“While the threats that climate change poses to material history are well-known and frequently studied, researchers have tended to focus on immovable assets … Archives, because they are technically mobile, have received less attention … Sadly, relo…
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The Vatican Secret Archive isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply […]
These illuminated Christian manuscripts—at around 1,500 years old, perhaps the oldest of their kind in existence—belong to Abba Garima monastery,
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Roberta Mazza of the University of Manchester writes about her search for the origins of a Coptic fragment of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians that appeared on eBay in 2008 and ended up – like too many other pieces of dubious provenance – in the collection that forms the basis of the Museum of the […]
The tumult is extraordinary at the Athenaeum, an elegant private library on Beacon Street whose five galleried floors house a valuable collection of more than 750,000 objects, including paintings by John Singer Sargent, a first edition folio of Audubon…
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