First of all, I’m exhausted. I haven’t had proper holidays for a couple of years, and, now that my fellowship at King’s College London finished and I’m waiting to start a new one in another university, it’s time for me to take some time off and slow down a bit. I’m going to the gym, adding zen-kinda stuff to my everyday life, and in general spending more time processing than doing. Yay me.

Second, I’ve had work to finish for long, a couple of articles and a book I’ve been writing for some ten years now and I very much look forward to tying up and send to my editor. Instead of writing posts, I’m devoting my time to this. I’m quite proud for one of the articles has received quite a praise from the peer-reviewers, I’m very pleased with that work and I hope to tell you more about it soon.

Third, I’ve been thinking for a while now that I don’t really like the site as it is. I’m not sure it’s functional, and, anyway, I’d like to add some things to make it more so. I need some distance to think about it (sure, comments welcome).

Four, new projects. This is the exciting part. As you might know, for the last four years or so I’ve been working on the transition from Visigothic script to Caroline minuscule. I approached the topic from a historical point of view first (that would be the article published in the journal Mediaeval Studies and the PIMS LMS dissertation), then from a palaeographical one (not published but in the LMS dissertation if you happen to be in Toronto). The latter opened for me another topic, polygraphism, that I certainly enjoy and about which I still have much to say. I want to wrap up my ideas and write something to close this door a bit (for now). Polygraphism, at the same time, opened another topic I’m just an amateur on but I immensely enjoy; cognitive palaeography. It found me at the right moment, and I’m eager to continue studying this.

More on new projects. As sometimes happens, my aim of moving from the transition from Visigothic to Caroline to something different solved itself. I’ve always been attracted to the change from Roman scripts to Visigothic, although still considered I was too junior to try to figure that out. Well, I’ve recently been given the opportunity to prove myself wrong by participating in an interdisciplinary conference in Heidelberg in late September. It took me a long time of study to prepare myself for it, but it seems my ideas are well on the right track. So, as soon as I write the piece mentioned above, I’ll start researching on this.

Finally, I should state the obvious; it’s not easy to write posts when the things you want to write about are part of unpublished work and when you’re not focused enough to write about something else in a platform you’re not sure about. Simply, I just need time off. But, I’ll be back as soon as I’ve something worthy to share. In the meantime, you can find me on my other social media profiles for any paleographically related question.

Cheers.