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Source: The Conversation – UK – By Giles Gasper, Professor in High Medieval History, Durham University

The best location for a monastery was one that was close to water and wood. Many monastic chroniclers mention this.

Orderic Vitalis, born in England near Shrewsbury in 1075 and sent to the Norman monastery of St Évroult at the age of five, was explicit about this twin need. Water for washing, sanitation, drinking, for making ink, for making lime mortar, and wood for building, and perhaps for keeping warm.

The Benedictine version of monastic life was the most popular across the medieval period, although many others existed. The rule attributed to St Benedict was set down, in 73 chapters, to provide guidance for how monks should live their lives. They should be focused on the world that is to come, on life after death, as well as on obedience and humility.

Monks could not own anything or have personal wealth, even though monasteries as institutions could be very rich indeed. Material comfort was not high on the agenda, at least in theory. Indeed, a contrasting relationship between material discomfort and spiritual worth is often identifiable in the religious expression of the period. In many ways it was seen as the greater the physical discomfort, the greater the spiritual value. The Cistercians, who emerged as a distinctive monastic grouping at the very end of the 11th century, and who followed the Rule of St Benedict too, laid great emphasis on austerity in all areas of their lives.

The regulation of monastic communities provides the context for their attitudes towards being cold. Concession to cold in the Rule of Benedict was limited – that monks in colder regions would need more clothes is recognised. In general the only difference between winter and summer wear was a thick and woolly cowl (a hood which extended across the shoulders) for the colder months and otherwise a thinner one.

Benedict was writing in 6th-century Italy. Conditions in northern regions in later medieval centuries were quite different, in many respects, to the early medieval Mediterranean. Not least in how cold monasteries could get. Orderic had a description of the effects of the winter at the end of his fourth book (of 13) of his Historia ecclesiastica. After writing a little about disputes and clashes on the frontier between Normandy and Maine, in what is now France, he notes that:

Mortal men are oppressed by many misfortunes, which would fill great volumes if the whole take of them were written down. But now, numbed by the winter cold, I turn to other pursuits; and weary with toil, resolve to end my present book here. When the warmth of spring returns I will relate in the following books everything that I have only briefly touched upon or omitted altogether.

But one room in a monastery was kept warm in cold weather. The calefactorium, or calefactory, that is to say, the warming room, was equipped with a fire, and in some cases other treats.

Very few buildings within monastic compounds had fireplaces. The church buildings would have been unheated, and so would the dormitories. The warming house was an unusual and important location in this respect. While some warming rooms were larger they would still not have been able to fit all that many people in at a time. It is easy to imagine a group of ten or so monks huddled round the fireplace, with wood crackling, talking quietly (talking was also discouraged in monastic houses), and seeking some measure of warmth in a cold environment. And that image is probably not far from the truth.

Despite their evident value to the community warming houses do not feature prominently in written records. Nevertheless, surviving examples of buildings and textual references do allow insights into monastic lives, and the difference that the calefactory must have made. Examples from medieval England included the Cistercian house of Meaux in Yorkshire. Founded in 1141 nothing survives of the building but an extensive chronicle does.

The record of new buildings made under Abbot Thomas from 1182 onwards includes mention not only of a fine refectory (dining room) for the monks, built in stone, but also the warming house and a small kitchen. That these should be be entered into the chronicle amongst the achievements of the abbot, as a record to future generations of the community, says a lot about the value placed upon it. It is of interest too that while the refectory went up quickly, paid for by a donor to the monastery, the kitchen and warming room were put together gradually and as resource allowed.

The value of fire

While the warming house of Meaux exists only in its historical record, good surviving examples of other warming houses are common enough. Rievaulx Abbey in north Yorkshire is a good example.

The warming house at Rievaulx is next to the refectory, and was altered quite substantially over the period from the 12th to the 16th century. Eventually two storeys, the warming complex also included clothes-washing facilities for the monks in winter.

And then to Durham. Here we turn to The Rites of Durham, a wonderful treatise from the 16th century (and later), the last memory of the practices of the pre-Reformation monastic house.

It reveals that the warming room, here referred to as a common house, was on the right-hand side as you exited the cloister. And inside there was:

a fyer keept all winter for the mouncks to come and warme at, being allowed no fire but that onely; except the masters and officers which had their seuerall fires.

While medieval buildings were difficult to heat, the presence of warm rooms was an indication of the value put on warmth. And in the case of the Durham Cathedral priory’s common house the monks were provided with additional treats around Christmas time, if the account is to be believed. Figs, raisins, cakes and ale were offered and taken in moderation.

