Each May, the annual Medieval Congress is held in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  This year, I joined a panel of bloggers organized by Kisha Tracy and John Sexton to think about how we use the medium of blogging to share our work and our passion about medieval culture.

Kisha and John blog at MassMedieval, updating folks about things medieval in the context of the Massachussets State University system but also medieval, and sometimes personal, topics more broadly.  John made a comment at the panel that I think captures the particular blending of the personal and the academic in the blogosphere–‘We are medievalists, and people too.”  We are all learning how to navigate those identities.

Beth Anderson will help your heart soar with a sonnet a day from Petrarch at her blog Voi che ascoltate.  She presents a sonnet (a lyrical 14-line poem) in modern English and Italian and gives insights into the poem, making connections to contemporary ideas about love, friendship, books, common sense, and much more.

Peter Konieczny and Sandra Alvarez are professional bloggers with the amazing blog medievalists.net, which carries the tag line: where the middle ages begin. At their site you can read essays, watch videos, read reviews and find out about, well, just about everything in the juncture of the medieval and the contemporary, both in academia and in popular culture.

Shaundra Lamaute shared some info about her site Beyond Borders, a collaborative blog by several medieval art historian colleagues.  As an art historian, she is particularly interested in the intersection of text and image.  The most recent post is about the beautiful, intricate ceiling of the Rosslyn Chapel, which achieved pop culture status through the Dan Brown book, The DaVinci Code.

A robust suggestion of the panel was to include other bloggers in your site–are there any erstwhile Roman War campaign commentators out there?  Let me know if you would like to contribute a post to PassionateGeography!