Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries

Cambridge University Library is delighted to announce that it has secured a Research Resources Award of £493,456 from the Wellcome Trust, in support of a two-year project to digitise, catalogue and conserve over 180 medieval manuscripts that contain unedited medical recipes.

These manuscripts include both recipe compilations and medical texts, but also scientific and alchemical, legal and literary, liturgical and devotional books, illustrating the many different routes by which medical knowledge of this kind was recorded, shared and transmitted.

A team of project cataloguers will prepare detailed descriptions of their textual contents, material characteristics, and origins and provenance, and place the recipes in their material, intellectual and historical contexts.

The project team will also produce full-text transcriptions of the approximately 8,000 medical recipes that these manuscripts contain. These recipes are highly variable and have never been edited. Transcription will open up their contents to health researchers and historians of medicine, enabling keyword searching, surveys of treatments for specific ailments, or quantitative analyses of particular ingredients or preparatory techniques.

Cover-to-cover digitisation will enable researchers to see the recipes in their original setting: where they were written on the page and how they were presented, and whether they were added by different hands or at different times.

Conservation will also guarantee continued physical access to the material for future generations of researchers. 

This will be the first concerted effort by a group of libraries, led by Cambridge University Library, to make all of the medical recipe contents of these types of manuscript available in this manner.

The project will commence in March 2022 and run for two years. It will be based at Cambridge University Library, taking advantage of its world-class digitisation and conservation facilities.

It will include books at Cambridge University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as twelve college libraries: Clare, Corpus Christi, Emmanuel, Gonville & Caius, Jesus, King’s, Magdalene, Pembroke, Peterhouse, Sidney Sussex, St John’s and Trinity.

The results of the project - high-resolution digital images, detailed descriptions and full-text transcriptions - will be made freely available online on the Cambridge Digital Library, opening up these collections to researchers around the world.