Digital Resources

The Archivio della Latinità Italiana del Medioevo (ALIM) contains, beyond obvious medieval authors, more than 40 works of the 14th and 15th centuries written by the authors usually classified as humanists. The texts can be browsed and downloaded in multiple formats, and the interface also enables various analytical tools: frequencies, comparisons, collocates, and concordances.

The Biblioteca Italiana contains more than 3,500 works of Italian literature (both in Italian and in Latin), ranging from the Middle Ages to Novecento. More than 1,000 authors, many of them Neo-Latinists, are included. The collection can be browsed through by authors, titles, periods, and genres. Full-text and advanced searches are also available, with the possibilities such as term exclusion and proximity search.

The Bibliotheca Latina: Latinitas Nova is the Neo-Latin section of the Intratext, containing the works of around 80 authors. There is a slight emphasis on ecclesiastical writings, many of them recent (20th and 21st centuries).

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 Danish Neo-Latin Heritage Corpus, housed at The Centre for Danish Neo-Latin (CDNL), 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 Deutsche Inschriften Online (DIO) is the digital extension of the editorial project Die deutschen Inschriften des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, which, since 1934, publishes Latin and German inscriptions from Germany, Austria and South Tyrol created in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Within the DIO, the contents of the printed volumes are increasingly digitised in the form of a database searchable by inscription contents and metadata, in which entries are provided with a description, a translation, photo(s), a commentary and a list of references.

The Documenta Catholica Omnia aims at collecting all the documents of the Popes, Church Councils, Church Fathers, Doctors of the Church and other related authors from the apostolic age to the present time. Needless to say, a great number of the texts are Neo-Latin.

The collection Early Modern Latin Correspondence, hosted at The Latinum Institute, contains links to epistolary material by dozens of Neo-Latin authors and aims at providing texts that facilitate approach to Latin for early stages learners. A special section is dedicated to the instruction manuals for letter writing.

The Eurasian Latin Archive is dedicated to presenting Medieval and Early Modern Latin texts and documents concerning East Asia. Browsing by language reveals that 64 Neo-Latin texts are included. The system enables complex full-text searches and browsing.

In De Heinsius Collectie, hosted at the Leiden University, you will find a collection of Dutch Neo-Latin poems and prose texts. It is named after the learned poets Daniel Heinsius, librarian of Leiden University Library, and his son Nicolaas, a diplomat and philologist. Among other things, you will find the complete works of Caspar Barlaeus and Constantijn Huygens, numerous texts by Erasmus and Grotius in Dutch translation, the Latin texts of five books by J.P. Guépin, and a large number of references to Neo-Latin internet publications.

The 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 Italian poetry in Latin: 13th–16th centuries collection contains, besides the medieval segment, Latin works of more than 260 Italian humanist poets. The search options include proximity search, as well as searches based on word-form or metre. The collection is now part of the MQDQ Galaxy, which also contains Musisque Deoque (a digital archive of ancient and early medieval Latin poetry) and Pedecerto (a tool for automatic analysis of dactylic verses).

Neolatina Sarmatica is a repository of critical editions of Latin texts created by authors associated with the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Res Publica Utriusque Nationis) consisting of the Kingdom of Poland, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Royal Prussia, and Duchy of Prussia (Regnum Poloniae, Magnum Ducatum Lithuaniae, Prussia Regalis, et Prussia Ducalis).

The Neo-Latin Drama Corpus (NeoLatDraCor) features Neo-Latin dramatic texts written and premiered across Europe from the 15th century onwards. NeoLatDraCor is part of the DraCor infrastructure.

DraCor – short for Drama Corpora – is a digital ecosystem dedicated to the study of drama from Greco-Roman antiquity to the 20th century. The multilingual community project follows the principles of open science. In May 2025, DraCor maintains 28 TEI-encoded drama corpora with a total of over 4,000 annotated full texts of plays in 22 languages. It is the basis for a very vibrant research landscape around the computational research of drama corpora. For more information and inspiration, see the DraCor research bibliography.

By incorporating Neo-Latin dramatic texts into the DraCor infrastructure, the NeoLatDraCor group aims to make the role of Neo-Latin drama in European theatre more visible and available for digital research.

