3. The Initial Stages of Research and the Use of Bibliographic and Reference Sources

We proceed from a formal consideration of the various subject matters and their subdisciplines to the practical task of research itself. Once a student has chosen to work in the broad field of church history or theology, he or she will soon encounter the need to select and narrow a viable topic of research. In some respects, the mental processes of choosing and limiting a topic are time-­honored and traditional; in other respects, the use of computer-­assisted searches has influenced even our preliminary considerations. This chapter sets forth the methods by which students may delimit a topic; we then introduce a wide variety of bibliographical tools, including those that utilize the latest techniques of storage and retrieval, and we show how the judicious use of these tools and techniques should contribute to a successful outcome. We will find that traditional resources and guides, when used in conjunction with computer databases and the Internet, offer advantages in both the method of selecting a topic, and in the creation of new areas of research.

Selecting and Narrowing a Topic

When the research student first considers selecting and narrowing a field of study, personal interest in the topic is an important beginning point, because in most cases, engagement with the field will extend considerably beyond the three- or four-year period of graduate studies. Students will commonly continue academic work well beyond the completion of the degree and may thus be involved in the general area of research chosen for the dissertation topic for ten or even twenty years. An individual’s personal interest in the research topic raises once again the issue of bias and the theological and/or Christian commitment of the researcher. Indeed, the student’s own theological or scholarly pilgrimage ought to come into play at some point, since an investment in the worth of the topic is often necessary for sustaining an interest in an area for a long period of time. This chapter will show, however, that the problem of bias and personal interest can be brought into fruitful tension with the process of narrowing and selecting a topic.1

Students should be able to answer with some sophistication the question of why they are engaged in advanced historical or theological studies. The specific reason that one finds a topic interesting is less important than the interest itself. Everyone should take the time to ponder the wide variety of circumstances that lead to the decision to study a particular topic, ranging from objective matters largely beyond one’s control, to highly personal and subjective choices. If, for example, a professor’s advice about a topic is alone determinative, the student may not fully adopt the topic as his or her own possession. On the other hand, a degree of tentativity about the viability of a subject should be cultivated, especially in the early stages of research, because it is imperative that the particular shape of the project be determined primarily by the evidence, rather than by a predetermined notion about the results of research.2 The best approach is characterized by a healthy tension between genuine commitment to the value of the subject and the integrity that comes into play when one examines a topic with detachment. Nothing is more difficult for the researcher than maintaining a balance between interest and detachment, and yet nothing is more valuable in the quest for objectivity.3

It is not uncommon for a student to begin on a topic, only to find after a significant investment of time and energy that it is less compelling than originally thought. In such a case, it is essential that both mentor and student be sufficiently flexible to start afresh on a new topic. Even six months or more of time spent on a topic that ultimately proves abortive is not lost, because by this time the basic method of research is well-­established and the student will have acquired a working knowledge of a number of scholarly tools. The fact that much of the energy that is devoted to an advanced degree is properly focused upon developing the skills of research is in itself a salutary motive for the endeavor. Indeed, almost any topic will serve this purpose, even those for which the student can muster little enthusiasm. But without a positive interest in the field, students are not likely to be able to maintain sufficient interest in a long-­term program of research. Thus a willingness to turn to a different topic at a relatively early stage in scholarly production may actually help preserve a career of scholarship that would otherwise be jeopardized. It is also well to remember that if the general area of the dissertation does not carry a scholar for a decade or more beyond the Ph.D., the area of research can serve as the point of departure for writing articles and monographs in adjacent areas. Students should not be intimidated by the consequences of their choice, but they should think seriously about how their topic will bear upon the whole future of their academic career in one way or another.

The value of staying with the original topic for several years beyond the Ph.D. is revealed by the second book that will begin to show what a person can really do in their chosen field. To make a significant breakthrough in any scholarly field it is necessary to move past one’s dissertation. Only after the dissertation does one finally learn the discipline well enough to play with the materials, and it is the long-­term investment in a field of research that is really productive. Not infrequently, students will produce a good dissertation only to turn to other things, but it is the long-­term cultivation of a specialized area that will produce lasting results.

The long-­range view of scholarly activity we are advocating here is important for another reason. At the beginning of a research project, when supervisors require a student to narrow the topic down, the common fear is that the subject will become so narrow as to lose all relevance. Thus existential interest in the area seems to be threatened by the need to find a heretofore unexamined field of primary research. This tension between relevance and originality is highly salutary, and if at times the first is sacrificed to the second, the student will have the assurance that at least he or she is acquiring a proper methodology. But it is at this point that a consideration of the long-­term perspective can help alleviate the student’s anxiety. In time, the narrow study will broaden in scope, and if at the outset of one’s career the first piece of research examines only a decade, the second book may cover the period of a generation. Only mature scholars should attempt to write the history of a century or an era, or a system of theology, and thus the inculcation of a proper method at the outset will one day lead to a much broader scope with even greater relevance.

If some students worry about the narrow focus of their dissertation topic, others may feel that their course of study is too broad and not directly germane to their primary purpose of producing a publishable piece of research. These people may need to be reminded that they are not only learning the methods of technical research, but acquiring the skills of comparison, balance, and a due sense of proportion — in a word, the characteristics of a teacher.4 These are qualities that can only be acquired by wide reading and broad-­ranging reflection. The greatest benefits in graduate work thus come to those who expend considerable effort in both detailed, close reading of texts that cover perhaps merely months of time or a single doctrinal locus, and reading that ranges at least across the decades of the century in which they work.

The second step in selecting a topic involves asking the question, “Does it exist?” and this question should be put at the same time we ask, “What is it?” Is the topic the student wishes to write about a real topic, or is he or she moving into an area that by its very nature will not sustain research. For example, one might consider the topic “The View of the New World Reflected in Dante’s Inferno.” Granting that Dante died in 1321, there cannot be views of the new world reflected there. It is not uncommon for students to imagine topics that are in fact not topics, because they may believe there are sources available for a topic that in fact do not exist. Once it is clear that a topic is viable, then one has to ask, “Is what I have thought of as a topic something that everybody in the field already knows about? Is my chosen topic covered exhaustively in somebody else’s monograph, or in a major article in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique?” and if so, the topic must be abandoned. One might then ask the question, “Can I deal with a subtopic of this issue that appears to be common knowledge, the subtopic not being common knowledge? Is there a ramification of it that no one else has seen?” From the very outset of research, students must think about the distinction between a discovery that is new to them and a discovery that makes a genuine contribution to a field. The majority of one’s early insights will fall into the former rather than the latter category, and in one sense, the entire goal of the search in secondary literature is to enable the student to make this critical discrimination with certainty.

These questions raise the issue of the scope of the topic. “The History of the Necessity and Extent of the Atonement from the First Century to the Present” is not a dissertation topic, but a multi-­volume series, probably written by more than one established scholar. The question must be asked, “Am I choosing a topic that can be examined in some 200-350 pages?” That may be hard to do at the beginning, and one has to be aware of the need to adjust as progress is made on the project. A person might begin a doctoral dissertation on “Spiritual Gifts in the Early Church,” assuming that there was just enough material in the sources to sustain the dissertation. After several months of research, it might become evident that the materials were rich to the point of embarrassment, and thus it should be admitted that the early church was far too great a period for the scope of the dissertation. The doctoral advisor should be able to help with the matter of scope and the general outside parameters of a topic. But students themselves should constantly ask, “What is the extent of this topic? How can I narrow it down?” One of the ways of doing this in dissertation research is to think about the various parts of the dissertation and ask, “Is this piece of research a thirty-­page chapter? Or is this piece a two-­hundred-page topic? Do I need to re-­adjust?” These are questions that should be asked at the outset, but they also need to be asked over and over again. Selecting a topic is not a separate matter from narrowing a topic; these tasks actually interrelate and one should keep on asking such questions as the project develops.

We have alluded to a number of ways of narrowing a topic. The most obvious way for the historian is chronology. It is not uncommon today for dissertations in modern British political history to be confined to a single administration that may extend to only three or four years. A student may also narrow their area by means of a subtopic. This approach allows one to examine the broader field while concentrating in more detail on specific aspects that have heretofore been neglected, and for this reason, it holds great promise for maintaining a connection with the student’s interests. Within the chronological period of the eighteenth century, for example, one might concentrate on a single denomination or movement. Another way of narrowing a topic is to focus on a particular method that has not been used before. Today this often involves quantification. A researcher begins with certain impressions about an area of historical study, but these impressions are based upon qualitative, impressionistic evidence. It is then useful to look at that data and say, “Is there a way of quantifying this?”

