“The refrain “The Lord works in mysterious ways” is rarely truer than it is in the Ethiopic Miracles of Mary...”

“Considered the king of animals, lions frequently appeared on coats of arms used by...”

“Antwerp seemed, in the 16th century, to be the center of the Western world...”

“In the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles (17:34), Luke describes the ‘marketplace of ideas’ in Athens...”

“In Arabic literature, as with many cultures, dogs are viewed with some ambivalence...”

“Bird watching is typically an activity that...”

“In historical Timbuktu—as in any part of the pre-modern world—animals were...”

“The most famous weather event in Maltese history occurred in the first century CE when...”

“In describing printed books, a cataloger looks for subjects or areas of study where...”

“The term “April showers” derives from the frequency of short and regular showers that are...”

“The best-known eclipse mentioned in Muslim sources was the solar eclipse that occurred on...”

“Many of the regions where HMML has worked are no stranger to earthquakes...”

“In the days before social media, how did people share a noteworthy weather phenomena...”

“An answer to the question of what it means to be human...”

“One of the most common uses of manuscripts over the centuries is to train children in reading and writing...”

“With their 1962 children’s musical Space Adventure...”

“Dr. Arthur Voobus was many things—a scholar, pastor, teacher, and refugee in exile...”

“All of Timbuktu’s family libraries that were digitized by HMML include numerous compositions that...”

“HMML’s preservation work in India began in 2008 with the manuscript collections of...”

“Singing is one of those amazing things...”

“Although music is an aural and tactile experience, human beings also have a...”

“Among HMML’s microfilms of the Durham Cathedral Library...”

“The Arabic manuscript tradition is rich in medical works discussing remedies and...”

“The book of vows contained one manuscript...”

“Ephrem is perhaps the most widely known of all Syriac authors...”

“Grief, loss, and death itself were very much part of...”

“In the days before they were going to kill him, Fra Sylvain de Bosredon woke up early in the morning to the dull sound of...”

“The Black Death pandemic of the 14th century dramatically reshaped many cultures...”

“How do you represent grief? For Marc Chagall, the Russian-born Jewish artist...”

“Stories about saints, much like their relics, rarely remain tied to...”

“A choir of cowled monks around a shrouded casket, a body being laid into a coffin, a smiling skeletal figure, an old man sitting on a dung heap...”

“The Gaza Strip is the smallest of the two Palestinian territories in...”

“Khalīl ibn Jirjis Janāwī was a scribe, a collector of manuscripts, and an artist who was...”

“The act of hand-copying a manuscript requires specialized skills that...”

“A great opportunity to look at the interaction between manuscript and print cultures can be found in the Middle East...”

“In the mid-15th century, the invention of the printing press made books relatively easier to produce and...”

“In 1492, the abbot of a Benedictine monastery in Sponheim, Germany, wrote a small paean to scribes and the act of writing...”

“A large amount of the manuscripts digitized in Timbuktu, Mali, that we at HMML have cataloged are fragments...”

“HMML’s Art & Photographs collection is full of fragments of the 15th and 16th century...”

“Johann Gottfried Wetzstein served as honorary Prussian consul in Damascus, Syria, from 1849 to 1861...”

“When I arrived at the Palazzo Falson in Mdina, Malta...”

“Cultural losses continue to beset communities around the world, especially in areas subject to armed conflict...”

“Manuscripts are known for their idiosyncratic nature...”

“What would you do if someone handed you a page that had clearly been torn out of a book...”

“In the early decades of HMML, the region beyond the proverbial Iron Curtain was out of reach.”

“The Great ʿUmarī Mosque in Gaza is the largest and oldest mosque in the Gaza Strip...”

“When Father Oliver Kapsner began to microfilm the medieval manuscripts at Kremsmünster Abbey, Austria, in late 1964, he could not have imagined...”

“Jacques Hnizdovsky had arrived in the city the year before as a...”

“Pope Paul IV (1476–1559) issued the Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559 to publicly identify books the...”

“The Lebanese poet, journalist, and linguist Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī (1847–1906) has gained fame as a...”

“Printing reached Ethiopia rather late. In Europe, texts were occasionally printed in Ethiopic characters from...”

“Maḥmūd ibn ʻUmar al-Zamakhsharī did not have an easy childhood. He was born in 1075 CE into a...”

“A book you would love to read is lost, altered, destroyed, buried, hidden, left unpublished, unwritten, banned.”

“The advent of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century led to...”

“ʻUmar ibn Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr al-Turūdī, was a scholar from Kebbi, present-day northern...”

“Angels occupy an important place in monotheistic religions. They are mainly presented as celestial beings...”

