pursue Penda and his allies, which would put his actions at odds with the portrayal given to us by Bede.6

Indeed, the vast majority of information we know about Oswald was taken from Bede; one of the very few sources that we have for the seventh century in early medieval England. Writing within 100 years of Oswald’s death, his Ecclesiastical History is highly valuable for us, but it should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism. Oswald was, after all, a Northumbrian king, and Bede was (most likely) from a noble Northumbrian family before joining monastic orders, and thus more likely to be portrayed in a positive light.

Following his death, Oswald’s body was dismembered and staked in the battleground; his body parts were eventually retrieved by members of his family in the following year. Oswald’s dismemberment, likely intended to humiliate the former king, had the opposite effect, as the slain king had quickly become the subject of a saintly cult. This cult appeared to be genuinely popular with the laity (i.e., members of the church who were not ordained) after the earth from the battlefield where he died was said to have the power to heal, with Bede reporting that individuals would take soil from the ground from the battlesite in the hope of becoming a recipient of the earth’s powers.

This popularity with the laity was seized upon by Oswald’s relatives, who promoted the cult heavily in order to promote their own specific agendas. Oswald’s niece, Osthryth, took some of Oswald’s bones to Bardney Abbey in the Kingdom of Lindsey. Supposedly, the nuns refused to accept them on account of Oswald being a foreign conqueror, but when the bones were seemingly associated with a miracle, a pillar of light appearing over the wagon that carried them, they were subsequently accepted into the community.7

It is important to remember that the strength of Christianity at this time was “intimately linked” to that of the strength of regional kings and their ability to promote it effectively, so the genuine popularity of Oswald amongst the laity was seriously valuable to other members of the Bernician and Deiran royal families.8 Saintly relatives offered your dynasty both legitimacy (presenting yourself as being favoured and chosen by God in your military endeavours has historically tended to work as quite effective propaganda) and allowed you to establish some independence from the church in Rome.

With Oswald now a popular warrior saint, his family (particularly his brother, Oswiu, and niece, Osthryth) lept at the opportunity to publicise their ancestor, using his bones to both promote the legacy of her family whilst simultaneously promoting his overlordship over the Kingdom of Lindsey via the veneration of his bones. In a time where the beginnings and ends of kingship could be markedly violent and bloodsoaked affairs, developing new methods to stake claims for your family’s legitimacy could be highly lucrative. In addition to the work by his family, Oswald’s legacy also benefitted from Bede’s accounts of his life.

Stancliffe notes that Bede’s portrayal of Oswald as both a victorious king and a saint was a unique one, which had no real exemplar in contemporary literature.9 Unlike Stephen’s Life of St Wilfrid, which drew heavily upon Gospel passages and other saints’ lives for inspiration, or indeed Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, Oswald’s presentation as a saintly warrior king is highly unique, potentially even controversial, since as a warrior, you did have to kill folks in battle which does somewhat violate one of the more important of the ten commandments. Bede’s portrayal of Oswald manages to skirt this awkward reality somewhat by both recognsising that violence was a necessary component part of Anglo-Sazon kingship, and presenting Oswald as a saintly warrior-king, fighting for the defence of Christianity against paganism.

Oswald’s severed head was eventually interred at Durham Cathedral following the movement of his bones several times to escape Viking raids, along with the remains of Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. Traditional depictions of St Cuthbert show him holding a severed head, that of Oswald, the saint who shares his shrine. However, Oswald’s cult was prolific throughout both England and Europe, and thus several other heads are claimed to belong to him.

Whether the head in the tomb of St Cuthbert is really that of Oswald is not a particularly valuable argument to try to prove or disprove though; what is most interesting is understanding what needs the promotion of Oswald’s cult was able to fulfill for its patrons and promoters. (The number of heads is certainly testament to its popularity, however.)

As is the case with so many medieval saints, it is the circumstances and needs of the living that lead to the production of hagiography and cult promotion, leaving details of the real individual, their personalities, actions and characters, vulnerable to adaptation, the brushing over of inconvenient facts or truths that would detract from the image that their immortalisers were attempting to construct for their own purposes. In the case of Oswald, the opportunities that were to be gained by capitalising from his death, power, familial legitimacy and were too great to be ignored.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to share it with a friend who might enjoy reading about this slightly lesser known Northumbrian saint.

Share

All posts from M.R. James Appreciation Society are free to read for all subscribers. However, if you do feel compelled to support open access history, paid subscriptions are switched on and available from £3.50 per month.

If you would like to support me monetarily but would prefer to not to commit to a monthly subscription, you can buy me the cost of a cup of tea instead! Any and all financial support goes directly towards my Substack writing and outreach work, and is greatly appreciated.

Buy me a herbal tea!

