Cambridge Digital Library

Treasures of the Library

Many items within the Library’s collections deserve to be highlighted. This may be because of their historical importance, uniqueness, beauty, fascinating content, or perhaps their personal associations. In this special collection within the Cambridge Digital Library we will draw together books, manuscripts and other items from across our collections that are especially significant. Many of them have been displayed in Library exhibitions in the past – now they can be accessed at any time, from anywhere in the world, and browsed cover to cover.

Darwin-Hooker Letters

No single set of letters was more important to Darwin than those exchanged with his closest friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker.

The 1,200 letters published here are a connecting thread that spans forty years of Darwin's mature working life from 1843 until his death in 1882. They bring into sharp focus every aspect of Darwin's scientific work throughout that period, and illuminate the mutual friendships he and Hooker shared with other scientists, but they also provide a window of unparalleled intimacy into the personal lives of the two men.

Newton Papers

Cambridge University Library is pleased to present the first items in its Foundations of Science collection: a selection from the Papers of Sir Isaac Newton. The Library holds the most important and substantial collection of Newton's scientific and mathematical manuscripts and over the next few months we intend to make most of our Newton papers available on this site.

This collection features some of Newton's most important work from the 1660s, including his college notebooks and 'Waste Book'.

The Cairo Genizah Collection

The Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library is the world's largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts.

For a thousand years, the Jewish community of Fustat (Old Cairo), placed their worn-out books and other writings in a storeroom (genizah) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, and in 1896–97 the Cambridge scholar, Dr Solomon Schechter, arrived to examine it. He received permission from the Jewish community of Egypt to take away what he liked, and he brought 193,000 manuscripts back to Cambridge.

Hebrew Manuscripts

Cambridge University Library holds one of the world’s foremost collections of Hebrew manuscripts, on account of the University’s long interest in the literature of Judaism. Chief among them are the famous Nash Papyrus, one of the earliest known artefacts containing the words of the Hebrew Bible, and the Cambridge Mishnah, a complete codex of this work copied in fifteenth-century Byzantium. With 1000 items acquired over more than 500 years, the Collection ranges wide from Samaritan Hebrew Bibles to important compositions of halakha and exegesis, through to manuscripts of philosophical, kabbalistic and scientific works.

Islamic Manuscripts

Islamic manuscripts were first added to the Library’s collections in the 1630s and since then, the holdings have grown substantially both in size and diversity. A number of our religious and literary texts, outstanding for their content, rarity, and historical value, have been added to the Library’s ‘Foundations of Faith’ collection; many of these examples also have beautiful illuminated pages. Our online selection  also includes examples of some of the earliest existing Qur'anic fragments which are known to date from the first centuries of the Hijra.

Christian Works

A selection of some of our finest Christian manuscripts and early printed books, from the Bible to the liturgy, spanning over 1000 years of worship and debate. From the early bilingual New Testament known as the Codex Bezae to the tenth-century pocket Gospel Book the Book of Deer, and from a beautifully illuminated sixteenth-century book of services and ceremonies commissioned for a Cistercian abbot in Northern Flanders to a sumptuous Life of St Edward the Confessor produced for royalty in mid-thirteenth-century England, the collection includes works of scripture, theology and liturgy, reflecting both Church ceremonial and private devotion.

Sanskrit Manuscripts

The AHRC-funded project “The intellectual and religious traditions of South Asia as seen through the Sanskrit manuscript collections of the University Library, Cambridge” has begun a systematic investigation aiming to produce a full catalogue of the manuscripts and to digitise a substantial proportion of them. These comprise more than 1,600 works in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Tamil and other ancient and medieval South Asian languages, produced over a time-span of more than 1,000 years. We present an initial selection from the collection to demonstrate its richness.

Spanish Chapbooks

Cambridge University Library has an impressive and rich collection of what have been termed ‘no-books’. Usually referred to in English as chapbooks, and in Spanish as sueltos, or pliegos sueltos (loose leaves or folded loose leaves), these predecessors of the yellow press provide a fascinating bird’s eye view of popular culture from the eighteenth century onwards. They show us, among other things, versions of how forms of wrongdoing (of different kinds, and of different degrees of severity) were perceived, or were presented to the populace as constructed forms of wrongdoing.

Board of Longitude

The papers of the Board of Longitude held in Cambridge University Library include remarkable and invaluable details of a vast range of maritime, astronomical and navigational activities between the mid-eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Our initial selection includes the Board’s confirmed minutes and papers from the astonishing Pacific and Antarctic voyage of James Cook in 1772-1775.