For those of you excited about the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017 (its never too early, right?), check out the Refo500 Foundation (NL: Stichtung Refo500), which just launched an English version of their web-site detailing various exhibitions, trips, conferences, seminars, and so forth. The first council meeting for its US complement, Refo500 Council North America, will meet in June on the Emory Law School campus in Atlanta, GA. The first stateside Reformation conference in the US will be held at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, KY on September 27th -28th. More … “Refo500 @ SBTS in Louisville, KY - Sept. 2010″

For those of us in the humanities, theology, philosophy, and other such fields heavily reliant on rare books, I have to say I just read this in the Wall Street Journal (and this, this, and this) regarding Google Books new business plan and swallowed hard. Dare I dream that this will affect only copyrighted books? I am a little skeptical, but here’s hoping judiciaries internationally allow public domain content to remain public domain even online. Google does have to settle the copyright/public domain/institutional/international patrimony issues surrounding the rare books they have scanned to date before they could sell them I suppose. Of course, technically they are Google’s images, but I hope that for educational purposes they will remain open. I was comforted just a little to read from this blog, “For now, Google Editions will only allow users to read in-print books, since Google can’t yet distribute out-of-print books.” I also have to wonder where the DOJ will take this issue given their Feb 5 stance against Google.

… for some reason, I have a sudden urge to download like mad …

ADDENDUM: It appears it may be that as usual we are dependent on Google’s generosity, as the issue of selling out of print books is out of print copyrighted books. However, one of Google’s product manager posted this 9 months ago. Hmm. … still downloading.

This Swiss digitization project has made quite a splash in the last week or so. If you are interested in rare 16th century works published in Switzerland, you really must check out www.e-rara.ch. This represents a digitization project among the following Swiss institutions at the moment: the Bibliothèque de Genève, ETH-Library Zürich, Basel University Library, University of Bern, and the Zürich Central Library. The images of rare works are publicly available for free, in high quality, for download in PDF, and the site is multi-lingual. At the moment there are well over 800 works ranging from16th - 19th c. works, but the project leader at ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Dr. Franziska Geisser, states that more than 10k works should be available by the end of 2011. That’s about 2.5 million pages of rare Swiss books! The original announcements were posted on the E-lib.ch blog  in French and German, for a news article from a Zürich news outlet (NZZ) try here.

In addition to the normal search options, it is possible to search by publisher. This is quite a helpful feature when tracking down rare editions in a certain time frame. Overall, the site is exceptionally well done and easy to use. Enjoy! I have found such treasures as Sadoleto’s 1540 letter to the council of Geneva, Calvin’s 1547 comments on the Council of Trent, Calvin’s 1550 Institutio, Bullinger’s 1532 commentary on Hebrews, Daneau’s Ethices Christianae (1582), and Zwingli’s 1530 De Vera et Falsa Religione.

I must say I would not have known of this site without the reference from a good friend in Geneva and fellow doctoral student. Thanks Albert!

For yet another 19th century Latin Dictionary, Try this one. It is roughly 950 pages, and is primarily geared towards Classical Latin (i.e. pre-Augustan/Imperial Latin) based on the 2 volume German-Latin dictionary of Karl Ernst Georges Ausfuhrliches Latinisch-Deutsches Handworterbuch (Leipzig: Siebente Auflage) vol 1 | vol 2. By the way here is another 19th c. Latin-English dictionary published in the UK based on an earlier edition of Georges.

What happens when two French Renaissance men are in exile, the one a man of letters the other a distinguished theologian? They write a psalter, of course! Clement Marot and Theodore Beza collaborated on this historically influential version of the psalter while Marot was out of favor with the French court and residing in Geneva.

Les Pseaumes de David Mis en Rime Francoise Par Clement Marot & Theodore de Beze (Paris: Anthoine Vincent, 1565) PDF

Right. I don’t speak Basque either, but thanks to a comment on the post-Reformation Digital Library site I was able to download a copy of Theodore Beza’s 1559 Confession de la foy Christienne from the Bizkaiko Foru Librutegia. I also downloaded a very rare copy of Alfonso Salmeron’s commentary, such as it is, on the whole New Testament (Mastricht - a 17th c. Reformed theologian and exegete at Utrecht - goes after Salmeron - a 16th c. Jesuit exegete - in a few places, so I needed to reference this). I also found quite a bit of other Spanish theologians from the 16th and 17th century, including a 1689 work against Reformed Theology by a Jesuit theologian, Didaco de la Fuente Hurtado (If you want this work search by author name Fuente due to old Spanish nobility cognomens and such, even though Voetius frequently seems to cite him as simply Hurtado).

