Gregory Heyworth is a textual scientist; he and his lab work on new ways to read ancient manuscripts and maps using spectral imaging technology. In this fascinating talk, watch as Heyworth shines a light on lost history, deciphering texts that haven’t been read in thousands of years. How could these lost classics rewrite what we know about the past? Source: Gregory Heyworth: How I’m discovering the secrets of ancient texts | TED.com
Tag Archives: manuscripts
Burger King Challenges Book of Kells’ Global Trademark | IrishCentral.com #books #law #branding #copyright
The Book of Kells is officially registered as a global trademark owned by Trinity College Dublin, despite complaints made by worldwide fast-food chain Burger King that the new trademark infringed on their own trademark in the US. READ MORE: Burger King challenges the Book of Kells’ global trademark – IrishCentral.com
Student Finds Old Parchment In University Library, Turns Out It’s Probably The World’s Oldest Quran | HuffPost #Quran #libraries #artifacts #religion
http://embed.live.huffingtonpost.com/HPLEmbedPlayer/?segmentId=55aff7fd02a76081990002ef&autoPlay=false
A Ph.D. student who stumbled upon several ancient pieces of paper hidden in another book may have inadvertently discovered pages from the world’s oldest Quran, researchers at the University of Birmingham in England announced Wednesday.
Radiocarbon dating estimates the pages, likely made of sheep or goat skin, are 1,370 years old, the BBC reports. The testing is more than 95 percent accurate, meaning the parchment is probably from the era of Prophet Muhammad, who is thought to have lived between the years 570 and 632. READ MORE: Student Finds Old Parchment In University Library, Turns Out It’s Probably The World’s Oldest Quran | Huffington Post.
Scientists are Brewing Medieval Potions to Fight Hospital Superbugs | Gizmodo #ancientbooks #medievalbooks
Last month, a microbiology lab in Nottingham, England made international headlines when it unearthed a substance that kills methicillin-resistant staph, one of the deadliest superbugs of modern times. The most astounding part about the find? It was a 1,000-year-old Viking potion. “This is something we never, ever expected,” said Christina Lee, the Viking scholar at the University of Nottingham who translated the recipe from Old English. “When this tested positive against MRSA, we were just bowled over.”
Bald’s eye salve, intended to vanquish a stye, was discovered in Bald’s Leechbook, an Old English medical primer that hails from 9th century England. The recipe, which claimed to be “the best leechdom” in existence, caught the eye of Freya Harrison, a microbiologist at the University of Nottingham who moonlights as an Anglo-Saxon warrior on the weekends, as a member of the UK’s oldest and largest Viking reenactment society.
“This all kinda started from me being a big nerd,” Harrison told me over Skype. “When I met Christina, she was eager to talk with a microbiologist, because she has an interest in the history of infection. One of the things she had always wanted to do was test some of these medieval remedies out, to see whether they actually work.”
Together with microbiologist Steve Diggle, the three pooled resources to begin the “AncientBiotics” project, which would identify promising Anglo-Saxon remedies and test their medicinal value using modern science. They never expected their first attempt at replicating a medieval potion would be such a roaring success.
“To be honest, I didn’t think anything would come of this,” Diggle, whose interests lie in bacterial communication and evolution, told me over Skype. “For me, one of the most interesting aspects is asking whether this was a true scientific attempt at a recipe for treating an infection. If so, that completely changes our perspective on Anglo-Saxon medicine.”
READ MORE: Scientists are Brewing Medieval Potions to Fight Hospital Superbugs | Gizmodo
A few popular fiction titles I’ve enjoyed reading relating to medieval/historical “primers,” “recipe books” or books of knowledge are:
X-ray Reveals the Secrets of Burned Vesuvius Scrolls | CNET
Scrolls that were damaged, but not destroyed, in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius may now be read for the first time in nearly two millennia.
READ MORE: X-ray reveals the secrets of burned Vesuvius scrolls | CNET
British Library gives teachers tools to inspire | Books | The Observer
Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians from British Library Learning on Vimeo.
