Digital Resources

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.

The Analytical Bibliography of Online Neo-Latin Texts was created and is maintained by Dana F. Sutton in 1999, and is the most comprehensive such list available. As of August 2023, it contains more than 75,000 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 August 2023, 787 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 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.

Frühneuzeitliche Ärztebriefe des deutschsprachigen Raums (1500–1700) aims at collecting, indexing, and selectively summarizing the bulk of letters written to and by 16th and 17th century physicians of the German-speaking countries. The database currently contains some 62,500 letters from more than 500 archives and libraries across the world. Moreover, epistolae medicorum from printed editions since the early 1500s until the present time have also been included as completely as possible. By focusing on the protagonists’ networks as well as the contents of their writings (be they medical or not), we hope that this database may be helpful to any researcher of Early Modern history, science, and literature in the widest sense. Further items and summaries have continually been added, and English translations of the summaries are now being completed for most of the 16th century letters.

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.

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) and Bibliography of Books Printed in the German Speaking Countries in the 17th Century / Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (VD17) 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.