A PhD student at Trinity College has unearthed a complete, unpublished play 65 years after Peter Shaffer wrote it - and before he reignited the world of theatre with the acclaimed plays The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and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.
To mark International Women’s Day (Sunday 8 March), the Cambridge Festival (16 March–2 April) is spotlighting the outstanding achievements of women across a wide range of disciplines.
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.
‘The World Tree’, written by Professor Robert Macfarlane, was performed for the first time by the Helsinki Chamber Choir in Finland.
Researchers have launched a public survey to help them unlock the secrets of vivid memory, and find ways to help us better recall past experiences
Twelve academics from the University of Cambridge have been made Fellows of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social science
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.
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.
John Milton’s handwritten annotations have been identified in a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles, a vital source of inspiration for the Paradise Lost poet. The discovery, made by a team including Cambridge's Prof. Jason Scott-Warren, includes a rare example of prudish censorship.
A new cultural history of the 1970s wellness industry offers urgent lessons for today. It reveals that in the seventies, wellness was neither narcissistic nor self-indulgent, and nor did its practice involve buying expensive, on-trend luxury products. Instead, wellness emphasised social well-being just as much as it focused on the needs of the individual. Wellness practitioners thought of self-care as a way of empowering people to prioritise their health so that they could also enhance the well-being of those around them.
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