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16
Nov

Printed Books from the National Library of Medicine

In 2022, the National Library of Medicine in Prague provided access to four printed books from the first half of the 19th century. Three of them, including the oldest, which deals with smallpox vaccination (Erste Fortsetzung der Geschichte der Vaccination in Böhmen from 1805, shelf mark T 528/2), were printed in Prague. The fourth, Chirurgische lithographirte Tafeln (shelf mark T 537), is of foreign origin – it was printed in Graz probably in 1827.

16
Nov

Manuscripts from the National Library of the Czech Republic

Another group of digitised medieval manuscripts of the National Library of the Czech Republic comprises ten volumes. These are codices created over a wide time span. The oldest of them are a binder’s volume of various originally separate books of the Bible with glosses (shelf mark III.E.3) and a homily on the Gospels by Saint Gregory the Great, Pope (VI.C.25). The other manuscripts come from the 14th and 15th centuries; apart from theological and preaching texts, they also contain miscellaneous educational works. Czech authors are represented by the works recorded in the codex VI.C.11: these include an exposition of the Book of Psalms by Mikuláš of Rakovník and a treatise by Štěpán of Páleč, De aequivocatione nominis ecclesia. German-language texts are contained in the manuscripts VI.C.27 (instructions for growing fruit trees) and IV.E.26 (the contents of individual Psalms).

12
Oct

A Collective Volume from the Olomouc Research Library

The Olomouc Research Library has digitised a collective volume from the first half of the 15th century (shelf mark M II 55). It contains the speeches of an envoy of the Council of Basel, Juan de Palomar, and other anti-Hussite works as well as writings of the Chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Charlier de Gerson, and shorter texts, including the bulls of Pope Martin V.

12
Oct

Medieval Manuscripts from the National Library of the Czech Republic

The first part of the manuscripts digitised from the collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic in 2022 comprises 27 medieval codices placed under the shelf marks I–VI. Most of the manuscripts are of Czech origin and were written in the 14th and 15th centuries. In terms of content, they mainly include various theological writings and collections of sermons. Among the works of Czech authors, access has been provided to the commentary of Jan Rokycana on two letters of the Apostle Paul (shelf mark IV A 24). Some volumes also contain works on the natural sciences – for instance a treatise on medicines, probably by Nicholas of Salerno (III E 13), a medical compendium (I G 23) and the astrological work Liber introductorius ad iudicia stellarum by Guido Bonatti de Forlivio (IV B 10). Liturgical manuscripts are represented, for example, by a 14th-century hymnal of Friars Minor (VI C 20b), a Cistercian missal from the turn of the 14th century (I E 10) and a book of sequences from the turn of the 16th century (VI C 15). A work important for the history of German literature is the collection I C 40, which contains, among other things, Heinrich Seuse’s Büchlein der Ewigen Weisheit, Irmhart Öser’s translation of Rabbi Samuel’s letter to Rabbi Isaac, and the so-called ‘Münchner Apostelbuch’.

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