No, it couldn't. 🧵

Hello! I'm an art historian who researches the 15C coinage of England! These headlines are not only sensationalist; they also participate in a longstanding effort to date as early as possible Euro presence on & further legitimize claims to this continent. /1

https://twitter.com/ANACoins/status/1591236080984014850

The story is that someone found a coin in Newfoundland from the reign of Henry VI, minted btn 1422-1427. To the credit of those who wrote this press release, they make no claim as to the coin’s presence suggesting Euros arriving in Canada at that time. gov.nl.ca/releases/2022/… /2

🧵 One of the things I do is teach college students how to read old handwriting. Very, very old handwriting. This field is known as paleography. If handwriting didn't change over time, this part of my job would be unnecessary. So, some thoughts on top of these ones. /1

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1579484660224389121

Perennial commentary abt the decline of instruction in cursive often makes several assumptions.

Assumption 1: cursive is one thing
Assumption 2: cursive gives us access to history
Assumption 3: cursive has prestige
Assumption 4: this educational lapse is new
/2

🧵 Medieval Manuscript Lesson of the Day. Canon Tables! A sophisticated form of textual technology, cross referencing, & theological argumentation all delivered in a beautiful and meaningful package—what we would today call graphic design. /1 The invention of canon tables is attributed to Eusebius of Caesaria in the 4th century CE to answer the need for correlation between the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John. Each of these tells the life of Christ, but they differ in order, content, & detail. /2

People typically associate apps with smartphones (in definition apps are just programs designed to execute tasks that don't run the computer itself). But apps are common in premodern books.

A 🧵 on app technology in this book from 16th-century England!/1 The book is known commonly as Frank Adams's Writing Tables, as can be seen on the title page here. This copy is in the Houghton Library, and it's especially famous for two things: its erasable pages and the survival of its original stylus. /2

I always end my course "Romanesque & Gothic Art" w a lecture on the Black Death & Art of the Macabre. It was long believed that the macabre emerged in response to the plague, but art historians have argued against this myth. A🧵on why the macabre was NOT a response to plague. /1 Whenever I deliver lectures on the same topic across the years, I revise them. As one can imagine, this particular lecture has changed dramatically over the last 2 years. One thing that's changed has been my understanding of why busting the myths abt the macabre is important. /2

🧵Manuscript Lesson of the Day! What is this?

I received this leaf as a gift a couple of years ago with almost no information included. So. How did I figure out what I got? A step-by-step guide. /1 Step 1 is eyeballing things. The leaf is relatively small, about the height of my hand (measurements can come at a later point; we’re just feeling things out here). And it’s in Dutch, so this puts me in the mindset of a private prayer book, probably from the 15th century. /2

This is repugnant, and bc @Yael_Rice and I have already written about this sort of research, you can read a (p)refutation here:
hyperallergic.com/604897/how-sci…

https://twitter.com/joshuacpeterson/status/1517224879136796672

One thing I’d like to highlight from near the end of our article is this, bc it’s precisely what these new researchers are reviving. I implore people to do just a casual search of Galton and see what horrors he wrought.

I’ve seen a few of these, owned by wealthy 20th-century collectors like Hearst, but I wasn’t aware it might have been a wider phenomenon. If it’s not already been done there’s an article to be written here on the (potential) trend. /1

https://twitter.com/astridbeckers1/status/1516847826784993281

For a photo of one of the Hearst Castle lampshades produced from recycles medieval manuscript pages see commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hear… /2

In my class on Romanesque & Gothic Art today, we talked about representations of the vulva in late medieval art, as you do.

One thing I didn't address are representations of...this story! Women hoisting their dresses to rally men to battle. Link: bl.uk/manuscripts/Vi… /1 The original story comes from Plutarch's "Bravery of Women," which recounts:

loebclassics.com/view/plutarch-… /2

For the last lecture of the semester in my medieval manuscripts class, I anchored our discussion in busting the myths of print.

So, I present Five Myths about Print! 🧵 /1 MYTH 1: European print was invented by Gutenberg in c1450.

