Please Read: A Personal Letter from Todd Rester, Junius Institute Director

November 8, 2013 | By Todd Rester

Greetings PRDL users and supporters of the Junius Institute,

Just about five years ago, a group of students at Calvin Theological Seminary, with the encouragement and guidance of Dr. Richard Muller, began to collect and share links to primary sources in theology that were increasingly becoming available in digital formats. The original list was limited to sources available on Google Books, and included 331 titles. After proceeding first to a wiki format and later to what is the Post-Reformation Digital Library today, we’ve added more than 4,500 authors and nearly 64,000 titles from digital collections and libraries the world over. There really is nothing else like PRDL out there for early modern theological and philosophical research, and we’re pleased that it has come so far in so short a time.

I’m reminiscing for a couple of reasons. First, I want to thank you for your encouragement, support, and use of the PRDL throughout these years. The whole point of PRDL from the beginning was to make available our individual findings as students and researchers to a broader audience, particularly those that are not blessed with easy access to sources in other venues. Every time you find and download a PDF you found via PRDL that is useful to you in your study, this founding purpose has been fulfilled.

Second, I wanted to let you know that we are at a critical stage in the development and maturation of PRDL. Earlier this year we founded the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research at Calvin Theological Seminary to be a formal and permanent home for PRDL as well as other digital research projects. The encouragement from the seminary community has been outstanding, and we’ve been able to develop a variety of projects already this year, including unveiling the Scholastica project, a feature embedded in PRDL that adds a new layer of understanding to the primary sources listed in PRDL.

From the beginning, PRDL and now the Junius Institute have been a labor of love for a group of students, and they will continue to be a passion for us. As many of us have graduated or are graduating, however, the need for financial support to continue focusing on developing digital research tools and methods becomes more significant. For projects like PRDL to be sustainable in the long-term, we need to move toward a model that will fund upkeep, maintenance, development, and improvement.

In the days ahead, we’ll be looking at all of our options for fundraising and development to support the work of the Junius Institute, including PRDL. But as we close out this year, you have a real opportunity to make a difference in the development of digital research on the Reformation era. If you have ever benefited from PRDL or have appreciated the helpfulness of our efforts, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Junius Institute at Calvin Seminary. You can make a donation online at Calvin Seminary via this secure form, or you can send a check.

We know that there are many worthy causes that vie for financial support, particularly at this time of year. And yet this truly is an important moment for PRDL and the Junius Institute. Contributions of any size will help show that our efforts mean something to scholars and researchers all over the world.

Even if you aren’t able to make a financial contribution at this time, please consider sharing some thoughts about how the work of the Junius Institute and PRDL has helped you in your work in the comments section below.

Thank you for your support over these years and your continued use of PRDL.

Todd Rester
Director
Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research

Our Informal Anniversary

November 7, 2013 | By Jordan Ballor

Our research curator David Sytsma is teaching the doctoral methods course at Calvin Seminary this fall, and he recently passed on that he was discussing the increasing availability of sources that have come to be in the last five years in a recent class session.

He then went digging through some old emails, and found that the original finding list that would grow to become the PRDL, first in wiki and later in the current PRDL 2.0 format, was circulated in October 2008, just over five years ago. You can read more about the transition and development of PRDL in this piece from the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

David, who directs the PRDL project, writes further, “Looking back through the email thread, it was Jordan who suggested on Nov. 7 that we start a wiki and think about forming a digital research center.” So this day a sort of informal five year anniversary for the beginning of the PRDL and now the Junius Institute!

PRDL now covers over 4,500 authors, with listings of more than 85,000 volumes. Take a look at the original finding list to see where it all began, a short five years ago.

Muller Festschrift Presented at CTS PhD Anniversary Celebration

October 14, 2013 | By Jordan Ballor

Last Wednesday Calvin Theological Seminary held a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the school’s doctoral program. Part of the agenda included a lecture by Richard A. Muller, the P.J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin, who also serves as senior fellow of the Junius Institute. Dr. Muller and Dr. Ronald Feenstra were two of the key faculty appointments at the founding of the doctoral program, and Dr. Muller’s talk focused on the past, present, and possible futures of the doctoral program.

After Dr. Muller’s lecture, Dr. Feenstra introduced an item for the event that did not appear on the schedule: the presentation of a Festschrift to Dr. Muller on the occasion of his 65th birthday this past weekend. I served as a co-editor of the volume along with Dr. David Sytsma, the research curator at the Junius Institute, and Dr. Jason Zuidema. The three of us spoke about the volume and presented a copy to Dr. Muller at the event, who was taken by surprise at the gift and treated to a standing ovation.

Richard Muller (holding book) stands with the editors of his Festschrift (from left to right): David S. Sytsma, Jordan J. Ballor, and Jason Zuidema

The Festschrift is published by Brill, and appears as no. 170 in the Studies in the History of Christian Traditions series, a series which was founded by Heiko A. Oberman, who was the doctoral supervisor of Dr. Muller’s own supervisor, David Steinmetz of Duke Divinity School. The theme of the volume is captured by the title: Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Muller on the Maturation of a Theological Tradition. As we write in the acknowledgements and dedication:

The scope and scale of Richard Muller’s influence on more than a generation of scholarship of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods is unlikely to be properly appreciated in the near future. But this volume represents an initial attempt toward that end. The size of this collection of essays produced in his honor is merely emblematic of the literature inspired by his helpfully revisionist career. The variety of the essays, both in terms of content as well as in terms of the institutional affiliations of the authors, speaks to the diverse audiences in which Richard’s insights have found positive reception. In attempting to find a unified theme around which to organize this Festschrift, the dynamic relationship between the church and the academy, between the pulpit and the lectern, was chosen, not because it exhausts the implications of Richard’s work, but because it represents one of the key insights of his approach to the sources.

The volume includes work from 55 different contributors, whose variety of institutional affiliation, geographical location, and research interests speaks directly to the significant of Richard Muller’s intellectual legacy. The volume runs in excess of 800 pages, including a 40 page bibliography of Dr. Muller’s work.

You can view photos from the celebration here, and the video of the entire event is available here. A full list of the contributors to the Muller Festschrift in alphabetical order follows, and you can download a table of contents for the volume here:
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Colloquium Series Opens This Fall

September 11, 2013 | By Jordan Ballor

The Junius Institute is pleased to announce the launch of its Colloquium program, pursued in collaboration with the doctoral program at Calvin Theological Seminary. The Junius Institute Colloquium formalizes on a more permanent basis a long-standing practice of the historical theology doctoral students of holding occasional public talks on Reformation and post-Reformation history. I’ll be serving as project director, and CTS doctoral candidate Jay Collier will be acting as project coordinator.

A major purpose of the Colloquium is to provide doctoral students “an outlet to present research on their dissertations and to be exposed to research projects in progress from graduates and established scholars.”

The Fall 2013 series opens this Friday with a talk from Jay Collier on the topic, “Troubles after Dort: Augustine, Perseverance, and the Real Story of the ‘Arminian’ Richard Montagu.” Details about time, location, and the rest of the Fall schedule are available at the project page.

Junius Institute Launches PRDL Scholastica

August 30, 2013 | By David Sytsma

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.
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