The Royal Irish Academy, in its efforts to produce a definitive Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic Sources, has worked to establish an electronic database containing the whole of Celtic-Latin literature from the period 400-1200 A.D.--a body of over 1300 texts, ranging from mere fragments to learned treatises hundreds of pages long, including saints' lives, canons and pentientials, liturgical and penitential works, theological works from British, Irish, Breton, and Scottish authors.
Recognizing, moreover, that these texts neatly complement the largely Continental canon of Brepols' Cetedoc Library of Christian Latin Texts (CLCLT-2), the two have joined forces to present them using Cetedoc's own operating system. Researchers f amiliar with one will have no difficulty making use of the other. The ACLL-1 DOS interface allows users to perform complex searches on all texts contained in the library, and the results can be downloaded to diskette or printer for later use.
Introduction: Responsa
The Responsa Project of Bar-Ilan University has been a twenty-year endeavor to compile an electronic database of Jewish scriptural texts. Currently the collection stands at over 400 volumes, making it the largest of its kind in the world. The database inc ludes the Tanach and its commentators, the Babylonian Talmud with Rashi's commentary, the Jerusalem Talmud, Rambam, Midrashim and a wide range of Responsa, spanning a period of about a thousand years. While the project is ongoing by nature, as of 1994 the complete holdings had been made available on CD-ROM.
Bible, Rashi on Bible, Bible Commentaries, Mishnah, Talmud Bavli, Rashi on Talmud, Talmud Yerushalmi, Halachic Midrashim, Aggadic Midrashim, Rambam, Tur, Shulchan Aruch, Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, Mishnah Berurah, and Responsa, or ----, from medieval times through the present century.
You may search for grammatical variants, forms derived from a given root or lemma, prefixes and suffixes, or plene and defective spellings.You may include alternative forms or terms in the same search, negate search terms, and specify the distance between them.
Texts Incude:
Located at the Université Catholique de Louvain, the Centre de Traitement Electronique des Documents' CD-ROM of Christian Latin Texts is part of an ongoing project to produce a database of Patrological texts covering authors of the 2nd century through 15th centuries. The CLCLT-3 CD-ROM contains the complete Latin texts of the Corpus Patrum Latinorum (including the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, and the Continuatio Mediaevalis), as well as the Vulgate, Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, the complete works of Augustine, Jerome and many others. The CLCLT-3 Windows interface allows users to perform complex searches on all texts contained in the CLCLT-3 library. Search information can be downloaded to diskette or printer for later use.
The CIC collection currently includes materials that are available from the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Ultimately, this page aims to pull together disparate humanities texts resources maintained by all CIC universities into a cohesive collection for easy access by our humanities scholars and other library users; to give our CIC colleagues experience in using these resources, and to establish an identifiable "CIC Collection" of humanities e-texts. Additional texts from all CIC members will be added in the future. The following pages have been developed by the CIC Libraries' Working Group on Electronic Texts in the Humanities:
Religious Texts
The Multilingual Bibles and Search Bibles: This site: hosts a detailed and user-friendly search interface, which supports simple, proximity, and boolean queries.
The English Poetry Full-Text Database contains the works of 1,350 English-language poets from the Anglo-Saxon period to the end of the nineteenth century. The peots are British, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish, and their works have been chosen from the New Cambridge Bibligraphy of English Literature (Cambridge U.P., 1969-72).
You can search either through entire volumes of a poet's works, or through individual poems. The poems are encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. Some texts relevant to Religio us and Biblical Studies contained in the English Poetry Database include:
The Lay Folks Catechism. Saint's Lives in Middle English A Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament The Harrowing of Hell The Gospel of Nicodemus Apocrypha The Passion of our Lord sermons religious poems legendaries prayers psalms hymns pastoral and clerical instruction The Pricke of Conscience Hell, Purgatory, heaven, world, man, sin, grace, virtue, good works, God's mercy, God's justice. Dream of the Rood Exodus Daniel Genesis
PHI WORKPLACE PHI Workplace, a Windows application corresponding to Pandora for the Macintosh, is designed to read and search through Classical texts produced by the Packard Humanities Institute. There are currently two CD-ROMs related to this field. The first, PHI's CD-ROM #5.3, contains virtually the entirety of Latin literature up to A.D. 200, including the later writers Servius, Porphyry, Zeno, and Justinian. The second, CD-ROM #6, contains both the Inscriptions of the Christian Empire and the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papryi. Inscriptions, a database of nearly 87,000 Greek texts of the late imperial and Byzantine periods, is intended as a resource for the study of late antiquity.