A topic may also be narrowed by the specific type of subject matter to be studied (which is closely related to method, but somewhat different). Is there a possibility of bringing a new set of documents or source materials to bear on a topic that has already been examined? One example of this is found in the distinction between printed and manuscript sermons. In colonial America, printed sermons have been quite thoroughly examined, but the study of manuscript sermons is currently an active area of research. In late-eighteenth-­century Britain, however, neither published nor unpublished sermons have been examined in sufficient detail. In this case, a student would probably wish to select a representative sample of sermons of either the published or unpublished variety, though it might well make sense to draw from both types of sources. In any case, the type of source examined may serve as one method for narrowing a topic. This method is particularly useful in light of the vast new collections of source material that are available on the Internet.

Finally, one may narrow geographically. Suppose one wished to study the relationship of church and state through the medium of preaching during the period of the American Revolution. The topic could be studied in the North American colonies, or it could be confined to England. One might also chose to study church and state in Wales or Scotland and have a legitimate topic, assuming that the conclusions one draws are geographically as well as chronologically specific. But by the same token, we should note that it is probably not a valid dissertation topic to examine all four of these countries. The examination of two countries might be desirable, and we thereby arrive at yet another principle of delimitation in research, namely, comparative analysis. If, for example, other dissertations have already been done on each of two countries, there is the possibility of a dissertation arising from a comparative study of the two through an investigation that looks at parallels, influences, and differing outcomes. On the other hand, a dissertation that is historical in orientation and that deals with institutions or movements, as distinct from ideas, will not often be attempted on both America and Britain. Of course, there are exceptions. One might realistically address the transatlantic community, a topic of recent high interest among scholars, but if the geographical spread is too broad, it will commonly take the beginning student too far afield. Even in the case of North America alone, it would be critically important to distinguish between New England, mid-­Atlantic, and Southern regions; attitudinal differences will be found related to the different political contexts, and the difficulty of handling the vast body of literature and attending to the need for properly nuanced distinctions might require that the student narrow the topic to two, or possibly even one, of these three regions. Much attention has also been given to religion and political authority in local studies that deal with one or more towns within a single colony.

In philosophy, the history of ideas, or the history of doctrine, there are additional ways to limit a topic. No one will be able to write a dissertation on the entire philosophy of Thomas Aquinas or the entire thought of David Hume. When we consider the philosophy of a great thinker, then we begin to ask about the impact of other materials on that writer. Naturally, we are limited by which materials the person had access to, which may not be geographical. But then again, the question of the influences on a person’s thought may have certain relationships to geography. At different periods in history the flow goes in different directions. It is obvious, for example, in late-seventeenth-­century British philosophy that the impact of Cartesianism must be registered somewhere after 1660, and we should ask, “How is Descartes’s thought coming across the Channel and how is it being interpreted?” At the same time, we must begin to register the impact of British philosophy on the continent. For example, one can observe the impact of Hume on Voltaire. But there is far less impact of German philosophy on the French in the eighteenth century than English philosophy on the French. Christian Wolff does not significantly impact the French, but Hume definitely does. In the history of thought, it is not so much the geographical limitations as the lines of communication that are important, and these have to be clearly traced out.

It is entirely legitimate to discuss late-seventeenth-­ or eighteenth-­century British philosophy, or nineteenth-­century British philosophy, on the condition that the student is careful to note continental influences. That is a proper limitation in that it permits one to restrict the main lines of analysis to British thinkers and not have entire chapters on individual continental thinkers. A student can build in geographical limitation, even in those areas, as long as the lines of influence are defined. By the same token, one might discuss late-eighteenth-­century German biblical criticism, as long as one carefully notes the impact of the English deists, but this does not necessitate having separate chapters on the deists. The student can take for granted a whole body of research that has already been done on the deists and focus instead upon their impact on the Germans. Proper footnoting handles the comprehensive survey of secondary sources, rather than exposition in the text. In this case, then, the geographical distinction does work, as long as one is careful about it.

In the process of selecting and narrowing a topic, research students may now take advantage of the powerful new tools available on the Internet. The new techniques and databases are so important that they already have become, in and of themselves, one means of finding and delimiting a viable topic. On the one hand, this technology simplifies certain aspects of the initial search process, but on the other hand, because of the comprehensive and extensive bibliographic reach of these vast databases, it adds new and sometimes daunting complexity to the task. Neither the possibilities nor the pitfalls of these new sources can be adequately grasped apart from a thorough acquaintance with the traditional tools of research.

Current Research Techniques and New Bibliographic Databases in Church History and Theology

Major methodological advances in the humanities are usually not as frequent, nor as dramatic, as advances in the natural sciences. Two notable exceptions to this rule are found in the period of the Enlightenment and in the current revolution in the storage and retrieval of information. For over 200 years the basic methods of historical investigation have remained essentially the same, but while the mental tools of the Enlightenment have not been superseded, they are no longer sufficient for critical historical study. Advances in technology are currently influencing the humanities on a scale comparable to the impact of the scientific method during the Enlightenment, and scholars are now talking about the influence of the computer on the study of history as a paradigm-­defining change. This change was adumbrated two decades ago at a time prior to the massive impact of electronic books, online journals, and above all digitization projects of major collections of rare books and archives. Given the florescence of these projects, historiography in all fields has undergone a massive paradigm shift.5 Thirty-­five years ago it was commonly thought that the use of computers and sources in microform applied to only certain types of historical investigation, such as economic and social history, or more narrowly, to those areas that were susceptible to quantification. Research on the impact of religious belief on voting behavior is one example of the use to which quantitative data was often put. But a number of well-­known scholars resisted the so-­called “new history” with a passion that bordered on paranoia. They feared that the new methods would drain history of meaning; most of the critics worked in the field of intellectual history, and in their apprehensions, the specter of economic determinism was always standing in the wings.6

Church historians have been even more reluctant than historians of ideas to embrace the new technology, and apparently for the same philosophical reasons.7 Innovations in storing and searching documents have simply passed these critics by and placed the debate on an entirely new footing. It is now evident that scholars in all areas of history and theology must become thoroughly acquainted with the new techniques. The revolution in the manipulation of information made possible by the computer and the Internet is clearly transforming the nature of research, though, to be sure, the mental habits of disciplined study and critical judgment remain unchanged. The areas in which students can safely ignore the new methods and source mediums are becoming fewer, and even those scholars working in areas as yet untouched by this technology can still benefit from an exposure to the conceptual elegance of unimpeded research and exhaustive, near-­perfect bibliographies.

In many, if not most, fields of historical and theological inquiry, the nature of critical study today thus necessarily entails the utilization of new searching techniques based on the Internet. The new techniques and sources have considerable relevance for research students in a variety of ways. For example, given the ease of access to full text databases on the Internet, the need for students to locate themselves near large research libraries is definitely lessened. Above all, however, the new technology bodes well for the creation of new research projects alluded to throughout this book. Indeed, old topics can now be reexamined, but with more extensive documentation and, hence, greater precision. New areas of research are opening rapidly as the capabilities of the new techniques are recognized. It is now possible to study the number of editions of religious pamphlets and the place where they were published, and this in turn will allow us to offer new interpretations concerning the influence of religious ideas. The entire written corpus of less well-­known persons can now be examined, and these works will often provide enough new material to sustain a thesis or dissertation. Clearly, the use of the new techniques for identifying people in the past has implications for the study of minorities and women’s studies in church history. The power these tools offer the historian in primary research is simply unparalleled in history, and the same observations apply to searches of secondary literature, both unpublished (dissertations) and published (articles and monographs). Clearly, traditional hard copy bibliographies, particularly in specialized fields, will remain essential, but given the current rate of proliferation of monographic literature, computerized searching has become mandatory.

Researchers on the Internet need to understand a basic distinction between the public and the hidden web — or as also identified, the visible and invisible or the surface and deep web. Recent estimates of the amount of material on the worldwide Internet web have claimed that nearly five hundred times as much material exists on the hidden web as on the public or surface web that is searched by such standard engines as Google and Yahoo. The difference between the public and the hidden web may be compared to that between fast food and fine dining: with your automobile as a search engine, you will be able not only to locate a fast-­food vendor, you will also be able to get your meal at a drive-­through window without ever leaving the car — but with the same search engine, you can only manage to locate fine dining. In the absence of a drive-­through window, accessing fine dining will mean setting aside your first search engine and using another, namely, your feet. Google and Yahoo deal in fast food; they do not provide the fine dining of online research bibliographical tools and online library access. Moreover, inasmuch as these public search engines do not access the hidden or deep web, they do not come close, by themselves, to serving the needs of even a beginning researcher.

Nearly all major bibliographical tools and nearly all significant text resources, the portals of which can be located by standard public search engines, belong to the hidden or deep web: the online catalogs of major universities, the Online Computer Library Center’s (OCLC) FirstSearch, the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) Religion Database, and Journal Storage (JSTOR) discussed below, as well as sources discussed in chapter 4, such as the Patrologia, Early English Books Online (EEBO), and so forth. These resources of the hidden web also need to be distinguished into unrestricted and restricted databases.

