With most of Google’s partner libraries, it is impossible to know what books are in the process of being digitized. However, the KB catalogue offers a glimpse of books currently tagged for digitization. In order to inform its patrons that a book has been pulled from the shelf, the librarians at KB have added a note: “This book is temporarily unavailable due to digitization.” (“Dit boek is tijdelijk niet beschikbaar vanwege digitalisering.”) A search for this phrase turns up books in the catalogue that either have been recently digitized or will be digitized in the coming months. As of today, there are in the queue over 38,000 titles from the eighteenth century (1700-1799) and 13,000 titles from the nineteenth century (1800-1899).

For users of the Junius Institute’s Post-Reformation Digital Library, this means that in the coming months the collection of available eighteenth-century Dutch theological works is set to rapidly expand. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of theological works from Dutch Reformed authors will become available in a relatively short period of time. Among these are numerous works by pastors associated with the so-called Nadere Reformatie or “Further Reformation,” including multiple editions of Aegidius Francken’s Kern der Christelyke Leere, which served as a textbook at Calvin Theological Seminary in the nineteenth century. Below is a sampling of links to Reformed theologians with titles set aside to be digitized in the KB catalogue. Taken together, this short list alone represents over 500 digitized titles on the horizon.

Leiden Professors:

• Johannes Marckius (1656-1731) [16 works]
• Herman Witsius (1636-1708) [11 works]
• Salomon Van Til (1643-1713) [9 works]
• Johannes Wesselius (1671-1745) [14 works]
• Taco Hajo van den Honert (1666-1740) [13 works]
• Albert Schultens (1686-1750) [25 works]
• Johan van den Honert (1693-1758) [61 works]
• Bernhard De Moor (1709-1780) [15 works]
• Ewald Hollebeek (1719-1796) [15 works]

Utrecht Professors:

• Melchior Leydekker (1642-1721) [9 works]
• Herman Witsius (1636-1708) [11 works]
• Hermann Alexander Röell (1653-1718) [2 works]
• Hieronymus Simons van Alphen (1665-1742) [12 works]
• Friedrich Adolph Lampe (1683-1729) [18 works]
• Albertus Voget (1695-1771) [7 works]
• Willem van Irhoven (1698-1760) [7 works]

Franeker Professors:

• Campegius Vitringa, Sr (1659-1722) [13 works]
• Ruard Andala (1665-1727) [3 works]
• Herman Venema (1697-1787) [18 works]

Groningen Professors:

• Paulus Hulsius (1653-1712) [4 works]
• Antonius Driessen (1684-1748) [18 works]
• Cornelius van Velzen (1696-1752) [15 works]
• Daniel Gerdes (1698-1765) [10 works]

Nadere Reformatie Pastors:

• Jodocus van Lodenstein (1620-1677) [14 works]
• Franciscus Ridderus (1620-1683) [8 works]
• Willem Sluiter (1627-1673) [41 works]
• Jacobus Koelman (1631-1695) [18 works]
• Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635-1711) [18 works]
• Abraham Hellenbroek (1658-1731) [16 works]
• Jacobus Fruytier (1659-1731) [15 works]
• Bernardus Smytegelt (1665-1739) [16 works]
• Johan Verschuir (1680-1737) [5 works]
• Aegidius Francken (1699-1743) [15 works]
• Wilhelmus Schortinghuis (1700-1750) [7 works]
• Theodorus van der Groe (1705-1784) [13 works]
• Alexander Comrie (1706-1774) [13 works]

De academia van Vrieslant (Franeker), 1622

Grand Rapids, Mich. (August 30, 2013)—Scholars now have a new tool for the early modern religious and philosophical history in its academic context. From the beginning of the Reformation at the University of Wittenberg to the establishment of the Academy of Geneva, schools were integral to movements of reform as they arose in the sixteenth century and perpetuated themselves into the seventeenth century. PRDL Scholastica, a new project of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research of Calvin Theological Seminary, will facilitate the understanding of this history by allowing the scholar to survey faculties and academic disputations over large stretches of time.

For almost two years, editors of PRDL culled names and dates of appointment for faculty from a variety of sources—online university faculty records, secondary sources on universities, biographical encyclopedias, title pages of primary source disputations, and the personal research of members of the PRDL editorial and advisory boards—resulting in a growing database of over 200 schools and 2,300 faculty appointments.

Senior fellow Richard A. Muller, one of the contributing editors of the project, believes PRDL Scholastica provides a significant insight into the institutional context in which the theology and philosophy of the early modern era were debated and formulated. “It offers a tool for the identification of the development of schools of thought and of the changes that took places within those schools as one generation of faculty succeeded another,” he said. “As such, it should serve as a major resource for categorizing and analyzing the increasingly massive body of early modern documents that are becoming available through the digitalization of rarities in a wide array of major research libraries.”

