Research Award of £493,456, Wellcome Trust

Cambridge University Library is delighted to announce that it has secured a Research Resources Award of £493,456 from the Wellcome Trust, in support of a two-year project to digitise, catalogue and conserve over 180 medieval manuscripts that contain medical recipes: specifically, receptaria and non-medical manuscripts whose peripheries contain recipes.

Applications are now invited for the three Project Cataloguer positions on this project (two full-time, one part-time). The team will prepare detailed descriptions of the manuscripts' textual contents, material characteristics, and origins and provenance, and place the recipes in their material, intellectual and historical contexts. They will also produce full-text transcriptions of the approximately 8,000 medical recipes that these manuscripts contain, opening up the contents of these highly variable and hitherto unedited texts to health researchers and historians of medicine. The results of the project will be published on the Cambridge Digital Library.

This will be the first concerted effort by a group of libraries, led by Cambridge University Library, to make all of the medical recipe contents of these types of manuscript available in this manner. It will include books at Cambridge University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and twelve college libraries: Clare, Corpus Christi, Emmanuel, Gonville & Caius, Jesus, King’s, Magdalene, Pembroke, Peterhouse, Sidney Sussex, St John’s and Trinity.

The project will commence in March 2022 and will be based at Cambridge University Library.

The job advertisement and further particulars may be found on the following web-page:

https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/32395/

The deadline for applications is 2nd January 2022.

Interviews are scheduled for the week commencing 17th January 2022.

These posts are available from March 2022 for two years from the date of appointment.

Working patterns for the full-time and part-time positions can be discussed at interview stage.