“Have you ever wondered why gingerbread is a common part of Christmas traditions?”

“Hindu traditions and Islam share a deeply intertwined history in the Indian subcontinent...”

“In the middle of the 19th century, Arabic-speaking immigrants began to appear among the waves of newcomers arriving in the United States...”

“Animals in scripts as symbols of meaning and the art of communicating a message...”

“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...”

“It began with a dinner in 2013...”

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

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

“Nestled in the streets of London, just northwest of St. Paul’s Cathedral, resides a...”

“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 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...”

“Few things can impact daily life in quite the way that weather does...”

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

“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...”

“The organ is not the first musical instrument that comes to mind when...”

“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...”

“...each manuscript is an artistic production and requires physical labor performed by a single individual—the scribe...”

“If you want to establish a new church, you’re likely going to need some books...”

“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...”

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

“Luqmān the Sage (also known as Luqmān al-Ḥakīm, the wise) is a legendary character in Arabic and Islamic storytelling...”

“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...”

“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...”

“Much of human history remains for us today only in the form of smaller remnants or fragments...”

“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...”

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

“Christianity has a long, rich history in India. Some even trace the origins of Christian communities in India to...”

“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.”

“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...”

“When I was a boy, the night sky always fascinated me—stars, moon, planets, nebulae, comets, and...”

“The use of tobacco in the Sahel, whether smoking, chewing, or taking as snuff, was widespread and...”

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

“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...”

“Pie. Today, for many, this tasty baked good with its short, flaky crust suggests associations of...”

“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...”

“Who hasn’t heard a fairy tale about a princess whose beauty moves the richest and...”

“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.”

“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...”

“While many artists have provided illustrations for books, some works in the Art & Photographs collection at HMML were inspired by stories...”

“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...”

“The highlights of the island included the harbor of Valletta, an elaborate and protective harbor famous for...”

“When people ask how we find new projects for HMML, I admit that sometimes they just come to us.”

“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...”

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

“This note is the sole testament to the manuscript’s remarkable journey from Egypt to Mardin, a city in...”

“In September 1647 CE, al-Ḥasan al-Ḥaymī left the port of al-Mukhā (Mocha) in...”

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

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

“On this day seventy-five years ago, an early-14th century illuminated gospel book arrived at the...”

“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...”

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

“The Monastery of Saint Macarius is one of the oldest active Coptic monasteries in Egypt.”

“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...”

“The Khalidi Library in East Jerusalem and The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library announce that the complete digitized manuscript collection...”

“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...”

“HMML is pleased to announce the acquisition of “William Shakespeare’s Second Folio” to its...”

“HMML’s Malta Study Center has completed a digitization project with Heritage Malta to...”

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...”

“L’viv is a Ukrainian city whose multicultural past survives in at least two forms: its buildings and...”

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