![]() The panel comprised a group of scholars with diverse. But the NYAM manuscript was not a unique copy (al-Zahrawi’s work exists in some 33 extant Latin manuscripts), and so-my questions quickly answered-I moved on again.īut my attention was brought back to the NYAM volume again last year, because of some questions being raised by a new project. The overarching topic of the panel was open access and the digitization of medieval legal documents. This was the visually stunning (and rightly famous) Surgery of the early 11 th-century Cordoban physician, Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn ‘Abbas al-Zahrawi, whose work had been translated from Arabic into Latin in Toledo. I did come back, many years later, with some questions about one of the surgical texts in the volume. Manuscripts Medieval Astronomy The oldest scientific manuscript in the Library, which contains various Latin texts on astronomy. But the other contents of the manuscript, let alone its structure as a whole, were all but invisible to me. These were certainly enthralling: they included one of only two known copies of the Gynecology of the 4th-century writer, Caelius Aurelianus. My peripheral vision went no further than the other texts on women’s medicine that surrounded it in the manuscript. ![]() ![]() Like most scholars who study the history of intellectual traditions, my eyes were on my immediate object of study-in this case, a 12th-century compendium of texts on women’s medicine and cosmetics. Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age explores one major manuscript repositorys digital presence and poses timely questions about studying books from a temporal and spatial distance via the online environment. This large, 94-leaf, handsomely bound volume was formative to my training as a historian of medieval medical history, having been the first “real” manuscript I examined when I was beginning my researches on the so-called Trotula texts in the early 1980s. This digital exhibition explores illuminated manuscripts through print and digital copies. Several times over the past 30 years, I’ve consulted a mid-13th-century manuscript in the New York Academy of Medicine’s holdings.
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