Most online library catalogs belong to the unrestricted databases: one can access the libraries, for example, of the University of California system, Duke University, Princeton University, Oxford University, Leiden University, and so forth, either directly by finding and entering their library home pages on the Internet or by using a tool such as LibWeb that provides a convenient portal to most of the major library sites (http://.lib-­web.org/). These resources classify as hidden but unrestricted inasmuch as Google and Yahoo will not enter their databases, but — once the entry point to the database is located, including through Google or Yahoo — the database may be used by anyone without need of a log-in or password. Some online libraries not only offer their catalogs for bibliographical purposes, but, like the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Jan Laski Bibliothek in Emden, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, also offer select holdings in digitized form to the public.

By contrast, such resources as OCLC FirstSearch, the ATLA Religion Database, and JSTOR (all bibliographical), and the Patrologia and Eighteenth Century Collections Online or ECCO (both text libraries, the latter two digitized and word-­searchable), not only cannot be accessed directly by means of a Google or Yahoo search, but once a prospective user has found the home page or portal, a log-in and password will be necessary.8 Typically, access to these databases can be gained by way of the websites of major research libraries — available to all users within the library (using the library’s own system that includes proper log-in) and to regularized users like faculty and students by way of external access (using a library card or other identification for access).

There is also a middle category, of which the British National Maritime Museum at Greenwich is an example: it is a hidden database that asks for a log-in and password, but allows anyone the privilege of requesting a log-in and password for entrance. Subsequent entrance to the site is governed by the log-in and password, which typically expire after a term or after a period of non-­use.

Church History and Theology: Research in Secondary Sources

Dissertations and Theses

One of the first steps in doctoral research is to determine whether the proposed topic of one’s dissertation has been researched by someone else at the doctoral level and whether her or his dissertation covers the topic in such a way as to make further research unnecessary. Logically, one might begin with a bibliographical search for scholarly monographs, or even with a search of the periodical literature. By far the best approach, however, is to begin with a search of the dissertation literature.

This is a simple piece of advice that offers several advantages to those who follow it. It is, in the first place, a salutary exercise because it leads the student to think about the character and scope of dissertation topics and to begin to look at what other students have done at other seminaries and universities across the land. The dissertation search ought to lead to conclusions about what can be accomplished in a dissertation and about the length and breadth and depth of research topics at the doctoral level. In the second place, granting the exhaustive cataloging done by University Microfilms for Dissertation Abstracts International, now available online through ProQuest’s Digital Dissertations and OCLC’s FirstSearch (both by subscription), the current character of the listing of titles and abstracts, and the careful bibliographical work required in most doctoral research, together with the availability of all cataloged dissertations from University Microfilms, the dissertation search can offer the most convenient access to recent work, whether in the form of dissertations or in the form of references to the monographic and periodical literature. It is not a crime — in fact, it is a prerequisite to good research — for a student to pay close attention to the bibliographical work of previous scholars.

The Bibliography at the end of this book lists several older hard-­copy searching tools that offer a comprehensive listing of dissertations for the earlier period, but these have now been superseded by the online databases, and in particular, the new Open Access Theses and Dissertations (http://www.oatd.org), which, unlike the commercial ventures, provides unrestricted access to dissertations, many in full text (Bib. I.A). Master’s-­level theses typically need not be consulted; there are very few cases when a master’s thesis ought to give anyone pause for concern. This observation would be less true in the case of British commonwealth countries than it is in the United States; M.Lit. theses from Oxford or Cambridge, for example, are usually of high quality. Most American master’s theses, however, will be fairly superficial treatments of a topic, and even if they cover precisely the topic that one is dealing with, the Ph.D. dissertation should supersede any master’s work considerably.

Students should be alert to the problematic nature of the older title “Dissertation Abstracts International,” and the current online resources, because the term raises the issue of the difficulty of estimating the exact geographic and retrospective extent of the database coverage. Although it is referred to as an “international” guide, its coverage of dissertations for the period before 1976 is limited almost exclusively to dissertations produced in North America. Moreover, the online versions of some of the abstracts were truncated by UMI (when compared to the older, hard-­copy versions), and very few listings provide any abstract at all for dissertation titles before 1980. For the earlier period, only authors and titles are listed, and hence the search parameters that one adopts for dissertations completed before 1980 need to be thought through with even greater than normal care. Once the appropriate dissertations are chosen, they may typically be ordered in either soft, unbound copies or obtained in electronic PDF files. Many dissertations by UMI may also be borrowed on interlibrary loan through local library services (see below under Library Networks and Online Libraries).

Several ancillary tools are also of use in obtaining titles of dissertations in history, and specifically in church history and historical theology. The American Historical Association allows open access to dissertation titles completed in history departments in North America and supports a separate search for some history dissertations currently in progress (http://www.historians.org/dissertations/). The British counterpart to Dissertation Abstracts International is the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses — UK & Ireland, available by subscription (http://www.proquest.com/products-services/pqdt_uk_ireland.html). Many dissertations completed in the U.K. can be obtained in full text from the British Library’s Electronic Theses Online Service (http://ethos.bl.uk/), and retrospective digitization is ongoing. Researchers who are working on topics centered in other foreign countries will have recourse to the specialized dissertation guides for those specific countries. Harvard University provides a fine guide for obtaining dissertations around the world, and it organizes the web page by the dissertation’s country of origin (http://guides.hcl.harvard.edu/dissertations), but the searches for some countries are by subscription only. An indirect avenue to dissertation searches may be taken by identifying doctoral advisors and their students. For example, the American Historical Association’s site, noted above, allows one to search dissertation titles by doctoral advisor and by departments of history. Similarly, directories of scholars (which are often arranged by century or era) can assist in locating dissertations by determining the advisors’ areas of interest and their current research. The International Directory of Scholars, members of the Renaissance Society of America, and the Directory of Scholars of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference are all available online, though access is by subscription (http://www.itergateway.org/). The International Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies also maintains a directory that allows searches by scholars’ names and research interest with open access.

The question of the retrospective extent of these volumes raises a further issue: the dissertation search can safely be concentrated upon the last forty years, or fifty years at the most. Dissertations that were written before 1960 are usually of much less concern. Given the technological and methodological advances typical of most disciplines in the humanities in the last generation, one can be fairly certain that a dissertation written before 1960 is not going to pose a major threat to current research efforts. In addition, the best dissertations of the past have typically either been published in book form or consistently noted in subsequent studies of the same topic.

The main scholarly achievements of older dissertations, whether they are good dissertations or not, will thus commonly have already been brought into the history of research between the date of the writing of the dissertation and the present. The topic will have been covered in some way, and most often the dissertation will be superseded by someone else’s research. But occasionally one finds older dissertations that have not been entirely superseded. The existence and quality of such works become readily apparent from the rest of one’s research in the other forms of secondary literature. The exceptions to the “fifty year rule” will therefore easily be dealt with in the subsequent stages of one’s literature search. Almost without exception, students will find ways to cover the literature examined in dissertations more than fifty years old without difficulty, and they will readily improve upon them.

As with almost every kind of search that will be discussed in this chapter, one should start with the most recent references and work back in time. The briefest experience in theological or historical research reveals the logic of this procedure. The more recent studies will have many references to previous dissertations as well as to recent monographs and articles. Students will, therefore, save themselves a good deal of time and energy if they begin with the most recent references.

An examination of recent scholarly bibliographies will make it very clear that the relative ease of this initial search process in no way diminishes its importance for the final product of one’s own research and certainly in no way implies that the reading of dissertations belongs exclusively to the dissertation-­phase of scholarship. We are in the midst of a bibliographical revolution that has as much to do with unpublished as with published materials. Those of us who went through graduate school in the early 1970s used many scholarly books that failed to refer to a single dissertation, but because of the publication program of University Microfilms International, this is becoming less and less true. Good books and good contemporary dissertations will almost always refer to at least a half dozen dissertations. Indeed, references to dissertations in a scholarly monograph are one indication of the currency of its research.

Students must not assume that dissertations that have not been revised for publication are of no value. Graduate schools make and retain their reputations on the quality of their dissertations. The vast majority of dissertations are never revised for subsequent publication as books, and this occurs for a range of reasons. Sometimes scholars move on to other topics, sometimes the dissertation is too long to be turned into a book, and sometimes the extent of the changes necessary to induce a publisher to accept the dissertation as a monograph is not appropriate to the subject. (The advantages and disadvantages of turning dissertations into books will be the subject of a subsequent discussion.)

