Welcome and thank you for visiting the historically blonde blog! This is a space where I will share all kinds of weird and wonderful stories from various periods of history. This includes both obscure and well-known places I have visited, people I have read about and ideas I have explored throughout my life. In short, I will tell you stories about everything and anything that interests me and that I think are worth sharing.
My name is Kiri and I am historian of medieval Europe living and studying for a PhD in Aberystwyth, Wales. I am originally from the Netherlands where I did my first two degrees before moving across the Channel to continue my education. Throughout my academic career I have moved between different time periods and geographic focus points and it is pure accident that I am currently looking at the Middle Ages. My PhD research project looks at origin narratives in the 12th century German Kingdom. These can be stories about how and when monasteries were founded, what kind of people lived in the region in the remote past or how a city was founded by a refugee from Troy. I use these texts to ask how they describe the origins of the subjects, if there are similarities between them and why there seemed to be such an increase in these kind of narratives in the twelfth century.
Even before I started university I had always been fascinated by all aspects of history. I would read both popular academic books and historical fiction novels, which only fed my cravings to know more. The idea for this website, however, came from the enormous amounts of pictures I have taken over the years when visiting places of interest on holiday. On this blog I want to share those pictures with you and the remarkable stories behind their subjects. Aside from the holiday visits, I will also write about any intruiging bits I have come across in my research, in articles and books I read for fun or in the Latin reading group I attend every Friday with a lecturer who seems to be a never empty fountain of knowledge. Also, if you have any ideas you think I might want to write about, do use the Contact page to let me know. Thank you for visiting my blog and happy reading!
P.S. Snaps! I totally forgot to tell you about the name of this blog. I am a big musical fan and Legally Blonde the Musical is one of my favourites. I like to think Elle Woods and I have a number of things in common, not least both being blonde and this is why I came up with my rather quirky blog title.