Tuesday News: Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries

[rhubarbjam]

Cambridge library has been digitising a fascinating collection of medieval manuscripts. While the manuscripts are largely medical recipe compilations and texts, they also include scientific, alchemical, legal, literary, liturgical and devotional books. Operating under the name “Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries,”; the collection is composed of over 186 manuscripts, 120 of which have now been photographed as part of the digitisation project.

The process of archiving these items has several steps; these can be simplified into conservation, cataloguing, digitisation, and transcription. First, any fragile papers are repaired, being sent to a separate team for this. Then the scripts are catalogued, being given an appropriately descriptive record in Cambridge’s system. The photographs of the manuscripts are taken, and the text itself is finally copied out as an accompaniment to the digitised photos.

This isn’t the first attempt at transcription for one of these manuscripts – the Victorian horror writer and noted scholar James Rhodes wrote the short story “The Experiment” based on a text from this collection. Describing the haunting events after his characters follow a necromantic ritual, he included his full transcription of the ritual used to summon the dead at the end of his story, noting that it could be found in Cambridge Library. Interestingly, his work has one small mistake that changes the ritual. He writes how you must ask permission from the angel Raphael as part of the spell – the true manuscript instead names the demon Azazel, giving a demonic slant to the events of the story. With the ongoing project, perhaps some new horror writers will find inspiration from these ancient pages. 

Read about James Rhodes’ work here.

Read about the Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries project here. 

Read the digitised Manuscripts here. 

Comments

[zenigotchas]

I'm glad I stumbled on this page, I love reading about things like this. I've always found ancient manuscripts really fascinating, they're inherently arcane and honestly very weird, the glimpse into how people understand reality through early science then is very amazing to me, alchemy as its own is fascinating enough already. (I admit I also find this stuff interesting just because of all the lost media surrounding lost manuscripts and texts). It's cool to see people trying to preserve these for future generations, maybe more art will be made based off this stuff!

[rhubarbjam]

Thank you for your kind words. I'm very passionate about libraries and their importance, and I enjoy sharing encouraging stories like these.