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Giles Gasper receives funding from Arts and Humanities Research Council, Research England, the John Templeton Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust

– ref. How medieval monks tried to stay warm in the winter – https://theconversation.com/how-medieval-monks-tried-to-stay-warm-in-the-winter-270829

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Roberta Garrett, Senior Lecturer in Literature and Cultural Studies, University of East London

For films and books about Shakespeare’s life, there is little source material to draw on beyond the few known facts of the great writer’s parentage, hometown, marriage, children, property and death. Shakespeare biopics therefore require considerable speculation and invention on the part of writers and directors.

Director Chloe Zhao’s earthy and sensuous film Hamnet is based on the book by Maggie O’ Farrell, who also co-wrote the screenplay. It not only foregrounds Shakespeare’s personal rather than professional life but does this by focusing chiefly on the experience of his previously maligned wife, Anne Hathaway (referred to as Agnes in the film).

From the 18th century to well into the 20th, Shakespeare biographers and researchers tended to represent Hathaway in highly negative terms. She was viewed as the “shrewish” wife that Shakespeare impregnated, was forced to marry and later escaped by fleeing Stratford for the exciting world of the London theatre.

This perception of Hathaway is grounded in sexist assumptions drawn from the few known facts of their marriage. Namely, that she was eight years his senior, he was only 18 when they wed, she was already pregnant and he spent many years of their marriage working in London.

The popular 1998 romantic comedy, Shakespeare in Love, reproduced the “shrewish” Hathaway narrative. She is absent from the film, but Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) dolefully comments on his sexless, loveless marriage and finds genuine passion instead with London-based heroine, Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow).

The more recent film, All Is True (2018) offers a different view. It depicts Hathaway and Shakespeare’s marriage in their twilight years, when the playwright has resettled in Stratford and is finally mourning the death of his son, Hamnet. Although Hathaway is central to the drama, she is depicted as an ageing and conformist provincial wife. Casting Judy Dench in the role alongside the much younger Kenneth Branagh as Shakespeare, also accentuated their age difference.

Hamnet’s Agnes

In sharp contrast, Hamnet’s Agnes (Jessie Buckley) is a young, robust and free-spirited woman who is associated with nature rather than dull domesticity.

Zhao and O’Farrell establish the themes of the film early on by opening with a scene of Agnes wandering in the richly toned mossy forest with her hawk. This view of Agnes draws on Shakespeare’s vision of the magical “green world”. But it also captures the atmosphere and skilled world-building of O’Farrell’s novel in which Agnes, like her long dead mother, is skilled and knowledgeable in turning herbs and flowers into remedies that are valued by the local community.

While many representations of Elizabethan life are centred on the largely male-dominated culture of politics and courtly life, Hamnet offers an account of the busy and productive life of an ordinary (if eccentric) Elizabethan wife and mother. Agnes is in charge of the labour-intensive life of the household. Her family home is situated in the centre of Stratford, boarded by a muddy, dirty, bustling thoroughfare. Women are shown as managing the core human processes of birth and death, birthing in an all-female environment and desperately struggling to keep their children alive in an age of precarious health and mortality.

As other critics have argued, the film’s climax – in which Hamlet is interpreted as the artistic expression of Shakespeare’s personal grief over the loss of his son – is one of the less convincing aspects of the film. Hamlet is essentially a revenge tragedy and Shakespeare’s plots were largely derived from classical and historical sources rather than personal experience.

Yet its heart-wrenching portrayal of Agnes’ anguish over her child’s untimely death is moving and persuasive, offsetting the modern misconception that as child mortality was higher, these experiences were less painful. The death of Hamnet is therefore recast as a tragedy for his mother, who birthed and raised him, rather than just the writer-genius, Shakespeare.

Hamnet’s representation of Agnes/Anne is, of course, almost entirely speculative. Only the wealthiest of women were literate at this time, so unlike her husband, Hathaway left no written traces. However, as Zhao and O’Farrell’s feminist film clearly illustrates, women’s lack of formal education and career opportunities did not mean that they contributed less to their communities – or that we should regard their lives as less meaningful.

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Roberta Garrett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Hamnet: by centring Anne Hathaway, this sensuous film gives Shakespeare’s world new life – https://theconversation.com/hamnet-by-centring-anne-hathaway-this-sensuous-film-gives-shakespeares-world-new-life-272969

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lee Cronin, Regius Chair of Chemistry, University of Glasgow

Chemistry deals with that most fundamental subject: matter. New drugs, materials and batteries all depend on our ability to make new molecules. But discovery of new substances is slow, expensive and fragile. Each molecule is treated as a bespoke craft project. If a synthesis works in one lab, it often fails in another.

