Benjamin Breen on the remarkable story of George Psalmanazar, the mysterious Frenchman who successfully posed as a native of Formosa (now modern Taiwan) and gave birth to a meticulously fabricated culture with bizarre customs, exotic fashions, and its own invented language.
The Kitab al-Bulhan, or Book of Wonders, is an Arabic manuscript dating mainly from the late 14th century A.D. and probably bound together in Baghdad during the reign of Jalayirid Sultan Ahmad (1382-1410). The manuscript is made up of astrological, astronomical and geomantic texts compiled by Abd al-Hasan Al-Isfahani, as well as a dedicated section of full-page illustrations, with each plate titled with 'A discourse on....', followed by the subject of the discourse (a folktale, a sign of the zodiac, a prophet, etc.). Housed at: Wikimedia Commons | From: Oxford Digital Library Underlying Work: PD Worldwide | Digital Copy: PD
This morning the Wellcome Library announced its release of 100,000 of its historical images under an open license (CC-BY - meaning they are free for any re-use provided that the Wellcome Library is credited). The range and quality of the images released is phenomenal. The collection covers more than a thousand years of imagery relating to the history of medicine, including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements - from medieval Persian anatomy to the satirical prints of Rowlandson and Gillray. This move by the Wellcome is yet another recent example of a hugely respected institution releasing digitisations of its
