4. Research in Primary Sources and the Use of Text Databases and Materials in Microform
A research topic cannot be defended solely on the grounds that it has received insufficient attention in the secondary literature; at this early stage of research, such an argument for the topic’s viability is only half convincing. Every topic must also be defended by showing that it can be adequately grounded in primary sources. Therefore, while a student must have a sufficient acquaintance with the general contours of his or her field of study to defend the preliminary viability of the topic, a time will come when it is necessary to turn to primary documents. Too much time spent in acquiring background material can be dangerous, for as one experienced mentor put it, “you may become hypnotized by a sense of your own ignorance.”1 Kitson Clark offers good advice for those who may begin to feel depressed or overwhelmed by the thought that they will never know enough about their topic: “you must, if you are working on secondary authorities, turn at once to work on primary evidence, and if you are working on primary evidence, you must start to write and risk the dangers of ignorance.” The wise research student is conscious of the fact that one’s work is always done in ignorance of much that one ought to have known.2
While the distinction between primary and secondary sources cannot be rigidly maintained, we turn in this chapter to a more or less chronological treatment of the reference tools of church history and historical theology with a greater focus on primary research. Here we will discuss the use of the new text databases on the Internet and the more traditional storage techniques in microform for locating and searching primary source materials. We begin, however, with a brief survey of standard reference works for primary research. Students who acquire a thorough understanding of the use of traditional resources, such as specialized handbooks and concordances, will work with greater confidence and hence benefit most from the newer methods of searching and retrieval. Researchers in any specialized field ought, moreover, to keep in mind that, inasmuch as others have previously investigated the same or similar materials, there are probably specialized tools available in even the most arcane disciplines. A great deal of time can be saved and numerous mistakes and delays avoided if a researcher makes an effort to identify the relevant tools in his or her field as a first step in graduate study.
Beyond the important general sources mentioned in the preceding chapter, there are numerous specialized bibliographies that cover more limited time frames and topics. Typically, these works do not offer much biographical information, but they do provide very detailed bibliographical material. Researchers need to identify the specialized bibliographies and research tools that pertain directly to their particular field of research. The listing offered in our bibliography is far from complete, but it does provide an overview of the most important works of historical bibliography. These and other specialized bibliographies can be found in the bibliography section of most libraries and in what ought to be the most obvious source: the subject catalog of major research libraries.
“Patristics” is the term given to the study of the church fathers of the first centuries of the Christian era. It is one of the best organized fields of research in the whole of church history — with most of the documents available in good editions and translations and with a vast array of monographic and periodical literature available to the student or researcher. The best and most expeditious access into this field is through the standard manuals of “Patrology” which offer, usually by period, a series of biographical, topical, and bibliographical studies of all of the writers of the early church.
By far the most valuable patrology in English is Johannes Quasten’s work, now in five volumes, that brings the survey of the patristic era to completion with John of Damascus in the mid-eighth century (Bib. II.A.1). It is an unusually valuable work because of its superb organization. Quasten offers basic information on the life and work of an individual, provides a comprehensive listing of extant editions and translations, and then discusses the various doctrines that the person wrote on, with relatively up-to-date bibliographies. Fulbert Cayré’s Manual of Patrology is distinctive not only because it extends the scope of patrology through the sixteenth century and into the modern period, but because it focuses on the history of spirituality.
The recent completion of a massive scholarly endeavor deserves special attention. The Encyclopedia of the Early Church represents the work of more than one hundred and fifty patristic scholars from some seventeen countries, and it reflects a truly ecumenical range of Christian traditions. This work summarizes several recent decades of patristic scholarship on a truly comprehensive scale and must be used as a guide for anyone seeking a way into the field for the first time.
The bibliography lists a number of tools that function much like a concordance of the Bible. Biblia Patristica provides students with references to all biblical texts and allusions to texts in the Fathers and is now available online (Bib. II.A.3, http://www.biblindex.mom.fr/). Edgar Goodspeed does something a little different in his Index Patristicus. The “index” is a concordance of words that are found in the Apostolic Fathers with every word in this body of literature listed in Greek. There is nothing available in traditional sources that accomplishes the same thing for the entire body of patristic literature, but the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (discussed below) offers us a far more powerful searching tool than the traditional concordance.
