Religious Studies

The Library of Latin Texts is a searchable full-text database of classical, patristic, medieval and neo-Latin writers. It includes:
- Literature from Antiquity (Plautus, Terence, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Titius-Livius, the Senecas, the two Plinys, Tacitus and Quintilian and others).
- Literature from Patristic Authors (Ambrose, Augustine, Ausonius, Cassian, Cyprian, Gregory the Great, Jerome, Marius Victorinus, Novatian, Paulinus of Nola, Prudentius, Tertullian and others) It also contains non-Christian literature of that period (Ammianus Marcellinus, the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Claudian, Macrobius and Martianus Cappella).
- Literature from the Middle Ages (Anselm of Canterbury, Beatus de Liebana, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, Sedulius Scottus, Thomas à Kempis, Thomas de Celano, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the Rationale of Guilelmus Durandus and important works by Abelard, Bonaventure, Ramon Llull, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham and others).
- Neo-Latin Literature (decrees from the modern ecumenical Church councils up to Vatican II and translations into Latin of important sixteenth-century works).

Includes epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, and oratory.

One Mail instructions:

If you chose to register for an optional, personal account using your indiana.edu email address you will need to update your account to use your iu.edu email address before December 31, 2025. Please use the following instructions to update your account:

1. Log in to your Loeb Classical Library personal account
2. Click on My Loebs at the top of the screen
3. Select My Account
4. Update your email address and press the Save button

From the Vetus Latina Institute: The Vetus Latina Institute was founded in Beuron in 1945 by the Benedictine monk Dom Bonifatius Fischer OSB († 1997). Its goal is the complete collection and critical edition of all surviving remnants of the Old Latin translations of the Bible from manuscripts and citations in ancient writers. Vetus Latina or "Old Latin Bible" is the collective title for the large and very diverse collection of Latin biblical texts used by Christian communities from the second century. Following the expansion and triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Latin became increasingly used as a lingua franca in place of Greek, first in North Africa and then in Spain, England, Gaul and Germany. A diverse array of translations of the Bible appeared, frequently inaccurate and not controlled by any ecclesiastical authority. This flood of versions came to an end in the fourth century as one of them, later known as the Vulgate, gradually established itself in place of the others. By the Carolingian era, the variety of Old Latin texts had been completely superseded. In contrast [to the Vulgate] the Vetus Latina consists of all biblical texts translated from the Greek which do not correspond to the Vulgate. Most Old Latin versions have only been transmitted as fragments. Alongside the few manuscripts which have been preserved, covering an uneven selection of biblical books, the citations and allusions in Latin Church Fathers (and Christian writings in Greek which were translated into Latin at an early date) are an essential source for investigating the tradition. The citations of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage († 258) provide a firm starting-point: the vocabulary and translation technique of the version used by Cyprian are clearly differentiated from later forms of text, attested in abundance from the fourth century onwards.

Contains the text of the sixty-eight printed volumes of Acta Sanctorum published in Antwerp and Brussels by the Société des Bollandistes, from the two January volumes published in 1643 to the Propylaeum to December published in 1940. All prefatory material, original texts, critical apparatus and indices, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (BHL) reference numbers, are also included.

This book is the first English edition of all of Anselm’s major works to appear in one convenient volume. Contents:
Letter to Archbishop Lanfranc -- Monologion -- Proslogion -- Pro insipiente (On behalf of the fool), by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers -- Reply to Gaunilo -- De Grammatico (Dialogue on literacy and the literate) -- On truth -- On free will -- On the fall of the devil -- On the incarnation of the Word -- Why God became man -- On the virgin conception and original sin -- On the procession of the Holy Spirit -- De concordia (The compatibility of God's foreknowledge, predestination, and grace with human freedom) -- Philosophical fragments.

The Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a non-commercial online image database of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, or manuscripts made in the tradition of books before printing. DS unites scattered resources from a consortium of many libraries into a union catalog for teaching and scholarly research in medieval and Renaissance studies. It provides unprecedented access to illuminated and textual manuscripts through digital cataloging records, supported by high resolution images and retrievable by various topic searches. DS enables users from the most casual to the most specialized to study the rare and valuable materials of academic, research, and public libraries. It makes available collections that are often restricted from public access and includes not only recognized masterpieces but also understudied manuscripts that have been previously overlooked for exhibition or publication. DS fosters the public viewing of non-circulating materials otherwise available only within restricted access libraries. As a visual catalog, DS allows scholars and beginners to verify with their own eyes cataloguing information about places and dates of origin, scripts, artists, and quality. Special emphasis is placed on the touchstone materials, i.e., manuscripts signed and dated by their scribes, thus beginning the American contribution to the goal established in 1953 by the Comité international de paléographie latine (International Committee of Latin Paleography): to document photographically the proportionately small number of codices of certain origin that will serve stylistically to localize and date the vast quantities of unsigned manuscripts. DS publishes not only manuscripts of firm attribution but also ones that need the attention of further scholarship and traditionally would have been unlikely candidates for reproduction. Because it is web-based, it also allows for updates and corrections, and as a matter of form individual records in DS can and do acknowledge contributions from outside scholars. DS encourages interaction between the academic and the library world to build a growing and reciprocally beneficial body of knowledge. DS looks to the needs of a very diverse community of specialists: medievalists, classicists, musicologists, paleographers, diplomatists, literary scholars and art historians. At the same time DS recognizes a broader user community in the public that values rare and unique works of historical, literary and artistic significance.

