Cambridge University Library Special Collections

Fragmentary strips of medieval manuscripts

Fragments, fragments, fragments

Posted on 18 January 2023 by Special Collections

A guest post by Matthew Coulter In libraries across the world there are boxes and boxes of fragments from medieval texts. Between the 15th and […]

Fragmentarium project, Fragments, Manuscripts, Medieval manuscripts, Special Collections

Shared digital curation of southern African collections

Posted on 12 January 2023 by Sally Kent

Creating new connections: shared digital curation of the RCS southern African collections at Cambridge University Library A two-year project is underway at Cambridge University Library […]

Archives, Cambridge Digital Library, Digitisation, Royal Commonwealth Society, Special Collections

A New Year’s Eve Ghost Story

Posted on 31 December 2022 by Special Collections

This Christmas we bring you a spine-chilling ritual for conjuring spirits from the margins of a medieval manuscript that features in our current Curious Cures […]

Archives, Collectors and collecting, Curious Cures, Manuscripts, Medieval manuscripts, Special Collections

Joyful Sounds of Salvation

Posted on 14 December 2022 by William Hale

The Library Choir has been performing carols in the University Library Entrance Hall for more than thirty years. This year each of the seven carols […]

Christmas, Music, Special Collections

An Early “Mirror for Princes” in Southeast Asia: The First Known Malay Translation of Akhlaq-e Mohseni

Posted on 12 December 2022 by Majid Daneshgar

This post is by Munby Fellow Dr Majid Daneshgar, whose project for 2022/23 is entitled Revisiting Malay Islamic Manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library: Global […]

South Asian, Special Collections

Egyptian antiquities ..in a country house in Bulac From Views in Egypt by Luigi Mayer. 1801.

A game of stones – how Cambridge acquired a cast of the Rosetta Stone

Posted on 7 December 2022 by Catherine Ansorge

Exactly two hundred years ago, in 1822, the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion (1790–1832) succeeded in his attempts to decipher the hieroglyphic text of the famous Rosetta […]

Anniversaries, Archives, Cambridge University history, Collectors and collecting, Near and Middle Eastern, Special Collections, Travel

Introducing the CUL Additional Fragments Project or Three Lessons in Fragmentology

Posted on 1 December 2022 by Special Collections

A post by Dr Marie Turner. A square of parchment no larger than a postage stamp, bearing a scattering of words from a Middle English […]

Fragmentarium project, Fragments, Manuscripts, Medieval manuscripts, Special Collections

Simon Armitage on Ukraine: a new acquisition

Posted on 14 November 2022 by Special Collections

Private press books have been acquired by the Library since the late nineteenth century, when William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (active 1891-98) led to the flourishing […]

Acquisitions, Poetry, Rare Books, Recent acquisitions, Special Collections