NeoLatDraCor is a project based on an international collaboration of researchers working on Neo-Latin drama. The NeoLatDraCor group would be pleased to welcome more interested colleagues to their project. Moreover, they would be grateful if you helped them grow this corpus. For instance, you may encode dramatic texts in TEI yourself or with your students and publish them in NeoLatDraCor. If you are not familiar with TEI encoding, you may use their From Word to TEI Workflow; format your text in Word according to their guidelines, and your Word file will automatically be transformed into a TEI file. Visit the NeoLatDraCor Wiki to find out more.

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).

The Opera Camerarii has taken its start from a thorough census of all texts ever produced by the German humanist and friend of Melanchthon’s, Joachim Camerarius the Elder (1500–1574). Based on Semantic MediaWiki, there is now a highly complex but easy-to-use documentation of more than 900 printed works from full-scale books to single distichs, giving information about Camerarius’ acquaintances, works and topics mentioned in his writings. In a second step called Camerarius digital, these are now processed through an OCR engine in order to provide a first-ever searchable full text. Moreover, a Camerarius-Lexikon is currently in the making, where central topics of Camerarius’ works, such as natural science, medicine, or philology are treated in depth, giving references to the writings themselves as well as to the general background of the era. Whilst the printed part of Camerarius’ correspondence (about 2,200 letters) has been analyzed and summarized in depth as well, it is hoped that the remaining further 2,000, which are only preserved in their handwritten originals, may be added at a later date.

The Poesis Latina Hodierna (available as a page in English as well) hosts the works written by around 40 latin poets of the 20th and the 21th centuries. It contains links to other similar material and to some useful related resources.

The Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL) is a select database of digital books relating to the development of theology and philosophy during the Reformation and Post-Reformation/Early Modern Era (late 15th-18th c.). Late medieval and patristic works printed and referenced in the early modern era are also included. The PRDL is a project of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research.

The Latinske Tekster section of the Renaessancesprog i Danmark collection contains digitised searchable Latin works of around 80 Danish autors from the 16th and 17th centuries. Another part of the collection is the Ordbøger section, conteaining eight dictionaries involving Latin or Latin and Danish, published in the period between 1510 and 1626.

Apart from its ancient and medieval parts, The Neo-Latin section of The Latin Library provides texts by 70 post-medieval Latin authors.

The Tirolensia Latina is a collection of several dozens of early modern Latin texts from Tyrol (1510-1888), within the Austrian Literature Online portal.

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 Neo-Latin Lexicon (LNL) was created by the late David W. Morgan as the most comprehensive and regularly updated born-digital English-Latin dictionary; now it is maintained by Patrick M. Owens. It contains the vocabulary of Latin used by Neo-Latin authors and practitioners of active Latin, aiming both to document unique vocabulary found in literature from the Renaissance to contemporary Latin and unite the entries of other existing glossaries of Neo-Latin and Modern in one place. A selection od words can be searched by direct links, and the site also contains a “Neo-Greek Classical Wordlist”.

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.

An analytic Bibliography of Online Neo-Latin Texts was created and is maintained by Dana F. Sutton in 1999. It is the most comprehensive such list available. As of May 2026, it contains almost 80,000 items. The list is is alphabetically arranged and divided in around 40 segments. There is also a “Search” box. The basic structure of the most entries contains the following sections: “Author”, “Title”, “URL”, “Site”, “Subject”, and “Notes”.

The Bibliotheca Corvina Virtualis is the digital collection of codices, almost exclusively manuscript and in Latin, that once belonged to the library of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus (reigned 1458–1490). As a ruler who wanted to make his court one of the centres of humanist learning, king Matthias established the first royal library outside Italy and north of the Alps and commissioned creation of copies of important writings. It was the second greatest collection of its era, after the Vatican Library. Of approximately 2,000 volumes, which were contained in the library, 220 are preserved, scattered across 15 countries. All of them, with some additional ones, are digitised as pictures within the project, along with a rich commentary and set of metadata.

