It's weird that I'm terrible at maths but I have an unusually vivid memory for dates; I associate them with events, or just picture them as images of what things looked like in that year
Historian of religion and belief | folklorist | Balticist | indexer | lay canon @stedscath.bsky.social | series editor for @universitypress.cambridge.org
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It's weird that I'm terrible at maths but I have an unusually vivid memory for dates; I associate them with events, or just picture them as images of what things looked like in that year
Some random church in a very boring suburb
I'm quite cautious about the whole 'Quiet Revival' thing, but at Mass this morning there were loads of 20-somethings, and they were even normal-looking. When I was in my 20s you had to be a *proper weirdo* to be attending Mass on a weekday
Just got an album that's some random German organist's chorale variations, all on the same chorale. For hours. Why aren't there more like this
We were honoured to welcome His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh to Jewry Wall during his visit to Leicester yesterday. The Duke explored our fully immersive museum – where 21st century technology brings to life one of the largest surviving Roman structures in Britain.
The title of this book is 419 words long. Authors, become ungovernable.
If you’ve spent lots of money on something, of course it is imperative it should be integrated into everything; it’s like when you cooked too much turkey for Christmas and now it’s cold turkey for lunch forever
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this story is that 72% were very satisfied with the bot, suggesting they had no idea it was useless
On 7 October I'm going to be in conversation with Prof. Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski about his new book 'Lithuania: A History', in an event hosted by @britishlithuanian.bsky.social. Email blssecretary@hotmail.com if you'd like to join via Zoom hurstpublishers.com/book/27074/
Oh yes. And building through time books. I keep meaning to find a copy of this one:
What I still absolutely love are the old history of architecture books with the clear black and white line drawings, outdated perhaps but still better than anything today imo
Ha ha I love this kind of shit. I used to read books about costume again and again until they fell to bits. Not even because I was especially interested in costume, but because I was obsessed with chronology and the passage of time, and costume seemed to capture that better than anything
This book is why I am a historian (possibly). Printed in 1989, it is full of absolute bollocks. I love it
I was especially pleased with this chapter title in 'Silence of the Gods' 😉
Tbh I mainly enjoy punning on the titles of other people's books (and even my own)
Spring 26
I am one!
One of my vices as a writer is that I can't resist the temptation to make subtitles into puns, hence the section in my next book about the commercialisation of fairies is called 'The bottom line of the garden'
Later this month I'm looking forward to speaking at #BaroCon2025 at Vilnius University on the subject of 'Baroque Epic in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: James Bennett’s Virtus dexterae Domini' www.barocon2025.flf.vu.lt/component/sp...
I'm intrigued by the idea of pre-Slavic migration Poland as a Scandinavian country
It’s a reconstruction of the lost Palace of Westminster by Henry William Brewer
I find it so offensive that people are using AI to generate deliberately boring historical content you can fall asleep to - erasing the labour and skills of real, boring human historians
I had to keep stopping the last one I was listening to and searching for the right phrase on Google Books so I could take note of a page number. Maybe narrators could just read out the page numbers in a special squeaky voice or something?
Emma Wilby is a scholar I very much admire, so this means a lot
“Francis Young carves a genuinely original path… the first comparative analysis of cultures from the northern and eastern peripheries of the European continent.” Thank you to Emma Wilby for her review of ‘Silence of the Gods’ in @historyextra.bsky.social magazine
I've just completed the index for @jonathanmcgovern.bsky.social's book 'The Early Parliaments of Henry VIII - an important and very comprehensive work of parliamentary history, coming soon from @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social boydellandbrewer.com/book/the-ear...
Although a shrine and an excarnation platform aren't mutually exclusive, ofc
Turns out it wasn't a church, it was the offices of Albion Archaeology in St Mary's church, which must have happened to be open to the public that day
Yes I think that's it!
I have a memory of once walking into a museum in Bedford (in a redundant church, I think?) and seeing a model reconstruction of the Iron Age four-post shrine excavated at Salford. Does anyone else know what I'm talking about? This is from the original archaeological report:
I’m glad to see it’s still up!
@drfrancisyoung.bsky.social I venture into Cambridge and there you are :-)
Where I live Starbucks is *the most exciting coffee shop*, the alternatives are Costa, Tesco cafe or Greggs. The London mind cannot comprehend this.