The problem is that any single molecule could have an almost infinite number of routes to creation. These routes are published as static text, stripped of the context, timing and error correction that made them work in the first place. So while chemistry is often presented as one of the most advanced sciences, its day-to-day practice remains surprisingly manual.

For centuries prior to the emergence of modern chemistry, alchemists worked by hand, mixing substances, adjusting conditions by feel, passing knowledge from teacher to student while keeping many secrets. Today’s chemists use far more analytical tools, yet the core workflow has barely changed.

We still design molecules manually using the rules of chemistry, then ask highly trained humans to translate these ideas into reality in the laboratory, step by step, reaction by reaction.

At the same time, we are living through an explosion in artificial intelligence and robotics – and chemists have rushed to apply these tools to molecular discovery. AI systems can propose millions of candidate molecules, rate and optimise them, and even suggest reaction pathways.

But frustratingly, these tools frequently hallucinate chemicals that cannot be made, because (unlike in the case of proteins) no one has yet captured all the practical rules for making molecules digitally.

Chemistry cannot become truly digital unless it is programmable. In other words, we need to be able to write down, in a machine-readable way, how to assemble molecules – including instructions, conditionals, loops and error handling – and then execute these instructions on different hardware in different places with the same outcome.

Without a language that allows chemistry to be executed, not just described, today’s cutting-edge AI tools risk generating little more than plausible-looking illusions of new chemical substances. This is where using the computer as an architecture to build a digital chemistry system, or “chemputer”, becomes imperative in my view.

Before computers, calculation was manual and mechanical. People used slide rules, tables and specialist devices built for specific tasks. But when Alan Turing showed that any computable problem could be expressed as instructions for a simple abstract machine, computation was liberated from having to be done on specific hardware – and progress became exponential.

Chemistry has never made that jump. Akin to chefs using individual methods to achieve the perfect souffle, researchers around the world have different ways of preparing chemicals. So while automation in chemistry exists, research remains largely artisanal in nature.

An AI can design a thousand hypothetical drugs overnight. But if each one requires a human chemist to manually work out how to make it because the molecules generated are not constrained by the real-world rules of chemistry, we have simply moved the bottleneck. Design has gone digital, making has not.

Chemistry by computers

To properly digitise chemistry, we need a programmable language for matter to encode these real-world rules. This idea led me, with colleagues in my research laboratory at the University of Glasgow, to develop the process of chemputation back in 2012.

We built a concrete abstraction of what a chemical code would look like – with steps such as “add/subtract matter then add/subtract energy”. By translating these steps into binary code, it was possible to build the components of a chemputer.

The premise is simple. Chemistry can be treated as a form of computation carried out in the physical world. Instead of publishing chemistry as prose, it is published in executable code, as described in our new preprinted article. Reagents are data. Operations like mixing, heating, separating and purifying are instructions. A range of machines, such as those shown in the image below, play the role of processors.

Once chemistry becomes programmable, we expect many things to change. Reproducibility improves because processes are no longer interpreted by humans. Sharing becomes meaningful because a synthesis can be run, not re-imagined. Importantly, programmable chemistry allows feedback loops for error correction, with sensors monitoring reactions in real time.

Self-driving laboratories

Our ambitions for chemputation took a major step forward in June 2025 when Chemify, our University of Glasgow corporate spin-out, launched the world’s first chemifarm. At this facility in Glasgow’s Maryhill district, the process of chemputation is applied to making new molecules for drug and materials discovery.

It uses AI and robotics to enable the entire system to “self-learn”, and thus get better at making more advanced molecules over time. Discovery becomes an iterative, programmable process rather than a linear gamble.

This fits with the wider emergence of “self-driving” laboratories – robotic labs we pioneered that use AI and automation to enhance the speed and breadth of research.

Chemistry began as alchemy – a human art shaped by intuition and mystery, making potions, manipulating precious metals and building the first laboratory equipment. It has since grown into a rigorous science, yet never fully escaped its manual roots. If we want chemistry to keep pace with the digital age, especially in an era dominated by AI, we must now finish that transition.

Lee Cronin is the CEO and shareholder in Chemify and is the regius Professor at the University of Glasgow and recieves funding from many organisations including the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

– ref. Chemistry is stuck in the dark ages – ‘chemputation’ can bring it into the digital world – https://theconversation.com/chemistry-is-stuck-in-the-dark-ages-chemputation-can-bring-it-into-the-digital-world-272610

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Paul, Associate Professor in Earth Science, Royal Holloway, University of London

Greenland, the largest island on Earth, possesses some of the richest stores of natural resources anywhere in the world.