In the summer of 2021, my then-boyfriend and I had been rocky, shall we say, for at least a year prior. There were questions about whether he had cheated on me with another girl a few months before (I don’t know if we ever really got over that, to be honest), and for most of 2020 we had hardly seen each other due to him being a key worker in the NHS during the height of the pandemic. Maintaining a relationship through that was hard, but we kept at it, rightly or wrongly.

When tourism started to open up cautiously, I thought booking us a holiday somewhere in the UK might help out our struggling relationship. Despite me having put in most of the emotional and logistical labour throughout our time together, I thought that maybe this occasion would be different, and if I just planned something else for us, I would get the reciprocation I had been searching for. We could reconnect on both a personal and romantic level, spend some quality time together and explore a new place.

I suggested the city of York for a destination. He agreed, somewhat tentatively. I assured him I could take care of organising everything, that he didn’t need to lift a finger, but that he should tell me if we had any preferences for activities, so we could make an itinerary that we both enjoyed. His answer?

“I don’t mind, we can do whatever you want.”

This had been a problem throughout the majority of our relationship. Anytime I asked him what he would like, to express an opinion, he would default the decision making back to me. At first, I thought it was him being kind, generous even. As time went on, it became clear that this was complete avoidance of responsibility. All was left on my shoulders, to plan and organise as much as possible to make sure that we had a good time. But I thought that just getting away on holiday, however we did it, was the best thing for our relationship, so I swallowed my frustration and went ahead with it.

Despite this I did ask him, multiple times, what he wanted to do. If he even had one thing that he wanted added to the itinerary, or, not added to the itinerary! I insisted, time and time again, that I didn’t want to just drag him along to galleries and museums, that I didn’t want to bore him. I wanted to centre his ideas, his thoughts. He assured me that “I’ll be happy with whatever you want!”

Okay, sure.

I organised the train travel, hotel stays, reserved a spot at a specific vegan restaurant I knew he’d like, and booked some historical activities. Since York is brimming with wonderful museums and experiences, and he’d made the point that he’d be happy with “whatever I wanted”, I ended up purchasing us tickets for the York Castle Museum (complete with a recreated, period accurate Victorian street), York Minster, and the Jorvik Viking Centre.

After exploring the recreated section of Viking street in the Jorvik centre, we entered the attached museum, filled with archaeological finds from the local area, a total treasure trove. I had started to realise the importance of material culture within historical analysis by this point in my undergrad, and was gearing up to start my dissertation in the early medieval period, so I was having a wonderful time. My boyfriend had been lukewarm in his enthusiasm throughout, but I was trying my best to maintain my own excitement.

It was then that I saw the famous Coppergate Sock on display. Recovered at the site of Coppergate, it was made with the Scandinavian technique of nålebinding, a kind of knitting that requires the use of only one needle. It is quite significantly damaged, with much of the heel missing, but the chance survival of such a delicate and personal item, the sheer humanity that was woven into every stitch of this handmade piece of clothing was enough to make me cry, right there in the museum.

I wasn’t full on weeping, mind, but it was a catch-your-breath and let a tear roll down your face kind of moment. It was a moment I think many historians are familiar with, where you can feel the stretch of time between yourself and those who came before you shrink into a negligible second, where you revel in the universality of the human experience across centuries and space.

My boyfriend’s reaction? He laughed at me.

“It’s just a sock.”

I tried, hard, to brush this off. Tried to explain how I felt, that to me it wasn’t just a sock, it represented so much more than that, but he could not seem to bring himself to care. I don’t think he realised that in that moment he wasn’t laughing at me, he was laughing at the time, the effort, the care I’d put into this relationship, at my vulnerability I had laid before him. To him, it was just his overly emotional girlfriend getting sad over a muddy sock.

When we returned home, I didn’t quite put the pieces together until we were spending time with a friend of ours, who asked us about our holiday. My boyfriend retold the sock story with glee, of how “she was crying over a sock!”, with an incredulity that could only have meant to mock and taunt. I tried to laugh along, but my friend, notably, did not, and part of me knew why.

Eventually the relationship went even more quickly downhill. I went back to university for my final year of my BA degree, where I was lucky enough to move into a room in Durham Castle. I hadn’t had the best experience in my first and second years for a multitude of reasons, and was determined to, finally, enjoy myself.

(As an aside, if you’re interested in reading more about what it was like to live in a medieval castle as a student, and the complicated emotions I have surrounding it, I recommend reading my post linked below.)

I made new, wonderful friends, went to society balls and events that I’d only ever been too socially anxious to attend before. My studies felt like they were improving after returning to face-to-face teaching, and I was planning the next stages of my academic career, all whilst living in a Norman castle. To put it mildly, I was thriving more than I ever had before. Given I had seriously considered dropping out of university several times for a multitude of reasons, it felt cathartic to experience so much joy in a place that had nearly beat me down several times over.