📢 Delighted to play a small part in this new chapter of the Church of Ireland Gazette 🕯️ (which maintains full editorial independence), with its new look and new editor, by reviewing an exceptional volume of essays on the long seventeenth century, edited by Patrick Little.
Sir Keir always has the opinions his spads and focus groups tell him to have
Why can’t UCL be renamed ‘University College London University of London’ for avoidance of ambiguity
Wait till he learns the Roma ruled a vast ancient empire
The structure and organisation of the University of London (or is it universities?) is so hard to explain it’s like a convoluted plot point in one of the less successful films in the Marvel franchise
Wait, answering emails isn't the core activity of actual work?
It's the 'Labour' Party, not 'Labor'. I don't care that he's American, it's a British political party and it should be referred to with UK spelling
Mastodon is like one of those dead-end sects who have bright ideas like practising universal celibacy
But at the same time, just as the pre-schism Church was racked by tensions, so it’s important not to remember Old Twitter as being rosier than it was…
Increasingly I look back on the time when everyone was on Old Twitter like the undivided Church of the first few centuries - now social media feels as though it’s fragmented into denominations: the Xians, the Blueskytes, the Threadsians, the Substackites, the Instagramarians &c
It’s not on the Polity website yet - I’ll post the link here as soon as it is!
The po-faced censoriousness of Bluesky is what gives it its distinctive character. The scolding is part of its culture, without it Bluesky would lose its cultural identity. Incomers should culturally assimilate
The proofs are here! Not not long to go now... 📚
In the latest free post on ‘All Old Strange Things’ I consider how quasi-mystical beliefs in the potential of AI may usher in a wholly new epistemology where AI, by definition, is never wrong: open.substack.com/pub/drfranci...
A Happy New Year to everyone who's spent too much of their life working in education
I agree wholeheartedly with your opposition to the use of chatbots, but I’m not sure we can avoid research being a solipsistic endeavour at times - scholars may be too precariously employed to have ‘colleagues’ in any meaningful sense, or could be working in a field no-one else within reach studies
Dominatrices refers to the mathematical concept, dominatrixes to the critical apparatus
Oh, I will!
I just marked the first 1000 words and ignored the rest!
A blessed feast of St Andthatotherguy to you all
This reminds me of a student I once had who was supposed to hand in a 5000 word assignment. I pointed out that the first draft was only 1000 words long, so he just copied and pasted the same block of text 5 times until he reached the word count
My most eccentric lecturer was probably the one whose lectures consisted of relentless polls of the students on how they would act in increasingly strange and extreme moral scenarios. There was never any resolution or explanation and you were always left wondering what he thought of your answer…
"To any critic [who’s] worried about the negative impacts of AI on our society, we want you to participate. Join us."
No, he’s tackling Proust
I very much hope so, but whether it happens is down to Audible deciding to pick up the contract from CUP, so it's beyond my control unfortunately
The book is a sort of follow-up to ‘Silence of the Gods’, which is about the peoples of Europe who *didn't* adopt Christianity; the new book will be about the peoples who *did*, but did so in their own peculiar ways
Not to get too excited, but I've just signed a contract with @reaktionbooks.bsky.social to write ‘Strange Christianities’, a new and different history of the Christianisation of Europe... drfrancisyoung.com/2025/08/30/c... 📚🎉
We're super lucky to have some amazing and talented humans joining us for Writing the Occult: Belief - including UK media favourite @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social, who'll speak about the creolising beliefs of Europe's early modern pagans. 🧵⬇️
That's reassuring, thank you!
Thanks!
I see what you mean, but it still seems bonkers; we’ve managed it with Romano-British religion (at least 3 good overviews by Henig, De La Bedoyere and Aldhouse-Green). The ‘is it more Roman than local or vice versa’ debate will always be there ofc
I had an odd experience this morning in Paris where I sat down to read and a few minutes later found myself surrounded by a crowd of religious sisters of the order which ran the religious community I once belonged to
More than a ministry, it’s older than the French state itself - the Académie Française
But the complaint here is that there’s no book about religion in the Roman period in France!
Religion is vastly more historically interesting, imo, when it is popular, messy, nasty, syncretistic, creolised, grassroots, and chaotic
But why on God’s green earth do any of those features make it *less* worthy of study?? I find this mentality unfathomable. Are religious and cultural phenomena only worth studying if they are ‘pure’ or somehow imbued with prestige?
