A pipeline from heaven: 800 years of Dominican books

In 1216 St Dominic settled a religious community of preachers at Saint-Romain in Toulouse. In 2016 the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) celebrates its 800th anniversary. This exhibition marks the central role that books have played in the work of the Order over eight centuries.

The moving word: French medieval manuscripts in Cambridge

An exhibition tracing the development of medieval literature in French, and the manuscript culture through which it was conveyed across Europe and beyond.

The fame of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine: a view from the Cairo genizah

The Canon of Medicine (Al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb) of the Persian polymath Avicenna (980–1037) was one of the most influential medical texts in both the medieval Arabo-Islamic world and in pre-modern Europe, and it is no surprise that such a pervasive treatise should be found among the 200,000 fragments of manuscripts of the Cambridge Genizah Collections. This exhibition presents a sample.

Discarded History: The Genizah of Medieval Cairo

For a thousand years the Jewish community of Old Cairo put their worn-out writings into a synagogue storage room, a genizah. Explore one of the greatest collections of Cambridge University Library and a remarkable survival of the medieval past. Discarded History: The Genizah of Medieval Cairo provides a window on the life of a community a thousand years ago – a Jewish community in the centre of a thriving Islamic empire, international in outlook, multicultural in make up, devout to its core.

Recipes, Prescriptions and Drugs from Medieval Cairo

Among the 350,000 fragments of medieval manuscripts retrieved from the Genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo) we find almost 2,000 leaves dealing with medicine, the medical profession and health problems. They are written in Hebrew, Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic and are an amazing source for studying the transmission of medical knowledge and the actual practice of medicine in the Middle Ages. This exhibition presents a sample.

Remembering the Reformation

2017 is the 500^th anniversary of the events that brought about a permanent religious schism within Western Christendom. This digital exhibition explores how Europe’s multiple and competing Reformations have been remembered, forgotten, contested, and re-invented since the sixteenth century.

Private Lives of Print: the use and abuse of books 1450-1550

A major exhibition giving insights into the ways early books were decorated, annotated, bound, used and abused by their owners in the first hundred years after the development of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg.