Over the last few years, I’ve found Twitter a handy platform indeed. I’ve learned a lot from other users and been privy to all sorts of interesting discussions. I’ve found opportunities there that I wouldn’t have been able to find elsewhere, particularly during my regrettably unfunded PhD, when I didn’t…

Here are some changes I’d like to see. Not massive societal overhauls, mind — just a few minor improvements to scholarship and publishing and public discourse on certain topics. Little desiderata. I’d love it if Euro-medievalists could find it within themselves to be specific about the places they’re talking about…

I recently quit Twitter because I didn’t like the fact that a load of total arseholes — Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and others of that ilk — had been allowed back on the platform by new owner-operator Elon Musk. Things seem to be getting worse over there as I write…

This piece has also been posted on my Patreon — patreon.com/Before1500. I’ve posted it here on the Medieval Indonesia blog because there are already so many clove-related stories on this site and it feels a little incomplete without this one (and the previous post on Cloves in Bald’s Leechbook). …

This article has also been posted on my Patreon — patreon.com/Before1500. I’ve posted it here as well because there are already so many clove-related stories on this site, and it feels a little incomplete without this one. I’ll be posting the next post here as well, which will be on…

I will no longer be updating this blog. I have started an account on Patreon and will be posting my work there instead, under the name Before 1500. I’ll still be writing about Indonesian topics, but the scope will broaden (and already has a little). There will also be occasional…

Timor is one of the largest islands on the eastern side of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, and also one of the driest. Alfred Russel Wallace, who first visited western Timor in 1857, describes the landscape thus: ‘The vegetation is everywhere scant and scrubby. Plants of the families Apocynaceæ and Euphorbiaceæ abound…

Java is the world’s most populous island. More people live there than in Russia or Japan and, if you count in terms of contiguous bits of land rather than arbitrary continents, Java is also the world’s third most populous landmass, after Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. Jakarta, the largest city in…

Hello again! This is the last time I’ll be posting any uninteresting life/work updates on here for a while, but I thought it would be a good idea to let you all know that I now have a Patreon. You can sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/indomedieval I also have a Ko-Fi…