The digital outputs of the AHRC-funded project The Syriac Galen Palimpsest  based at the University of Manchester from 2015 to 2020 are now available. Our multidisciplinary team used cutting-edge imaging techniques to recover the erased text from a unique manuscript and restore a valuable witness to the scientific heritage of the Syriac Christian world.

The dataset, which is accessible in Open Access, includes a critical edition of Books 6–9 of Galen’s On Simple Drugs, presented in PDF, RTF, and Mellel formats, along with processed images of the manuscript. Further information on our editorial approach will be published in the forthcoming volume The Syriac Galen Palimpsest: A New Paradigm for Cross-Disciplinary Research (Proceedings of the British Academy), stemming from the project’s international British Academy Conference held in 2019.

Consult the files on Figshare: Pormann, Peter; Sellers, William; Bhayro, Siam; Afif, Naima; Smelova, Natalia (2025). Galen: On Simple Drugs in Syriac Translation. University of Manchester. Collection. https://doi.org/10.48420/c.7641374.v1

My contribution to the volume Retranslating the Bible and the Qur’an: Historical Approaches and Current Debates is published in Open Access. Edited by Pieter Boulogne, Marijke H. de Lang, and Joseph Verheyden, this publication brings together studies that highlight the complexity of retranslating canonical religious texts. My paper explores a double indirect Hebrew translation of the Qur’an from the eighteenth century by a Jewish convert to Christianity. It discusses how the translator’s identities are negotiated, articulated, and reconstructed through the process of retranslation. This research builds on a talk delivered in March 2021 at the “International Workshop: Qur’an and Bible,” organized by the University of Notre Dame and the ERC project “The European Qur’an”.