More than 200 rare scientific manuscripts, books, maps, amulets, and magical texts have been brought together from renowned collections in Europe, Canada, Israel, Great Britain, and the United States specifically for this exhibition. The most famous among these is a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls containing chapters 81 to 85 from the Book of Psalms: fragments from the scrolls have been in Canada on only two other occasions. The exhibition will have an Assyrian cuneiform tablet from the seventh century BCE that describes treatments for eye ailments, a first edition Copernicus, and several texts by Maimonides, including one with marginal notes by Martin Luther. Also featured, in a rare Latin translation, is an Arabic medical book written by a Jew, demonstrating the international and inter-faith nature of the medieval scientific endeavour.

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"The books and manuscripts assembled here" Barry Levy writes in the introduction to the catalogue, "can be examined from a number of perspectives. Each is part of the history of science and contains interesting data on the pre-modern evolution of the quest to understand 'the world and fullness thereof'."