Undoubtedly the most important reason today that dissertations are not published is that University Microfilms has rendered publication unnecessary. The assumption is commonly made that contemporary dissertations ought to be the final product of advanced research. ProQuest/UMI provides copyright services and, in effect, an on-­demand publication service. In a sense, the form of citation frequently used in references to doctoral research — “Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of X” — no longer accurately represents the case. Word-­processing, desktop publication, and the photolithoprinting of so-­called “camera-­ready copy” have resulted in dissertations that are more like books and books that look more and more like visually improved dissertations.

When a dissertation is published, it becomes a monograph, and then it belongs to a different literary genre that requires different searching tools. Monographic studies in series thus need to be noted separately because many, if not most, revised dissertations that are published will be placed in such series. Monograph series relative to one’s research interests are readily identified since they are typically well-­defined by era or topic, and although the vast majority are now listed by publishers on-­line, they remain an underutilized resource for research students. The Bibliography provides a guide to the most important monograph series in church history and historical theology listed by period in chronological order (see Bib. I.C, II.A.4.b, and so forth). Whether working on-­line or at the library shelf, one can frequently scan the list of titles in a series and find useful works that might otherwise have been missed in a bibliographical search that used key words only or that was narrowly focused on dissertations. For example, the major series on Reformation studies published by Neukirchener contains several groupings of volumes on related topics. When a series is catalogued on-­line or shelved as a set, it is therefore frequently worthwhile to examine the set as a whole, particularly when searching for works that first appeared as dissertations.

In addition to the main guides, we have listed a few indices in the Bibliography that deal with specialized fields. These references are to be understood only as illustrative of a vast host of specialized bibliographies of dissertations.9 For example, V. F. Gilbert and D. S. Tatla, Women’s Studies: A Bibliography of Dissertations, 1870-1982, would be a critical source for anyone working in women’s studies, albeit necessarily supplemented by more recent resources. Michael Montgomery’s American Puritan Studies: An Annotated Bibliography of Dissertations, 1882-1981 was also a significant bibliographical effort. Both of these works used Dissertation Abstracts International extensively, and most of the annotations in Montgomery’s book are from Dissertation Abstracts International. Montgomery has added a few annotations of his own, but the main contribution of this book is its convenience; though it must be supplemented by a search for the past three decades, in Puritan studies it is the best initial point of entry.

Constant vigilance is required to ensure against the chance that others are working on the same topic, and this is not a concern that can be settled definitively in the early stages of one’s research. However, if a student does find that another scholar is working on the same body of literature, it may well be that the specific topic or methods of research are sufficiently different to justify several monographs. Open discussion is required, and much can be accomplished in this respect by a candid exchange through correspondence.

Once a student has determined that his or her subject has not been treated by someone else’s dissertation, or, if it has been the topic of someone else’s dissertation, that its thesis is capable of modification or reappraisal either in whole or in part, the bibliographical search moves on to the next stage, i.e., to published discussions of the particular subject and its collateral subthemes. Just as one’s topic can be ruled out at the dissertation level, it can also be ruled out at the level of scholarly articles and published monographs. Commonly, one gathers materials in the two categories of articles and monographs at the same time, but we have chosen to examine articles before monographs because periodicals are themselves an excellent tool in the search for pertinent books and because recent articles often provide the most up-­to-­date research available on a given topic.

Periodical Indices and Online Databases

Simple convenience dictates that the search for secondary sources in the form of journal articles and books in one’s area of research (including indices, hard copy guides, bibliographies, and monographs) will almost invariably begin in the electronic catalog of a single research library. But even within the confines of one local library, detailed attention must be given to the conventions of the specific library and to the relatively complex nature of author, title, and key word searches. A working bibliography of articles and books is then gradually built as one combs through and assimilates the relevant titles from the footnotes and bibliographies of individual items. Journal articles and dissertations combined are themselves the most substantial, if initial, resource for developing an acquaintance with the relevant secondary literature, and they often provide valuable insights into the nature and location of primary source material as well.

In the search for relevant articles, however, one will soon turn to the online databases and indices that concentrate on a wide range of journals under single or multiple subject areas. In the general field of religion, including Church History, History of Christian Doctrine, and Systematic or Philosophical Theology, probably the best single source for references to articles in the field is the ATLA Religion Database online. This database, along with ATLASerials, is the standard reference work used by all scholars in a wide variety of fields having to do with religion.

Such indices do, however, have their limitations, both in the number of journals indexed and in the system of topics and cross-­references used. It would be worthwhile for the beginning student to scan the list of indexed periodicals supplied, for example, by ATLASerials (search “Title Lists”) and notice the fact that the years of coverage vary dramatically from journal to journal. Students who use the topical section of the index should recognize that the researcher’s topics and the indexed topics will not always be identical in definition or parameters; the index will often use a different name for a topic and proceed on different assumptions than the researcher. Continental Protestant theology in the seventeenth century, for example, can be identified as “Protestant Scholasticism,” alphabetized with other things Protestant, as “Scholasticism, Protestant,” listed as a sub-­category of “Scholasticism”; it could be listed as “Protestant Orthodoxy” or “Orthodoxy, Protestant,” with the same qualifications, or, alternatively, as “Lutheran” or “Reformed Theology, Seventeenth Century,” or, somewhat differently again, as “Post-­Reformation Protestant Theology, Reformed” or “Lutheran.” The researcher must be aware of all of these possibilities and be prepared to look for all of these terms, even after a preliminary search under one of them yields some useful references.

A further limitation of the ATLA Religion Database relates to the word “religion” itself. A student can be very seriously misled if she uses this index as the only source for articles and essays in the field of religion. There will be numerous articles with titles that conceal the fact that they contain crucial religious content that, for one reason or another, was not indexed under “religion.” Virtually everything that was published in the fields of Western history and philosophy before the eighteenth century — politics, economics, recreation — has some kind of religious content or implication, and articles on these topics will also have religious implications. It is entirely possible that the journal that has published the key article for one’s own research in “religion” may not be indexed by ATLA, and hence no researcher can safely depend exclusively on the use of a single online tool.

The search for pertinent periodical literature can often be helpfully delimited by an appeal to specific denominational guides, disciplinary areas, and topical indices. Among the tools that might be consulted are the Catholic Periodical and Literature Index, now a subset of the ATLA Database, Elenchus Bibliographicus, and the Philosopher’s Index. The Philosopher’s Index (http://philindex.org/), with coverage beginning in 1940, deals with nominally religious topics, such as the existence and attributes of God, the problem of evil, and so forth, but it references primarily philosophical periodicals and frequently identifies important essays not listed in the ATLA Database. The Philosopher’s Index is available online, on CD-­ROM, and in print, thus placing the information of some 1400 journals from eighty-­five countries before the bewildered student. Thankfully, tutorial guides are available for searching such databases as The Philosopher’s Index (see App. below, under the Philosopher’s Information Center). Project Muse is also valuable for listing many periodicals in philosophy. Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses (http://poj.peeters-­leuven.be/content.php) is known to scholars as the larger publication that includes Elenchus Bibliographicus, a massive bibliographic tool from the University of Louvain that indexes both articles and books and offers very fine year-­end cross-­referencing. It appears as two of the four quarterly issues of the larger journal and currently lists some 15,000 entries annually. All of these reference tools should be consulted regularly for current bibliography in the field.

“Journal Storage,” or JSTOR, is a scholarly journal archive of vast extent, comprised of full-­text journal articles in numerous modern languages. Membership in some professional history organizations, such as the American Historical Association, allows one access to JSTOR, but with access limited to searching the American Historical Review alone. This critical tool illustrates both the power of online searches in journal articles and the pitfalls of partial retrospective coverage. Basic searches in JSTOR provide full-­text reviews of pertinent books and articles, and, notably, the key word searches extend into the full text of the articles, not just the titles. However, one needs to carefully note the retrospective extent of such tools. The searchable volumes of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, for example, are available in JSTOR, but do not contain the last five years, and hence this “archive” must be supplemented with the ATLA Database, which offers online access to Church History from 1934 to the present.

In addition to such broadly defined topical databases as those noted above, there are also online indices that are publisher-­specific, like Cambridge Journals & Books Online, IngentaConnect, Brill Online Journals, and Wiley Online Library. Journals that have been indexed in these databases typically do not appear in the more generalized topical databases. Students and researchers need to develop a sense of which of the many extant online databases reference periodicals that contain studies relevant to their projects. Some libraries also offer an Electronic Journal Locator tool that can be used to identify in which database a particular journal may be found. A final line of defense is the advanced search tools found in Google Scholar and Google Books. Google Scholar will frequently locate articles and, even when the article itself cannot be retrieved from Google Scholar, provide a usable reference or even an identification of which subscription-­only database carries the journal in which the article was published.

