Case 5: Middle Eastern Manuscripts 1: Sciences
At the centre of the exhibition are three display cases representing St John’s College’s small but significant collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts. Fifteen of the College’s twenty-one Arabic or Persian manuscripts were donated by Archbishop William Laud and eight of these had previously been owned by the courtier and diplomat Kenelm Digby (1603-1665). Apart from three Qurans, all of these manuscripts were scientific works, mostly astronomical. All of the College’s Middle Eastern scientific manuscripts were donated by Archbishop Laud.
In the same year as the formal opening of the Canterbury Quad and his new library at St John’s took place, William Laud, then chancellor of Oxford University, introduced the position of Laudian Professor of Arabic (now Abdulaziz Saud AlBabtain Laudian Professor) at Oxford University in 1636. Scholars at the time were particularly interested in the Arabic language and in the Islamic sciences, especially astronomy.
The first display case presents two manuscripts of Ulugh Beg’s New Tables of the Sultan, the original Persian work (MS 151) and an Arabic translation (MS 91). One of St John’s few medieval manuscripts from the Middle East is Nazam al-Din al-Nisaburi’s The Explication of the “Memoir” (MS 103). An example of Middle Eastern mathematics is Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Revision of the Principles of Geometry by Euclid (MS 145).
