Freddy Potts

WRoCAH-funded PGR in Medieval History at Uni of Sheffield, with a particular interest in medieval colonialism and the Eastern Baltic. Onions own. He/him.

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

You can now add "pogrom" to this. What a time for the discipline.

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

As a discipline concerned in recent years with misuse of important concepts, medievalists could and should probably have more to say about the absolutely grotesque twisting of "blood libel" in defence of the intentional, genocidal killing of civilians by a militarised state.

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

"I am heartsick over the death & destruction in Gaza. But I am also stunned by the simplistic hatred that has been hurled at Israel... Just as egregious as calls for the destruction of Israel is the blood libel that it is committing “genocide”." (@sapinker)https://t.co/PxbhdSvcse

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

Better late than never - if you'd like to talk about loyalty, trust, oaths or allegiance at next year's @IMC_Leeds, please heed this #CallForPapers and get in touch within the next couple of weeks!

[Rohan Talbot @rohantalbot]

Updates from Gaza are unbearable. Our team are doing all they can to keep health services running, in unthinkable circumstances - please, please support our appeal if you can.

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

[typing up some Latin]

Word: Is that Portuguese? Is that English? Would you like me to start autocorrecting this? No? Don't worry, I'll get started anyway :)

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

"The Bishop of Kraków dies on January 20, some say because he fell from a ladder while trying to get into the honey loft"

(Annals of Jan Długosz, 1382)

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

"Bishop Laurence of Wrocław dies an unusual death, that of excessive smelling of roses, from which he contracts rheumatism, which proves incurable and finally kills him"

(Annals of Jan Długosz, 1233)

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

Ultimately there's Bolesław the Pious, Bolesław the Bald/Horned and Bolesław the Bashful/Shameful/Shamefaced/Chaste all active in Poland at the same time and all dying within a year of each other (April 1279, December 1278 and December 1279 respectively). Who'd be a medievalist?

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

a fun mistranslation in a (very good) article I've just read: Bolesław the Chaste of Kraków is mistakenly referred to as Bolesław the Shameful, presumably because one other way of translating 'pudicus' ('chaste') from Latin is 'shamefaced'

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

this same Bolesław is also referred to as "Bolesław the Bashful" in the English translation of Jan Długosz, which is doubly confusing since Bolesław is referred to as Leszek the Black's brother (he actually *adopted* Leszek as his heir). Just pick a single translation, everyone!

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

today's excitement: a man (probably ~German) called Johannes Ruthenus, who is mentioned in Riga debt books both together with and independently of a Rus' man called Ywan Ruthenus (which is sometimes also Latinised as... Johannes Ruthenus)

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

neither "In den ältesten Willküren der Neustadt Thorn" nor "Es hatte eine eigene Willkür" make any sense if you take Willkür as meaning 'arbitrariness', but *do* make sense if you assume it's meant to read as 'liberties', 'grants' etc but that this has been lost in translation

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

Fun linguistic confusion of the day: a first-language Polish speaker has translated dowolność, which can mean both "freedom" and "arbitrariness", into German as "Willkür" (despotism/arbitrariness) rather than "Freiheit", causing me no end of confusion

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

such are the pitfalls of translating from Latin to Lithuanian to English I guess, we've all been there with one language or another

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

friends fear he's listening to Burial while working today

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

@MJMStaub I was just drafting an email to you wondering if you knew of anything like this, so thank you again!

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

a cool part of working on medieval German history is googling a historian's name, finding out they had a namesake in the SS, googling "[name] Historiker" instead and then finding out that the namesake historian also joined the Nazi Party in 1933

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

@MJMStaub Very interesting, thank you!

[Freddy Potts @fPGRpotts]

find someone who loves you as much as late-20th-century French philosophers love completely inscrutable diagrams