Cursed cats! They are so fond of disrupting human work, especially medieval manuscript composition. In 1420, a scribe in what is now the Netherlands discovered that a cat had urinated on a page that he had written. He ad...

The Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Is...  ...on of 30,000 of the world's most precious ancient manuscripts . Or it did until recently. On January 23rd, al-Qa...  ...t 40 of his 72 years on earth taking care of rare manuscripts . The illiterate old man, who walks with a cane an...  ...ucated elite wo...

How can you know which pages in a medieval manuscript were the most popular? Kathryn Rudy of the University of St. Andrews reasoned that the finger smudges left by readers would be a good indicator:Using a device that me...

Wound Man, as he is known among the archivists at the Wellcome Library, has had a hard life. His superpower is apparently getting wounded in many, many different ways. But this medieval manuscript illustration of him was...

Tree ring data indicates that sometime around 774 or 775 A.D., an intense burst of radiation hit the Earth. What was its source? Scientists were uncertain, but it was probably a supernova. Unfortunately, there were no re...

No, you're not looking at a secret level in a Super Mario game. This is a picture of a medieval illuminated manuscript with a touch of photoshoppery applied. Carl Pyrdum, a medieval scholar, uses our friendly plumber to...

Having to endure the mind numbing monotony of...  ...o endure the mind numbing monotony of duplicating manuscripts by hand every day of their cloistered lives, medi...