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Dr Francis Young Profile picture
Dr Francis Young
@DrFrancisYoung
Historian of religion and belief | folklorist | Balticist | professional indexer | lay canon @stedscath | tutor @OxfordConted
Jun 24 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I’m fascinated by the history of cultural portrayals of Roman Britain; Arthur Machen’s vision of decadent religious strangeness was perhaps the most out-of-kilter with other Victorian portrayals of a martial and masculine province The introduction to my short story collection ‘Shades of Rome’ traces the lineage of one particular tradition of portraying Roman Britain as a site of the sinister and uncanny…
Jun 22 • 7 tweets • 5 min read
I decided to hit the Circus Visitor Centre first, to see what remains of the circus discovered in 2004 - an example of a site so massive it was too big to see, so no-one had realised it was there. These models give some idea of the scale…

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Image The starting gates have been partially reconstructed, although of course most of the colossal site has been built over


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Jun 13 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
TIL that Ceaușescu deliberately left some Romanian regions uncollectivised so folklorists could go there and study the unspoilt folk culture. Folklore studies as a totalitarian social experiment 😬 Communist regimes generally had some understanding that the 'modernisation' they craved destroyed folk culture, but they wanted to preserve that folk culture as a foundation of national particularity (and specifically *proletarian* national particularity)
May 19 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
It's Pentecost, the patronal festival of linguists - so I thought I'd share some of the realisations that liberated my approach to language, and gave me the confidence to work (or try to work) with multiple languages in my research Image At school, I didn't consider myself very good at languages. I was OK, but I didn't get the highest marks. But I realised I was more interested in languages - how they sounded, how they worked- than anyone else. Those who got higher marks were more careful and had better memories
May 13 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
There's fascinating stuff in this series on the religion (or was it religion?) of the Lakotas and the strange clash of modern and pre-modern modes of being in c19th America. Incredible as it may seem, such clashes were still occurring *in Europe* too in the same era (thread)
Image The United States wasn't the only nation expanding its frontier into the plains - the Russian Empire was doing the same thing, and enforcing Russification (and Christianity) on animist peoples on the Volga and beyond (the photo shows forced baptism of Kalmyks)
Apr 8 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Today my second favourite university in the world, Vilnius University, celebrates its 445th birthday. @VU_LT was conceived by Jesuits as an ideal Counter-Reformation university, and was from its inception an international endeavour; Jesuits from Britain played a key role 🇱🇹🤝🇬🇧 Image The university's second rector, Adam Brooke, was an Oxford-educated Englishman, while James Bosgrave was an early Professor of Greek and Rhetoric; another Englishman, John Howlett, was Professor of Scholastic Theology
Apr 6 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Finally made it to @senhousemuseum! Altars, altars, ALTARS!!!
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Image So here are some ALTARS


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Apr 5 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I absolutely love this book’s commitment to comprehensive coverage of all Cumbria’s prehistoric sites - it underlines how little we know, and how little some of these sites are studied - and how recently some have come to light
Image For example, until 1999 it was thought there was no prehistoric rock art in Cumbria; but then the first cup marked rocks were discovered, and examples are still being found
Jan 31 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What we really need are universities that support scholars who never publish articles or monographs, but spend their whole lives editing and translating primary sources. The problem is not that we’ve become obsessed by publication, but that we don’t prioritise primary source work Monographs are great and all that but long-term, what sustains a field over decades is good editions/translations of the primary sources, and this crucial work is being neglected because such activities receive little recognition
Jan 21 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I've taken the plunge and started a S*bstack, 'All Old Strange Things', about what it's like to be a historian of religion and belief. It's a return to the best traditions (I hope) of antiquarian notes and queries! Please do consider subscribing: drfrancisyoung.substack.com
Image 50 subscribers within 5 hours! Thanks everyone Image
Jan 2 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
‘The lost revenue for authors would be small’. Oh, would it now? Some of us still try to make a living from writing, astounding as that may seem. By the same reasoning, why don’t we just stop paying people who do low-paid jobs altogether, since they earn so little from them?
Dec 30, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A visit to @museumofnorwich, the home of Snap the dragon and other accoutrements of the traditional procession of the Lord Mayor of Norwich

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Image I’m intrigued by this late c18th chasuble, which must have been made for the city’s Catholic community Image
Dec 30, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The Moderator of the CoS describes selling off kirks as “a real opportunity to reimagine ourselves and to let go of some of the baggage that’s held us down.” Which is fine, if you believe churches exist only for the benefit of the church as an institution The problem throughout the UK is that churches have a cultural significance far beyond their ‘usefulness’ to the denominations they belong to. The idea that the institutional church of 2023 gets to determine the fate of cultural monuments is pretty terrifying, really
Dec 29, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I’ve never actually been to Great Yarmouth before - I loved the ruins of the Franciscan friary


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Image St George’s Chapel (1714), part of Queen Anne’s church-building campaign. Sadly no longer a church Image
Dec 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
‘We are proposing to digitise [and then destroy]…’ 🤦‍♂️ This is a textbook misuse of digitisation. Digitisation is about accessibility - it isn’t about long-term archival storage
Dec 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
A rather exquisite fragmentary statue of a Roman charioteer @lincmuseumusher Image Another fragmentary Roman statue, found at Ancaster - perhaps part of the cult image of the god Viridius, known only from Ancaster Image
Nov 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If human ritual and religion is (at a very conservative estimate) around 40,000 years old and we imagine it as a single day, then the earliest written record of human religion is from 8.40pm. The vast majority of human religion is simply lost to us. Image And yes, archaeology allows us to speculate - but archaeological remains that offer tantalising clues about possible religious beliefs (things like megaliths or the Nebra Sky Disc) are pretty recent too, in the great scheme of things...
Sep 23, 2023 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
I popped into the outstanding St Kyneburgha’s, Castor this afternoon - which is celebrating its 900th anniversary - to see the flower festival


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Image Of course, it’s just the present church that’s only 900 years old - it’s on the site of a massive Roman administrative building whose walls you can still see, along with stacks of column drum sections built into the church walls


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Sep 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
And it’s true that translations are indeed there to help you with your research. The difficulty is that if we normalise working solely from translations and strip linguistic competency from our disciplines, where do we expect the new translations to come from? The supreme irony of the decline of linguistic competency is that the more entrenched the assumption that everything will be in translation becomes, the fewer translations there will be
Aug 29, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
The last @nationaltrust house of the summer is The Vyne, taking my total of domestic chapels bagged this August to 4: Forde Abbey, Lytes Cary, Petworth and The Vyne ⛪️⛪️⛪️⛪️


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Image The chapel at The Vyne dates from the 1520s, and I first heard about it through comparison with @hengravehall; Hengrave and The Vyne are the only private chapels to retain in situ stained glass from the pre-Reformation era
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Aug 21, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Yesterday I finally had the opportunity to visit an iconic site that’s intrigued me ever since I first saw a photo as a child in one of those ‘Mysteries of the Unexplained’ books: Knowlton, the church within a henge. But it’s a deeply misunderstood site (🧵) Image As English Heritage’s website proclaims, ‘The unusual pairing of the henge and the church symbolises the transition from pagan to Christian worship,’ and Knowlton has long been used to illustrate the idea of Christian churches being built on pre-Christian sacred sites