I am off to Oxford Patristics next week, to talk about the Brill Companion to Rome (400-1050) that I am co-editing with the wonderful Caroline Goodson, & coming out in 2025. It‘s been a long journey since our ⁦The British Academy⁩ conference in 2021 thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/british…

Heute so #effzeh

Flights of fancy (title of my article) discussing this. The Actus Silvestri are certainly that. And Helena gathers all kinds of flights of imagination.

Charlemagne‘s Pfalz in Ingelheim, with aula regia, massive exedra as representative entrance and a gold coin that shouldn’t even exist (because he had decreed to mint only silver coins).

A great reflection on the Roman Bonn tour and website, by Maja Keller & Giulia Cappucci. "We had to consider the fact that some participants were unfamiliar with Western Europe's ancient past, which is often not taken into account when studying history at German universities".

So impressed that the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies has a family room for the children of staff, students, and visiting scholars. I’m inspired to set one up at my university

#cupolone

Here is my not very good photo of Helena with the Jews at San Silvestro in Tivoli, though a better one can be found here, albeit in black and white catalogo.fondazionezeri.unibo.it/entry/photo/62…

Reading about Peter Brown being at the British School atRome while having breakfast British School at Rome. 👍

The more I read and reread Julia Hillner's "Helena Augusta. Mother of Empire" (2023, OUP), the more I realize it is an extraordinary achievement in something that is in itself a very difficult task: writing the biography of a Late Roman woman. Julia Hillner