Deep inside the archives of the National Library in Prague’s Klementium, a 13th-century document has been discovered that’s exciting attention from musicologists. It contains fragments of six musical compositions for two voices and was bound inside a later manuscript.
A scrap of 1,900-year-old papyrus has revealed the salary of Gaius Messius, a Roman soldier in what is now Israel…and the bleak deductions that were made from it for essential kit and food.
German print-makers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries worked in wonderful colors across many mediums, from works of art to missals to wallpaper. Their work is explored in detail in a new publication, Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts at the British Museum by Dr. Elizabeth Savage
Restoration of a damaged artwork or artifact poses a delicate issue: while restoration can perhaps return an artifact to what it might have looked like when it was newly completed, the fact that the artifact is damaged in the first place is also part of its history.
On Monday, March 15th, Lippert will join Nicholas Lowry, poster expert at Swann Galleries, to discuss the centuries-old advertising history of books.
Hong Kong printmakers quietly documented everyday life in the city for decades. Juxtaposed with printmaking through the decades and into the 21st century, their work is now the subject of two ongoing exhibitions at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum
Italy's culture ministry has acquired the vast library and archive of Umberto Eco, the late Italian medievalist, philosopher, and writer, as an official part of the cultural heritage of the state. The acquisition guarantees the conservation of this incredible legacy, while also making it accessible to students and scholars.
Spanish and Taiwanese scholars have discovered the world’s oldest extant and largest Spanish-Chinese dictionary at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Archives. Founded in 1611 by the Dominicans, UST is the oldest university in Asia.
Kirigami (切り紙) is a style of Japanese paper folding that, unlike origami, includes cutting the paper, rather than solely folding the paper as is the case with origami. A team from Northwestern Engineering published a research piece on microstructures and nanotools, finding their inspiration in a seemingly unlikely place: kirigami.
Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, was hacked to death in Canterbury Cathedral 850 years ago and has been studied ever since, so it was generally assumed that everything that could be known about him was already explored.
Linear Elamite is a Bronze Age writing system used in Elam, a civilization that stretched in the west & southwest of Iran and a small part of southern Iraq 4500 years ago.
The iconic Powell’s bookstore in Portland Oregon has released a unisex fragrance to evoke the comforting scent of bookshops in a year where nobody could go to them.
Archaeologists have discovered tens of thousands of ice age paintings in an isolated location in the Amazonian rainforest. A full two-hour drive from San José del Guaviare, the paintings date back to over 12,000 years ago and span nearly 12 kilometers across Colombian cliff faces.
MIT Professor Regina Barzilay and MIT PhD student Jiaming Luo recently made a major development in the study of the linguistics of lost languages. They have developed a new system that has been shown to be able to automatically decipher a lost language, without needing advanced knowledge of its relation to other languages.
Ancient Egyptians used black ink for writing the main body of text, while red ink was often used to highlight headings, instructions, or keywords. Research into the composition of ink has transformed ideas around Ancient Egyptian writing practices.
