Isaac Junius, Antapologia (1640)

There is also the reality that there are treasures of early modern theology and philosophy tucked away in smaller institutions and private collections. A digitization initiative can be scaled to other institutions, archives, and private collections as a way to build a consortium of truly invaluable sources. One example that we are proud to present is a piece by Isaac Junius simply entitled the Antapologia, or thoughts on the 16 heads of the Remonstrants. Through the generosity of a private owner, we are able to make it available to you. According to Worldcat this piece is housed primarily in Europe and, as far as we are aware, is unavailable in digital form for free. We encourage you to take a moment and browse our version of it here. And yes you may download it in .pdf form.

At the core of the digitization project is an automated digital photography device developed over the past 24 months by an interdisciplinary team I had the privilege of spearheading (several specialists in engineering design, robotics, automation, and computer programming). In particular this device expedites the digitization of rare books while respecting the fragility of their age in a new and innovative way. You can see some of its initial results here. The presentation format is another testimony to David Sytsma’s programming wizardry and is the Junius Institute’s adaptation of a publicly available book viewer. Together we hope we have created a process and result that meets the needs of teachers, scholars, and students in a relatively cost-effective way.

Unprecedented access to primary sources through print media once changed the face of education and shaped all of society in early modern Europe. Now we live in an age where unprecedented access to primary sources through digital media is changing the face of education and all of society in ways only dreamed of a decade ago. We invite you to consider a few things. We are looking for individual and institutional partners who are interested in advancing initiatives of this nature. You might think that is way beyond your means or your contact list, but in my experience scholars and students are a creative and innovative bunch of people. You can be a part of this initiative in a variety of ways: (1) You can sign-up to receive our updates and e-mails. (2) You could fully or partially sponsor the digitization of a particular rare book. (3) You can be the link to put us in contact with individuals or institutions that have a similar vision and desire to advance scholarship through digital means.

We look forward to providing you updates on initiatives of this sort as well as displaying the results in the days ahead.

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.

Friday, October 25, 3:30-5:00pm

114. Early Modern Italy and Pedagogical Practice: From Lay Conservatories to Digital Humanities (Flamingo B)
Organizer: Meredith K. Ray
Chair: Mark Judjevic

• Educating Rich and Poor Girls in Counter-Reformation Florence
  Jennifer Haraguchi, Brigham Young University
• Machiavelli and Castiglione: In Service to a Senior Humanities Seminar
  Veena Carlson, Dominican University

120. Digital Maps (1): Mapping the History of Printing and Text Circulation (Tropical A)
Organizer: Colin F. Wilder
Chair: Niall Atkinson

• “And All the Good Journeymen”: Visualizing the Early Printing Trade
  Greg Prickman, University of Iowa
• Printing and Text-Transmission Networks in Early Modern Germany
  Colin Wilder, University of South Carolina
• A cultural Industry on the Digital Highway
  Paul Dijstelberge, University of Amsterdam

Saturday, October 26, 8:30-10:00am

142. Digital Maps (2): Spatial Humanities / New Uses of Digital Mapping (Tropical A)
Organizer: Colin F. Wilder
Chair: Paul Dijstelberge

• Mapping the Soundscape of Pre-Modern Florence
  Peter Leonard & Niall Atkinson, University of Chicago
• Envisioning a Historiography: Geospatial and Thematic Connections between Local Social Histories of
  Early Modern Europe
  John Theibault, Richard Stockton College
• Digital Maps (2): Spatial Humanities / New Uses of Digital Mapping
  Paul Dijstelberge, University of Amsterdam
• Waves of Empire: Mapping Renaissance Sovereignty at Sea
  Jason Cohen, Berea College

Saturday, October 26, 10:30am-Noon

164. Digital Methods (1): Digitization, Editing and Text Curation (Tropical A)
Organizer: Colin F. Wilder
Chair: John Theibault

• A comparison of computer-assisted collation techniques
  Gabriel Egan, De Montfort University
• Standardization and Authenticity: Classroom Use of Archival and Digital Versions of Early Modern
  English Manuscripts
  Marie Baxter, Albion College
• A Digital Edition of the Business Correspondence of the Venetian printer Giovanni Bartolomeo da
  Gabiano (ca. 1520-1530): Some Technical and Scholarly Considerations
  Giovanni Colavizza, Universitá Ca’Foscari Venezia

Saturday, October 26, 1:30-3:00pm

186. Digital Methods (2): Text Curation, Text Analysis and Network Analysis (Tropical A)
Organizer and Chair: Colin F. Wilder

• Little Gidding: An Early Modern Digital Humanities Collaboratory
  Whitney Trettien, Duke University
• Martyrs, Exiles and Dissemblers: The Networking of Protestants during the Marian Persecution (1553-1558)
  Martin Skoeries, University of Leipzig
• Topic-Modeling the Correspondence of Hugo Grotius
  Matthew Simmermon-Gomes, University of Aberdeen

Saturday, October 26, 3:30-5:00pm
208. Roundtable: Early Modern Digital Humanities (Tropical A)
Organizer and Chair: Colin F. Wilder

Participants:

• Matthew Simmermon-Gomes, University of Aberdeen
• Whitney Trettien, Duke University
• John Theibault, Stockton College
• Greg Prickman, University of Iowa
• Paul Dijstelberge, University of Amsterdam
• Niall Atkinson, University of Chicago

Tropical A certainly looks like the place to be. You can download a PDF of the program here. This will be the first conference I’ve missed in a number of years, and it just happens to be one that is chock-full of sessions related to digital research! This is an encouraging trend, and no doubt one that will continue in the years ahead.

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.

“We believe that the newer technology, understood broadly, is no longer optional. The scholar who neglects current technological advances in the manipulation and accessing of sources puts himself or herself in the position of the student who refuses to adopt the methodological advances of the Enlightenment; they become, by definition, precritical. The areas in which students can safely ignore the new methods and source mediums are becoming fewer, and even those scholars working in areas as yet untouched by this technology can still benefit from an exposure to the conceptual elegance of unimpeded research, and exhaustive, near-perfect bibliographies.”

–James E. Bradley and Richard A. Muller, Church History: An Introduction to Research, Reference Works, and Methods (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 74.