Fifty-two discoveries from the BiblioPhilly project, No. 8/52
A guest post by former Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies CLIR Fellow, Dr. Erin Connelly
Recipes and extracts on alchemy, medicine, metal-working, cosmetics, veterinary science, agriculture, wine-making, and other subjects, Northwestern Italy, Probably before 22 December 1438. Philadelphia, Science History Institute, MS Othmer 1, front cover
Labeculae vivae was a project supported by a microgrant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The project ran for one year, from August 2017 to September 2018, during which stains from about forty Western European manuscripts, ranging from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, held in the special collections of five partner institutions, were imaged, and subsequently analyzed. In 2016, the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project catalogued manuscripts from the Science History Institute and its Othmer Library of Chemical History, which houses over 140,000 objects, including an invaluable collection of medieval alchemy manuscripts. Prior to the recent work of the BiblioPhilly project, these manuscripts were undigitized and several have never had a printed edition. The team members of Labeculae vivae1 performed multispectral imaging and analysis on a selection of alchemical manuscripts from the Science History Institute based on stains identified during cataloguing by BiblioPhilly.