Medieval cures and more at Cambridge University Library
Get ready for our major new exhibition, the return of The Really Popular Book Club, and much more besides in 2025.
2025 promises to be another thrilling year of exhibitions, events and research projects at Cambridge University Library - one of the world's great libraries and research collections.
Our exhibitions are FREE to the public.
Booking tickets in advance ensures you can explore our exhibition centre, the gallery corridors in our iconic 1934 Giles Gilbert Scott building, and stop for some refreshments in our tearoom.
Curiouser and curiouser: medieval medicine exhibition opens in Spring 2025
Our major new exhibition in 2025 – Curious Cures: Medicine in the Medieval World – delves into the medieval mind to better understand the theories that guided the work of medical practitioners, their ideas about the care of patients, and how they developed and tested their treatments.
Building upon the Wellcome-funded research project that began in 2022, Curious Cures brings together medieval medical texts held at the University Library and across collegiate Cambridge which illuminate how our ancestors sought to deal with the ailments and maladies that plagued their society – many of which remain familiar to us today.
Cambridge University was a centre for medical study: physicians were among its members, and they bequeathed medical textbooks to the libraries of Gonville Hall, Peterhouse and King’s College.
The exhibition also explores the remedies of members of religious orders, practitioners of the art of healing or 'leechcraft', and ordinary householders and communities.
These texts, diagrams and case-notes challenge our own preconceptions about the medieval period, blurring the boundaries between science, religion and magic, between 'learned' and 'folk' medicine, and between western and non-western cultures of knowledge.
Within the pages of these precious manuscripts is a human story of life and mortality, the experience of being ill and in pain, and the desire to be cured and to live healthily.
The culmination of a two-year project to digitise, catalogue and conserve over 180 medieval medical manuscripts. The 'Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries' project was funded by a Research Resources Award in Humanities and Social Science from the Wellcome Trust.
Tickets are FREE and can be pre-booked. To get the link for pre-booking as soon it’s ready, please sign up to our What’s On mailing list.
A season of public in-person and digital events, including a public exhibition launch hosted during the Cambridge Festival, as well as book clubs, an in-conversation with the curator, a Library Late, an illuminated manuscript workshop and a comedy improv show, will allow audiences to engage further with the intriguing world of medieval manuscripts.
Curious Cures: Medicine in the Medieval World runs from March 29, 2025, to December 6, 2025. We are closed Sundays and most Bank Holidays. Please check our website for further details.
Don't miss your last chance to see
Endless Stories
You only have until February 22, 2025, to see our current exhibition Endless Stories: Manuscripts, Knowledge and Translation in the 17th Century.
The exhibition has put on display exceptionally rare manuscripts from Asia and North Africa, the majority of which are believed to be on show for the very first time.
Through these works, Endless Stories reveals how knowledge travelled thousands of miles, over hundreds of years, during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.
Chris Burgess, Head of Exhibitions and Public Programmes at the Library, said: "Ancient manuscripts are time machines, they take us back to other worlds.
“The youngest object in this exhibition is 400 years old, the oldest over 700. The age range is long, the locations varied, and the number of languages extraordinary."
Objects on display include one of the oldest surviving prose texts in Persian - a 730-year-old commentary on parts of the Qur’an from the Persianate World.
Visitors can also see the oldest known Malay Qur’anic Commentaries from Aceh, Indonesia; a Sufi book on morality and ethics, which survived a devastating earthquake in Akhsikath (Uzbekistan) in 1620; and the poetic works of Rumi, Attar, and other celebrated literary figures.
Endless Stories runs until February 22, 2025.
Endless Stories events:
book before its too late
Conservation of World Collections – 17 January. 12-1pm. £5
Join our Head of Conservation and Heritage, Kristine Rose-Beers ACR, for a tour of our exhibition Endless Stories. This tour will explore the materiality of some of the diverse objects on display and give an insight into some of the techniques used to prepare them for the exhibition.
How the World Made the West: a 4000 Year History – 30 January
Professor Josephine Quinn, historian, archaeologist and the book’s author, will be in conversation with University Librarian Dr Jessica Gardner, to make the case that millennia of global encounters, exchange and sharing created what we now call the West. The talk will be followed by the opportunity to visit the Library's Endless Stories exhibition after hours.