Those who are interested in the writers, texts and manuscripts of Antiquity and the Middle Ages know how difficult it is to identify a particular work encountered by chance in a manuscript, or, when studying or publishing a particular text, to make an inventory of all the manuscripts in which it appears. These difficulties arise primarily from the manner in which literary works circulated prior to the invention of printing. Before Gutenberg, the text had a life of its own, independent of its author, and was modified from copy to copy. It is not only the text that changed; titles might vary and authorial attributions could shift. There was a tendency to lend only to the rich, and Ovid, Saint Augustine and Saint Bernard found themselves credited with a host of apocrypha. The incipit or first words of a work thus remain the surest means of designating it unambiguously. In a sense, the incipit, by virtue of its invariability, is the identity card of the text. Standing apart from the diversity of attributions and titles, the incipit guarantees the presence of a particular text.
 

Also includes: a chronology, a visual sources gallery, an interactive map, a glossary, family trees and links to other scholarly free to access digital resources for researching the medieval period.

Only five major letter collections exist from fifteenth century England and they are all available digitally via this resource.

The Paston letters have long been a subject of both literary and historical interest and are the largest of the collections and the best known of the five families. Their letters document the life of a gentry family during the War of the Roses. Hundreds of documents and letters exchanged between different family members cover in microcosm the dilemmas of a nation beset by war, disease and legal disputes.

The Celys were a merchant family, and crucial players in the wool trade between England and the Channel ports. This collection covers every aspect of their commercial dealings.

The Stonors were a well-established gentry family in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. These documents cover the longest time period of any of the collections and throw light on both business and domestic issues. 

The Plumptons were a dominant northern family. Their documents, which continue right through to the early sixteenth century, reveal a family entangled in the social and economic affairs of the region.

The Armburgh family material is primarily concerned with a dispute over a family inheritance.

From the first book published in English through the 17th-century, this collection contains over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. The database offers complete citation information and page images.

Includes access to collections 1-10, and 15. Religious works dominate, but the resource also includes secular material. Fully searchable pages scanned directly from the original printed sources in high-resolution full color. Each item is captured in its entirety, complete with binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages and any loose inserts.

This collection offers a comprehensive survey of the original writings of the Hungarian reformers. It includes texts from the period of the first stirrings of reform in the 1540s through to works written for the established churches of the region during the 1650s. Useful for those studying the Lutheran Reformation, international Calvinism, the Catholic Reformation, and the emergence of Anti-Trinitarianism.

Includes access to six modules: LGBTQ History Since 1940, part 1;  LGBTQ History Since 1940, part 2 ; Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century ; International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture ; L'Enfer de la Bibliotheque Nationale de France Digital Archive ; Community and Identity in North America.

Includes access to two modules:

Module 1: Global Missions and Contemporary Encounters, 1804-2009: features publications from the Church Missionary Society and the South American Missionary Society between 1804 and 2009.

Module 2: Medical Journals, Asian Missions and the Historical Record, 1816-1986: focuses on the publications of CMS medical mission auxiliaries, the work of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society among women in Asia and the Middle East, newsletters from native churches and student missions in China and Japan, and 'home' material including periodicals aimed specifically at women and children subscribers.

Includes the entire corpus of Barth's Gesamtausgabe, comprised of more than 40 volumes of sermons, letters, lectures, conversations, and academic writings. Also includes Barth's magnum opus, the 14-volume Kirchliche Dogmatik.

Includes interactive maps and original documents linked to essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies. The sections cover Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class and Colonialism, c1783-1969. The images are sources from the British Library, including the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library; the University of Birmingham Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Public Record Office and the State Records, New South Wales, Australia.

Includes interviewees from across the United States, from a variety of fields, and with memories stretching from the 1890s to the present. Rather than focus on one particular part of a person’s life or a single subject, such as a career or participation in the civil rights movement, the interviews are life oral histories covering the person’s entire span of memories as well as his or her own family’s oral history.

Personal narratives including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories dating from around 1840 through the present, focusing heavily on the period from 1920 to 1980, with much of the material being previously unpublished. Also includes indexed and searchable Ellis Island Oral History interviews, and some image and audio files.