Students should adopt some means of checking on the completeness and accuracy of their online search of periodical literature. Hard copy reference tools and the footnotes of journal articles themselves are important means of cross-checking one’s online searches. For example, Recently Published Articles was one of the best hard copy tools available, but it has, unfortunately, ceased publication. Published by the American Historical Association in three fascicles per year from 1976 through 1991, it was based upon a compilation of hundreds of periodicals that drew together all the materials on world history and organized them by country and then by standard periodization, such as, Britain, 1714–1815. In a given year, some 200 articles would typically appear in that one section alone. Recently Published Articles was a truly international index, listing articles in all languages, and it might still be used as a means for cross-­checking one’s online searches in the area of church history (as distinct from theology).

Students at the doctoral level should not only regularly consult major journals in their field, they should also subscribe to one or more of those journals (Bib. I.C). Those doing advanced work in church history should think seriously of taking Church History, the standard and best journal for the study of church history, broadly understood, in this country, or the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, which is the British counterpart. Regular consultation of scholarly journals is the only way to maintain a truly current knowledge of articles and monographs in one’s field: the standard indices are seldom able to list an article within a year of its publication, and the review sections of the journals will frequently offer the first available notice of new books in a field.

The best international church-­historical journal is Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, which, like Ephemerides, is published at Louvain. Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique appears three times annually in a large volume of about 450 pages. Though written primarily in French, it covers literature of all countries, the majority of articles being in French or in German. It is the bibliographical breadth of the Revue, however, that is stunning. It does far more than any other journal with reviewing research, including work in progress at various universities in Europe. It reviews articles and frequently offers critiques, and it reviews a greater number of books than any other journal of church history. It is, therefore, the standard work, although written in languages other than English, for virtually all scholars working in church history.

In addition to using indices to find articles in one’s field, it is a worthwhile practice to simply survey several of the major journals in the discipline by working one’s way back in time from the most recent issue. This is the only way to find major articles in a field before they are listed in the standard indices. As in the case of the dissertation search, the journal search provides a helpful sense of the kinds of articles and the styles of research found in various fields of study. Often the website for individual journals will supply the table of contents for at least some back issues, even when the articles themselves are not available in full text form. One of the most valuable contributions that journals make to scholarship is the bibliographical essay that appears from time to time. Most of the articles that fall under the heading of “bibliographic essay” will identify and analyze the literature in a given field, including monographs, dissertations, and articles written during the past twenty years or so. Bibliographical essays can also be of significant value when one arrives at one’s first teaching position. The specific topics around which lectures are formed can be greatly strengthened by reviewing the recent literature found in these essays. The bibliographic essay can thus save a considerable amount of time; students should remain alert to its value for both research and teaching.

One of the major specialized bibliographies that is made available in a journal is the exhaustive Calvin bibliography published yearly in Calvin Theological Journal. The editor of the bibliography is presently collating the various yearly bibliographies into a single cumulative bibliography. A further advantage of this particular bibliography is that approximately ninety percent of the articles and monographs cited are available at the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and copies are available from the center on request. Up-­to-­date cumulative indices are typically available for most other major periodicals as well. After databases, current periodicals remain the best means of identifying pertinent monographs through their book reviews sections, notices of books received but not reviewed, and publishers’ advertisements of new and forthcoming books.

Library Networks and Online Libraries

We have previously alluded to the Internet databases of University Microfilms and the American Theological Library Association.10 Just as with dissertations and articles, bibliographic databases comprised of monographic literature must be investigated, and appropriate tools that increase the searching power of individual libraries are available in all research libraries.11 Online networked libraries, however, should be used with the same cautions in mind as the more specialized databases.

The value of these networks is limited in part by the still vast reservoir of unentered materials, even in the libraries belonging to the networks. For example, the Online Computer Library Center is cataloging new books daily by the member libraries as the works are accessioned, but it is taking some libraries a long time to enter their entire old catalog into the database. A research project of 2005 sampled the proportion of records found in the 754 bound volumes of the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints in comparison to those that appear in OCLC WorldCat and found that over one-­fourth of the contents of the National Union Catalog (27.8%) did not appear in OCLC. The authors rightly concluded that the National Union Catalog remains an indispensable resource.12 Efforts at retrospective conversions of materials to machine readable form are impressive, but some libraries in the country will probably never belong to one of the networks, and thus the larger holdings nationwide represented in the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints will still need to be checked manually. Using a database, therefore, does not make it possible for a researcher to avoid manual work in printed indices: computerized searches of a database must still be used in conjunction with standard reference works. This is not to say that OCLC ought not to be consulted: OCLC WorldCat statistics available online at http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog.en.html, as of August 2013, contain 203 million bibliographic records and reference 72,000 member libraries.

In addition to library networks, all major research libraries, both nationally and internationally, have online catalogs that may be searched for specific holdings. For example, such major European universities as Oxford, Cambridge, Leiden, Utrecht, Tübingen, Leipzig, Geneva, and Zürich have online catalogs that are distinctive. A superficial acquaintance with a single online library catalog may leave the student with a sense that they are all the same, but the riches of individual collections can sometimes be discovered without too much difficulty. The Speer Library at Princeton Theological Seminary illustrates the importance of considering the distinctiveness of each library when used as an online resource. The Sprague Collection at Princeton is an extremely valuable body of nineteenth-­century American sermons and religious pamphlets comprised of some 20,000 items published mostly before 1866. By using the search term “Sprague Collection,” and then sorting the results by date (related to events) and title (such as “addresses”), one can locate a vast collection of commencement addresses delivered at American colleges and seminaries that offer commentary upon such pivotal nineteenth-­century events as the Civil War. Both the collections of individual libraries and the nature of their accessibility should be weighed on a case-­by-­case basis.

In addition to networks and individual library databases, there are a few well-­organized disciplinary areas that are moving toward comprehensive databases of secondary monographic literature (App.). One of the most impressive projects is found in Patristics. The Bibliographical Information Base in Patristics stores information from books and articles in the field, and it currently has an inventory of the abstracts of articles from more than 930 journals. The retrieval software of this database is designed specifically to serve patristic scholars in obtaining ready access to summaries of secondary works that are pertinent to their research.

Since each library and online database is structured differently, students should be alert to the need to change searching strategies when they change databases or libraries. The attempts of a rank novice will produce some results with any database, but excellent results will require serious investigation of the searching methods of each discrete database, and often the best results will only be achieved with practice. Students would thus be well advised, especially at the outset of their research, to rely on the expertise of librarians who have had considerable experience in using online databases. Once the database has been used to develop an initial bibliographical survey, then one should go on from his or her basic list to the more traditional references and continue to fill out the bibliography. Of course, the bibliographical search is not something that happens once and for all at the beginning of one’s work on a dissertation. Building a comprehensive bibliography of secondary literature not only takes a lengthy period of time initially, it continues in the addition of dissertations, articles, and monographs that appear during the entire length of one’s research.

Students occasionally wonder whether all of these indices are in English. An index will characteristically cite all articles and books in their original language, unless the language is one not normally used in the scholarly community addressed by the index. For example, articles written in Eastern European languages will typically be cited with translations of their titles. A quick glance at Ephemerides will serve to underline the importance of the use of several modern languages in almost all areas of religious, historical, and theological study, particularly English, French, and German. Students in advanced studies need to come to grips with the fact that modern languages are not an “official” problem. They are the necessary means of obtaining essential information and there can be no excuse for not using them. However, one does not need to be an expert in several foreign languages in order to use most of the tools discussed in this book. A biographical essay in a German dictionary can, for example, be read to find out when an individual was born and died, where the person studied, and so forth, without great linguistic skills. It is also worth noting that particular fields of study are dominated by specific languages; the French virtually own patristic and medieval theological and philosophical studies. Similarly, German scholarship has tended to dominate Reformation and biblical studies, and naturally the tools reflect these areas of emphasis and strength.

Besides general knowledge of a broad field, students need to accept the fact that specialized knowledge, such as foreign languages, quantitative techniques, or skill in reading handwritten manuscripts is often required. It might be discovered, for example, that vital records, such as birth and baptismal registers, have a great value in identifying the social strata of individuals, a datum which in turn has relevance for questions of religious motivation. Vital records, however, especially in seventeenth-­century handwriting, are difficult to read without training, and a student might be tempted to either avoid the difficulty altogether or muddle along without acquiring a technical understanding of early-­modern handwriting. The acquisition of specialized knowledge for the purpose of research must be taken in stride, at whatever cost, and this rule applies to the newer techniques as well as to the old.

