Seb Falk
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Seb Falk
@sebfalk.com
11K followers 610 following 600 posts
Historian of science ||
Admissions Tutor at Girton College, University of Cambridge ||
Singer, sailor, runner, father ||
"Always generous" – The New Yorker
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sebfalk.com
Seb Falk @sebfalk.com · Nov 19
Since "La Luz de la Edad Media" came out in September, there are now 8 editions of #TheLightAges!

I'm fascinated by each publisher's different approach to design – but thrilled by the results in every case. Feel free to judge this book by its covers!
8 copies of The Light Ages in different languages: Dutch, English (UK), Italian, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, English (USA), Portuguese
Reposted by Seb Falk
mearcsteppende.bsky.social
Want to learn how early medieval people living on the coast in Scotland hunted seals and seabirds? Or how collecting sea snails on the beach was part of new Christian practice?

You should check out my new article in Water History!

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#medievalsky
Wild animals, small practices, and the formation of an early medieval coastal landscape on the Firth of Forth - Water History
The large-scale landscape changes that occurred in northern Britain from roughly 400–800 C.E. were built on a vast array of smaller shifting practices which reflected the realities of local environmen...
link.springer.com
September 12, 2026 at 12:52 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
sebfalk.com
Looking forward to taking part in this symposium at @dias.ie in a few weeks. Open to all (but spaces limited) – so register now!

(I'll be speaking about medieval navigation, of course ⛵ )

www.eventbrite.ie/e/the-voyage...
The Voyage of St Brendan, A European Odyssey
A day of events to celebrate the launch of a modern edition and English translation of the text
www.eventbrite.ie
August 25, 2026 at 3:48 PM
sebfalk.com
Looking forward to taking part in this symposium at @dias.ie in a few weeks. Open to all (but spaces limited) – so register now!

(I'll be speaking about medieval navigation, of course ⛵ )

www.eventbrite.ie/e/the-voyage...
The Voyage of St Brendan, A European Odyssey
A day of events to celebrate the launch of a modern edition and English translation of the text
www.eventbrite.ie
August 25, 2026 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
rhiggitt.bsky.social
We have made the news! #eshs-hss (overlooking the blandly sweeping statements made about Edinburgh and #histSTM) www.heraldscotland.com/news/2627512...
Thousands of academics descend on Scottish capital for 'landmark' event
The five-day conference is being held at Edinburgh University, the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC), and the National Museum of…
www.heraldscotland.com
July 13, 2026 at 9:41 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
mazarine.bsky.social
Always blown away by conference presenters who present in languages other than their primary one. And answer audience questions, sometimes spoken at lightning speed. Bravo! #eshs-hss
July 15, 2026 at 4:48 PM
sebfalk.com
On my way home from a magnificent #eshs-hss conference. Edinburgh hosted us brilliantly (including the conference ceilidh!) & it was wonderful to catch up with old friends & colleagues, and make meet many new ones. Newly inspired by #HistSTM!
Ceilidh lines in the National Museum of Scotland Edinburgh castle in the sunshine, with blue sky behind View down over Edinburgh from Salisbury Crags, with the castle visible in the background
July 16, 2026 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
suzpaul.bsky.social
Fabulous medieval postdoc opportunity on a brilliant project…
marianneodoherty.bsky.social Marianne O'Doherty @marianneodoherty.bsky.social · Jun 8
OK #MedievalSky and #Skystorians: early career job klaxon! A post on my new project 'Strange Geographies: Spatial Imaginaries of Medieval Britain', 30 months (with poss. of extension). Details at jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx... @royalhistsoc.org @memorients.bsky.social @imc-leeds.bsky.social
June 8, 2026 at 8:49 PM
sebfalk.com
My review of Katherine Harvey, "The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living" & Peter Jones, "Self-Help from the Middle Ages", is out in the new issue of @thetls.bsky.social

www.the-tls.com/history/medi...
Mind, body and medieval spirit
Should the Middle Ages be a model for modern life? The period hardly seems promising, with its religious violence, pandemics and penchant for fart jokes.
www.the-tls.com
May 29, 2026 at 1:09 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
uoyborthwick.bsky.social
Sweltering in the UK heatwave?? Why not visit your Local Archival Repository! Low temperatures and humidity GUARANTEED* And we throw in the history for free😍

*by regulatory standard BS4971:2017

Archives - Where the records are cool and so are you.
May 26, 2026 at 9:40 AM
sebfalk.com
Job opportunity for an early-career scholar in politics/international relations of the Middle East / North Africa / South Asia.

3 years from 1 September. Apply by 4 June.
Come and work with me at wonderful @girtoncollege.bsky.social!