While Discovering Literature is an important cultural resource that can be enjoyed by all ages, it has been carefully tailored to appeal to GCSE and A-level students. The British Library’s research among teachers showed that original manuscripts, with their edits and revisions, dodgy grammar and messy handwriting, can be a powerful way of engaging pupils. Contextual material can also be a source of inspiration, and the site is packed with items such as letters, diaries, dictionaries, newspapers and illustrations that illuminate the historical, social and political contexts of classic works.
READ MORE: British Library gives teachers tools to inspire | Books | The Observer.
This is How the Vatican Will Digitize Millions of its Documents | Mashable
Digitizing the Vatican’s 40 million pages of library archives will take 50 experts, five scanners and many, many years before the process comes to a close.
The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 and has around 82,000 manuscripts, some of which date back about 1,800 years. It will work in tandem with NTT Data, a Japanese IT firm, to convert the first batch of 3,000 manuscripts. It is expected to take four years to digitize the initial round, though some of those documents will be online toward the end of 2014.
via This is How the Vatican Will Digitize Millions of its Documents | Mashable
For the Music Librarians: Leonardo da Vinci piano hybrid heard after 500 years | CNET
An unusual musical instrument that combines keyboard and cellos has seen the light of day some 500 years after the Renaissance superman conceived it.
Leonardo’s viola organista has come to life through the passion of Polish pianist Slawomir Zubrzycki, who has played a lavishly designed version of it in concert.
Zubrzycki produced the mechanically bowed keyboard, which resembles a bowed clavier, based on a sketch and notes in Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus, a collection of manuscripts covering miscellaneous subjects that is dated 1478 to 1519.
Read more: Leonardo da Vinci piano hybrid heard after 500 years | Crave | CNET
Creature Feature: The Original Frankenstein Text Is Now Readable Online | Gizmodo
Full Post
In the pantheon of classic horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ranks as one of the first, and most memorable, monster tales ever told. And while it’s easy enough to pick up a new copy of the spine-tingling 1818 narrative from pretty much any bookstore, it’s now possible to pore over the original, hand-penned manuscript online.
New York Public Library teamed up with the University of Maryland’s Institute for Technology in the Humanities to digitize Shelley’s two surviving notebooks containing most of the work—complete with edits by Percy Bysshe Shelley, her poet husband. Making this almost 200-year-old text click-accessible for a modern audience is only the first step for the Shelley-Godwin Archive, which hopes to digitize the entire oeuvre of the ultra-writerly family of Percy, Mary, and her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.
There’s a pretty extensive how-to on the best ways to navigate the site, which fittingly launched this All Hallows Eve and is currently in beta mode. Have a look around at what genius looked like in the most truly terrifying time of them all: pre-word processing. [New York Times ArtsBeat]
Image: Shelley, M. (1817). “Frankenstein—Draft Notebook B,”
in The Shelley-Godwin Archive, c. 57, fol. 29v.
via Creature Feature: The Original Frankenstein Text Is Now Readable Online | Gizmodo.
Oldest known complete Torah scroll discovered miscatalogued in Italy | Holy Post | National Post
An Italian expert in Hebrew manuscripts said he discovered the oldest known complete Torah scroll, a sheepskin document dating from 1155-1225. It was right under his nose, in the University of Bologna library, where it had been mistakenly catalogued a century ago as dating from the 17th century.
The find isn’t the oldest Torah text in the world: the Leningrad and the Aleppo bibles — both of them Hebrew codexes, or books — pre-date the Bologna scroll by more than 200 years. But this is the oldest Torah scroll of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, according to Mauro Perani, a professor of Hebrew in the University of Bologna’s cultural heritage department.
via Oldest known complete Torah scroll discovered miscatalogued in Italy | Holy Post | National Post – May 30, 2013.
If you are interested in religious texts and/or illuminated manuscripts I recommend the Sacred Traditions permanent exhibition at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland. This exhibition is much more rewarding than trying to view the Book of Kells among the masses at Trinity College. The Old Library is worthwhile but tourists are restricted to a very small area.
infophile 