Handbooks, Bibliographical Guides, and General Surveys

The most extensive handbook on church history is G. E. Gorman and Lyn Gorman, Theological and Religious Reference Materials: Systematic Theology and Church History (Bib. I.D).13 The organization of this volume leaves much to be desired, and though it does not include Internet sources it remains the best, most comprehensive annotated bibliographical guide to research reference tools in church history and theology presently available. A more accessible guide, though covering the broader field of history in general, is the recently published Reference Sources in History: An Introductory Guide.14

Yet another kind of bibliographical tool is the bibliography of bibliographies, such as the recent volume on women by Patricia Ballou. These are unique tools whose value might not be immediately recognized by the student researcher, but they are a very important genre of reference works. If a scholar wants to find a bibliography on their particular topic, one of the first places that she should look is a bibliography of bibliographies. This advice is particularly germane to the search for primary materials, because even the best most recent article on any given topic will commonly not cite the scholarly bibliographies that contributed to the location of primary documents. Such bibliographical guides, as helpful as they are to the researcher, tend to remain deeply layered in the research process and hence uncited in the scholar’s final published product.

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

The use of dictionaries and encyclopedias in scholarly work can be a source of trouble and dismay to the uninitiated (Bib. I.E). An initial necessary distinction must be made between the encyclopedias and topical dictionaries written for the general public and those written by scholars for students in scholarly fields and for other scholars. The former, including such famous and prestigious works as the Britannica, Americana, Colliers Encyclopedia and the World Almanac, ought to be avoided as conceived on a level below that of graduate scholarship. The latter, some of which follow, are of considerable value and worthy of citation in scholarly studies.

Basic language dictionaries like Webster and Cassell are not cited in our Bibliography, but are also excluded from the above caveat. Similarly, certain encyclopedias of a more general scope are also capable of being cited in scholarly work: one is the 1911 edition of the Britannica which has signed articles by major scholars of its day, including, for example, a major article on Gnosticism by Adolf von Harnack. It is, of course, out-­of-­date. The basic rule for the use of dictionaries and encyclopedias in scholarly work is that only those ought to be cited that relate to specialized areas of research — like dictionaries and encyclopedias of church history, philosophy, theology, and so forth. These specialized works can be divided into several distinct categories.

Linguistic Tools: Dictionaries and Paleographic Aids

The briefest survey of linguistic tools shows that even the best modern language dictionaries do not always serve the purposes of research (Bib. I.E.1). For example, the language of a medieval Latin source may be illuminated by the definitions in Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, but particular medieval words or usages might not be found in a classical dictionary. Or if the word is present in the classical dictionary, the meaning may not fit the context in the medieval document. In these cases, specialized dictionaries must be consulted, such as Albert Blaise, Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi (“A Lexicon of Medieval Latinity”) or Charles Du Cange, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, which is a glossary of Middle and Later Latin. An increasing number of these major tools are becoming available online. Thus, Du Cange is available in a digitized, word-­searchable format that renders it even more useful than the original hard copy (http://ducange.enc.sorbonne.fr/). Similarly, the great classical lexica of Liddell and Scott (Greek) and Lewis and Short (Latin) are both available at the Perseus Digital Library of Tufts University (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/). In these two latter cases, the searchability also serves to render these two fine tools into English-­Greek and English-­Latin dictionaries, respectively.

As the titles and annotations indicate, many of these dictionaries are written in languages other than English and all have limitations, whether linguistic, topical, chronological, or geographical, that ought to be noted by the careful researcher. Thus, French is needed to use Blaise and Latin is required to use Du Cange. Roy J. Deferrari’s superb A Lexicon of St. Thomas Aquinas is an English language lexicon limited to Thomas Aquinas’s theological and philosophical language that, nevertheless, has broad application for the study of medieval theology, although it cannot illuminate the highly technical or particularized language of other medieval theologians.15 The Medieval Latin Word-­­List is in English and references only British sources; Souter is in English and does not reference usages after A.D. 600; Niermeyer is English-­French, with a less-­specific frame of reference than either the Medieval Latin Word-­­List or Souter. These, as their titles indicate, are very specific lexica that deal with temporally and geographically defined usages. The Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française is also a case of a very important historically oriented dictionary. It is the French equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is itself a crucial reference book for all scholars working in the English language. The range of meanings of a word in the sixteenth century in French or English can be determined from these dictionaries, including meanings that have been lost over the course of centuries. By way of example one might wonder why the title-­page of the published works of a seventeenth-­century English minister would identify him as a “painfull preacher.”16 A bit of work in a historical dictionary will indicate that the preacher did not torment his hearers’ ears but was merely “painstaking” or “diligent.” This definition may appear in a large modern dictionary as an archaism, but it will be identified as a standard meaning in a historical dictionary of English or in a seventeenth-­century English dictionary. There are also words, some once common, that have simply dropped out of the vocabulary. Thus, a recent version of Webster’s International Dictionary will identify “centesimo” as a foreign currency, but will not note “centesm” as an English term for a “hundredth part of any whole thing,” nor will it indicate that “centinel” was once the standard spelling of “sentinel.” Both of these definitions appear in eighteenth-­century dictionaries.

Beyond these modern historically grounded dictionaries and lexica, researchers also should be aware of the numerous early printed dictionaries relevant to their fields of research, many of which have in recent years been made available online. By way of example, there are numerous highly useful seventeenth-­century lexica: Randle Cotgrave, Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1632); Henry Hexam’s Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie (1648); Francis Gouldman, Dictionarium Etymologicum (1669), a Latin dictionary including Greek roots and English definitions; Gouldman’s Copious Dictionary (1674), an English-­Latin, Latin-­English dictionary compiled from four predecessor dictionaries; and William Robertson’s Thesaurus Graecae Linguae (1676), based on the earlier work of Schrevel. Among the major eighteenth-­century dictionaries note: Pierre Richelet, Le Grand dictionnaire françois et flamand (3rd ed., 2 vols., 1739); Thomas Dyche and William Pardon, A New General English Dictionary (1760); A. F. Prévost, Manual lexique, ou dictionnaire portatif des mots françois (new edition, 2 vols., 1767).

Another example of the specificity of language tools is Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon. Patristic Greek is different from classical Greek and incredibly different from the koine Greek of the New Testament. Separate dictionaries must be used in each of these fields — although the classical and the patristic lexica will serve fairly well for the study of koine. The study of NT Greek in seminary is not sufficient preparation for research in patristics, particularly the patristic Greek of the third century and following.

Paleographical aids must be noted separately as a distinct class of linguistic tool. Late medieval and early modern printed books do not oblige the standard twenty-­six-letter modified Roman alphabet of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not only does one find the standard long “s” at the beginning and in the middle of words, the identity of “u” and “v,” and the use of “vv” in the place of “w,” one also finds an enormous number of abbreviations. Thus, Xpus in a Latin text is a Latin version of Christus, slightly abbreviated. Similarly, a cross-­tailed “p” in a Latin text stands for “per.” In addition, vowels and common syllables, like declension endings, are frequently replaced by superscripted dashes and other sigla. There is an excellent online resource for learning early modern English handwriting, with bibliography and links to other resources at the Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online (http://scriptorium.english.cam.ac.uk).

The high cost of parchment and rag paper, together with the need to find an expeditious way to print long books by hand, led medieval copyists to write in shorthand. Early printed books followed the same shorthand patterns. The systems of shorthand were quite intricate, involving some hundred sigla and varying from century to century and country to country. In other words, just knowing Latin does not necessarily qualify a person to read a medieval or early modern document — even one that has been done in a fine hand or set in print. The abbreviations are indexed and defined in such works as Cappelli, Dizionario di Abbreviature latine (now available at http://www.hist.msu.ru/Departments/Medieval/Cappelli/), or Chassant, Dictionnaire des abbreviations latines. The abbreviations are offered, first in alphabetical, and then, within the alphabetical listing, chronological order. Not only is the abbreviation defined, it is also identified in terms of the century or centuries in which it was used with a particular meaning.17

Biographical Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

Virtually every country has its own biographical dictionary (Bib. I.E.2). If one knows the birthplace of an individual, one can usually find a good biographical essay in one of the major national biographical dictionaries. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is, of course, the leading reference work for Great Britain. The Dictionary of American Biography is now superseded by the American National Biography, and both national biographies are available online by library subscription. The Bibliography contains a list of dictionaries for most of the western European nations.

