Sonja Drimmer
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sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Sonja Drimmer
@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
12K followers 940 following 5.1K posts
Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, UMass Amherst. http://sonjadrimmer.com/about-forte (She/her)
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sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
And this, boys and girls, is why one cannot rely on translations, esp not 19C ones.
Ubi et quando invenimus unam monialem, ipsius Roberti extra-ordinaria libidine, more sodomidico, per seminis lapsum, et Persod non per instrumenti ingressum, tam per confessionem ejus- semini: dem monialis quam literas dicti Roberti, quam eciam in-lapsum fit imp spexione corporis impregnate, ante partum, per matronas nacio. facta, fuisse impregnatam; et ex hoe filiam dieto Roberto similem, in festo Sancte Petronille jam ultimo lapso?, And then and there we found that a certain nun, by the unbounded lust of the same Robert, had become pregnant in an unnatural way,)as appeared as well by the confession of the same nun as by the letters of the said Robert, and also by a view of her body taken by matrons before the birth; and that she had thereby, on the feast of Saint Petronilla (31st May) last past, borne a daughter who was like to the said Robert.
November 28, 2025 at 9:52 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Expanding brain meme, reading, from top to bottom: You: speculative capital, Marx: Fictitious Capital; Aristotle: artificial welath"
November 27, 2025 at 4:03 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
The Times pushed the story again today.

