Do you frequently search the catalogue of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) for western medieval manuscripts? Then you must have noticed important changes lately. Some 1800 summary catalogue records in Dutch were replaced by more elaborate descriptions in English. Furthermore, the catalogue interface…

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has been able to acquire four remarkable medical manuscripts partly thanks to support from the Friends of Leiden University Libraries, the Pieter van Foreest Stichting and the Van de Sande Fonds. All four are largely written in Dutch and can be dated between 1595 and…

Recently, some changes have been made to the catalog of Leiden University Library, making more than 1000 digitized codices more accessible than before. The 'Inventory of Western Medieval Manuscripts Held by Leiden University Libraries,' created by manuscript curator André Bouwman, is also now available:…

Over 600 manuscripts and early prints have been made digitally available by Leiden University Libraries (UBL) via the Europeana platform. In the project 'The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages’ (ARMA), seven European heritage institutions added 30,000 digitised medieval items to Europeana’s database…

From 2 to 4 September 2024, the University of Fribourg organizes a three-day graduate course on multilingual manuscripts in the middle ages. Apply before: April 8, 2024.

Several of the most important manuscript collections in the Leiden University Libraries (UBL) Special Collections, comprising 443 extremely rare and often unique volumes, have been made available in Open Access via Digital Collections. The available manuscript collections include the private collections…

Persian stories with beautiful miniatures, letters on papyrus from Egyptian traders and medicinal manuscripts translated from Greek and edited in Arabic. Studium Generale organizes a lecture series on the world-famous manuscripts from the Middle East collection of Leiden University Libraries (UBL).…

Mariken Teeuwen started at the Institute for History as a professor by special appointment of Script Culture of the Middle Ages on 1 March. ‘I’m looking forward to doing research together with students.’

This study addresses and explains the issue of negative descriptions of the Arab Other in modern Iranian thought.

UNESCO has recognized an international set of fifteen manuscripts about Ferdinand Magellan's first circumnavigation of the globe and the three Hikayat Aceh manuscripts as World Heritage. The manuscripts are inscribed in the global UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This list contains documentary heritage…

Saeedeh Shahnahpur defended her thesis on 13 September 2016.

The physical features of twelfth-century manuscripts from the Flemish abbey of Ter Duinen – such as script, page layout, and reading aids – show how their readers organized, interpreted, and transmitted knowledge.

The center invites internationally renowned scholars to spend time at Leiden to teach graduate students in the BA and MA programmes and in custom made seminars, and to give public lectures. Specialisations vary covering so far manuscript studies, history, anthropology, literature, art history and religious…

The aim of this research is to investigate the informative potential of drawings and decorations in Italian secular cantata manuscripts from the seventeenth century.

The catalogue includes some of the most famous early medieval manuscripts, decorated with luxury materials and exceptionally beautiful script, ornament and illustrations.

The School of Celtic Studies (DIAS) is organizing a conference on medieval multilingual manuscripts. The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars working on medieval bilingual or multilingual sources from a variety of linguistic backgrounds, geographical areas, and literary genres. It will…

Due to the unrest in the Middle East, many ancient Syrian manuscripts are no longer available or have even been destroyed. Professor of Old Testament Bas ter Haar Romeny received 77 microfilms of Syrian manuscripts, enabling him and his PhD students to research these ‘lost’ manuscripts.

Radboud University Nijmegen is advertising a position for a Postdoctoral Researcher in Medieval Manuscript Studies (0.8 FTE) to be part of the research team of the ERC-funded project "Patristic Sermons in the Middle Ages. The Dissemination, Manipulation, and Interpretation of Late-Antique Sermons in…

The publication by the group of Catherijne Knibbe was awarded the 2016 AAPS Pharmaceutical Research Meritorious Manuscript Award.

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of the Faculty of Humanities with two partners in Uzbekistan.

Charles Melville, Professor of Persian History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Pembroke College, will be the Central Asia Visiting Professor from 20 November until 28 November 2017. Charles Melville will deliver a guest lecture on Thursday, 23 November, co-organized with LUCIS, and a masterclass…

This book presents an in-depth grammatical description of Kumzari, a mixed language spoken in remote villages on the Musandam Peninsula in northern Oman.