Leaving aside the fact that books had been produced by print in east Asia (incl by movable type) for hundreds of years prior, print tech had been in use in Europe in coins, badges, textile block prints, even waffles!/2

If you want to know what a naive reading of historical sources looks like when deployed as a foil to an argument about contemporary society, absolutely read this. /1 tudorscribe.medium.com/do-you-work-lo… First, as @MeghanKRoberts noted in her tweet on this, how are you defining “work”? /2

🧵Manuscript Lesson of the Day! Colophons! This example is from the latest acquisition by UMass Amherst's Special Collections, pictured here. Will transcribe and translate it in what follows. /1 A term from Greek meaning "summit," the word "colophon" had a poetic usage in 17C English to mean "finishing stroke" & was later adopted to mean a final statement that articulates something about the production circumstances in which a book was made. /2

This is a really important report, and I want to relate this to an alarm I've been raising about the intersection between my own field (history of art) and AI. 🧵

An interviewee for this piece states, "That face tends to look trustworthy, because it's familiar, right?" /1

https://twitter.com/shannonpareil/status/1508111096653115393

This might remind people of the disastrous study that came out last year on “trustworthiness” in historical portraiture, on which @Yael_Rice and I here.

hyperallergic.com/604897/how-sci… /2

To me, the non-linearity of skill-building is one of the most valuable things abt medieval manuscripts courses at the undergrad level. Tomorrow we start our week on Psalters. Almost none of my students know Latin & we don't do paleography till next week. And that's excellent. /1 After I lecture on the basics (what is a Psalter, what are some of its characteristic components), we're going to examine that opening together. Because none of my students will be able to read the text straight away, they will have to focus on the opening's visual elements. /2

Here we go again, another deceptive headline and article about "hidden paintings" being recovered by researchers. This is in actuality a PR stunt by an AI firm. The narrative follows the pattern of the earlier story about a Modigliani painting. A thread.

cnn.com/style/article/… For reference, here is my earlier thread.

https://twitter.com/Sonja_Drimmer/status/1402682731427991552

Today I bought my very first Farmer's Almanac. Reading it, I am more surprised than I thought I would've been at how similar it is to its late medieval English counterparts. Am going to do a slowly-developing thread over the course of my perusal, as I notice the similarities. First, a cool codicological note: see, in the photo from the first tweet that there's a hole in the upper left corner that runs through the whole book? Ppl hang the book from a nail or string for easy reference, but imagine being a future historian & having to figure that out!

Texas isn't medieval; it's modern.

The false opposition here between the modernity of "silicon valley" & the retrograde "medieval" state of Texas makes invisible the fact that those driving technocracy are often the same people driving profoundly conservative political agendas.

https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1433354268749275137

The anti-abortion, forced pregnancy movement is happening now in 2021. Until we stop defining things we don't like as aberrations from the past we make it impossible to see how the systems we have in place have made this movement possible.

I do not know who Kelly Grovier is, asside from that fact that he writes for the BBC and clearly learned about art history from the Da Vinci Code. Literally not hidden, Kelly.

A story about medievalist Eileen Power (d.1940) submitted without comment. Cited here: google.com/books/edition/… What gets me (aside from the fact that we're still saying things like today and "This is what a prof looks like" is its own hashtag) is that when a dude want to remark on how extra femme a woman looks but knows "Hey, you look very feminine!" is, you know, weird,

When popular media tell stories that come from the research of historians without citing their work, it makes history seem like something that just exists, just out there in the ether. But think about how frequently people hear news reports about “a new scientific study says…” This is all about the devaluation of not just the humanities but also LABOR in the humanities.

Manuscripts that copy printed books are great because they defy simplistic notions of media lineage. The colophon in this MS copied from a printed book reads, “Here endethe the proverbs of Lydgate...Empryntede at London in Flete Stret at the sygne of the sonne by Wykyn Worde.” Print does not have one single, social meaning and it performs and means differently at different times in different places. The replication of print in manuscript is not a retrograde backslide; it is another way to make the material aspect of books expressive.