Dr. Erika Graham-Goering
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jeanneologist.bsky.social
Dr. Erika Graham-Goering
@jeanneologist.bsky.social
Too many Jeannes | Medieval lordship and power, French comparative history, archives | Associate prof. Universitetet i Oslo (personal account) | she/hun.
V2.0 (which is also visualizing the data in a different way). Guess which piece of property was the most important?
November 22, 2025 at 8:36 AM
I'm back at my let's-diagram-this-lordship game
November 21, 2025 at 11:49 AM
You can see the result in this shot of the exhibition, to the left! We preserved the posthumously imposed grid-sequence for the images—I think the black backing makes them look a bit like a series of stained glass windows—but on the other side was the equally patchwork set of carved-up texts.
November 20, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Our theme was "Repeat, Reveal, React", focusing on the use and meaning of visual repetition. (We had a pretty sweet catalog cover, if I may say so myself 😉)

True to my self-appointed mission in life, I squeezed a few medieval manuscripts, some European, some Arabic, into our show.
November 20, 2025 at 7:29 PM
A really exciting slate of papers for this year's Late Medieval France and Burgundy Seminar! If anyone will be in Durham and wants in (or maybe even wants to attend online, I don't know?), drop me a line and I can share details!
November 20, 2025 at 8:42 AM
Searching for "ponh" found a few times the scribe wrote a longer version: ponhias, with a line over it. And specifically, the abbreviation connects to the H, suggesting a word shaped like "ponh_ias". Now Cappelli doesn't have this one, but it does note that h-with-a-line is often "her": "ponherias"?
November 19, 2025 at 8:50 AM
After all, I'd love to have a searchable copy, but typing it all out would be hell on my wrists (hurray RSI). Thing is, training a handwriting model to do whatever specific script you need is a heck of a job in itself. Simply feed the manuscript into the closest model, and the results are... poor:
November 19, 2025 at 8:50 AM
After all, having X number of portions of the grain that the peasants harvested would be a sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, this measurement is also abbreviated like this: ponh, with a line over it. That obviously can't be "portions" because there's no way for that H to get in there.
November 19, 2025 at 8:50 AM
Unfortunately for me, medieval scribes like to abbreviate, so the units of measurement for things like grain are rarely written out in full. Most of the standard ones I now recognize, but there was one that was bothering me. It looked like this: pon, with a line over it (indicating abbreviation).
November 19, 2025 at 8:50 AM
Je ne sais pas si Bluesky permettra de voir le détail, mais on verra!
November 17, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Possibly one for @greenleejw.bsky.social but really for anyone who feels like a bit of C14 French palaeography, what's the last word on the top line? "Item le tiers de la huche ? anguilles dudit vivier." I'd have expected "aux" but it's... not. What other word could link eels with their reservoir? 😂
November 17, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Fuck off @microsoft.com, get this shitty slop-generator out of my workspace and back to hell where it belongs

Anyone know how to kill this dead on a Mac? Meanwhile, looks like I'll be using alternatives to Word for the foreseeable.
November 12, 2025 at 3:13 PM
In related news, I have new evidence that Latin words are much longer than French words. This Latin document, while only 70 words more than a French record of similar type, is over 1/3 of a Word page longer (and I haven't even bothered expanding all the abbreviations).
November 5, 2025 at 7:53 AM
The internet is often crap these days, but wow is it cool to be reading a document from the late fourteenth century that mentions a house on a certain street in a certain French town, and be able to instantly see what that spot looks like now.
November 4, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Looking through some of my archival materials today, and would just like to shout out to the scribe of AN P 200 for having really lovely handwriting. Just look at these stylish letter forms! 😍
October 31, 2025 at 8:52 AM
A reminder that there's about a week left to pitch your paper for this year's interdisciplinary Late Medieval France and Burgundy Seminar, the loveliest event of its kind, at Durham in mid-December! There's a great (and non-exclusive) theme, and it's lots of fun for ECRs and senior scholars alike!
October 23, 2025 at 7:50 AM
Here's an interesting student question: in the game Pentiment [spoiler alert!], the player gets this message after a character dies in a burning building. It strikes me as anachronistic in several points, but I'm also not an expert in late medieval/early modern German law or contracts:
October 13, 2025 at 10:12 AM
Hecking moment to be prepping for a course on research ethics...
October 1, 2025 at 6:36 AM
Funnily enough, today Wikipedia has chosen another battle, from the start of the civil war, as their featured article!
September 30, 2025 at 8:13 AM
I want to send *both* books to someone who'd find my work useful! (PP in paperback, GR in hardback—note it's also available as a free PDF! library.oapen.org/handle/20.50...) If that's you, just *quote-post* this thread, and I'll pick a recipient next week 😊 (To share without entering, just repost!)
September 29, 2025 at 10:20 AM
It's Michaelmas, so it's also the anniversary of the battle of Auray (1364), which marked the beginning of the end of the Breton War of Succession begun 23 years earlier. And you know what? Let's mark it with a 🚨BOOK GIVEAWAY🚨 this time! (Charles de Blois has never had a stranger memorial...)
September 29, 2025 at 10:03 AM
Nero Wolfe was onto something (and, more specifically, I shudder to think what he might have to say about certain recent technological developments...)

[from A Right to Die, by Rex Stout, 1964]
September 24, 2025 at 6:33 AM
Early scene in Pentiment
September 22, 2025 at 10:14 AM
TFW you're leafing (digitally) through a fairly prosaic manuscript, then suddenly RUBRICATION 😍
September 19, 2025 at 12:24 PM
I was pleased enough by the inclusion of an "Entrapment" section in the Wikipedia entry on Unicorns, as if it was offering some kind of practical advice, but then my new favorite thing happened 😂
September 14, 2025 at 7:59 AM