Foundational Document, CCCC01/GF/1

The college's foundational document has been on display since the start of the year as part of the current 'Town and Gown' exhibition, due to run until March. The historic link with St Bene't's church, attested in this document, is this year celebrated anew in the year of St Bene't's millennium. Edward D.G. (Deo Gracias)...

Curing Thousands of Diseases

One of the great privileges of working in The Parker Library is the opportunity to slowly discover the collections, to spend a few minutes looking at a manuscript whose shelfmark you don't recognise, to talk to readers working on things you've never considered, to share in the excitement of new discoveries, and to learn just...

Two to One: The Otho-Corpus Gospels

Although we have highlighted the loan of four of the eleven manuscripts that have been on loan to the British Library as part of their spectacular Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War exhibition, and although we will be focusing on a few more items individually as they make their way back to the Cambridge, we thought...

Parker’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: The Æthelstan Bede (MS 183) and The Old English Bede (MS 41)

With Christmas almost upon us, before we break for the holidays we present one final feature in our series of blog posts celebrating our manuscripts appearing in the British Library’s triumphant Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War exhibition (but never fear; look forward to more in the New Year!). Our first post focused on Parker's magnificent fragment...

Parker’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: The Corpus Glossary (MS 144)

The Parker Library is proud to be the single largest lender of manuscripts to the British Library’s magnificent exhibition, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War. In a series of blog posts spanning the Christmas holiday and into the New Year, we will shine a spotlight on a selection of the Parker manuscripts currently on display. Our first...

Parker’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: The Northumbrian Gospels (MS 197B)

The Parker Library is proud to be the single largest lender of manuscripts to the British Library’s magnificent exhibition, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War. In a series of blog posts spanning the Christmas holiday and into the New Year, we will shine a spotlight on eight of the eleven Parker manuscripts currently on show, beginning with...

The Residue of Alchemy in Botany

Plants really don’t move. The majority grow in the same places, look the same, smell the same, and act the same for thousands of years, and this slow evolution is a useful lodestone to help us navigate the shoals of botanical thought, which have changed so dramatically in the past 600 years as to be...

My experience as an intern at The Parker library; or a brief look into the retained importance of the physicality of manuscripts in an increasingly digital age.

I am a year 12 student at Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge, who is in the process of writing my Extended Project Qualification on the digitisation, and viewing of medieval manuscripts today. I am also taking A-levels in History, English Literature and History of Art. At the start of this academic year, I was...

Uncovering the Dover Bible’s True Colours – How modern science can be used to aid discovery within England’s oldest manuscripts.

As with any historical field, despite the sheer quantity of evidence you may collect, there will always be parts of the past that remain shrouded in mystery. This is of course true for manuscripts; even if we combined all our current knowledge, we will never quite manage to uncover each and every hidden facet of...

‘The Naked Text’?: the Wycliffite Bible Controversy

Language can be exclusive. When a text is unavailable in one’s own language, one feels barred from understanding its meaning. This concern allows us insight into the thinking behind the production of this highly controversial manuscript from the Parker Library collection: the Wycliffite Bible (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 147). The Wycliffites, followers of the...