This book challenges the traditional and still widely-held belief that the West was a self-made miracle, building on the heritage of Greece and Rome.
British Sign Language Tour of Endless Stories – 15 February. 11-12pm FREE
Join one of Special Collections curators for a guided tour of our Endless Stories exhibition. This tour is devised for the d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing community and is delivered in British Sign Language with the Cambridge Deaf Association.
You can also watch an in-conversation YouTube video with the Endless Stories exhibition curator here
The Really Popular Book Club in 2025
Our online Really Popular Book Club returns in 2025 with powerful books that challenge us to question our ideas about race, religion, and sexuality.
The Really Popular Book Club is Cambridge University Libraries' book group. Everyone is welcome to come and discuss a really popular book with the group, library staff, and an expert on the novel. Hosted on Zoom, the Book Club is completely free and open to everyone, with avid readers attending from all over the world.
Book a FREE spot on our Really Popular Book Clubs by clicking on the date of each event. The Book Club meets monthly, so do please bookmark our website to stay up to date.
28 January, 2025
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
25 February, 2025
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
3 April, 2025
Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo
The Cambridge University Library Research Institute in 2025
The University Library Research Institute (ULRI) will continue to support ground-breaking, collections-led research in 2025, and is excited to announce several new initiatives.
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, Research England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Materialising Open Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MORPHSS) will devise ways to encourage and embed innovative open research practices within humanities and social science (HSS) disciplines.
It aims to reinvigorate openness in HSS through a researcher-led approach that will feed directly into mainstream research cultures.
The project is led by Samuel Moore (Scholarly Communication Specialist, UL) and is a collaboration with Cambridge Digital Humanities, Coventry University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Southampton. Look out for the full project announcement coming soon.
The Research Institute will continue to build its support for early career researchers through new activities including the WongAvery Visiting Scholar Exchange Programme.
Generously supported by the Avery-Tsui Foundation and in collaboration with the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego), this new initiative will enable doctoral students from the University of Cambridge and UC San Diego to undertake research focused on the Chinese Collections held at Cambridge University Library and Chinese Collection (as part of their East Asia Collection) at UC San Diego Library.
Future Nostalgia: Safeguarding the knowledge of floppy disks will also continue in 2025. Funded by a British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Research Grant and led by UL Technical Analyst Leontien Talboom, the project investigates best practice in the preservation of floppy disks.
Project lead Leontien Talboom
Project lead Leontien Talboom
Floppy disks are an important example of the significance of digital preservation and why it is needed to ensure a future for our digital heritage. Future Nostalgia will guarantee floppy disk knowledge is not lost for future generations to come.
You can keep up-to-date with ULRI research news, opportunities and events by signing up to their mailing list.
Participation in 2025: the year ahead
With generous support from HEIF (Higher Education Innovation Funding), the Participation team is looking forward to collaborating with local groups and community members to enable more people from the local area and beyond to access the UL’s unique collections and spaces, services and expertise.
From January, library taster tours for people who are new to the library or thinking about joining will be available to book through the public programme.
We are also excited to be collaborating with local organisations including Cambridgeshire Libraries, local Sixth Form Colleges, and trainee and existing teachers to design membership pathways, workshops, orientation and training that meet the needs of people wanting to use the research library and engage with our collections at greater depth.
Sandars Readership 2025
The 2024-5 Sandars Readership will be undertaken by Joan Winterkorn MBE, who will deliver the Sandars Lecture Series in late 2025.
Joan has been an independent advisor on archives and manuscripts since 2012. She began her career as an archivist in London and then a rare book librarian at Cornell University before joining Bernard Quaritch Ltd in 1979.
For more than four decades she has handled the valuation and sale of literary, historical, political, scientific and business archives.
She is a Trustee of the Friends of the National Libraries, served for 9 years on the Acceptance in Lieu Panel, and was on the Editorial Board of the Book Collector.
She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, received the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2006, and in December 2023 was awarded an MBE for services to heritage and culture.
More details on the Sandars events programme will be confirmed (and updated here) in 2025.
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