The academic year has commenced and this brings a slew of academic seminars! Does anyone have some particular programmes or one-off lectures they'd like to highlight?

I'm going to be a frequent attendee of the Earlier Middle Ages and European History 1150-1550 seminars at the IHR in London (Senate House). Some particular highlights on my calendar:

October 15

'The Space Between: The 'undead' Roman Empire and the aesthetics of Salin's Style I'

Guy Halsall (York)

16 October

'Posthumous Love as Culture: outline of a medieval moral pattern'

Bernhard Jussen (University of Frankfurt)

Chaired by David d'Avray

29 October

Sacral Kingship and Its Discontents in Sixth- and Seventh-century Byzantium

Philip Booth (Oxford)

30 October

'What can we learn from fourteenth-century inquisition manuals'

Derek Hill (Birkbeck)

AND

'To catch a heretic: co-operation and collaboration between medieval Italian inquisitors'

Jill Moore (Birkbeck)

Chaired by John Arnold

12 November

'Daniel O'Connell, the Irish Question and the early Irish Church'

Ian Wood (Leeds)

27 November

'The Ten Commandments in the Medieval Schools: conformity or diversity?'

Lesley Smith (Harris Manchester College, Oxford)

Chaired by Cornelia

3 December

'The afterlife of the 'old law': rethinking pre-Gratian texts' roles in later-twelfth-century canonical collections'

Danica Summerlin (UCL)

10 December

'Negotiated power in northern Eurasia, c. 7th to 10th centuries'

Naomi Standen (Birmingham)

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These seminars, and others such as the Interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance seminars hosted by UCL, are usually open to the public and free. Please do remember that these are professional events to test research and not public classes. There is no onus on the speaker or chairs to perform outreach or try to educate the audience from a basic understanding. There is often little in the way of explanation of terms and concepts familiar to professional historians (although topic-specific jargon is often toned down). Like anything you will get out as much as you put in, reading a book or two in preparation will enhance your experience immeasurably and if you are familiar with any of these, often world-renowned, historians or the period they are addressing these are invaluable opportunities to hear them talk (or talked about)!

Some people working with the Greek Scholars Initiative have

found the earliest manuscript attributed to Eratosthenes

in a palimpsested layer of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus. (This is alongside a less intriguing, though still very worthwhile, find of what is now the earliest copy of Aratos.)

But infuriatingly, the only report that's public so far doesn't say what the text is. Given that there is only one extant text associated with Eratosthenes, it would be nice to know if this is something new or not. We have texts based on his Katasterismoi ("constellations", a collection of mythological stories of people and things turning into stars); and other than that, just isolated fragments of his Chronographies, Geography, On Old Comedy, On the measurement of the earth, Olympic victors, On geometrical means, Platonikos, Ariston, an epyllion about Hermes, short poems about Hesiod and Erigone, and others.

Given that the report mentions "classical drawings of celestial constellations", though, I'm guessing this is just another copy of the Katasterismoi. Pity. Still useful, if not exactly earth-shattering.