I got accepted into Oxford University for a Master's degree in Early Christian thought, and am graduating with first class honours from Durham on Wednesday! I recently gave a talk on the changing views of self-castration in the fourth century due to a rise in ascetic sensibilities. I also got my undergraduate dissertation back, and after some work on and additions to it in the next year or so, I'm thinking of submitting it as a journal article.

Interesting things are happening for me :)

Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, which led me to spend awhile on YouTube watching clips of the 1970 film Waterloo. Since the production incorporated over 15,000 Red Army soldiers as extras, the battle scenes are quite epic, with huge overhead shots and incredible recreations that today's CGI couldn't hope to reproduce.

I always wondered why the director didn't use a more accurate filming location within Belgium, given the extraordinary effort in the rest of the film. Then I realized it would be highly unlikely that a NATO member would believe 15,000 Soviet troops wanted to "film a historical reenactment" and would "totally leave right after that".

I then realized that would be an incredible ruse for an invasion, if it worked.

So, I ask you, what is your favorite ruse in history?

I'm accepted in university for next year ! Let's go for three years of history, starting this September !

There are a couple of questions in /r/AskSportsHistory that are in dire need of well-researched answers. Unfortunately since our current subscriber base is pretty small (only a couple dozen), they're just sitting there.

I've been re-reading Gregory of Tours' Glory of the Confessors, a small book of miracles attributed to 'bloodless' martyrs and written by the the famous bishop during his tenure in the last quarter of the sixth century. Some of the stories deal with saints from third and fourth century Gaul, but most the events described are intended to have taken place in the fifth and sixth centuries. Gregory relies a lot on word of mouth and third-hand information for these stories, mainly in the form of information he collected from friends, family, and colleagues as he visited various saint shrines. In the spirit of early medieval Christianity, some of the stories are more than a little wonky, and I came across one gem that I thought would be fun to share and try to puzzle out.

Gregory recounts that he had once visited his friend Aredius, the abbot of a monastery at Limoges, and while they were sitting in his cell, they began to talk about the miracles that had been performed in his oratory where relics of St. Martin were kept. Aredius claimed that the oil which he had taken from the tomb of St. Martin in Tours had performed several miracles, including one man in particular:

Since the oil had restored many possess people to health, he placed some of it on the head of one man who possessed, I think, a more hideous demon. Immediately the man expelled the demon in a blast of air from his bowels.

Demonic toots. That is where my mind went first. Unfortunately I am reading the work in translation and don't have access to the Latin text. While I don't want to get my hopes up, and while saints don't usually shy away from bodily functions, I am unsure of what the passage is actually implying. So esteemed readers of /r/AskHistorians, what's your take? Are we talking demonically inspired bodily functions, a literal blast of wind from the stomach area, or something else?

How does the historiography of the Second World War treat Field Marshall Montgomery? Is he considered an especially capable commander? Run-of-the-mill? Below average?

Once again we're back with Better Know An Historian, and this week on highlight is our own native Breadstorian, /u/agentdcf: he reminisces about the primordial days of this subreddit, and also spills the beans that he doesn't even eat bread all that much...

Have we discovered anything new in Latin in the last 100 years?

Seems we discover ancient greek writings all the time(though most are incredibly fragmentary and are rarely translated) in the Egyptian desert. Though for latin that appears to be very rare that new Latin works are discovered in this manner.

How many Historical corrections would you make to This Video? I personally would have replaced the first of the two Greeks with an Achnamaeid, as it was the Persians that beat the Babylonians first, and Ptolemy was one of Alexander's generals from what I remember.