Title page of Peter Shaffer's Our Lady. Image courtesy of Trinity College Cambridge

Unseen Peter Shaffer play revealed at Trinity

A PhD student at Trinity College has unearthed a complete, unpublished play 65 years after Peter Shaffer wrote it - and before he reignited the world of theatre with the acclaimed plays The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus.

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Richard Rolle

Original version of medieval England’s ‘best-seller’ discovered

The only surviving original version of one of late medieval England’s most popular works, Richard Rolle’s Emending of Life, has been identified in Shrewsbury School. The 14th-century manuscript features unique elements, shedding new light on the work of a writer far more widely circulated than Geoffrey Chaucer.

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Dr James Wade and Dr Seb Falk.

Lost English legend decoded, solving a Chaucerian mystery

A medieval literary puzzle which has stumped scholars including MR James for 130 years has finally been solved. Cambridge scholars now believe the Song of Wade, a long-lost treasure of English culture, was a chivalric romance not a monster-filled epic. The discovery solves the most famous mystery in Chaucer's writings and provides rare evidence of a medieval preacher referencing pop culture in a sermon.

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A lawnmower cutting grass

Study reveals Britain’s poetic obsession with the humble lawnmower

Over the last half-century, British poets including Philip Larkin and Andrew Motion have driven a ‘lawnmower poetry microgenre’, using the machine to explore childhood, masculinity, violence, addiction, mortality and much more, new research shows. Francesca Gardner traces the tradition goes back to the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell who used mowing – with a scythe – to comment on the violence of the English Civil War.

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