Brunaux hints at why this may be - Gallo-Roman religion is ‘bastardised’, neither truly Gaulish nor truly Roman. It’s a creole peasant religion
So let me get this straight: no French scholar has thought it worth writing a book about an *entire era* of the religious history of Gaul. Like, what is wrong with people?
I just finished reading this on the Eurostar home, and my jaw literally dropped when Brunaux notes in passing that no-one in modern times has written a book dedicated to the subject of Gallo-Roman religion. This would explain why I couldn’t find one in Paris’s many bookshops 😮
🎆 LAUNCH 🎆 The team of the Glasgow-Maynooth OG(H)AM project have the pleasure of launching the revised & updated 𝗢𝗴𝗵𝗮𝗺 𝗶𝗻 𝟯𝗗 database Where: Royal Irish Academy @ria.ie When: 12 Sept 2025, 15:30 @maynoothuniversity.ie @uofglasgow.bsky.social in collaboration with @scs-dias.bsky.social @dias.ie
Was he abbot of anywhere?
Was Casimir the last monarch-abbot? (Not counting the Dalai Lama, obviously)
Did you know you can find the tomb of a Grand Duke of Lithuania in Paris? Casimir II Vasa (reigned 1648-68) was the founder of the University of Lviv and died in 1672 as Abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Interestingly, his tomb emphasises his Jagiellonian ancestry 🇱🇹🤝🇫🇷
Some elements of France’s nuclear arsenal are hidden better than others
If you've ever wondered why Dublin has a church dedicated to St. Werburgh -> A great account here from @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social on Ireland's Anglo-Norman history & the use of English saints "in a kind of sacred imperialism". www.historytoday.com/history-matt...
Today, Provins
In the world post-PhD I've been doing various writing projects, some of which are about to see the light of day. Top of the list is Magic in Roman Britain, with Amberley. www.amberley-books.com/current-mont...
I love trolleybuses
I’m excited about Ben Hazard’s new biography of Luke Wadding, a welcome volume on the greatest Irish intellect of the early modern period www.peterlang.com/document/149...
Oh wow, this looks terrific! I think I hit the order button so hard I broke my phone
I think it was a real timeslip, but then I’m quite open to anything strange being true
I really want to thank @DrFrancisYoung.bsky.social for his expertise and knowledge in today's episode of Weird in the Wade. I'm curious to know if anyone reading also knows of a local fairy hill, fort or dell? There are so many stories of such places. Photo is of Doon Hill Aberfoyle.
All I ask for is enough time to become an antiquarian Maurist monk and edit a few volumes before I get my head chopped off
In addition to the Chicken Man there are some lovely mosaics at Bignor Villa. #MosaicMonday #RomanBritain
Today I’m heading to the Jardins de Versailles, if I get caught in a timeslip and find myself trapped in the c18th it was nice to know you
Over on ‘All Old Strange Things’ I write about the perils of writing down everything about our lives: open.substack.com/pub/drfranci...
Woah.
He kind of reminds me of the little Romano-British Iron Age god who was found at Wimpole in 2018 and who I am obsessed with
The medieval church porch at Corwen, #Denbighshire has been built round a little standing stone bearing the splendid name of Carreg y Big yn y Fach Rhewllyd (the pointy stone in the icy nook). #Folklore suggests this may have been true of earlier churches on this ancient site. #StandingStoneSunday
This tiny bronze deity from the Gaulish shrine of La Bauve has freakishly long arms and no mouth, like a meditating Slenderman
I believe there are some examples at thelasttuesdaysociety.org/museum/
I presume this travel agent will arrange you a visit anywhere as long as you’re willing to attend a mass
It’s so pungent that it has to be consumed in a single sitting. This is definitely true
Don't miss tomorrow's episode of Weird in the Wade about the Spectral Army at Sempringham. I'm joined by @DrFrancisYoung.bsky.social again and my brother Chris to tell you this tale. Plus the wonderful Emily Elle Watts plays the role of Edith. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...
Today, a visit to Meaux - home of the world’s smelliest Brie, France’s biological deterrent
Ha ha! Paris is not a city that has to pay for attention…
I’m intrigued at how Welsh names for English places often preserve echoes of their Roman names