There is also a large number of older general biographical dictionaries of which researchers ought to be aware, such as the forty-­five-­volume Biographie universelle (1845-65) and various older biographical works like the Dictionnaire historique, littéraire et critique of Barral (6 vols., 1758-59) and John Noorthouck’s Historical and Classical Dictionary (2 vols., 1776). These volumes, like the works of Zedler and Jocher discussed below, often will be found to reference persons viewed as important at the time at which the dictionary was published but forgotten in more recent times. Nor can a researcher afford to ignore the web-­based biographical resources: there are numerous older biographical lexica like Barral and Noorthouck available on the web through Google Books. With the caveat that the OCR digitization of books printed before 1800 can be quite unreliable, references in these older lexica can often be retrieved by a general name search — and failing in that, their pdf versions can be searched with that more reliable optical scanner, the human eye. Beyond these older sources, there are also the new web-­based dictionaries and encyclopedias like Wikipedia. These works are often criticized for their inaccuracy, but it is worth noting that Wikipedia is no more unreliable than popular hard-­copy encyclopedias like Collier’s or the Americana and it has the distinct advantage of being very recent and capable of being corrected.

Some libraries now provide a bio-­base available on microfiche that indexes several hundred different biographical dictionaries. A project is also presently under way to conflate all major biographical dictionaries in the world and reproduce them on the Internet. The World Biographical Information System Online published by de Gruyter is the most comprehensive biographical database presently available (http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/35520). Included in this compilation are American, British, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American biographies. De Gruyter’s “British Biographical Archive Online,” for example, draws upon 324 sources and includes a third of a million biographies (though it is available only by subscription). The value of such compilations is that the biographies of the individual being referenced are put together on the same page, resulting in a comparative source that retains all of the details and virtues of each separate biographical dictionary. There are also specialized topical-­biographical tools, like the Dictionary of Scientific Biography.

Theological and Church-­historical Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

The note of caution sounded above concerning the use of dictionaries and encyclopedias in general applies in a more specific way to this section of the Bibliography (Bib. I.E.4). Some of the works are genuinely scholarly and some are not. Asterisks in the Bibliography identify several of the genuinely eminent works. In the main, one-­volume dictionaries are not as useful as the multi-­volume works. Similarly, multi-­author dictionaries that do not have signed articles should not, with a few exceptions, be trusted; one notable exception is F. L. Cross’s Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, originally published in 1913, is to be distinguished from the New Catholic Encyclopedia, which, beginning in 1967, was designed to supersede the 1913 work. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia was indeed a fine resource containing basic information on Roman Catholic theology, medieval, Renaissance, and Counter-­Reformation figures, and so forth. It is, of course, bibliographically a century out of date and its scholarly perspectives reflect the tendencies of the early twentieth century. Given those qualifications, it is now online and remains a resource full of significant information, albeit one that must be used carefully and critically as any out-­of-­date encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/).

Some comments concerning individual works are in order. The Dictionnaire de théologie catholique is a work of some thirty volumes (each “volume” is published in two parts). It is also printed in narrow line, double column folio, and is an enormous project. Many of the articles in this dictionary are full-­fledged monographs and go on for one hundred to two hundred folio columns. This is a tool that will not be superseded in the foreseeable future. It remains the standard source for medieval church history and history of doctrine; it is a fine source for the patristic period and for Catholic theology in general. In addition, it should be consulted for topical essays: it contains, for example, an essay that discusses the history of the concept of theology in monographic detail. (This essay and several others have actually been translated into English as monographs.) The Dictionnaire is not to be ignored; it is a beginning place for virtually all study of medieval theology. The New Catholic Encyclopedia is another excellent resource and should be consulted with the Dictionnaire, particularly for bibliographical references, inasmuch as it is a more recent work and will tend to cite major English-­language monographs.

The New Schaff-­­Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge is also a fine tool, but it does not really replace the Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche. Many of the entries in both of these older works have been superseded by entries in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie. Haag, La France Protestante, is also an older but non-­superseded reference work; it contains biographies of French Protestants from the Reformation and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Other specialized biographical and topical works that should be singled out for mention are the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, and the Encyclopédie des Sciences religieuses. All of these works should be noted as potential sources of data and bibliography in research. The shorter one-­volume dictionaries tend to exclude (or roughly duplicate) one another, and it is seldom useful to consult more than one of them. But one ought to survey as many of the longer multi-­volume pieces on a subject as possible.

There are several important issues in the method of research that bear directly on the use of biographical and topical dictionaries and encyclopedias. Particularly in past ages, individuals have been regularly known by different names, often because of references to them occurring in different languages. The medieval theologian named Hervaeus Natalis, for example, was also called Hervé Nédellec and Hervaeus Britto. A careless reader might conclude that the three names indicate three different people. The fact is that Hervé was a French theologian who was known in Latin as Hervaeus Natalis or Hervaeus Britto.

Knowledge of such variations of names is crucial to the construction of a bibliography. There is at least one extant bibliography on the study of seventeenth-­century Protestantism that lists the early-twentieth-­century work (c. 1908) of Emil Weber separately from the work of Hans Emil Weber, written after 1920 — leading several students to conclude that there were two different Webers, perhaps father and son, engaged in related research. The fact is that Emil and Hans Emil are the same person. Such problems of identity continue right up to the present. Virtually no library in the country has a main catalog reference to Emil Brunner: he is cataloged, not as he wrote, but as he was born, Heinrich Emil Brunner. The correct attributions for anonymous and pseudonymous works will be found in the numerous specialized works that have painstakingly traced these books to their source (Bib. I.E.3). In addition to these specialized works, researchers should be aware of the Consortium of European Research Libraries or CERL (http://www.cerl.org) which offers an online research tool now including over 600,000 records for the period 1450-1830. The CERL Thesaurus references variant “forms of imprint places, imprint names, personal names and corporate names as found in material printed before the middle of the nineteenth century — including variant spellings, forms in Latin and other languages, and fictitious names.”

Along the same lines, we have to recognize that our present-­day convention of translating everything but the name of an author was not the typical usage of the Middle Ages or of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: translators and even the thinkers themselves sought out foreign-­language translations and equivalents of their names. It was even typical of writers in the age of the Renaissance to translate their names into Latin or Greek: thus the rather lowly sounding German theologians Buchmann, Goldschmid, and Schwartzerd became Bibliander, Aurifaber, and Melanchthon. The easiest way to identify the various names of a person or various spellings of a person’s name is to look in a good specialized dictionary of the period.

From the very beginning of research one must recognize that the English version of a medieval thinker’s name, like Giles of Rome or Albert the Great, will not be found in medieval sources or in contemporary resources written in other languages: there one would find Aegidius Romanus (sometimes Aegidius de Columna) and Albertus Magnus. In order to find out the Latin form of a medieval thinker’s name, one could look in the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Then, knowing the individual’s name in other forms, the various major research tools can be searched with some confidence of finding references to the individual. In other words, all forms of a name must be searched — Giles of Rome, Aegidius Romanus and Aegidius de Columna, or Nicholas of Cusa, Nikolaus von Cues, Nicholas of Cues, and Nicholaus Cusanus. Some library catalogs will index the latter under “Cusanus, Nicholaus,” others under “Cues, Nicholas of” and so forth.

Finally, some comment is necessary concerning hierarchies of value and use in the consultation of biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias, and topical, theological and church-­historical dictionaries and encyclopedias. Some of these works are oriented toward very specific tasks and should be consulted on the basis of certain kinds of initial information about an individual. In the case of the various national biographies, the obvious initial information is the country of a person’s birth or primary historical residence. A search for information concerning American and British thinkers would naturally begin with the American National Biography for America and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) for Britain. An online version of the new ODNB requires subscription. The original DNB is now available online through Wikisource (i.e. it does not require access through a subscribing library). Details about the life of a German figure would be found in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (originally, 1875-1912, and now brought up to date with the Neue Deutsche Biographie at http://www.deutsche-­biographie.de/) and so forth.

If, however, the figure in question can be identified as a relatively significant Protestant theologian, the biographical search process can begin with the Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche and its English-­language equivalent, The New Schaff-­­Herzog Encyclopedia, or, in the case of more recent European thinkers, with Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, presently being rendered in English as Religion Past and Present. Both the Realencyklopädie and Schaff-­­Herzog are excellent resources, despite their age. Many of the articles in the original Realencyklopädie were written by major scholars of the nineteenth century and have not yet been superseded. The New Schaff-­­Herzog is a translation of the Realencyclopädie which both expands and reduces the original. On the one hand, it augments the encyclopedia with British and American materials. On the other hand, it deletes large sections, typically theological detail and citation of old sources, from some of the major articles that were in the original German. The New Schaff-­­Herzog, then, does not render use of the Realencyclopädie unnecessary for English-­speaking scholars: major articles in The New Schaff-­­Herzog, particularly those dealing with the theology of the European Reformation or with the development of Protestant theology on the continent, are typically abbreviated, sometimes with problematic results. In the hierarchy of value and use, the Realencyklopädie takes precedence over the New Schaff­­Herzog for the continental European references, while Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart precedes both, particularly on recent topics or on topics that have undergone historiographical revision since the time of the earlier encyclopedias.

