Scholars uncover Irish translation of Persian medical text

Some of us may think we’re skilled at reusing items and making do. They’re probably right — but it’s important to remember that we’ve got nothing on medieval bookbinders.

A family that had owned a pocket-sized Latin manual about local administration since the sixteenth century recently discovered that a fifteenth-century vellum manuscript had been used in the binding.

The Guardian reports that the original work was famous Persian physician Ibn Sīna’s Canon of Medicine ... translated into Irish.

So, according to the article, the discovery was not only exciting for having found a new artifact, but also for revealing that Sīna’s scholarship had reached Ireland.

The book’s owners gave scholars permission to remove the fragment of Sīna’s translated text and have it digitized, for all to view online.

Learn more about Sīna and how his work wound up in a much less exciting treatise in the Guardian.