Texts in the collection range chronologically from the accession of Diocletian to the fall of Constantinople (A.D. 285-1453). However, pre-Constantinian Christian inscriptions and Jewish inscriptions of the earlier Roman period are also included, as are non-Christian texts dating to the period of the Tetrarchy or later. In addition to the macaronic Greek and Latin of many of these works, the Judaic corpus includes material in Hebrew and Aramaic.
The Duke Data Bank, on the other hand, began in 1983 as a ten-year project at Duke University to construct a machine-readable data bank comprising all published Greek and Latin documentary papyri. Defined broadly, this includes all original documents (as distinguished from literary and subliterary texts) written on papyrus, parchment, ostraca, wooden or waxed tablets during a period extending from the 4th century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. Of the 421 volumes of such papyri published since 1813--over 35,000 documents--375 of them had been included on CD-ROM #6 as of April 1991.
A complete bibliography of these Latin texts is available either
online or in print form from the LETRS staff.
The TLG, an index and concordance to the literature and vocabulary of ancient Greece, was originally conceived by the publisher Stephanus in 1572. His four-volume edition soon became obsolete, however, as additional and variant manuscripts were discovered and as rival publishers joined the market. In 1894 a similar project was begun for Latin literature, scheduled to be completed within a decade. This estimate was too optimistic, as the project still continues, now with completion scheduled for 2025. Given that the literary output of ancient Greece was more than ten times that of Rome, there seemed little hope for such a project. Then, in 1971 a way was found. At the time, Marianne McDonald, a doctoral candidate at the University of California at San Diego was writing her dissertation on the concepts of happiness in Greek drama. Her investigative research into the vocabulary used to express happiness had two avenues of approach: the unacceptable approach of using a dictionary with a few sample quotations, or the equally unacceptable approach of reading every word of Greek until she came across such instances. She then offered the recently-established University of California at Irvine one million dollars to create an electronic concordance of Greek literature--with money provided by her father, the founder of the Zenith Corporation. After two years of extensive research and testing, the project was off the ground, headed by Theodore Brunner, U.C. Irvine Professor of Classics.
The data entry for the TLG was conducted for the most part by an electronic firm in South Korea, and is now being continued in China. Through their efforts, the TLG data bank now contains virtually all ancient Greek texts surviving from the period between Homer (8th century B.C.) and A.D. 600, plus historiographical, lexicographic, and scholiastic texts deriving from the period between 600 and 1453. This canon amounts to approximately 69 million words of text. Approximately 58 million words of this total are verified, and available for distribution; verification and correction of the remainder is in progress. The TLG Project is now concentrating efforts on the canon of works from 600 to 1453, the fall of Constantinople, and hopes to complete the project within a decade. The costs of producing and maintaining the TLG and its staff of eight are paid in part by private donors and foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, foreign government agencies, professional associations, the University of California, and licensees of the TLG CD-ROM, such as Indiana University.
LETRS has available searching and textual analysis software for the TLG in a variety of formats and for a variety of platforms. For DOS: Lbase, produced by Silver Mountain Software; for Windows: TLG Workplace, produced by Silver Mountain Software; and for Apple Macintosh: Pandora, produced by Harvard University and distributed by Scholars Press. Printed documentation is available for all of these products.
For a list of authors contained on the TLG CD-ROM, as well as textual, biographical, and literary data on these authors, see Berkowitz, Luci and Karl A. Squitier, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: Canon of Greek Authors and Works, 3rd. ed., New York: Oxford University Press---available at the LETRS facility. For further information, connect to the TLG Gopher Server at U.C. Irvine, the TLG Home Page, or contact LETRS staff.