If reference to a Protestant theologian cannot be found in any of these sources, a series of questions narrowing the search ought to be asked: “Should the person be discussed in a national biographical dictionary? If not, would this individual be discussed in some other kind of biographical dictionary, i.e., a dictionary with a different set of organizational limits? Granting the parameters of the search, what dictionary is useful?” If the research is concerned with a sixteenth-­, seventeenth-­ or early-eighteenth-­century author, then Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Grosses vollständiges Universal-­­Lexicon der Wissenschaften und Künste or Christian Gottlieb Jocher’s Allgemeines Gelehrten Lexikon are very useful. Zedler was printed between 1732 and 1754, while Jocher was first issued in 1750 and consists of one full encyclopedia and a fragmentary second encyclopedia: there is a complete alphabet for Jocher from the mid-­eighteenth century and an added set of volumes that reach the letter “S” dating from the late nineteenth century. Zedler’s lexicon is certainly the more significant of the two works, running to some sixty-­eight folio volumes, 68,000 pages, with approximately 270,000 references! The eighteenth-­century printings of Zedler and Jocher provide a very important resource because many people viewed as significant in the early to mid-­eighteenth century were no longer viewed as important in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when such resources as the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, the Dictionary of National Biography, the Herzog-­Plitt Realencyclopädie, and New Schaff-­­Herzog Encyclopedia were published. From the point of view of critical historical method, Zedler and Jocher stand lower in the hierarchy than the other encyclopedias: searches ought to begin with the best sources and note the relevant materials in those sources, although the most information may eventually derive from a source that is lower on the list. Zedler, moreover, is recently online in a digitally searchable form that permits searches for names and places that do not occur in the main alphabetical run of the lexicon (http://www.zedler-­lexikon.de).

In Roman Catholic studies, the first place that one might want to look is The New Catholic Encyclopedia, or if one’s French is good, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique. If the person is not found in either of these resources, then the search might proceed to the Dictionnaire de spiritualité or the Dictionnaire apologétique. Failing in all of these places, the process can continue with works like Hurter’s Nomenclator litterarius theologiae catholicae, which is poorly organized, uncritical, and difficult to use, but is also a goldmine of information.

Historical Atlases and Guides to Historical Geography

One of the things that a person learns very quickly in studying history is that the political geography of the world has changed (Bib. I.F). It changes constantly. The map of Europe and the map of Asia were very different even forty years ago. Boundaries have shifted, countries have appeared and disappeared. Place names have changed as the vernacular of various European nations has replaced Latin, as revolutions alter national self-­understandings, and as nations in the majority world replace the European names of their cities and geographical features with transliterations that more accurately reflect local pronunciations.

By way of example, several of the scenes in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night take place in the palace of the Duke of Illyria. Many of those who enjoy the play in the twenty-­first century — including some of the benighted authors of program notes, have assumed that Illyria is an imaginary place, simply because it is no longer on the map. Such program notes would have been quite distressing to the sixteenth-­century Lutheran theologian Matthias Flacius Illyricus, who was born and reared in the country in question — known in the late twentieth century as Yugoslavia, more recently as a grouping of smaller countries including Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. Similarly, the River Ister was an important river in the history of Europe, but the student will not find it on any European map because now it is called the Danube. These and other Latin place names can be identified using Theodor Graesse’s Orbis Latinus, which is the definitive dictionary of Latin place names (online with open access at http://www.bayerische-­landesbibliothek-­online.de/orbis-­latinus). Latin place names can also be identified via the CERL Thesaurus (http://www.cerl.org). Webster’s Geographical Dictionary can serve a similar purpose, in addition to being a source for other details concerning the countries of the world.

More recently, Peking has been replaced by Beijing, Bombay by Mumbai. What was once Burma is now Myanmar. In the former Soviet Union, Leningrad has become what it was in the past, namely St. Petersburg; Stalingrad is now Volgograd; Gorky has regained its ancient name of Nizhniy Novgorod. For such recent changes, only newly published atlases will suffice — and historical atlases become necessary for identification of even the recent past.

Historical atlases and works like Graesse’s Orbis Latinus are also important for the identification of the places of publication of older books. Quite a few seventeenth-­century theological books were published in Trajecti Ad Rhenum, present-­day Utrecht; a proper citation would indicate Utrecht as the place of publication. Not only is it important that the citation be formally correct, it is also significant to most research to identify major centers of publication and the places of publication of the works of particular authors: this kind of data often has intellectual and political significance, such as the publication, in 1582, of the “Rheims” translation of the New Testament into English at Rheims in France and the publication of Socinian works in the seventeenth century in Amsterdam.

By the same token, if one wishes to find out the location and geographical features of the Frankish kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia, one would obviously not look at the most recent Rand McNally Atlas. A historical atlas must be consulted. The works of Hartmann, McEvedy, and Palmer are noteworthy. Hartmann offers a specifically church-­historical perspective; McEvedy is especially useful for visualization of economic and demographic issues; Palmer is significant for its worldwide scale. The Anchor Atlas of World History is also highly useful, given its scope (from the Stone Age to the American Bicentennial) and for its running commentary on the maps. Websites such as the National Geographic Society’s “Map Machine” (http://maps.nationalgeographic.com/maps/index/) and the University of Texas Libraries’ “Map Collection” (http://lib.utexas.edu/maps) offer up-­to-­date resources, historical maps, and printable maps that can be downloaded and used for classroom purposes.

1. The following paragraphs reflect similar concerns to those expressed in G. Kitson Clark, Guide for Research Students Working on Historical Subjects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 10-22.

2. Kitson Clark, Guide for Research Students, p. 12.

3. Carl Becker rightly observed that the “really detached mind is a dead mind”; Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters of Carl L. Becker, ed. Phil L. Snyder (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), p. 24.

4. Kitson Clark, Guide for Research Students, p. 11.

5. Janice L. Reiff, Structuring the Past: The Use of Computers in History (Washington: American Historical Association, 1991), p. 4.

6. Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-­­History, Quanto-­­History, and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); G. R. Elton, “Two Kinds of History,” in Robert W. Fogel and G. R. Elton, Which Road to the Past? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987). Recent quantitative research in popular religion and popular politics has in fact demonstrated the influence of ideas on behavior, but with far greater authority than the analysis of literary sources alone.

7. The briefest survey of major periodicals like the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Church History suggests the lack of interest in these topics.

8. Public access to major databases is in a state of flux and rapidly expanding. The Text Creation Partnership, originally at the university libraries of Michigan and Oxford, now involves some 150 libraries worldwide and will eventually place all of the texts of EBBO, the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and Evans Early American Imprints in the public domain. See http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/.

9. See for example, chapter 7, “Dissertations and Theses,” in Reference Sources in History: An Introductory Guide, ed. Ronald H. Fritze, Brian E. Coutts, and Louis A. Vyhnanek, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara: ABC-­Clio, 2004).

10. The databases we discuss here are ones the authors have used or investigated; they are merely suggestive of what is available and we by no means provide a comprehensive coverage. Students should be aware of Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life, both by EBSCO; Thomson Reuters has produced, online, the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, for which, see the Appendix.

11. Our comments provide only the briefest of introductions to these vast resources. We concentrate here, for example, on the search of secondary literature. The data in OCLC, for example, actually falls into numerous categories including books, periodicals, maps, manuscripts, music scores, visual materials, audio recordings, and a variety of other files.

12. Jeffrey Beall and Karen Kafadar, “The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Titles Represented in OCLC World Cat,” College & Research Libraries 66 (2005): 431-35. After the integration of RLIN into WorldCat the figure was still around 25% according to Christine DeZelar-­Tiedman, “The Proportion of NUC Pre-56 Titles Represented in the RLIN and OCLC Databases Compared: A Follow-­up to the Beall/Kafadar Study,” College & Research Libraries 69 (2008): 401-6.

13. Many older reference works listed in the bibliography at the end of this volume are now available on the Internet through Google Books, Project Gutenberg, or the Internet Archive. Our discussion here assumes the use of these sources and attends instead to works and websites that will be less well-­known.

14. Note 9 above and see Michael J. Galgano, J. Chris Arndt, and Raymond M. Hyser, Doing History: Research and Writing in the Digital Age (Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008).

15. Note Fernandez Garcia, B. Joannis Duns Scoti Doct. Subtilis Grammaticae Speculativae, new edition (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1902); and Léon Baudry, Lexique philosophique de Guillaume d’Occam (Paris: Lethielleux, 1958).

16. Thus, The Workes of that faithfull and painfull Preacher, Mr. Elnathan Parr, 4th ed. (London: Griffin and Hunt, 1651).

17. Olaf Pluta has developed an online database of medieval manuscript abbreviations that is supported by many platforms with links on his web page to the ongoing project (http://olafpluta.net/software/software.html).