Pembroke Launches New Digitised Manuscripts Website

Pembroke College is pleased to announce that its new digital collections website is now available to view.

The new website gives full access to images of six medical manuscripts, as well as one of Pembroke’s greatest treasures, a 14th century Bohemian Book of Hours. More manuscripts will be added in the future, giving scholars access to these now-fragile texts.

Pembroke’s medical manuscripts were almost certainly left to the college by the first Master, Thomas Clayton, who was Regius Professor of Medicine. They represent a wide range of medical knowledge from the medieval world, including herbals, remedies, and even a diagram of the brain with the sense centres marked.

Thanks to the generosity of the Wellcome Trust, we have not only been able to have high-quality photographs taken, but also conserve these manuscripts so that they can be used by future generations. Close study of the texts has already shown that MS10 contains part of a work previously thought lost. It contains an early twelfth century copy of Books VI and VII of the Pantegni of Constantine the African, adding a new link to the chain of knowledge transmission in the medieval world. Read more about this text and its significance from its discoverer, Prof. Monica Green, in her article HERE.

Professor Green also proved some years ago that sections of MS21 were used to create a copy of the same text in the Bodleian, a rare example of being able to show which text was copied from which.

As these texts are opened up to the wider scholarly community in full for the first time, who knows how many more unknown treasures are hidden in their pages? We’re looking forward to finding out!

Find the website here: http://digital-collections.pmb.ox.ac.uk/

Article by Laura Cracknell