There is a trick to downloading though since it does not save directly to PDF. So if you want a highly compressed but good quality PDF, you need to “print” to file. If you have Adobe Acrobat Standard or better, this is no problem. If you have some other PDF print driver, it may work I haven’t tried. I will say that if you “save” rather than print, you may run into problems as I did the first time around as it is a non-descript “FILE” extension that Adobe reader and acrobat do not like.

If you are feeling adventuresome, here is your phrase book for searches: AUTOREA = author; IZENBURUA = title; ARG. DATUAK = (perhaps) Place, Publication, Date as it appears in the language of the work; GAIA = topic; SIGNATURA = shelfmark. Make sure that under Katalogoa you select: Librutegi Digitala.

If you are not feeling adventuresome, here is the English version of the site.

As far as the shelf mark is concerned, you can browse the works around it. So when I found Hurtado’s work, I also found a few other works in a Jesuit and Molinist vein such as Francisco Palanco’s Tractatus de Providentia Dei concordata cum humana libertate, et sanctitate diuina. That is quite a helpful layout for a digital library.

Enjoy!

Meeter Center Launches New Web-based Resource for Reformation and Post-Reformation Studies

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (November 5, 2009) — A newly-available research tool, sponsored by the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies and the Hekman Library at Calvin College and Seminary, promises to aid the work of scholars from around the world. The Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL) is a select bibliography of primary source documents focusing on early modern theology and philosophy, spanning publicly-accessible collections from major research libraries, independent scholarly initiatives, and corporate documentation projects.

The core of the PRDL project involves the organization of thousands of documents available in digital form from sources including Google Books and the Internet Archive. Also included are the offerings of select libraries from Europe and North America, which are beginning to make digitized forms of their holdings available to the public. The project covers the work of hundreds of authors from a wide variety of theological, philosophical, and ecclesiastical traditions, from figures like John Calvin and Martin Luther to the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) and Jacob Arminius (1560-1609).

According to David Sytsma, moderator of the PRDL editorial board, the current availability of a vast array of materials is unprecedented in academic history. “The opportunity presented by this kind of digital access is matched by the challenge to the individual researcher to deal responsibly and comprehensively with a broad cross-section of source material,” observes Sytsma, a doctoral student in historical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. “The PRDL is one way to help ensure that the reach of technical digitalization does not exceed the grasp of the scholar,” he says.

The first stage of the PRDL project involved the collaboration of dozens of scholars from around the world on a privately editable website, or wiki. Once a standard level of comprehensiveness was achieved, the wiki was transitioned to a publicly available bibliography hosted by the Meeter Center. The site will continue to be updated and users will be able to suggest revisions via interactive web forms.

Dr. Richard A. Muller, P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Seminary and current chair of the Meeter Center Governing Board, notes the potential of the PRDL to advance research in a variety of disciplines. “The Post-Reformation Digital Library will be a boon to both students and professional researchers alike,” he says. Muller also serves as a member of the PRDL editorial board, as does Lugene Schemper, theological librarian at Calvin College and Seminary, who oversaw the migration of the resource to Hekman Library’s LibGuides system.

Members of the PRDL editorial board represent institutions from across North America and Europe. In addition to Muller and Schemper, the PRDL editorial board includes: Jordan J. Ballor (University of Zurich/Calvin Theological Seminary); Albert Gootjes (Calvin Theological Seminary/Institut d’histoire de la Réformation, Geneva); Todd Rester (Calvin Theological Seminary); and moderator David Sytsma (Princeton Theological Seminary).

Schemper led a roundtable discussion of the PRDL and other digital research tools at the Fall meeting of the Chicago Area Theological Library Association earlier this month. Board members Jordan J. Ballor, David Sytsma, and Todd Rester are scheduled to present on the PRDL at a “New Technologies” session at next year’s annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, to be held in Venice, Italy (April 8-10).