Students should be especially alert to the value of both the contents of and the indices to the two major series edited by Jacques-Paul Migne, the Patrologia Latina and the Patrologia Graeca. The Patrologia Latina extends from the earliest church writings in Latin up to the death of Innocent III in 1216. This date is a significant terminal point because it closes the Patrologia at the beginning of the great era of scholasticism: the Patrologia does not contain all of the large systems written in the thirteenth century, the Sentence commentaries and Summas. The Patrologia Graeca reaches from earliest times up to the eighth or ninth century. Both sets, but particularly the Latin set, are very well indexed (at least for their day); the sets are indexed by doctrine, by title, by century, by author, and by Scripture reference. The index will indicate, for example, who wrote treatises on Christology in the fifth century.
Another feature of the Patrologia Graeca worth noting is that it contains a Latin translation of the whole Greek patrology on a facing column. Similarly, Sources chrétiennes offers a French translation on the facing page. Both are very useful for purposes of interpretation as well as translation, and the Latin translation, in particular, provides a guide to the technical theological understanding of the language of the Greek fathers by western writers.
General resources that all researchers in medieval studies ought be familiar with are Louis Paetow’s A Guide to the Study of Medieval History and its sequel, Gray Cowan Boyce’s Literature of Medieval History, 1930-1975. These were superb references works for their time, but unfortunately now bibliographically out of date (Bib. II.B.2). Of continued usefulness in all fields is Everett Crosby’s Medieval Studies.3 The present standard work in print is Caenegem’s Introduction aux sources de l’histoire médiévale.4 The later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation are well covered in the Handbook of European History, 1400-1600.5 Farrar and Evans’s Bibliography of English Translations from Medieval Sources, for its time an exhaustive effort, is continued in Mary Anne Ferguson, Bibliography of English Translations from Medieval Sources, 1943-1967. Ferguson, in turn, has been continued online at Stanford University’s Medieval Studies site (http://library.stanford.edu/guides/introduction-medieval-studies-resources), and arguably students ought to begin with the resources at this well-maintained and often updated site. Students are often surprised to discover how much material is available in translation and how many series of translated sources are readily available. A good example is the Liverpool University series entitled “Translated Texts for Historians.” On the other hand, numerous critical tools which are indispensable remain untranslated. For example, Manitius’s Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters is old, but it has never been totally superseded. More recent is Brunhoelzl’s Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, with added bibliography in the French translation.6
Not all of the resources in this bibliography will be used regularly. We have included a number of highly specialized entries, for example, Berkhout and Russell, Medieval Heresies: A Bibliography 1960-1979, and Cosenza’s unparalleled Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary of the Italian Humanists and of the World of Classical Scholarship in Italy, 1300-1800. A well-catalogued library will put virtually all of the books on the same subject very close to one another on the shelf. For example, there is a whole section in the reference room of major libraries that gathers together bibliographies of books printed in the sixteenth century. One will find large subject-area bibliographies and extremely narrowly defined bibliographies, such as bibliographies of the publications of individual printers. The six-volume Bibliography of the Plantin Press of Antwerp 1555-1589, published in Amsterdam in 1980, is particularly valuable because it contains lengthy descriptions of each book printed by this major Renaissance press. This kind of resource is located primarily by shelf reading the bibliography section of a major research library in one’s particular area of specialization. Many online library catalogs, such as the Library of Congress, Harvard’s Widener Library, and the Hekman Library at Calvin College and Seminary allow one to browse the books shelved near the one originally requested, on screen, by using the item’s call number.
Two sources offering a minimal amount of bibliographical information, but unparalleled in their specific frame of reference, are the works by Friedrich Stegmüller, the Repertorium Biblicum (rendered in digital form by Klaus Reinhardt at http://www.repbib.uni-trier.de/cgi-bin/rebihome.tcl/) and the Repertorium Commentariorum (Bib. II.B.4). Both works provide basic data about the individuals they reference, and then proceed to indicate in exhaustive detail what these people wrote and the location of the sources. Both are alphabetically arranged by author. Stegmüller lists all known editions and the locations of virtually every Bible commentary and every commentary on Lombard’s Sentences written in the Middle Ages. In addition, the volume lists holdings of libraries all around the world; although Stegmüller lived and worked in Würzburg, he records items as distant from him as McGill University in Montréal or Harvard or Yale. Students need to begin, very rapidly, to identify the specific sources and tools, including the specialized bibliographies, relevant to their narrow research fields.
Many of the works cited in our bibliography, however, will not be chronologically defined. For example, under the section on the Reformation and Post-Reformation (Bib. II.C.1), we find the Catalogue général des livres imprimés de la Bibliothèque Nationale, the general catalog of printed books in the Bibliothèque Nationale of France. This work extends to 231 volumes. It is a major source for bibliographical information about older authors and their work, but unlike a lot of catalogues, including the National Union Catalog, it does not simply list books: it describes them at length. Under “Thomas Aquinas,” for example, it will list sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas, and then identifies the contents of each volume of each of those sets of Thomas Aquinas’s works. The work thus goes considerably beyond just a primary bibliographical reference. It is a detailed description of the individual volumes and sets of volumes that are available.