The Database of Neo-Latin Epic Poems lists, as of May 2026, 793 titles, including information on author, title, number of books making up the poem, verse count, subject, and a link or links to digital copies, if available. Subjects are linked to Wikidata items, while most author names are accompanied with links to external records in Wikidata, DNB, CERL, or VIAF. The JSON file containing the database is found here.

The Database of the Leuven Trilingue (DaLeT) s the first database devoted to an early modern trilingual institute, the Collegium Trilingue Lovaniense, or the Three-Language College in Leuven, where one could study the three so-called sacred languages Latin, Greek, and Hebrew for free. DaLeT focuses on this early period of the college, after which Leuven intellectual life became seriously upset by the Eighty Years’ War and other dire circumstances such as the plague. It contains: (1) a new and dynamic way for publishing student notes included in 16th-century prints, applied to three core Trilingue sources, one for each language taught; (2) A database of courses, books, and people at the Trilingue during its acme, around 1517-1578; (3) a ‘teacher’s corner’ (in Dutch) for high school teachers of Classics in the Low Countries with Trilingue-related teaching resources (DaLes).

The Database of Nordic Neo-Latin Literature, prepared at the Centre for Danish Neo-Latin (CDNL) 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).

The 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).

The National Census of Sixteenth-Century Italian Editions (EDIT16) aims at surveying the Italian printed production of the sixteenth century. The database describes editions printed between 1501 and 1600 in Italy, in any language, and abroad in the Italian language. Filtering by language reveals that, as of August 2023, more than 31,000 books included are Latin, and that over 8,600 of them are available as full digital copies. Although many of them are editions of ancient and medieval works, a significant number is Neo-Latin.

The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) is the international database of 15th-century European printing created by the British Library with contributions from institutions worldwide. The database records nearly every item printed from movable type before 1501, but not material printed entirely from woodblocks or engraved plates. As it does not contain an in-dept description of every item, it provides links to other databases. Among slightls more than 30,000 records, over 21,000 are prints in Latin language. When available, digital facsimiles are linked to.

The Magister Dixit database contains all known lecture notes taken by students of the first two years of the university curriculum at the old University of Louvain (1425–1797) and preserved at the Louvain University (KU Leuven and UCL) or in the Royal Library of Belgium. Hundreds of volumes of such notes are digitised in the form of images and can be searched by metadata such as source, professor, student, date, provenance, and topics covered. Project description is found here. (Note: Access might be unavailable or limited.)

The Manus: Manuscripts of Italian Libraries / Manoscritti delle biblioteche italiane is a database containing the descriptions and both partial or complete digitised images of manuscripts preserved in public, ecclesiastical or private libraries. It includes letter collections as well. As of August 2023, the number of Latin manuscripts from 1401 on is 672; 34 of them are available as digital images.

The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) contains information on the location of more than 4 million copies of books printed anywhere in the world between 1450 and 1650, thus connecting museums, archives and more than 9,000 libraries, along with links to more than 250,000 full digital scans. The USTC can be searched and filtered by various criteria. As of August 2023, the Catalogue has been expanded to include material published up to 1700. More than 411,000 Latin books are included, 130,000 of which are digitised.

The Bibliography of Books Printed in the German Speaking Countries in the 16th Century / Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD16), Bibliography of Books Printed in the German Speaking Countries in the 17th Century / Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (VD17), and Verzeichnis Deutscher Drucke des 18. Jahrhunderts (VD18) represent retrospective national bibliographies for the period between 1501 and 1700, covering hundreds of libraries and comprising, as of August 2023, more than 400,000 books, around half of which are fully digitised. Many of the books are Neo-Latin, although we do not know the exact number.

The OCR4All is a free, open-source system that helps non-technical users create an automatic workflow for text recognition of historical printed and handwritten material. Thanks to it, scholars without an IT-background can convert their Neo-Latin printed books to machine-readable format. The User Guide is found at the project website, but Johann Ramminger’s concise description of his experience with the system is a good starting point for a Neo-Latinist.

The Rescribe is a research collective with a focus on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and training for historical texts. Their OCR training packages are designed for the Tesseract and OCRopus engines and can be downloaded and used for free. The software and tools created are all released as free and open source software. There is a blog which contains various guides and articles, written to be useful for humanists, librarians and technologists.