My boyfriend, however, seemed to exist in a permanent state of anxiety about my new happiness. When we called there were questions about who I was spending time with, for how long, whether I was having a better time with them than I would be if I was with him. He seemed happier if I was having a bad time, because then he could comfort me; if I was happy, then my attention could be diverted from him. This wasn’t ever made explicit, he knew how that would sound if he said it out loud, but it was obvious this was how he felt.

It was increasingly clear that I could not continue the relationship any further if I wanted to value my happiness, which had to come at the expense of his comfort.

After a month’s worth of long-distance arguments that never truly seemed to reconcile no matter how hard we tried, I broke up with him via video call about three months after we’d returned from that trip to York. Funnily enough, he couldn’t understand why, in fact, he thought that our relationship had improved after we’d gone on that holiday. I was, to put it mildly, astonished that he could have come to that conclusion. Had we been on the same holiday? Couldn’t he see how I’d shut down emotionally over the past year? It wasn’t the easiest of breakups, but after a day or two of snotty ugly crying, I felt purged. It turns out I had disconnected emotionally a long time ago.

That week, I video called the same friend my boyfriend and I had spent time with to tell her we’d, finally, broken up. I knew it had been a long time coming, but I had put on a front for my friends to give off the impression all was well with our relationship, as you often do when you’re in denial about quite how bad something is before you admit it to yourself. She was, to put it mildly, overjoyed. It turns out she’d seen straight through my farce and was just waiting for me to call.

“It was when he took the piss out of you for the Viking sock. You were so passionate about it. That’s what made me hate him.”

And in that moment I realised- yes! It was the sock that did it!

Or at least, the sock was enblematic of so many other issues I kept brushing off, setting aside, unwilling to confront until it all became too much, and I had to put myself, my needs and my happiness first. To realise that I deserved more than someone who was happy to laugh in my face at my passion.

So thank you, Jorvik Viking Centre and the wonderful team at the York Archaeological Trust, for helping me realise what I needed. For making me realise the importance of a partner who might not always understand why you’re obsessed with Viking socks, but will hold you when you are overcome with the wonder and joy and strangeness of chance archaeological survival.

It is, after all, what we all deserve.

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to share it with a friend who might also appreciate Viking socks.

Share

All posts from M.R. James Appreciation Society are free to read for all subscribers. However, if you do feel compelled to support open access history, paid subscriptions are switched on and available from £3.50 per month.

If you would like to support me monetarily but would prefer to not to commit to a monthly subscription, you can buy me the cost of a cup of tea instead! Any and all financial support goes directly towards my Substack writing and outreach work.

Buy me a herbal tea!

Welcome to the PhDiaries, a series for me to talk frankly about life as a postgraduate history researcher. I hope it is as cathartic for other postgrads to read as it is for me to write.

Another month has whizzed by somewhat faster than I’d anticipated. The leaves on the trees lining the Cam riverbanks by King’s College have turned a beautiful scarlet, and I’m wrapping myself up in increasing amounts of knitwear early each morning, attempting to stave off the late October chills. The thermostat has decided it’s finally time for my heating bills to rise again and I’ve purchased a large amount of cinnamon and apple tea to really appreciate the turn of the season, which now lives on my desk in the graduate study room.

There’s been a lot of progress in many ways since I last checked in; I’ve met those in the same funding cohort as me, been introduced to the rest of the graduates in my department and the current PhD cohort, and classes have been in full swing for the past month. Having been out of academia for two years and now finally re-entering, I do feel imposter-adjacent, still, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling more at home each day. I’ve had to remind myself of much of the basics of schools of thought that would have come much easier to me when I was studying my MA, but recognising that this is normal given my circumstance. It’s okay that I don’t remember the minutia of the minster debate right now!

Turns out the Latin I’d done by myself over the course of the past 4 months or so has helped me significantly; I’m far more up to speed with the translations than I thought I was, but the focus that my department’s teaching places on really knowing the grammar rules by heart is one I wasn’t expecting, but has been welcome, if slightly intimidating when I sit my professor’s weekly quiz. It has been rigorous and challenging, but critical.

It turns out I really do need that push to get me to explain why a sentence should be translated in a specific way or I’ll just push through, all guns blazing to translate a sentence and leaping forward without ever taking a moment to understand why exactly a fourth conjugation verb is formed in a particular way. I will be honest, I am so glad I’m just auditing these classes and not having to take the 3 hour exam at the end of the year. I think that might just about have killed me off; I truly don’t know how Cambridge undergraduates manage. My Latin professor is wonderful, though, and I feel very, very lucky to have such quality instruction.