An extended example of how one might use such resources may be valuable. One could research the works of medieval doctors in print in the sixteenth century by extracting relevant information from Stegmüller and then moving onto the catalog of the Bibliothèque Nationale and its supplement; from there one would look at the Catalogue of Books Printed on the Continent of Europe, 1501-1600 in Cambridge Libraries and the Bodleian catalog from Oxford, Catalogus librorum impressorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae in Academia Oxoniensi. Next, one might examine Graesse’s Trésor for other listings of the same books and after that the British Museum catalog. Each of these catalogues was compiled with different resources at its disposal and each has a different scope. Some on-line databases may also allow refined searches of the same materials; the Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL) (http://www.prdl.org/), for example, enables searches that are limited to medieval or early modern authors that can also be limited by dates, places or publication, and publisher. A composite list drawn from the whole group of catalogues and databases will show whether there was any one city, university, or printer that specialized in editions of a particular theologian or if there is a concentration of publication of scholastic theology in any one place. Such information is useful historically, and in fact may provide the basis for an article or book.
Reformation and Post-Reformation
The vast range and extent of the secondary literature on the Reformation means that students of this period face a serious obstacle at the very outset (Bib. II.C.1). The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation offers a solid recent survey of issues and materials,7 as does the Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World,8 and the relevant sections of the Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, Handbook of European History, 1400-1600 should be consulted. On the general level, periodicals like Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Renaissance Quarterly, and Sixteenth Century Journal offer important resources, and Bainton’s little volume is a possible place to begin for older materials; more specialized are Bourilly and Calvin Theological Journal’s annual Calvin bibliography mentioned earlier. The Reformation and Renaissance Review will include bibliographical articles. Of course, with Luther, Calvin, and other major figures of the Reformation, one should go directly to the primary specialized bibliographies. In addition to Calvin Theological Journal and Niesel, Calvin — Bibliographie, and in addition to the Lutherjahrbuch and Schottenloher’s Bibliographie zur Deutschen Geschichte im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung, 1517-1558 (a limited early German Reformation resource), students will need to become familiar with the standard editions of the primary sources; in the case of Calvin, the Calvini Opera (CO) in the Corpus Reformatorum (CR), now available in a searchable CD-ROM version, but editorially superseded by the Ioannis Calvini Opera denuo recognita, and in the case of Luther, the Weimar edition of his collected works. CR, CO, and Weimar are now available online in pdf format through Google Books and Internet Archive. A full-text version of Zwingli’s works in CR (vols. 88-93) is available online from Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte: Huldrych Zwingli Werke: Digitale Texte (http://www.irg.uzh.ch/static/zwingli-werke/). There is also a full-text version of the Weimar available to subscribing libraries. Recent microform editions of primary sources, discussed below, provide ease of access to the works of the minor as well as the major figures of the Reformation, as do the finding guides that are provided by the libraries that hold major collections. Students should also be aware of the online text resources at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Johannes à Lasco Library in Emden, the Bavarian State Library, and the Swiss Electronic Library (http://www.e-rara.ch/), and the numerous smaller German libraries, which are available in the meta-search engines Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke (ZVDD) (http://www.zvdd.de) and Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/).
Sixteenth- through Eighteenth-century Sources in English
Under “Modern British Sources” we have placed the British Museum General Catalog of Printed Books to 1955, a critically important resource for anyone working in church history (Bib. III.C). The same point can be made concerning the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints, a source for books in the United States that in some ways parallels the British Museum General Catalog (Bib. IV.D.1). The National Union Catalog cites every printed book in all languages available in this country in the libraries belonging to the National Union and notes, in abbreviated form, the libraries in which the source may be found. It is available both on microfiche and in hard copy and is a basic research tool, particularly for materials published prior to 1956; it is so extensive that it almost takes on the character of a primary source. The importance of this reference work for research is indicated by the fact that in the past bibliographies have been compiled from it and published separately.9 The British Museum General Catalog cites all holdings of the British Museum (now known as the British Library), and like the National Union Catalog, is not limited to books published in English. Since many of the sources that were published in England were simultaneously published in this country and since both catalogues list all holdings, regardless of place of publication, these catalogues ought to be used in virtually all areas of research — they are not, in other words, specific to any particular country.
