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By the time you read this, I’ll be part-way through teaching my very own course for the first time (Edge Hill summer school excepted).  It’s exciting, but also a bit nerve-wracking, especially since I didn’t have very long to pull it together. It’s an 8 week module on The Making of Modern Britain for an…

I have spent much of the summer wrestling with a conundrum, which I still haven’t solved.  As regular readers will know, I have been working on the Pilgrimage of Grace.  I submitted my article to a peer-reviewed journal and at the beginning of summer, I got word back that they had decided not to publish…

A couple of weeks ago I went down to London for a few days, killing several birds with one stone.  The main purpose of the visit was to go to a meeting of the Historical Association Branches and Members Committee, but I went down two days early so that I could get some work done…

I’m going to make a confession: I’m not particularly good at role play. I was never very good at taking part in them, and experience of trying to use them in the classroom has usually left me slightly disappointed. There have been two exceptions to this.  The mock trial of Charles I with the summer…

I’m writing this in late August, while Twitter is alive with posts on what people have accomplished, or not, over the summer, and the guilt they feel or don’t. It’s got me thinking. There were so many things I planned to do this summer: Rewrite and resubmit my Pilgrimage of Grace article. Write and submit…

This is the final post in a short series about my trip to the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in Maynooth during July 2018. The final day of the conference dawned bright and clear (again!), so once I’d packed up and checked out of my accommodation, I headed over to the south campus for the…

This is the third in a short series of posts about my trip to the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in Maynooth during July 2018. Saturday morning was D-day.  Our panel, on musical prints and misprints, put together by the delightful Samantha Arten.  Anne Heminger was unable to be with us in person, so her…

This is the second in a short series of posts about my trip to the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in Maynooth during July 2018. Friday morning dawned slightly overcast, which was a bit of a relief, as it was very warm!  There were fewer things on the schedule that morning that I wanted to…

My daughter has been through a lot this year.  In May, she underwent over 10 hours of spinal surgery at Alder Hey Hospital to correct the curves in her spine caused by severe scoliosis.  She missed weeks of school and with that, her friends. She has spent a lot of her recovery time with her…