The answer to this question is "no."
A screenshot of a story in the Times, "From Vermeer to Raphael, can AI solve art’s most enduring mysteries? As artificial intelligence decides Vermeer’s Girl with a Flute is the real deal, we look at what science can tell us about art"
November 27, 2025 at 3:47 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Another week another press release for "AI" art history disguised as journalism.
www.thetimes.com/world/europe...
Screenshot of a piece in the Times. It reads, "Has science finally solved mystery of the vanishing Vermeer? Girl With a Flute is under dispute as an artificial intelligence company and a US national gallery disagree over whether it was painted by the Dutch master"
November 27, 2025 at 3:45 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Come see the sights at Shit-Hurn Way and Shit-Croft Corner! What are you waiting for?!
and thus to Shittehurneway, and thence to Shitt-croft corner, thence to Sydnall-gate, and thus by Merstone-way to Priest'e-wood-end,
November 27, 2025 at 12:33 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
My colleague's students wrote me a thank-you note for the guest class I gave on medieval manuscripts in Special Collections, and their font game is *on point.*
"Thank you Professor Drimmer" printed in a textualis font.
November 24, 2025 at 8:42 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
And engaging in this kind of pedagogy is simply the entry-level version of when scholars do this, which I wrote about here. www.artforum.com/features/gen...
This framing posits the algorithm as a form of alterity, an otherness that aids in self-knowledge. Casting errors as valuable for self-reflection without providing concrete examples of how that reflection has been beneficial does little more than create a permission structure for the failures of this technology.
November 24, 2025 at 1:32 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
This is not the way, and @cnygren.bsky.social and I lay out in detail why it isn’t in this essay here. static1.squarespace.com/static/55577...
How We are Not Using Al in the Classroom By Sonja Drimmer & Christopher J. Nygren Premise Prompt engineering is a term that has become commonplace since the widespread availability of generative AI applications like ChatGPT. The idea is that the outputs of the large language models (LLMs) on which these applications are based are only as good as the prompts that are input: vague prompts result in equally vague outputs. And thus was born the race to train for careers in prompt engineering. Unfortunately, the bubble seems to have burst before even the first generation of students was trained for this career outcome. We were given a prompt as an invitation to participate in this newsletter: "How are you using Al in the classroom?" While we have accepted this invitation, we are engaging in the most humanistic act we can imagine-refusing the prompt.
November 24, 2025 at 1:16 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Speaking of such things! A Eusebius reference in the NYRB.
John Ganz's When the Clock Broke changed my mind about many things. As someone who joined the staff of the neoconservative public policy magazine The Public Interest a few months before Ronald Reagan was first elected, I found it easy at the time to look at the previous forty years of American politics as a "preparation of the Gospel," to borrow Eusebius's phrase. By the end of the decade a healthy convergence did indeed seem to be taking place between a chastened liberalism among educated elites and a temperate conservatism among the mainly white Republican electorate. The fall of the Berlin Wall followed by the election of the moderate liberal Bill Clinton seemed to augur a new age of consensus and equilibrium in American politics. It was this kind of thinking that led many neoconservatives of my generation, most notably Francis Fukuyama, to think that the drawn-out historical drama in the
November 23, 2025 at 10:08 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
No one is more excited for this lecture than my son.
A large labradoodle asleep on his back with legs splayed next to my laptop showing a photo of the situla.
November 23, 2025 at 4:25 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Finally, we end on a discussion with this slide.
Same view of the situla shown six times. Below it I've written the word "form" as a reminder to my students to always bear in mind the meaning of an object's form. Above I wrote: "Material / Functional / Performative / Compositional / Iconographic /Historical (not discussed) Question: how does all of this bear on or relate to the substance within the situla? "
November 23, 2025 at 4:21 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
A lot of the time I'll lecture on a huge number of works in one class, but then I'll devote lecture to two objects that we walk through slowly and ruminate on. It'll take about a half hour just to get to this slide.
A slide showing the situa from six different positions so that all the images that wrap around it can be seen at once. I have labeled them as follows, with the image above listed first then its accompanying scene below it labeled second; Three Women at the Tomb and the Annuncation; Ascension and Visitation; Last Supper and Nativity; Judas Kiss and Angel visiting Joseph; Crucifixion and Baptism; above these pairs I identified themes linking each pair. They are: receptacle for the divine, progression from Old to New Religion, Incarnation of the divine; betrayal, death-life.
November 23, 2025 at 4:19 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
This is an 8-inch tall ivory situla (holy water receptacle) from 9th-century France, and we're going to spend about half of lecture tomorrow unpacking its dense imagery. www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...
A small ivory bucket comprising two horizontal rows of images in rectangular frames that wrap around it. In this view, we see below an image of the visitation and above an image of Christ's ascension.
November 23, 2025 at 4:15 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
A typo in the first sentence of a book is…not something I’ve encountered before.
Introduction ACROSS THE SECOND decade of the twentieth-first century, the tectonic plates structuring American politics and life began to shift. Even before the pandemic struck, developments that ten years earlier would have seemed inconceivable now dominated politics and popular
November 22, 2025 at 11:58 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
“Cant you see that neoliberal democratization poses no threat to elites, merely clothing a conservative economic agenda in the language of individual opportunity, MOM?!”
A labradoodle asleep on my lap with his hand sinking over the couch’s badge, and a copy of the London Review of Books to my right.
November 21, 2025 at 10:56 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Get a load of Faulkner over here. Using that one period like she MEANS it!
We were primed to participate in the farcical parable in which the son of a businessman dreams of making movies, goes to Hollywood, comes home, becomes a businessman who thinks, still, of the screen, thinks of Hollywood, who makes himself a star as consolation, becomes the skilled practitioner of a screen art that perverts notions of truth and make-believe, who like many stars succumbs to tyrannical impulses and authoritarian fantasies because the compromise of his life feels like a loss of control, an expression of weakness, because it is, and whose fantasies, in a pretty good twist, are not his alone but are instead woven into a mass delirium that splits us into a Gemini nation under a Gemini ruler.
November 18, 2025 at 2:36 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I am Howling.
Like all men but more so, he was a hunter. In a literal sense, he used not a bullet but a bird. It was not about a chase but about a puzzle of logic and skill that amounted to a test of his self-mastery. He was the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.
November 18, 2025 at 2:16 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
HOW DOES A BULLET CUT A BOUGH, OLIVIA?

WHAT MAGICAL AMMUNITION CAN DO THAT *AND* CUT A TRACK THROUGH AN ABSTRACTION. OLIVIA.
Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.
November 18, 2025 at 2:03 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
<<whisper shouting in his ear>>

