James Burns

(Limoges, France, the home of Pelagia.) ‘Since the pressures of the world weighed heavily on a woman, not least on a widow, Erkanfrida needed to...

Last week, I went to the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum. It situated slavery in wide-ranging Eurasian commercial networks, through which (for example)...

(James C. Scott, 1936–2024. Photo credit: Yale.) By James Burns Even if one accepts that the serf, the slave, and the untouchable will have trouble...

By James Burns At this year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies at West Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Sheida, Seth, and I gave our papers on...

By James Burns and Seth M. Stadel James: I have been reading Seth’s new book on Syriac exegesis, the abstract of which is below. When...

The new article in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (copyright: Cambridge University Press). By James Burns I have published an article in Transactions of...

A Merovingian sword (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Surrounded by his enemies, the sixth-century prince and rebel Merovech handed his blade to Gailen, and asked him to...

Photo credit: organisers of HistoryCon In this blog post, our researcher, James Burns, summarises a conference paper he gave on the importance and pleasure of...