Both this set and the pre-1956 imprint catalogue can be used effectively in tandem with the American Library Directory (http://americanlibrarydirectory.com/), a listing of all U.S. libraries, alphabetized by state and city. It is refined to the point of identifying librarians for such things as special collections in virtually all major libraries.
One way to obtain a book is to look it up in the National Union Catalog, find where it is located, and then if it cannot be obtained through normal inter-library loan procedures, write to the particular library. Frequently, for example, rare books have been microfilmed and the location of the film will be listed either in OCLC’s WorldCat or the European Register of Microform and Digital Masters (App.) or in the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints. The address of the library and of the librarian most likely to be of assistance will be found in the American Library Directory. Many libraries are willing to provide single copies of extant microfilms at a minimal cost to researchers. It is well to remember that as much as one-quarter of the materials identified in the National Union Catalog are still not listed by OCLC WorldCat. In short, a great many rare books that are crucial for historical and theological research in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries will be readily located through the National Union Catalog.
As in every field, however, there are more specialized, technical bibliographies that must be consulted. Pollard and Redgrave is far more extensive in its listings than the British Library catalogue: Pollard and Redgrave provides a “short title” for all English books, i.e., all books printed in any language in England and all books printed anywhere in English from the beginning of printing to 1640 (Bib. II.C.1). Until very recently students of early modern England used Pollard and Redgrave, and for the second half of the seventeenth century, its sequel, Donald Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries 1641–1700. Pollard and Redgrave and Wing remain essential tools, though they are now deeply embedded (and hence, invisible) in the digitized version of the database, now complete through 1800 in the English Short Title Catalogue.
Students of eighteenth-century church history and theology until very recently were dependent on the catalogs of major libraries, and the more specialized guides to unique collections, like the Catalogue of Dr. Williams’s Library, for English Nonconformists. General guides to the literature of the century, such as that of Stanley Pargellis and D. J. Medley, were helpful, and significant strides in comprehensive listings were made by F. J. G. Robinson, et al., in Eighteenth-Century British Books: An Author Union Catalog (5 vols.). These single and multivolume works have now been superseded by the digital, online version of the English Short Title Catalogue discussed below.
Just as specialized bibliographies are needed to supplement the major catalogs in British sources, students of American church history will not be satisfied with The National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints. All scholars who work in colonial American history will be acquainted with Charles Evans’s American Bibliography and the supplements by Roger Bristol (Bib. IV.D.1). The work of Evans and Bristol is continued into the nineteenth century by the multivolume work of Shaw and Shoemaker under the same title. One will, however, eventually turn to even more specialized bibliographies. If, for example, the topic is the American Revolution, in the holdings of every major research library, under the heading “American Revolution,” one will find Thomas R. Adams’s American Independence: A Bibliographical Study of American Political Pamphlets. The term “pamphlet” in eighteenth-century parlance was understood to include printed sermons, and hence, the use of Adams is one convenient way of obtaining information on the political engagement of the American and British pulpits.
In American church history, studies in the past have often been confined to denominations, and there are numerous tools that will guide one into the literature of specific religious bodies (Bib. IV.D.2). Particularly notable in this regard are the guides by John Tracy Ellis and Robert Trisco on American Catholic history and the massive “register” of Baptist source materials compiled by Edward Starr. Just as with bibliographies that deal primarily with secondary sources in a specialized topic area, there are specialized guides that will lead one into primary source materials, as for example, we find in the research bibliographies for Black Studies and the history of Evangelicals in America.
Garland Publishing Incorporated has undertaken a significant publishing endeavor in order to preserve and make more readily available a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American religious materials. Protestant source materials are organized into a small number of specific categories. The series of reprints, for example, entitled “Women in American Protestant Religion, 1800-1930,” runs to thirty six-volumes. Facsimile reproductions of books on the topics of Fundamentalism, and another series on the Pentecostal-Holiness movements, each extend to more than forty volumes, with some of the individual volumes containing numerous rare tracts and pamphlets. Experts in each of the areas covered by the series provide important bibliographical and contextual guidance on the most recent scholarship.
