Alice Oswald's final lecture as the English Faculty's Professor of Poetry will take place at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on Friday, 9 June at 5.30pm. The talk will be on Counterblast! (a manifesto for poetry).Tickets are free, but booking is required.All attendees are warmly invited to stay for a drinks reception after the lecture.
In the year 1,480, a household cleric and tutor to a noble family named Richard Heege went to a feast where there was a minstrel performing a three-part act. Heege recorded as much as he could remember, opening with "By me, Richard Heege, because.
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 get drunk; and shocking them with slapstick – shed new light on Britain’s famous sense of humour and the role played by minstrels in medieval society. The texts contains the earliest recorded use of ‘red herring’ in English, extremely rare forms of medieval literature, as well as a killer rabbit worthy of Monty Python. The discovery changes the way we should think about English comic culture between Chaucer and Shakespeare.