These include critical raw materials – resources such as lithium and rare earth elements (REEs) that are essential for green technologies, but whose production and sustainability are highly sensitive – plus other valuable minerals and metals, and a huge volume of hydrocarbons including oil and gas.

Three of Greenland’s REE-bearing deposits, deep under the ice, may be among the world’s largest by volume, holding great potential for the manufacture of batteries and electrical components essential to the global energy transition.

The scale of Greenland’s hydrocarbon potential and mineral wealth has stimulated extensive research by Denmark and the US into the commercial and environmental viability of new activities like mining. The US Geological Survey estimates that onshore northeast Greenland (including ice-covered areas) contains around 31 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in hydrocarbons – similar to the US’s entire volume of proven crude oil reserves.

But Greenland’s ice-free area, which is nearly double the size of the UK, forms less than a fifth of the island’s total surface area – raising the possibility that huge stores of unexplored natural resources are present beneath the ice.

Greenland’s concentration of natural resource wealth is tied to its hugely varied geological history over the past 4 billion years. Some of the oldest rocks on Earth can be found here, as well as truck-sized lumps of native (not meteorite-derived) iron. Diamond-bearing kimberlite “pipes” were discovered in the 1970s but have yet to be exploited, largely due to the logistical challenges of mining them.

Geologically speaking, it is highly unusual (and exciting for geologists like me) for one area to have experienced all three key ways that natural resources – from oil and gas to REEs and gems – are generated. These processes relate to episodes of mountain building, rifting (crustal relaxation and extension), and volcanic activity.

Greenland was shaped by many prolonged periods of mountain building. These compressive forces broke up its crust, allowing gold, gems such as rubies, and graphite to be deposited in the faults and fractures. Graphite is crucial for the production of lithium batteries but remains “underexplored”, according to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, relative to major producers such as China and South Korea.

But the greatest proportion of Greenland’s natural resources originates from its periods of rifting – including, most recently, the formation of the Atlantic Ocean from the beginning of the Jurassic Period just over 200 million years ago.

Greenland’s onshore sedimentary basins such as the Jameson Land Basin appear to hold the greatest potential of oil and gas reserves, analogous to Norway’s hydrocarbon-rich continental shelf. However, prohibitively high costs have limited commercial exploration. There is also a growing body of research suggesting potentially extensive petroleum systems ringing the entirety of offshore Greenland.

Metals such as lead, copper, iron and zinc are also present in the onshore (mostly ice-free) sedimentary basins, and have been worked locally, on a small scale, since 1780.

Difficult-to-source rare earth elements

While not as intimately related to volcanic activity as nearby Iceland – which, uniquely, sits at the intersection of a mid-ocean ridge and a mantle plume – many of Greenland’s critical raw materials owe their existence to its volcanic history.

REEs such as niobium, tantalum and ytterbium have been discovered in igneous rock layers – similar to the discovery (and subsequent mining) of silver and zinc reserves in south-west England, which were deposited by warm hydrothermal waters circulating at the tip of large volcanic intrusions.

Critically among REEs, Greenland is also predicted to hold sufficient sub-ice reserves of dysprosium and neodymium to satisfy more than a quarter of predicted future global demand – a combined total of nearly 40 million tonnes.

These elements are increasingly seen as the most economically important yet difficult to source REEs because of their indispensable role in wind power, electric motors for clean road transport, and magnets in high-temperature settings like nuclear reactors.

The development of known deposits such as Kvanefield in southern Greenland – not to mention those not yet discovered in the island’s central rocky core – could easily affect the global REE market, owing to their relative global scarcity.

An unfortunate dilemma

The global energy transition came about due to increasing public recognition of the manifold threats of burning fossil fuels. But climate change has major implications for the availability of many of Greenland’s natural resources that are currently blanketed by kilometres of ice – and which are a key part of that energy transition.

An area the size of Albania has melted since 1995, and this trend is likely to accelerate unless global carbon emissions fall sharply in the near future.

Recent advances in survey techniques, such as the use of ground-penetrating radar, allow us to peer with increasing certainty beneath the ice. We are now able to obtain an accurate picture of bedrock topography below up to 2 km of ice cover, providing clues as to the potential mineral resources in Greenland’s subsurface.

However, progress is slow in prospecting under the ice – and sustainable extraction is likely to prove even harder.