Professional scribes in the Middle Ages produced advertisement sheets with which they presented themselves to potential clients. In this lecture Erik Kwakkel will show known and new examples of such advertisement sheets and interpret their importance for our understanding of the culture of writing in…

This project intends to provide an integrated linguistic assessment of the hypothesised migration route of the Tocharians.

Sanjar Golomov is a senior scholar at the Al-Biruni Institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In Leiden he will deliver two lectures and one masterclass for MA and PhD students as part of the Erasmus Mobility Plus project between Leiden University and the Al-Biruni Institute. The project is coordinated and…

Turkic nomadic rulers established large empires in the Middle East and Asia between the 11th and 14th centuries. This project will explore the link between their political ideology and the production of art and literature, via the cultural heritage of five cities along the Silk Road: Kashgar, Samarkand,…

Manuscripts that look like a comic book, that's how you could describe the manuscripts of the Dongba people from China. The manuscripts are one of the last examples of a so-called pictographic script that can only be interpreted by Dongba priests, shamans, who have knowledge of the ancient Dongba cu…

This two-day international conference organised by the 'Innovating Knowledge' Project aims to bring together researchers applying network analysis to premodern manuscripts and manuscript texts.

It is time for the fifth lecture in the series Manuscript Mondays. We shall have two speakers. Jesse Keskiaho (University of Helsinki, Finland) will start with a talk about the soul. In the second talk Evina Steinova will tell us more about the medieval encyclopaedia. The talks will be followed by a…

On Monday 23 January 2023 J.T.P. (Hans) de Bruijn passed away at the age of 91. Until 1995 he held the Chair of New Persian Language and Culture at Leiden University.

Researchers from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries and from universities in the Netherlands have used high-tech imaging to uncover the details of a rare Mexican codex dating from before the colonisation of America.

This PhD research sets out to unravel and explain the socio-structural and cultural impacts of oil-industrialization on the local Bakhtiari community in general and the industrial laborers it provided in specific.

The Persian Empire (539-330 BCE) was the first world empire in history. At its height, it united a territory stretching from present-day India to Libya - and it would take 2,000 years before significantly larger empires emerged in early modern Eurasia. This territorial sweep is both a source of fascination…

On 15 February 2023 Uzume Wijnsma successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

“BABYLON” investigates the extent of the similarities between Babylonian and post-exilic forms of cultic and social organization and explores the question how Babylonian models could have influenced the restoration effort in Jerusalem.

Lecture, Worlds to Discover: Manuscripts from the Muslim World

Women behind the front play an important role in a large proportion of Iranian novels, written on the Iran and Iraq-war (1980-1988). But their martyrdom is an uncommon theme. Saeedeh Shahnahpur will give a lecture on this subject on 16 February.

This project investigates the full ecosystem of Middle Dutch prayerbooks in order to answer questions about their role in – and impact on – religion, culture, and society in the late medieval Low Countries.

Course, LUCIS Summer School

In his VIDI project “Turning Over a New Leaf: Manuscript Innovation in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance” (2010-2015) Erik Kwakkel and his team studied how books and reading developed under influence of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, a period in which Europe went through a variety of cultural and intellectual…

Classics and Ancient Civilizations (Research) covers two years and can be studied in four programmes, one of them is the Hebrew and Aramaic Studies specialisation. When you choose to study this programme you will both be guided through the broadness relevant sub-disciplines, as well as gradually led…

The global population speaks approximately 7,000 different languages and approximately half of the world’s population is bilingual. The unique orthographic characteristics of different languages can help us to gain insight into the seemingly simple process of transforming written to spoken words (i.e.,…

The focus of my research project are the archival scribes who wrote private legal documents in ancient Babylonia. Thousands of such records from the first millennium BCE have survived to this day. These documents were written on clay in cuneiform script, using Akkadian language. My sources are selected…

At Leiden University you can study Islam and Muslim societies within two Dutch-language BA and various MA programmes and specializations.