Search

15 Jun 2024: Search. One of the great privileges of working in The Parker Library is the opportunity to slowly discover the collections, to spend a few minutes looking at a manuscript whose shelfmark you don’t recognise, to talk to readers working on things you’ve never considered, to share in the excitement of new discoveries, and to learn just a little bit more about an item, bit by bit. One could spend a lifetime getting to know the collection, but even given many such lifetimes, there would still be many items that I will never even begin to understand; for now, they must remain filed away in memory, black holes sitting next to the tiny pinpricks of light that are connected to their neighbors on the shelves. Every year we welcome the students from the Corpus Christi Medicine and English Summer School Program to The Parker Library. During each of these visits we give the participants a tour of our current exhibition and then bring out a few items that we believe may be of particular interests to the students that they are allowed to (gently) explore as we talk about the history of the book. This year, I was delighted to share MS 227, Curing Thousands of Diseases, an eight volume Chinese work that was printed in the 1660s, and one of my