The first exhibition of the European Qur’an project (EuQu) supported by the European Research Council will take place at the Weltmuseum in Vienna from September 18, 2024, to August 24, 2025. This year-long exhibition is part of a series exploring the presence and impact of the Qur’an in Europe.

Visitors will have the opportunity to discovers historical artefacts, manuscripts, and multimedia presentations which illustrate the Qur’an’s role in European intellectual, artistic, and religious history from the Middle Ages to the present day.

The exhibition opening will take place on 17 September 2025. Check the museum website to register.

New publication: Naima Afif, Peter E. Pormann, William I. Sellers, Natalia Smelova, Siam Bhayro, “GalenQt. A New Software Tool for Recovering Lost Text and its Use for the Reconstruction of the Lacuna in Galen’s Simple Drugs, Book 8”, in C. Rapp, J. Gruskova, G. Kessel, G. Rossetto (eds), New Light on Old Manuscripts: Recent Advances in Palimpsest Studies, Veröffentlichungen zur Byzanzforschung, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 2023, p. 441–463.

As part of my collaboration with the GREgORI Project – UCLouvain, Belgium – which provides scholars with lemmatized corpora in many languages, I have worked with Bastien Kindt on the lemmatisation and morphological analysis of:  Books 1 (ch. 1-10), 6, 7, 8 of the Greek text of Galen’s On Simple Drugs and Discourse 13 (S2 version) of Gregory of Nazianzus in Syriac (+than 1000 pages of outputs).

This large amount of data is now accessible through an online, open-access interface that integrates a concordancer, text browser, and editions viewer.

You can now explore how to use this digital tool here and make use of it.

The Congress ‘Humanizing Digitalization. Digitalizing Humanities’ organised by El Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid took place online on the 20 and 21th October 2021. In the first session devoted to text analysis, I explained how to create a multilingual corpus (in Latin, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic) by using the textual analysis software Sketch Engine and how to use this corpus to construct a glossary with Lexonomy an open-source, web-based dictionary writing and publishing system.

I am very happy to present you the result of my online collaboration with the John Rylands Library  in 2020. I have compiled TEI XML descriptions of Syriac manuscripts from the John Rylands Research Institute and Library’s collection.

This material was presented in the exhibition Seeing the Invisible (2019-2020) and is now accessible on the Manchester Digital Collections.

The University of Notre Dame and the ERC project The European Qur’an are organizing an International Workshop: Qur’an and Bible ( March 22-26, 2021).

This three-day event will explore the various ways in which Medieval and Early Modern Jewish, Christian and Muslim readers relate Biblical literature and Qur’an.

In line with my current research at the University of Copenhagen, I will present a paper, “Jesus and the Bible in a 18th-Century Translation of the Qur’an into Hebrew”. This contribution aims to discuss the relationship between the Qur’an and the Bible in an 18th-century Hebrew translation of the Qur’an, derived from Glazemaker’s Dutch, which in turn was based on Du Ryer’s French version.

New publication: Naima Afif, Peter E. Pormann, William I. Sellers, Natalia Smelova, Siam Bhayro, « The Syriac Text of Book Nine of On Simple Drugs. New Evidence from the Syriac Galen Palimpsest » in Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences (Galen’s Treatise On Simple Drugs: Interpretation and Transmission), 70/184-185, 2020, pp. 130-149. Access through the publisher’s website.

Discover how our research team at the University of Manchester is uncovering the lost heritage of Syriac Christians through the exhibition ‘Seeing the Invisible’.

Curated by Professor Peter Pormann and Dr Natalia Smelova, the  exhibition will run from October 2019 to March 2020 at the John Rylands Library and will display the Syriac Galen palimpsest for the first time in the UK.

For more information, see here.

The Syriac Galen Palimpsest is an exceptional manuscript containing the Syriac translation of a pharmacological treatise by Galen. Our team at the University of Manchester is organising a two-day conference under the auspices of the British Academy. This conference will gather scientists and humanities scholars who will discuss the methods employed to decipher the palimpsest and the contribution of Eastern Christians in the history of medicine.

More details: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/exploring-syriac-galen-palimpsest-ancient-drugs-synchrotron-radiation/

Our latest paper in now published:

A. Afif, S. Bhayro, P. E. Pormann, W. I. Sellers, N. Smelova, « On Digamma and the Armenian Earth », in Le Muséon, 131 (2018), p. 391-414.

Abstract:

The treatise On the Mixture and Power of Simple Drugs (Περὶ κράσεως καὶ δυνάμεως τῶν ἁπλῶν φαρμάκων) by Galen of Pergamum (129-216) is transmitted in a number of Greek manuscripts, and was translated into Syriac and Arabic. One Greek manuscript, Vatican Urbinas gr. 67, contains a passage from book IX about digamma and ‘Armenian earth’, not transmitted in the majority of Greek manuscripts and not included in the standard Greek edition by Kühn (1826). Galen called ‘Armenian earth’ a mineral that probably was orpiment, although the exact identification remains problematic. We now present a critical edition of the Syriac translation of part of this passage on the basis of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest; discuss the historic use of digamma; and explore the importance of Galen’s attestation of Armenian words.