PRDL Scholastica presently includes large faculty lists, with appointment dates, for major Protestant schools, including Basel, Cambridge, Geneva, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Helmstedt, Jena, Leiden, Leipzig, Marburg, Rostock, Tübingen, Utrecht, Wittenberg, and Zürich. Faculty at Roman Catholic universities are also represented, although only select universities, including Dillingen, Ingolstadt, and Leuven, have large faculty lists at this time. With these faculty lists, scholars of early modern institutional and theological traditions can now easily discover available digital books for overlooked minor figures.

In addition to the study of faculty, PRDL Scholastica facilitates the study of academic disputation (disputatio), a dialectical mode of education and an understudied genre, but one with great potential for scholarship (see, e.g., the work of Ignacio Angelelli and Keith Stanglin). For each school, scholars can browse printed disputations from universities and academies in chronological order. Among the largest lists of faculty and disputations, Wittenberg includes 112 faculty appointments and about 700 disputations, while Heidelberg includes 102 faculty appointments and 170 disputations. The disputations listed under Swiss schools—Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, and Zürich—now collectively total over 900.

As with the larger PRDL project, PRDL Scholastica is a collaborative endeavor and a continual work in progress. The Junius Institute welcomes and encourages visitors to report additions and corrections to this growing database.

For more information:

David S. Sytsma
Research Curator
Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research of Calvin Theological Seminary
david.sytsma@juniusinstitute.org

http://www.juniusinstitute.org/
http://www.prdl.org/
http://www.calvinseminary.edu/

About the Junius Institute

The Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research of Calvin Theological Seminary seeks to further the advancement of studies in early modern (ca. 16th to 18th century) theology and interconnected disciplines through the use of digital research tools, skills, and sources; to foster the presentation, preservation, and public use of primary and secondary sources within the public domain; and to encourage via educational and curricular means the study of the documents themselves, their content, as well as the technical skills required to interpret and analyze these materials.

About Calvin Theological Seminary

Founded in 1876, Calvin Theological Seminary is the oldest denominational ministry and the sole theological seminary of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, which is comprised of approximately 250,000 members in over 1,000 congregations across the US and Canada.

However, dissertations are also among the more neglected sources. In the past there were good reasons for this. One reason was simply a lack of easy access. Dissertations were difficult to obtain until they became available on microfilm. Twenty years ago, due to the impact of University Microfilms International on the availability of microfilm dissertations, Bradley and Muller observed:

We are in the midst of a bibliographical revolution that has as much to do with unpublished as with published materials. Those of us who went through graduate school in the early 1970s used many scholarly books that failed to refer to a single dissertation. But because of the publication program of University Microfilms International, this is becoming less and less true. Good books and good contemporary dissertations will almost always refer to at least a half dozen dissertations.¹

Now, as educational institutions make digitized dissertations available in PDF format, many dissertations—recent dissertations in particular—are instantly accessible. Today the scholar has no excuse for ignoring unpublished dissertations.

A variety of services provide access to downloadable PDFs of dissertations. Of course the most complete commercial service is ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, which contains full-text for dissertations published since 1997 as well as many published earlier, but it is only available at subscribing institutions. Many dissertations are also freely available. Some of the best databases for finding electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) include:

• Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)
• EThOS (Great Britain)
• DART-Europe

A number of libraries contain detailed lists of these repositories. There are helpful lists at Indiana University Bloomington (“Finding Dissertations: a Research Guide”) and the Library of Congress.

Dissertations do not always appear in databases. Sometimes they are available for direct download at library websites. The Hekman Library of Calvin College makes available dissertations from Calvin Theological Seminary. Many European institutions, including Swiss universities, are e-publishing their dissertations. The University of St Andrews has divinity theses available in PDF from as early as 1952. Among these is a 1979 thesis on Franciscus Junius by Douglas Judisch, “A translation and edition of the Sacrorum Parallelorum Liber Primus of Franciscus Junius: a study in sixteenth century hermeneutics.” This three volume work contains a 50-page biography of Junius, an analysis of Junius’s exegetical principles, and a full translation of the preface and first book of Junius’s Sacrorum Parallelorum (1607).

For Further Reading

• Bailey, Charles W., Jr. Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography. Houston: Digital Scholarship, 2005-2012.

Footnotes

1. James E. Bradley and Richard A. Muller, Church History: An Introduction to Research, Reference Works, and Methods (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 79.