I’m also attending palaeography (the study of old handwriting) and Old English classes - I’ll likely be teaching some palaeography for the undergraduates from next year, and given it’s been nearly 2 years since I did any of it formally, it’s been excellent to get back into the groove of it again. Luckily, my project requires that the documents I need to read are relatively legible to me even now; a colleague of mine is working with particularly murky Icelandic texts written in Gothic script, which looks terrifying anytime she shows me a copy of what she’s trying to transcribe. Genuine shivers when I think about those manuscript fragments sometimes.

I’ve also attended my first Cambridge formal. These are, you guessed it, formal occasions, where you attend a multi-course meal, often preceded by a Latin grace, and are great opportunities to connect with others in your college. The conventions of attending a formal dinner weren’t new to me, coming from a gowned college at Durham, but this was really quite different from any experience I’d ever had there. Suddenly, the institutional wealth of the Cambridge colleges was made very apparent as I realised that the cutlery and tankard I was using were all 19th c. solid silver.

My college has a huge amount of silver in its collection, along with significant investments in port and wine that contribute to its pretty vast wealth, according to the librarian, whom I’d been sat next to. I believe it was only the High Table who were given the historic silverware, but even if I had been eating from stainless steel, it would have still been quite the culinary experience. I mean, it’s not like I’m buying guinea fowl breast from Sainsbury’s on the regular. Regardless, it’ll be an evening that’ll stick with me for a long time going forward.

To be frank, there has been so much to take in, with classes, college life, department dynamics, coupled with not living in the city centre, which have all required me to really adjust my ways of thinking, being, and behaving. I’m walking much more every day and sleeping very hard, but I’m still very physically and mentally tired. It is sometimes difficult to remind myself that this is to be expected until I get my routines in order. Change is great and fun and definitely not terrifying! (Neurodivergency in academia is fun, let’s leave it at that).

Something that has kept me sane though has been my visits and talks I deliver to my wonderful group of learners on my Exploring London course that I run with Kingston Adult Education. In the past few weeks, we’ve visited the London Mithraeum and All-Hallows-by-the-Tower, two incredible sites in central London that have sparked so much excellent conversation about heritage and how we interact with it in the modern day.

My students are real gems, and I’m so lucky I get to spend time with them each week. I’ve been treating this as protected time for me to get outside, explore somewhere beautiful and chat about history with them, and I am so grateful for it. Whilst it’ll be a shame not to see them over the October/November half term, I’m already prepping the lecture for when we return, focusing on the dissolution of the monasteries and combined with a visit to Barking Abbey.

I had been worried that my Substack was going to take a bit of a hit in terms of the energy I was able to put into it when classes started in earnest. Whilst my writing has been taking me longer than it did a few months ago, I’m quite pleased that I was able to publish my longest piece to date recently. There’s been some really excellent discussions on there about semantics and the contexts in which it is/is not appropriate to use the term “pagan”, and I hope to be making a similar post about the controversies and problems with the term “Anglo-Saxon” soon. If you missed it and would like to read about the issues with imposed identity in this period, I’ve linked it below:

A note on Substack in general, too, the community of early medievalist writers and readers has been so unbelievably welcoming since I joined. I could never have imagined that my history writing would have amassed any kind of following close to this when I started writing back in June of this year. Thank you all - the fact there are nearly 700 subscribers to this blog is rather surreal and very humbling.

November holds both a lot of excitement and a lot of work - I’ll be visiting Oxford for a residential with my funding co-hort to get to know our counterparts at Oxford and the Open University and launching myself headlong into funding enquiries for the equipment I’ll need to source for my project, as well as working hard on the methodology sections for my PhD, which I hope to have completed by Christmas. I’ve made a concerted effort to not make my life exclusively about research too, so I’ll be making cakes and biscuits for a department bake sale and hoping to get involved with the department Yule Play (for which I may or may not have written a St Cuthbert themed parody of “Pink Pony Club”. I am ridiculously excited for it).

I’ll be back for another check in with some more updates at the beginning of December!

Thank you for reading M.R. James Appreciation Society! I’m Olive and I’m a PhD student of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

My work focuses on early-medieval spirituality in Britain, its manuscripts and language, the history of the book, and how texts interacted with constructed sacred space. If you’re interested in learning more about this wonderful period of history, this is the blog for you.

All my posts are available to read for free, but if you would like to support my work as a researcher, I have turned paid subscriptions on - they start at £3.50 per month.

Subscribe now

If you would prefer to support me in a one-off capacity instead of committing to a full subscription, you can tip me the cost of a herbal tea (in lieu of buying me a coffee). Any and all support of my work is appreciated so much.

Buy me a herbal tea!