This year’s Longman-History Today award for Digital History went to Eleanor Parker for her blog, A Clerk of Oxford.
Parker writes regular blog posts on an astoundingly wide range of subjects relating to Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian history and literature. Her academic work as a researcher at The University of Oxford focuses on the interaction between Anglo-Saxon and Viking culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries following the Norse settlement in England.
The blog posts and her Twitter account, however, are much more wide-ranging. As History Today's editor, Paul Lay remarked in his speech at the award ceremony: not a morning goes by where she has not shared some fascinating and insightful new piece of medieval miscellany.
Her skill lies in making medieval topics – texts that are considered esoteric even by medieval specialists’ standards – engaging, accessible and fascinating to an audience of non-specialist readers. It is an added bonus that they have the same effect on specialist readers, too. Her inclusion of medieval texts in their original language as well as in translation means many of the misconceptions surrounding them are completely bypassed and her readers can engage directly with the material, guided by her expert commentary. The sources she draws on are wide-ranging, and always presented and discussed with humour, insight and passion.
This blog is a treasure trove of grounded in exemplary scholarship and is a much appreciated contribution to the field of history online.
I have her blog linked and reference it often. Quite an honor!
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