Soon, an unfortunate dilemma may need to be addressed. Should Greenland’s increasingly available resource wealth be extracted with gusto, in order to sustain and enhance the energy transition? But doing so will add to the effects of climate change on Greenland and beyond, including despoiling much of its pristine landscape and contributing to rising sea levels that could swamp its coastal settlements.

Currently, all mining and resource extraction activities are heavily regulated by the government of Greenland through comprehensive legal frameworks dating from the 1970s. However, pressures to loosen these controls, and to grant new licences for exploration and exploitation, may increase amid the US’s strong interest in Greenland’s future.

Jonathan Paul does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Greenland is rich in natural resources – a geologist explains why – https://theconversation.com/greenland-is-rich-in-natural-resources-a-geologist-explains-why-273022

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Francesco Grillo, Academic Fellow, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University

The so-called world order and the international rule of law are both officially dead in the wake of operation “absolute resolve”, the US infiltration of Venezuela to capture its president Nicolás Maduro.

It is true that both have been sick for some time – and Venezuela is a demonstration of this. Maduro was condemned by foreign leaders for illegally seizing power as long ago as 2013 – years before Donald Trump even became president. No concrete action was ever taken.

Operation “absolute resolve”, however, is a red line crossed.

Even when the US invaded Panama in 1989, there was some attempt to preserve a world order that no longer seems to matter. This invasion (more humbly named “just cause”) was anticipated by a declaration of war that came from Panama. The US Congress was, at least, informed and some countries even tried a mediation.

More importantly, the reaction when the US went ahead was much stronger. Even before the capture of Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Organization of the American States (which includes the US) condemned the invasion as illegal. The European Parliament did the same immediately after.

In the case of Venezuela, the silence is deafening. And seeing that no one has challenged it, the US government has immediately started talking about taking Greenland, hinting that it wouldn’t even need to use force. The world order is dead because nobody is willing to defend it.

However, it is equally evident that the alternative to the defunct world order cannot be no order at all. It’s not feasible that the world should operate according to the law of the jungle. It is too complex and big to be governed by just one empire.

This much was acknowledged even in the controversial US security strategy published at the end of 2025, which says that US elites “badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens” and that “they overestimated America’s ability to fund … a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex”.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff to Donald Trump, now says of the US’s changed vision. “But we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

But a world governed on these terms is obviously a world heading towards mutual destruction. In such a system, all countries would, legitimately, scramble to defend themselves militarily. For those countries not already equipped, the pursuit of nuclear weapons would be the only obvious route to invulnerability.

Turning crisis into opportunity

So, what should Europe do in the face of this problem? And in the current world order, it’s possible that I do really mean Europe rather than the EU.

This situation requires cooperation with the UK, Norway, and probably Canada and Switzerland. If necessary, it may require moving ahead without Hungary or whichever other EU countries are still doubtful about the need for an urgent, defence-based European integration.

In theory, a world without a world order is a much greater problem for Europe than for any other economy of the world. According to the World Bank, trade with other countries represents more than 60% of the five biggest GDPs in Europe but less than 40% of the GDPs of China, the US and Russia.

However, Europe is also probably the part of the world that is best equipped to try to be the broker a new framework. It has fewer enemies than other contenders and more friends (16 of the 20 countries whose passports enable entry to other states without a visa are European).

It has the strongest tradition of being a global meeting place (the top five host cities for international organisations are all in Europe).

So yes, Europe can, in theory, transform its biggest problem into its biggest opportunity. Indeed, I would even say that the only way to survive the chaos is by being ambitious. Europe must present itself as the only credible broker of a difficult and yet indispensable new world order.

Miller is right that this will take force, strength and power – but it is the force of standing up without double or triple standards over defending those rights that once inspired a “universal declaration” inspired by the United States.

It is about having the strength of ideas for drafting new institutions to reinforce those values. But also, it’s about having the power, even one based on a military deterrence, to defend freedom if somebody wants to impose a different vision of what civilisations are about.

Will Europe find the courage to be strong? It probably needs a trigger to wake up. Greenland could be that trigger.

If Europeans don’t manage to negotiate what they’ve mastered so far – another humiliating compromise that would only serve US interests and reinforce Miller’s worldview – then an incident over Greenland may be the end of an alliance that is already increasingly unstable. But it would also be an opportunity to draft a new vision for governing the world.

Francesco Grillo is affiliated with the think tank Vision which is the convenor of the Siena conference on the Europe of the Future.

– ref. As the US eyes Greenland, Europe must turn a global problem into an opportunity – https://theconversation.com/as-the-us-eyes-greenland-europe-must-turn-a-global-problem-into-an-opportunity-272872