This tool has enabled students, scholars, and pastors from universities, institutions, and seminaries around the world and from many confessional perspectives to do their research more conveniently and effectively. We could not have hit this milestone without the generous contributions of time and resources of our user community and donors. Thank you to all who have contributed, edited, used, promoted, and donated. And most importantly, this site is due to the tireless efforts of the PRDL’s moderator, David Sytsma, its executive board, and its contributing editors. Thank you all for making this possible! PRDL truly is a labor of love. It’s hard to believe that it started out just a few years ago among several doctoral students and a professor, contemplating the need to compile and disseminate sources.

PRDL is fueled by a commitment to a return to the sources for a closer reading and evaluation of viewpoints in the early modern reformations and post-reformation eras. But what makes PRDL truly unique is that we are not subscription based or controlled by a publishing house, rather we are driven by the interests and support of our users. Our goal is to help students, scholars, pastors, and seminarians engage the sources of the early modern period both to understand the past and better assist the present. Students and scholars from developing and even closed countries have thanked us for this work that brings unprecedented resources to regions that have little or no exposure to this era of history or where the costs associated with physical access are prohibitive. It is our hope to continue in this endeavor to make rare books more accessible to a global community of scholars than has been traditionally the case. With your help, I look forward to extending and expanding the sources found in the PRDL through our digitization initiative in conjunction with Hekman Library. Because we can digitize more effectively and safely than current industry standards, over the next year the Junius Institute has an opportunity to digitize 70,000 pages from 60 rare works spanning 1589-1775 housed in the Hekman Library at Calvin College. This represents just 1% of the collection.

By using the Razoo website, we are able to accept donations of any size for this project. You can find out more about this digitization effort as well as a prospectus of works in phase 1 here. The brief clip embodies the purpose and goals of the Junius Institute: “free rare books” and “free the rare books!”

And with the addition of a number of items from John Calvin’s expansive body of work, PRDL now includes over 100,000 total volumes.
Congratulations and thanks are due to the community of contributors and supporters of these efforts, all of which have been pursued pro bono thus far.

Join us in celebrating these achievements, and please consider supporting PRDL and the Junius Institute to make the creation and maintenance of these kinds of tools sustainable today!

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.

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.

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.

As I worked on editing the text for further publication, I needed to consult the original to clear up a few editorial queries. But I did not have a copy of the treatise by Mariana easily at hand to do some comparison. So naturally I went over to the Post-Reformation Digital Library to see if the original was listed among the site’s contents.

I was not disappointed. There were in fact multiple copies of the collection of treatises which included De monetae. Mariana’s treatise, De monetae mutatione, was the fourth of seven treatises published together in 1609 in Cologne. Via the PRDL I quickly downloaded a version.

But as I opened the document I found that the pages of the fourth treatise seemed to be missing from the PDF. The page number in the PDF would just suddenly skip ahead when I moved past the end of the third treatise. When I looked at the title page, I found that the contents listing for De Monetae mutatione was crossed out, and there was in fact a signature affixed to the document noting that the treatise had been expurgated!

Mariana’s tract, which attacks King Philip II’s debasement of the currency, led the monarch to haul the aged (seventy-three-year-old) scholar-priest into prison, charging him with the high crime of treason against the king. He was convicted of the crime, but the pope refused to punish him. He was released from prison after four months on the condition that he would remove the offensive passages in the work, and would promise to be more careful in the future.

King Philip, however, was not satisfied with the pope’s punishment. So the king ordered his officials to buy up every copy they could find and to destroy them. After Mariana’s death, the Spanish Inquisition expurgated the remaining copies, deleting many sentences and smearing entire pages with ink. All non-expurgated copies were put on the Spanish Index, and these in turn were expurgated during the course of the seventeenth century. As a result of Philip’s censorship, the existence of the Latin text remained unknown for 250 years, and was rediscovered only because the Spanish edition, which Mariana himself had translated into Spanish, was incorporated into a nineteenth-century collection of classical Spanish essays.

This censorship would have lasting implications for my efforts to secure a copy of the text, as De monetae had been expurgated in not only the first but also the second version of Tractatus VII that I consulted on Google Books. In the second instance, I found the table of contents intact, and moved ahead to download the file.

But again there was a missing range of pages right where De monetae ought to be! When I examined the front matter again, I found that a note explaining the expurgation was on the bottom and the verso side of the table of contents.

As anyone who has used Google Books for research purposes knows, there are some interesting quirks in the system. The PRDL had only turned up those two copies of Tractatus VII, both originating from the Complutense University of Madrid. But if you visit the “about” page for a Google Book, you can often find similar, related, or other versions of the work that are difficult to locate by other search methods. And in the case of my search for De monetae mutatione, the third time turned out to be the charm.

Google also has a copy digitized from the Austrian National Library that had been untouched by the Spanish expurgation efforts, and with a few more clicks I had my digital copy of De monetae mutatione safely downloaded and ready for consultation. The un-mutilated version of Tractatus VII including De monetae mutatione is now listed on the PRDL page for Mariana. Thankfully for my own research efforts, King Philip’s expurgatory efforts did not reach into the holdings of Austria.

In a future post I’ll explore some of the implications of this adventure for digital scholarship. But if you have your own story of the sometimes labyrinthine nature of digital source exploration, please share it below.

The most impressive aspect of DPLA is that it is not a library at all, but an intelligently constructed catalogue to many libraries, which are contributing their collections. DPLA, in other words, is a “pointer” service, which is, I think, exactly what the world wants. So a search on DPLA fetches documents from all over the place. I was just looking at something from the holdings of the University of Illinois, then I clicked a bit and was taken to Brewster’s Kahle’s Archive.org. Ten minutes on the home page and you can “visit” many libraries. If this is not cool, I don’t know what is.

This idea of a “pointer” service and the need for some kind of curated metasearch option is precisely what drove the creation of the Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL). The PRDL and DPLA are in this respect similar, despite differences in scope, size, scale, support, and (perhaps) significance. We might think of them as “pointer” sisters!

Today the DPLA announced a partnership with the David Rumsey Map Collection, which has a truly impressive array of maps in various formats. Be sure to check out Rumsey’s collection of early modern maps. The oldest map I found thus far was a facsimile of a map of America by one Peter Martyr d’Anghiera (1534).

Come to think of it, “pointer” services like PRDL and DPLA are also “maps” of a kind, pointing us toward heretofore hidden treasure troves of digital source material. Given the overlap in purposes between the two, no doubt our PRDL team will have to take note of the “openness” of the DPLA code and partnership setup that Lincoln Mullen highlights in his intro to DPLA.