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I've just finished indexing 'Aristotle Beyond the Academy', edited by Edith Hall, Arlene Holmes-Henderson and others - a fascinating collection on Aristotle's role in early modern politics, popular medicine, popular science, jurisprudence, and much more! www.routledge.com/Aristotle-Be...

Reading one of those books that’s just a PhD thesis where the author replaced every occurrence of ‘thesis’ with ‘book’ and hit send to the publisher

The existence of Iamblichus implies the existence of Youareblichus, Heisblichus, Weareblichus and Theyareblichus

Mulberry crime scene

Nearly ran over a bloke in a purple shirt and realised it was the Bishop of Bath and Wells 😳

There’s currently 20% off the paperback edition of ‘Twilight of the Godlings’ if you order from @universitypress.cambridge.org using the code HISBG26 🧚📚

Today on ‘All Old Strange Things’, I take a look at a largely forgotten (yet strangely influential) 1920s book about fairies open.substack.com/pub/drfranci...

In the shadow of CottingleyReading Bernard Sleigh’s ‘The Gates of Horn’open.substack.com

The latest number of Volupté is themed on Estonian and Finnish decadence!! 🇪🇪🇫🇮📙 journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/vo... ... Presumably that means lingering just a bit too long in a sauna, and flogging yourself with particularly soft birch leaves

Anyone else noticed how publishers demand ever shorter deadlines for proof-checking, peer-review etc.? I think it’s ’deadlineflation’, i.e. no author actually meets deadlines, so a ‘deadline’ is now a high ‘opening offer’ in an expected negotiation between publisher and authors

Latest brainfail: I just corrected ‘Woolf, Virginia’ to ‘Woolf, VA’, thinking Woolf must be the name of a town in the Old Dominion 🤦‍♂️

TIL one of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's ambassadors to Great Britain went to school in Bury St Edmunds - Charles Lee, who represented the Commonwealth at the Court of St James between 1766 and 1768. He is now better known for misadventures in America, of course

A peculiar feature of podcast culture is that there are some podcasts I follow closely, always checking what the latest episode is about - but never actually *listen to* because they’re far too annoying for that

‘Fairies, Spirits, Witches, and Wise Women’: an interesting CFP for the Renaissance Society of America (deadline 27 July): call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/...

All this bruhaha about The Odyssey and all I can think about is whether I can somehow spin this renewed interest in Greek mythology to get people interested in BALTIC MYTHOLOGY

Thank you to Summer of AstariaSen for her YouTube review of ‘Fairies: A History’! www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AV0...

Fairies: A HistoryYouTube video by AstariaSenwww.youtube.com

Apparently I’m now the 13th most popular historian on Substack - this can’t be lucky…

If there's a Silicon Valley in California and a Silicon Fen in Cambridgeshire, why isn't there an uncanny fen to parallel uncanny valley?

The obvious choice was surely Éva Pócs? Folklorists make great ceremonial presidents

Does anyone know of any Cold War-era efforts to establish magical or psychic defences in Britain against nuclear attack, in the same way as magical groups in WW2 worked on occult protection against Nazi invasion?

Today over on ‘All Old Strange Things’ I write about how historians (and non-historians) can take scepticism too far… substack.com/home/post/p-...