“HMML’s first library partnerships were to photograph the collections of prominent libraries in...”

“In summer of 1917, the New York-based artist Rockwell Kent made a bold decision.”

“Rainbows are optical illusions caused by the reflection, refraction, and...”

“The Syriac Book of Medicines is a fascinating compendium of medical lore from the...”

“Born Ben-Zion Weinman in Starokostiantyniv, Ben-Zion came to New York City in...”

“Today, depending on what communities you are a part of, your concept of a year may follow a calendar that is...”

“Astronomical observation is built into the most basic religious practices of the...”

“In Syriac Christian communities, astrological texts were sometimes appended to medical books and...”

“Among the well-known biblical narratives is that of the twins Jacob and Esau, and...”

“In 1744, the French Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary established a convent in ʻAynṭūrah, Lebanon, known in Arabic as...”

“A group of women cluster together, several clutching the handles of lidded pots...”

“When Cláudia Garradas learned about the opportunity to digitally preserve the archives of the Monastery of Santa Ursula...”

“There are several manuals in the Arabic literary tradition describing the profession of the...”

“Between 1585 to 1600 Maarten de Vos designed 141 engravings depicting hermits.”

“Who doesn’t love a good glass of wine? White, red, or something in between, authors throughout history...”

“It was the late 14th century, and Shīrāz was the city of poets.”

“The history of Arabian Nights stories in Christian communities is still imperfectly understood.”

“On a shelf in the Syriac Orthodox Church of Saint George in Aleppo is a manuscript copied in Arabic Garshuni...”

“This year, HMML received a large donation of Russian icons from the collection of Edmund Gronkiewicz...”

“While some elements of the story are fiction, others are clearly inspired by real events in Khaybar.”

“Biblical narratives often leave the audience wanting to know a bit more.”

“Despite having been contested in Islamic history by powerful groups rejecting them as illegitimate practices, magic and...”

“We live in a world ravaged by a pandemic, by wars, by all manner of catastrophic and...”

“HMML’s digital collections include entertaining stories from a wide range of linguistic and...”

“Have you ever heard a great joke, but then later when you tried to recount it for someone else, you couldn’t remember it?”

“At many points in its history, Jerusalem has been one of the world’s most important cultural crossroads...”

“Mobility was a central feature of individuals, societies, and texts within Muslim West Africa’s...”

“In 1945, a pharmacist living in Lebanon—Manaseh Kaprielian—presented a 17th-century Armenian manuscript to...”

“Rome has long been a destination for travelers from around the world.”

“The great Age of Sail conjures in our minds vast stretches of ocean populated by...”

“In the mid-19th century, a group of French artists began to reevaluate the art of...”

“Towards the middle of the 15th century, the Ethiopian Emperor Zar’a Yā‘eqob, a prominent theologian and scholar, faced...”

“The increased activity of Malta’s ports after the Aragonese conquest in 1283 led to a...”

“In West Africa knowledge of the Qur’an was often combined with local pharmacological traditions to...”

“Many medical works from antiquity were translated into Syriac and transmitted through the...”

“Herbals—books describing the medicinal use of plants—have been important scientific sources for...”

“The disastrous impact of plague epidemics in the Middle East has been documented in numerous accounts...”

“Yeɗi Sanba Ɓooyi was a scholar who belonged to the Fulani, a traditionally nomadic people who...”

“People in past centuries would sometimes use the blank flyleaves and margins of manuscripts to...”

“Yeɗi belonged to the Fulani people, one of West Africa’s many ethnic groups, which...”

“The Archivum de Piro in Valletta, Malta preserves a small invoice and...”

“Along with the direct physical resistance to this unjust trade, the text shows...”

“HMML’s Malta Study Center has completed the digitization of the important Lettere consolari fonds now held at the...”

“HMML’s Malta Study Center signed an agreement with the Archconfraternity of Our Lady of Mount Carmel...”

“HMML’s very own palimpsest fragment recently underwent high energy x-ray imaging at...”

“HMML began digitization at the Pontificio Collegio Armeno (PCA) in Rome in 2018.”

“This year marks twenty years since the first significant efforts were made to use multispectral imaging (MSI) to reveal hidden...”

Digital copies of the Rossi, Ansaldi and Caetani Yemeni manuscript collections now available in vHMML Reading Room.

“HMML’s Malta Study Center has completed the digitization of 90 manuscripts and rare Melitensia located at the...”

“Ted Erho, a doctoral student at Durham University in England, recently spent six weeks at HMML studying...”

“When the Benedictine monks came to Minnesota in 1856, they brought with them a chest packed with the...”