Resources

The CAMENA collection, built between 1999 and 2009 at the Chair for Modern German Literature of the German Studies Seminary, Heidelberg University, contains scans and (for the great part) machine readable Latin texts, mostly from early modern Germany, divided into five collections: THESAURUS ERUDITIONIS (encyclopedias and other reference works), POEMATA, HISTORICA ET POLITICA, CERA (Corpus Epistolicum Recentioris Aevi), and ITALI (a selection of Italian Renaissance works). In total, more than 230,000 printed pages are comprised.

In the lexicographical project TERMINI (Vernetzter Wortschatz lateinischer Wissensliteratur der Frühen Neuzeit), lemmas (including proper names) contained in the works of THESAURUS ERUDITIONIS are extracted and enriched with data from other sources of knowledge, in order to build a virtual encyclopedia of the early modern world.

The Corpus Corporum is a comprehensive database of Latin texts ranging from Antiquity to the Modern Era. The Corpus Corporum makes important corpora, such as Migne’s entire Patrologia Latina or the corpora from the Poeti d’Italia in lingua Latina project accessible, downloadable in the XML/TEI format and, most notable, searchable with a powerful search engine that also allows complex searches using a specific syntax.

Corpus Corporum also offers a useful reading environment through a large number of lexical resources linked to the lemmatized texts.

Croatiae auctores Latini (CroALa) is a peer-reviewed, freely available scholarly digital collection of Latin texts by Croatian and other authors connected with people and region of today’s Croatia. Published by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, the collection comprises works in the span from the 10th century until the present day. The included texts – counting about 5,000,000 words by almost 200 authors – are both literary and technical. It is possible to browse the collection or to do basic and advanced search, made possible by PhiloLogic architecture.

The Centre for Danish Neo-Latin (CDNL) houses two ressources, the Danish Neo-Latin Heritage Corpus and the Database of Nordic Neo-Latin Literature.

The Heritage Corpus comprises Latin texts written by Danish authors or relating to Danish cultural history; at the moment (Dec. 2022) it has the texts of the major Danish historians (e.g. Pontanus, Meursius, Bering), as well as the complete works of the prolific Danish poet Erasmus Laetus, as well as other poetry and prose texts. The texts are in varying states of preparation, either uncorrected, partially or fully corrected, or lemmatized (incl. POS-tagging).

The Database of Nordic Neo-Latin Literature contains a fine-grained bibliography of Neo-Latin printing in the Nordic countries, registering also paratexts such as liminal poetry and prose and their authors, dedicatees, respondents (in university disputations), etc.; also given are known copies (since many texts are extremely rare).

Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) is a freely available web-based inventory of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century correspondences. It combines finding aid and editorial interface for metadata of early modern letters and allows disparate and connected correspondences to be cross-searched, combined, analysed and visualized. Created in 2009 in the collaboration between the Bodleian Library and the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford, it is an active project in continual development. In January 2023 it contains more than 160 catalogues of letters from different parts of the world, mainly learned correspondences in Latin, but also in Ancient Greek, English, French, Italian, German etc. It has the subcatalogue Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO).

Humanistica Helvetica is a bilingual French-German website dedicated to the Latin literature of the Swiss humanists. It contains a general introduction to Latin literature in Switzerland in the 16th century, a presentation of the different literary genres (epistolography, theatre, biography, lyric poetry, etc.) and studies on several specific themes (education, patriotism, mountains, etc.). The lives and works of six representative authors (including Conrad Gessner and Heinrich Glarean) are studied more extensively. In addition, there is a list of all Swiss humanists, with brief information on their life and work, as well as a list of bibliographic tools. Finally, the website contains an extensive database of Latin texts selected from the works of Swiss writers.

All the texts have been critically edited, translated into German and French, annotated, and are accompanied by the reproduction of their original manuscript or edition. Humanistica Helvetica is the result of a research project hosted by the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

The Lemmatarium Neolatinum (LNL) is the companion site to the Neulateinische Wortlsite (NLW). Based on a collection of lemmatized texts (a.o. Petrarca, Bruni, Biondo, Varano, Valla, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Weston, More, and Vida), it offers an unfiltered overview of the complete repertory of the Latin lexicon in the same period as the NLW, in the form of a KWIC-concordance ordered after lemmata. Its main interest lies in the fact that it gives access to those parts of the Neo-Latin that are outside the parameters of the NLW. The LNL is rapidly expanding and has at the moment ca. one million examples for 17,000 lemmata.

The Neulateinische Wortliste (NLW) is a dictionary of Latin (roughly) between 1342 and 1700. It comprises words which are either newly coined or in some aspect of their usage deviate from the classical norm. A few key concepts are illustrated in full-scale treatment (humanitas, academia). With 22,000 entries it is by far the largest lexical resource for the period. All entries have a tag indicating their lexical status, and are POS-tagged. Meanings are given in German. Sources are European Latin authors as well as those from the “new” worlds.

The ERC funded project Nova Scientia: Early Modern Scientific Literature and Latin (NOSCEMUS) at the University of Innsbruck houses two digital resources, the NOSCEMUS Wiki and the Digital Sourcebook.

The NOSCEMUS Wiki contains c. 1,000 entries. It presents a selection of early modern works on science written in Latin along with their authors and some secondary literature. This selection does not constitute an anthology, as works famous for their authors, their groundbreaking character or other reasons are neither included nor excluded in a systematic way. Rather, the collection is intended to be representative of Latin literature’s engagement with contemporary science in terms of chronological spread, literary forms and scientific disciplines.

Attached to the Wiki is the Digital Sourcebook. (Almost) all works for which there is an entry in the database are available in the Digital Sourcebook in full text as machine-readable and searchable text. The texts were recognized with Transkribus (HTR model “Noscemus GM”), but they were not fully proofread (dirty OCR).