Samurai are a well-known image of Japan, but they are as much legend as history. Our Samurai: History and Legend exhibition explores the literary concept of the samurai and the changing nature of Japanese warrior culture from the 12th to the 19th centuries.

The great warriors of Japan’s medieval period (roughly the 13th to 16th centuries) gradually gave way to a more well-defined and self-conscious warrior class that ruled over a long period of relative peace, from the 17th to the mid-19th century.

Today’s familiar images of the samurai began to take shape in the histories and vibrant popular culture of that peaceful time. During this period, records and reinterpretations of an older Japanese warrior culture helped construct the histories and myths of the samurai that today hold sway in Japan and beyond.

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This exhibition is curated by Dr Kristin Williams.

Generously supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Howard and Abby Milstein Foundation and the Friends of Cambridge University Library.

An exhibition exploring Cambridge University Library’s remarkable collection of six large volumes of around 1100 caricatures, mostly produced during the two sieges of Paris and widely distributed as coloured lithographs.

Founded in 1819, the Cambridge Philosophical Society provided an open forum for Cambridge graduates to discuss current scientific ideas and present new research. Over the last 200 years, the Cambridge Philosophical Society has played a key role in raising the profile of Cambridge’s most significant developments in natural science.

Darwin’s theory of evolution; Newton’s laws of motion; Cambridge’s first Nobel Prizewinner, Lord Rayleigh’s seminal work on wave propagation, interference and diffraction; all can be traced through the archives of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. This exhibition shows us how the activity of the Cambridge Philosophical Society underpins 200 years of discovery.

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Open during normal hours. Free admission.

This exhibition showcases some of the fruits of an ongoing collaboration between the University of Cambridge and English Heritage, focusing on the historic library at Audley End House, Essex. The discovery there of previously unknown books belonging to Sir Thomas Hoby (1530-1566), the well-known courtier and translator, has provided new insights into the multicultural and multilingual experiences of Englishmen who travelled abroad in the sixteenth century. Hoby’s broad engagement with Italian literature culminated in his translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s much-celebrated The Book of the Courtier. The profound and lasting impact which this translation had on English tastes and mores is ripe for renewed attention as we once again ponder this island’s relations with her European neighbours

Cambridge University is delighted to be working with the BBC and First Story in the Young Writers’ Award for 2019. If you are aged 14 to 18 and love writing, why not enter your story of up to 1000 words? This virtual exhibition offers a treasure trove of potential inspiration…

100 years ago the Russian Exodus started. Following the revolutions of 1917, as many as three million people fled their native land, among them many of the best representatives of early 20th-century Russian culture.  Most of the émigrés, including the writers Ivan Bunin, Aleksei Tolstoi and Nadezhda Teffi fled to Western Europe, where their determination to preserve their cultural heritage saw the effective creation of a Russia Abroad.  The University Library books which feature in this exhibition and which have never been shown before have original autographs by Bunin, Teffi, and Tolstoi.

Collecting the stories of your UL.

To coincide with the opening of our latest exhibition Tall Tales: Secrets of the Tower, Cambridge University Library is crowd sourcing the memories, stories and favourite extracts of readers past and present. The University Library building reverberates with the history of things read, knowledge created, and people met. We want to capture those moments.

In the seventeenth century, the womb was regarded as a troublesome and unpredictable organ which afflicted women with numerous ailments. To pacify the wild womb, marriage was usually prescribed, but a favoured short-term remedy was fumigation. Like a second nose, the womb was considered to be attracted to pleasant perfumes and repulsed by stench. A womb could therefore be coaxed back to its ‘rightful place’ by wafting fragrant ingredients beneath it. Smelly Remedy shows examples of this procedure from the University Library collection and examines how the remedy was visually represented to a wide readership.

Landscapes Below celebrates a period of experimental geological map-making in the 19th century, focusing on the use of colour in geological maps and on the development of a visual vocabulary for the new science.

This exhibition looks at the events of the October Revolution and the year that followed, using a wide range of material from the University Library’s collections to illustrate the dramatic timeline.  Undergraduates from the University will share in the curatorial work.