15thcentury

P.9 recto of the Heege Manuscript. ‘Red herring’ appears 3-4 lines from the bottom of the page. Credit: National Library of ScotlandAn unprecedented record of medieval live comedy performance has been identified in a 15th-century manuscript. These boisterous texts – which include jests at the expense of kings, priests, and peasants; advocate for audience inebriation; and surprise them with physical comedy – provide fresh insights into the renowned British sense of humor and the significant role minstrels held in medieval…

Scribe's note ‘By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink’, in the Heege Manuscript (bottom of p.60 verso). This caught the attention of Cambridge researcher Dr James Wade. Credit: National Library of Scotland An unprecedented record of medieval live comedy performance has been identified in a 15th-century manuscript. Raucous texts—mocking kings, priests and peasants; encouraging audiences to…

How the east end of the Abbey church and its furnishes may have looked – crafted by illustrator Stephen Conlin, based on evidence from the study. Credit: Stephen Conlin New evidence, helping to form a 15th-century reconstruction of part of Westminster Abbey, demonstrates how a section of the building was once the focus for the royal family's devotion to the cult of a disemboweled saint and likely contained gruesome images of his…

A photograph of a scanned Korean text. The white dotted box indicates the areas shown in the middle and bottom panels. Each element produces a unique X-ray fluorescence. After scanning the text, the researchers applied filters for the known XRF patterns of different elements and created a color-coded heat-map of their abundance, from lowest (blue) to highest (red). An element found in only small quantities is in the red circles in the bottom part of…