An exhibition titled “Tired, Thirsty, Thoughtful,” focusing on medieval scribes, opened in Prague’s Klementinum on 25 May 2026. The exhibition is the result of the PAMELA, CoRe, and LINDAT projects led by the Faculty of Arts, Charles University.

Medieval scribes often added a note – a colophon – at the end of their transcribed manuscripts. In it, they usually stated when, where, and what they copied, and sometimes even introduced themselves. At other times, they pray or ask for prayers, apologise, complain, request remuneration, threaten book thieves, or simply play and experiment. However, they usually do not include their personal opinions or feelings, but rather set formulas that the scribes simply adopted, though often modified in various ways.

There are 30 manuscripts on display – cultural artifacts containing various unusual notes. A part of the exhibition is also available online. It is open from Tuesday to Friday, from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm, until 5 July 2026. The admission is free. If you are interested in a guided tour, please send an email at lucie.dolezalova@ff.cuni.cz.

The exhibition is accompanied by the book Za posledním řádkem: Kolofony ve středověkých rukopisech z českých zemí (Beyond the Last Line: Colophones in Medieval Manuscripts from the Czech Lands ), based on a corpus of more than 6,500 colophons in manuscripts currently held in Czech libraries. The book examines colophons in both Czech and Latin – regular and surprising, comprehensible and obscure. For philologists and historians, the book represents an attempt at a systematic analysis of the space “beyond the last line” of a transcribed text, and for others, an anthology of curiosities.