I LOVE YOU MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF
A large fluffy labradoodle lying on his back on a couch with his head on a pillow.
November 18, 2025 at 1:01 AM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
As Langdon Winner put so well 40 years ago, don't fall into the trap of accepting "RISK" as a good framework for these conversations. Business interests love framing their violence in terms of "risks & rewards" bc as a society, we love to heroize & reward risk-takers. Talk instead about "HAZARD."
But from the point of view I've described here, the risk debate is one that certain kinds of social interests can expect to lose by the very act of entering. In our times, under most circumstances in which the matter is likely to come up, deliberations about risk are bound to have a strongly conservative drift. The conservatism to which I refer is one that upholds the status quo of production and consumption in our industrial, market-oriented society, a status quo supported by a long history of economic development in which countless new technological applications were introduced with scant regard to the possibility that they might cause harm. Thus, decades of haphazard use of industrial chemicals provide a background of expectations for today's deliberations on the safety of such chemicals. Pollution of the air, land, and water are not the exception in much of
November 17, 2025 at 12:55 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
The "Get in Loser" Meme from Mean Girls edited to say "Get in Loser / WE'RE RUINING OUR EYES BY GOING THROUGH 1000 FRAMES OF CP40 BC THERE IS MONEY FOR DIGITIZATION BUT NOT INDEXING"
November 15, 2025 at 7:54 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
UGH WEIRD-ASS LITTLE LATIN WORDS ARE THE BEST.

journal.thewalters.org/volume/76/es...
Both passages are envoys that seem to derive from the same formula, a humility topos excusing excessive length.[37] In the first, schedula crevit in pellem is part of a series of three parallel clauses in which the first term connotes concision and the second verbosity: brevity…vast; small note [or draft or scrap or parchment offcut]…skin; epistle…book. However, in the second instance, the same formula, cedula crevit in pellem,” is part of an escalating construction in which the skin is one degree lengthier or less finished than a brief note [or draft or scrap or parchment offcut], a degree briefer or less finished than numerous skins, and briefer or less finished still than a roll and a book. Generally, the term schedula is taken to mean a brief note, but it is possible that it could refer to offcuts, the scraps of parchment that were the byproduct of cutting rectangles from the stretched animal skin, and which were used in the production of cheap manuscripts, students’ personal notes, and drafts. Often, as Erik Kwakkel has pointed out, it can be difficult to discern whether the material object or genre of composition is meant in a given occurrence of the term.[38] And while the word “skin” is used differently in these two instances, they share an intermediary position (whether as the middle clause of three parallel constructions, or as a middle item in an ascending list) between spontaneous, perhaps short, jottings on the byproducts of the parchment-making process and a completed textual work.
November 15, 2025 at 7:38 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
cedula / scedula / sedula is a weird-ass little Latin word, and I spent way too much time pondering its meaning when I was researching this article

journal.thewalters.org/volume/76/es...
Less technically, two sources afford greater insight into the significance of the term pellis in the context of textual composition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The first comes from the conclusion to letter 102 of Peter of Blois’s Epistles, in which the author writes I had shortened this brief exhortation of mine, written down with a pruned pen, but love, if it does not know the end (indeed, charity never ebbs) was scarcely able to reach the end of writing. Thus brevity turns out vast, a small note [or draft or scrap or parchment offcut] grew into a skin (schedula crevit in pellem), and an epistle transformed into a book. Farewell.[34] In a similar formulation, and deriving from a treatise that resembles Peter’s Genealogia in its contents, Girard of Auvergne’s (or Anvers) Abbreviatio historiae figuralis,[35] originally composed in 1272 for Pope Gregory X and revised for Abbot Yvo of Cluny, apologizes at its conclusion for its length in the following terms Certainly, father, I had undertaken to write a short thing, but a short thing grew into a long thing. Indeed, an unrestrained pen has strayed into vastness owing to the material that surged up to be composed. A brief note [or draft or scrap or parchment offcut] grew into a skin (cedula crevit in pellem). A skin grew into skins, skins into a roll and a roll transformed into a book.[36]
November 15, 2025 at 7:34 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
I love these notes left by civic scribes on legal records because they often include terms for different kinds of written documents. Here, at the bottom of a record of a common pleas court case, the scribe wrote, "more on the little note sewed to this roll" ["plus in cedula huic rotulo consuta"]
In brown ink, in a secretary hand from 1421 "plus in cedula huic rotulo consuta"
November 15, 2025 at 7:32 PM
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
<> www.unesco.org/en/articles/...
A screenshot of the top of an article from the Unesco website The screencapped portion reads as follows: "AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions This long read article is based on a talk delivered by Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education, at Digital Learning Week on 2 September 2025 in Paris, France. 24 September 2025 Last update:26 September 2025 The history of education is a history of disruption. Five thousand years ago, writing transformed memory into text. Six hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s printing press democratized knowledge. Three years ago, ChatGPT put generative AI in the hands of hundreds of millions."
November 15, 2025 at 5:02 PM