Full details: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/55579/
Girton College in the morning sun, with slanting light through the trees, a slight mist, and the tower in the background
May 26, 2026 at 12:11 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
pottedhistory.bsky.social
The replica Anglo-Saxon urn🏺⚱️I've been working on, based on one found in the grounds of @girtoncollege.bsky.social is now approaching completion #Archaeology One of my prime concerns when replicating archaeological artefacts, is to retain the spirit of the original and avoid over finishing it.
May 16, 2026 at 11:43 AM
Reposted by Seb Falk
matthewcobb.bsky.social
The Enlightenment is a C20 construct. Discuss.
Google ngram graph showing that 'The Enlightenment' appeared as a phrase in the printed corpus in the 1940s.
May 10, 2026 at 8:43 AM
Reposted by Seb Falk
stephenaj.bsky.social
Remarkable drawing by Frances Yates from 1952, as she was studying Giordano Bruno's art of memory. This is the lead image for Relics, a new student-curated exhibition at the @warburginstitute.bsky.social. Much looking forward to seeing this up close....
mailchi.mp/sas/news-fro....
Circular diagram on paper with fold marks. The outer rings of the circle are lettered in black ink and the inner in red.
May 8, 2026 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
docuracy.co.uk
✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa.
Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality.
docuracy.github.io/datini/

#DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory
A dark-themed interactive map of the medieval western Mediterranean showing 14th-century merchant letter routes as curved arcs coloured from cyan (fast, 0–5 days) through yellow to red (30+ days). Short land routes between Tuscan cities glow cyan; longer sea routes to Barcelona and Majorca burn orange and red, revealing the unpredictability of medieval maritime travel. (299 characters) Long (accessible description for screen readers / figure caption): Screenshot of the Datini Letters Geospatial Explorer in Travel Time mode. A dark basemap of the western Mediterranean is overlaid with curved arc lines connecting pairs of cities in the Datini merchant network. Arc colour encodes average letter delivery time on a gradient from cyan (near-instant, 0–5 days) through green and yellow (one to two weeks) to orange and deep red-magenta (more than 30 days). Dense clusters of fast cyan arcs radiate from Florence and Pisa across Tuscany, reflecting the reliable day-or-two land post. Arcs reaching westward to Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Majorca shift to orange and red, capturing the slower and far more variable sea routes that could take anywhere from a week to several months. City nodes are shown as circles: pink for the main Datini fondacos (Pisa, Florence, Barcelona, Genoa, Valencia, Majorca) and blue for correspondent cities. A sidebar on the left shows the Travel Time mode is selected, with a cyan-to-red colour legend and a filter slider for minimum letters per route.
May 1, 2026 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
historydan1066.bsky.social
I’m pleased to share that 'Borders and the Norman World', which I co-edited with Áron Kecskés, @rozierhistorian.bsky.social, and @lvhicks.bsky.social , is now being released in paperback. It will be available in June and is currently open for pre-order: boydellandbrewer.com/book/borders...
Book cover for Borders and the Norman World, featuring title, editors, and an image of two knights on horseback carved into stone
April 27, 2026 at 8:34 AM
Reposted by Seb Falk
camlibresearch.bsky.social
Venetian hedgehog
April 6, 2026 at 8:23 AM
Reposted by Seb Falk
camlibresearch.bsky.social
Venetian camel
April 6, 2026 at 8:20 AM
Reposted by Seb Falk
sadiahqureshi.bsky.social
Oh my word. I made Quote of the Day in Nature a couple of weeks back and had no idea. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Taken from this piece on de-extinction in Aeon: aeon.co/essays/de-ex...

Back to my break.
Quote of the day: "De-extinction will never be purely, or even primarily, the revival of lost species, but the bioengineering of new life forms that we choose to name after lost ways of being" Historian of science Sadiah Qureshi argues that efforts to 'de-extinct' species, using frozen biological material or living relatives, risks "reducing species to little more than genetic information, rather than appreciating them as living ways of being alive". (Aeon | 19 min read)
April 5, 2026 at 7:13 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
ottocr.at
Easter Sunday at Fountains Abbey
April 5, 2026 at 3:27 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
karlgalle.bsky.social
From the same publisher, a new open-access edited volume on Proclus for historians of medieval mathematics & theology: www.mirabileweb.it/edgalluzzo/m... #HistSTM #MedievalSky
Cover image for the book, "Proclus and the Science: Approaches to Understanding the Divine," edited by Anna Motta and Daniela Taormina.
April 2, 2026 at 5:17 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
lorekeating.bsky.social
I keep seeing "all authors use AI, the real issue is they're being forced to be sneaky about it" headlines.

Full stop No. This is a lie peddled for normalization. It's schoolyard-level pressure tactics "C'mon, all the cool kids are already doing it. We won't tell. It's fine. We're on your side."
April 1, 2026 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
drkrisztinailko.bsky.social
It's great to see this article in The Conversation up now! Link in the first comment.
March 31, 2026 at 5:22 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
aas.org
Call for HAD Osterbrock Book Prize Nominations

AAS Historical Astronomy Division (HAD) invites nominations for 2027 Donald E. Osterbrock Book Prize for Historical #Astronomy. Deadline: 1 March aas.org/posts/news/2...