Access the Post-Reformation Digital Library:
http://libguides.calvin.edu/prdl

Contact Jordan J. Ballor at (616) 617-7669 or jballor1@calvinseminary.edu for more information.

About the Meeter Center:

http://www.calvin.edu/meeter/about/

On October 15, 2009, Dr. R. A. Muller lectured on this topic in a presentation: Was Calvin a Calvinist? Or, Did Calvin (or Anyone Else in the Early Modern Era) Plant the “TULIP”? at the Meeter Center at Calvin College, Hekman Library. Dr. Muller engages with several lines of scholarship in a winsome, thought provoking look at Calvin’s place and impact in the trajectory and development of Reformed Protestantism. The Meeter Center has made the text of that lecture publicly available here. This is a similar presentation to Dr. Muller’s lectures this past year at the University of Geneva as well as at the Calvin Conference at Dordrecht, Netherlands.

For those of you who like to access your docs, pdfs, and pics on the go, life just got a little more wired. As of yesterday, there is a new Dropbox app for the iPhone. And I have to say, having access to files on three of my computers (work, home, laptop) was already a nice taste of cyberbliss, but the ability to be in conversation with someone at a research conference, remember that you have a document or file on that in your Dropbox account, and e-mail a link to it on the spot, that is quite worth it. Not to mention all the other happy file streaming possibilities for your music, quicktime podcasts, etc. etc. Also, it does have most forms of file support including MS Word documents, pdfs, and a score of others. If you absolutely have to have a snapshot of something, you can upload pics to your dropbox account straight from the phone without, I believe, using local memory on the phone. For a more technical CNET review of the app, gohere.

For those of you unfamiliar with Dropbox, it is a computer syncing service (free::up to 5 GB; paid::up to 100GB) that allows you cross-platform file sharing (do you have a mac, a PC, and Linux and would like to share files easily? This is one option for you). It also is nice for collaboration among authors, editors, etc.

For those of you who are familiar with Francois Du Jon (Franciscus Junius), you know how hard it is to come by original sources of this Reformed theologian of the late 16th century. For those of you who are not familiar with Junius - his bible translation, theological lectures and theses, linguistic lectures, and theological works would influence generations of Reformed and Lutheran theologians. He was a student of Calvin, a friend of Ursinus (he delivered Ursinus’ funeral oration), and an early voice in the development of covenant theology. If that were not enough, his lectures on how to interpret Scripture were influential in the academic contexts at Heidelberg, Neustadt, and Leiden. Abraham Kuyper’s Bibliotheca Reformata series of the late 19th century employed a select fasciculus from Junius for volume 1.

All that to say, besides his works on Google Books (by the way his son was also Franciscus Junius but commented primarily on art and classical literature throughout the 17th c.) you should check out these rare full color editions at the BSB here. I highly recommend the Sacrorum Parallelorum, and don’t forget the cycle of theological theses from Heidelberg (although those can be found in Kuyper’s work as well). Also, the lectures on the Hebrew language as well as his Protoktisia (1589) - lectures on Creation and “on the first Adam from creation in his integrity to his fall into corruption” - are worth your time. The Protoktisia was a set of “praelectiones” that typically accompanied his lectures on the interpretation of Scripture. There is evidence that these lectures were delivered as early as 1579 at Neustadt and 1585 at Heidelberg in conjunction with the lectures on the Hebrew language as well. Additionally in the 1585 Heidelberg lectures, he gave the same cycle of orations (which can be found in his Omnia by the way - go with the 1613 edition since it is a more exhaustive Omnia, and oh by the way the CDC fiche is missing some key sections - not pages!) except this time his test case was out of the psalms.

These orations and lectures on interpretation with examples from the psalms were published in a 1585 edition at Heidelberg (biblio info here).  The present day library at Heidelberg University has only a fiche copy ever since the library of the Palatinate was ‘conveyed’ to the Vatican after the sack of Heidelberg in 1622 - all 5k printed books (which were each a binding of multiple books into one volume) and 3524 manuscripts. It wasn’t until 1816 that a diplomatic envoy to the pope was able to procure the return of approximately 850 manuscripts. There is a digital MSS project of these returned works here. The remainder can be purchased in microfiche form from Saur, with a nice royalty to the Vatican of course. Ironically, Heidelberg has bought the fiche set to get their library back … all 12102 titles or so.