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.

If you want a period dictionary that was expanded upon from its publication in 1502 through its eleven language rendition in the 1590 Basil edition, you need to check out this Latin Lexicon. Alas, this is only the 1534 edition and not the 11 language edition, but it is a good humanist dictionary of the period tracing words back to their Greek and Latin roots as well as noting the specific passages in the primary source material. This dictionary, for example, went through 18 editions from one printer alone. Calepino’s name became almost synonymous with the phrase Latin Lexicon during this period. It was published in polyglot form as late as 1752. It is also noteworthy that the 1752 edition listed below was used in the seminary of Patavia and was intended for theological studies as well.

It is also extremely helpful on Latin phrases  and figures of speech in philosophy and theology as well.

The Bayerische StaatsBibliothek has several editions here. I believe the 1516 is a polyglot edition.

By the way, if your institutional library is so fortunate to have them tucked away in their rare book room, you might look for these: (more…)

This is an ongoing digitalization project of the library of King Matthias I of Hungary or Hunyadi Mátyás (1443-1490). From a brief scan of the holdings here (by the way click on the orange dot for the images and the blue one for the bibliographic information), there are quite a bit of early printed books and illuminated texts of patristic and medieval theologians, philosophers, and poets in Greek, Latin, and medieval Hungarian. It is well done, but at the current time it does not have the option to download in full pdf. At the present time they only have roughly 50 works scanned, but don’t despise the day of small beginnings there are still some gems available like Jerome’s Commentary on Galatians, which is pictured at the left.

Of course you could go at it one right click at a time …

By the way, if you want to try your hand at a little bit of Latin Paleography on this text just for kicks, try this.

The Italian humanist Niccolo Perotti was one of the most influential Latinists of the Renaissance era for his editions of classical texts as well as the grammatical commentary. Even into the modern era, his work is greatly appreciated among scholars of the period for its insight into humanist neo-Latin grammar. For any serious scholar of the era, I would encourage you to find a copy (however, be warned - one of the volumes of the 3rd edition Aldus printing - the Cornucopia - is priced at roughly $13k US in a rare book store).

Also, for those interested here is a 1608 Perotti edition of the text of Polybius with no less than Wolfgang Musculus’ interpretation included.

Although not a complete set, Google books has the following and the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek has others:

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I ran across this little plug-in for Microsof Word the other day and thought I would pass it along. There is also one for Open Office. And it does what it says. Check it out.