📷 Seb Falk, 2025 Osterbrock Award winner at the 246th AAS meeting (Anchorage) 🔭
February 17, 2026 at 8:27 PM
Reposted by Seb Falk
kcross.bsky.social
Hi guys. Please find attached my book. Some people say it will shape the idea of the English people. Don’t miss the section on the Synod of Whitby. My information is a little patchy, and I’m no fan of the Brits. Maybe you should supplement my work with archaeology? All the best, the Venerable Bede
magisterconway.bsky.social Dan Conway @magisterconway.bsky.social · Mar 23
Update: it gets so much worse. All of Bede's letters have no basis in the original Latin at all. This one reads like a modern email!

(Original Latin, real translation, fake "translation")
Desideratissimo et reverendissimo patri Albino, Beda Christi famulus, salutem. Dedicatio Gratantissime suscepi munuscula tuae dilectionis, quae per venerabilem fratrem nostrum Nothelmum presbyterum mittere dignatus es, et maxime litteras, quibus me iam secunda vice in ecclesiastica gentis nostrae historia, ad quam me scribendam iamdudum instigaveras, creber adiuvare atque instituere curasti. Propter quod et ipse tibi rectissime eandem historiam, mox ut consummare potui, ad transcribendum remisi. Sed et aliud, quod te partim desiderare comperi, volumen tibi vice remunerationis aeque ad transcribendum destinavi, videlicet, illud quod de structura templi Salomonis atque allegorica eius interpretatione nuper edidi. Teque, amantissime pater, supplex obsecro, ut pro mea fragilitate cum his, qui tecum sunt, famulis Christi, apud pium Iudicem sedulus intercedere memineris: sed et eos, ad quos eadem nostra opuscula pervenire feceris, hoc idem facere monueris. Bene vale, semper amantissime in Christo pater optime. I HAVE thankfully received the testimonies of your love which you have condescended to send me by the hands of our venerable brother Nothelm the priest, and especially your letter, in which you have shown so much solicitude, this second time, to give me aid and information for my Ecclesiastical History, a work which I first undertook at your instigation. Wherefore also I have with great propriety sent it to you, as I was able to finish it, to be copied.* But I intend to repay you by forwarding to you another volume for the same purpose, as I find, also, is consistent with your own wishes, namely, that which I have lately published on the building of Solomon's temple, and its allegorical signification. And I humbly beseech you, most loving father, and Christ's servants who are with you, to intercede fervently with the righteous in behalf of my frailty; and to admonish those, to whom you shall show my work, to do the same. Fare you well, my good and ever loving father in Christ. Bede, servant of Christ and priest, to the most reverend and learned Abbot Albinus, greetings. The Ecclesiastical History is complete, or at least I have completed it as fully as my sources allow — and here I must thank you, whose generosity in sharing the Canterbury archives has made a large part of the work possible. The history of the southern English church — the Augustinian mission, the archbishops of Canterbury, the councils and controversies of the seventh century — is documented in your archives in ways it is not documented anywhere in Northumbria. Without your assistance in providing copies of documents, narrative accounts from knowledgeable informants, and the episcopal lists that I needed for the chronology, I would have been writing the history of the north only and leaving the south as a shadow. What I still lack — and I write partly to acknowledge the gap and to ask whether anything can be done about it — is reliable documentation for certain events in the history of the East Anglian and Middle English churches. The informants I have consulted have been helpful but incomplete, and I am aware that what I have written about those regions is thinner than I would like. If you know of any further sources — letters, narrative accounts, episcopal records — that bear on those churches and that could be shared, I would be grateful to receive them even if the History is already complete. They could inform a revised edition if the work is widely enough copied to justify one. With all gratitude, Bede
March 24, 2026 at 9:00 AM
Reposted by Seb Falk
magisterconway.bsky.social
So, um... this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination. Thread:
sarahebond.bsky.social Sarah E. Bond @sarahebond.bsky.social · Mar 22
The new project mapping 7,000+ ancient letters is impressive: romanletters.org . The database & geolocation (although noting Pleiades rather than just AWMC would be nice) are great. But I absolutely cannot get over use of AI—however transparent—for translation.

🚨 Value human translators 🚨
AI translation transparency Modern English translations were produced using Claude (Anthropic), working from either the Latin/Greek original or an existing 19th-century English version. Translation work was guided by two internal documents: a translation guide covering late antique epistolary conventions, rhetorical register, and how to handle common formulaic phrases; and a modern voice guide specifying tone, vocabulary level, and how to avoid archaism while remaining faithful to the original. Al-generated translations are clearly marked in the interface. They are provided for accessibility and research convenience, not as authoritative scholarly translations. The original Latin or Greek is preserved alongside every translation, and 19th-century English versions are shown where available. Corrections from domain experts are welcome.
March 22, 2026 at 3:09 PM