IMC Leeds 2009 report

I’ve survived another Leeds (my 8th I believe) and thankfully, it was better than last year’s, both in terms of quality and weather. I still have some concerns about the over-use of case studies, but more of those later. I failed miserably to make it to either bloggers’ meeting due to double-booking myself and a successful round table: I’m sure Magistra et Mater and Jonathan Jarrett will update everyone on that score (the bloggers, not the roundtable).

Medievalists and the media: a short post

It has been an interesting two weeks in terms of medieval stories in the media and how they have been reported. Magistra has posted on the Viking conference in Cambridge, but we have also seen an increase in Robin Hood’s appearances in the news, both with and without bad puns.

Dr Julian Luxford of St Andrews has just published a short piece in Journal of Medieval History on attitudes to Robin Hood in chronicles. St Andrews put out a press release and since then, the news item has gone somewhat viral and has been picked up all over the place by various news agencies and bloggers as indicated by the most basic of Google searches. My favourite is Another Bloody WordPress Blog with the post entitled ‘Dr Julian Luxford, whoever you are, you made my day!’ following a sudden increase in the blog’s readership. A similar thing happened to this blog when I posted about Chris Wickham, but on a much smaller scale obviously!

Chris Wickham and the dialogue of the deaf

Last Wednesday, I escaped to London to hear Chris Wickham give the first Sir David Wilson lecture in medieval archaeology on ‘The problem of the dialogues between medieval history and medieval archaeology’. Given I have been wrestling with this very question in my own research and teaching of late, I was looking forward to hear Prof. Wickham’s thoughts on the matter; also it gave me the chance to catch up with some fellow bloggers, Jonathan Jarrett and Magistra et Mater. If what follows is slightly disjointed, then I apologise as I’ve written this post over several days.