Well the past few days have been pretty depressing so sorry for the lack of posts. Anyway the Guardian have a good piece about the discovery of a new letter giving details of the medieval mystic Margery Kempe.

A 15th-century letter found in an archive in Gdansk and believed to have been prepared for the son of Margery Kempe, who dictated the ( Read more... )

Even if you're not a comic book fan, this is great stuff! The Smithsonian tell the secret history of Wonder Woman, the most well known of all female comic book characters.

Wonder Woman’s secret history isn’t written on parchment. Instead, it lies buried in boxes and cabinets and drawers, in thousands of documents, housed in libraries, archives ( Read more... )

An 800 year old poem has been revealed as the earliest independent account of the creation of the Magna Carta.

Curators at the British Library have been researching all aspects of Magna Carta for an exhibition marking its 800th anniversary next year ( Read more... )

I'm sure a lot of people have seen this already but in case you haven't - the most exciting history news story of the day is the discovery of a Shakespeare First Folio in a library in St Omer in Northern France! It had been wrongly catalogued as an 18th century edition, meaning no-one realised its true value until now.

It was discovered by ( Read more... )

I enjoyed this post on the University of Missouri's blog today - have they found another Fordyce-reading Mr Collins in their Special Collections ( Read more... )

Thank you to dwyld for tonight's entry!

Could Mr Darcy afford a stately home today?? The Telegraph sets out to find the answer - using a handy conversion chart to calculate the fortunes of a whole list of Jane Austen characters.

Read it here! It's fun :)

The attic that historians believe could have inspired the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre is now open to the public.

Novelist Charlotte Brontë penned the ‘madwoman in the attic’ based on her experiences vising the stately home of Norton Conyers, North Yorkshire, in 1839 ( Read more... )

Hello! Sorry for the silence, I have been at Glastonbury :)

How about this for a good return story...

The sands of the Sahara have all but swallowed Chinguetti, a near ghost town found at the end of a harsh desert road in Mauritania, West Africa. Its majority of abandoned houses are open to the elements, lost to the dunes of a desert aggressively ( Read more... )

Here's something interesting I found out today! Apparently the earliest surviving book in English written by a woman was the early 15th century 'Revelations of Divine Love' by the anchoress Julian of Norwich. The book is around 11,000 words long and written in Middle English at a time when most religious texts were still in Latin. Although it ( Read more... )

Thank you to Nancy on twitter for this one!

Historians studying graffiti in ancient churches have found what they believe might be writing by one of medieval English literature's most extraordinary "lost" talents - including his signature ( Read more... )