James Freeman and project team, 'Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries'
Abstract:
'Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries' is a two-year project (May 2022 to May 2024) to digitise, catalogue and conserve over 180 medieval manuscripts that contain unedited medical recipes. It is funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Resources Award.
The results of the project - high-resolution digital images, detailed descriptions and full-text transcriptions - will be made freely available online. 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. The project team are also producing full-text transcriptions of the approximately 8,000 medical recipes that the manuscripts contain. This is the first concerted effort by a group of libraries to make all of the medical recipe contents of these types of manuscript available in this manner.
In this session, the members of the project team will describe their work, and share the project’s initial findings.
Biographies:
James Freeman is Medieval Manuscripts Specialist at Cambridge University Library and Principal Investigator for the Wellcome Trust-funded Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries project.
Tuija Ainonen
Tuija Ainonen works part of the week at the Cambridge University Library as a cataloguer of medieval medical manuscripts with the project “Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries". The other part of her week is spent in Oxford creating a new online inventory and catalogue of medieval and some early modern archival material at the Bodleian Libraries. She joined the Curious Cures project after working with medieval manuscripts and archives, their digitisation, cataloguing and dissemination at the Bodleian Libraries, Merton and Exeter Colleges in Oxford, the British Library, and the National Library of Finland. Her doctoral studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies at University of Toronto focus on pre-mendicant distinctiones collections that experiment on a variety of formats, techniques and organisational principles in arranging information about the different meanings and interpretations of Latin words.
Clarck Drieshen
Clarck Drieshen has studied the textual transmission of religious instructions in late medieval England, the Low Countries, and German-speaking lands in a doctoral dissertation at the Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds. Subsequently, he has been a cataloguer of medieval manuscripts. After working on the British Library's England and France Project, 700-1200 and the Harley Cataloguing Project, he is now a project cataloguer for Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries.
Sarah Gilbert
Sarah joined the Curious Cures project in July 2022 having completed an 8-month stint as a manuscript cataloguer for St John’s College, Cambridge. In 2020 she co-developed an online palaeography course for Durham University, and prior to that, while still a graduate student, had been a teaching assistant for medieval history and palaeography courses at Durham University. Sarah completed a PhD at Durham University in 2019, which examined the production, use, and circulation of scientific manuscripts in England before 1100. Since 2015, Sarah has been part of a team producing new editions and translations of, and commentaries on the scientific works of the medieval scientist and bishop Robert Grosseteste, where she is one of the project’s manuscript specialists. Sarah’s research interests include bookbindings, palaeography, and anything to do with the production and use of books in medieval England.