Internet Databases and Primary Research
To this point in the present chapter we have been examining mostly traditional guides to resources. Increasingly, students will have recourse to open access online resources that will supplement, and in some cases replace, conventional hard-copy bibliographies and guides. Currently, the most important bibliographic reference works for all topics in the English language are the online versions of the earlier hard-copy Short Title Catalogues. Pollard and Redgrave, Wing, and The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue have now been combined into a single open access technical bibliography called the English Short Title Catalogue, or ESTC (http://estc.bl.uk/). The English Short Title Catalogue provides an exhaustive listing of all known titles, mainly in English, from the beginning of printing in England (ca. 1473) through 1800, and it is comprised of about 470,000 imprints, including all known editions of the same title. The ESTC is a genuinely comprehensive, international union catalog based on British Library holdings and the collections of more than 2,000 libraries worldwide. It indicates all physical locations of books, pamphlets, and some serials, and all known microfilm and microfiche copies, and while largely complete, it is continuously updated with new information, mostly on the location of additional copies.10 All forms of searching are supported by this database, and specific records even provide further suggestions for subject searches. Internal URLs have been added for digitized full texts as well as microform copies, and hence the ESTC presently serves as the initial and indispensable research bibliography for all topics in the English language before 1800. Works in Latin and other languages that were published in England and the British colonies in this period will appear in the ESTC, but generally speaking, one cannot rely upon the ESTC for investigating non-English-language sources.
The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, by contrast to ESTC, is a commercial venture owned by Chadwyck-Healey and is accessible only through purchasing a web service or compact disks and hence can typically only be used on-site at university libraries. The NSTC comprises some 1,200,000 records drawn from eight major research libraries for the period 1801 through 1919.11 It aims to index all works published in Britain, the British colonies, and the United States, and all works in English wherever they were published, and like the ESTC, it provides some coverage for serial publications. However, as with the ESTC, the NSTC does not pretend to provide a comprehensive listing of books other than those published in English, and hence for a more comprehensive coverage one needs recourse to other online catalogs, such as OCLC, or the older national library catalogs (such as the British Museum General Catalog and the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints).12
For books in western languages other than English, the Universal Short Title Catalogue hosted by St. Andrews University should be consulted (http://www.ustc.ac.uk/). The USTC gathers information on all European books published from the beginning of printing to the close of the sixteenth century, including Eastern Europe. As of 2011 the USTC included references to 350,000 editions of some 1.5 million books in over 5000 libraries. While the USTC offers the greatest ease of access, the individual Short Title Catalogues for Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese books should also be examined for research that is language specific. For example, the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN) is the standard bibliographical database for 1540-1800 (http://www.stcn.nl and http://www.kb.nl/). The Verzeichnissen der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16./17. Jahrhunderts (VD 16 / VD 17) (http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/index.php and http://www.vd17.de/) and Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 18. Jahrhunderts (VD 18) (http://vd18.de/) survey German imprints (Bib. II.C.1).
The online versions of the Short Title Catalogues have the potential for greatly enhancing the accuracy of all historical investigations, to say nothing of the convenience and comprehensive breadth they offer. These critical bibliographies put incredible searching power at the fingertips of the historian; in addition to locating all of the published works of individual authors, it is possible to search any word or combination of words in a title. Important contemporary topics such as toleration, secularization, religious pluralism, and spirituality can now be examined in detail, exhaustively tracing their roots in the early modern period. For example, in a matter of minutes one learns that the output of Anglican sermons three years into the French Revolution (1792) was almost double the number of sermons published in England at the height of the American Revolution (1778). A very small investment of time thereby yields a valuable comparative datum that may lead to a working hypothesis concerning the influence of the pulpit and the timing of secularization in the age of revolution.
In addition to these powerful searching tools, a number of full-text databases are now available online, though they are typically restricted to on-site searches at university libraries. Four interdisciplinary collaborative efforts, three of which are a little more than two decades old, and a fourth which is more recent, have already transformed the way church historians and theologians study the past. The first pertains to the early history of the church (and in the East, through the fifteenth century), the second to the middle ages, and the last two to the Reformation and modern periods, and each of these major undertakings offers the student unprecedented ease of search and stunning breadth of bibliographical coverage. These projects are so revolutionary in their implications for research that they each deserve a brief introduction.13
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) project provides online access to the texts of all Greek authors who wrote from the time of Homer (ca. 750 B.C.) to A.D. 600 and to the majority of Greek works from 600 to the fall of Byzantium in A.D. 1453 (http://www.tlg.uci.edu/). This massive database comprises some 12,000 works by 4,000 Greek authors, making it one of the largest collections of machine-readable texts in the world. The works of all of the Greek fathers of the early church may now be examined and compared in ways heretofore thought impossible. All of the occurrences of a word or a phrase or a combination of words and phrases may be located in minutes.
The Thesaurus is the classicist’s dream come true, but it offers perhaps even greater potential for the church historian. Studies of theological terms and phrases in the large corpus of the works of Athanasius, the Cappadocian fathers, or Eusebius of Caesarea, will undoubtedly bring many new insights to light. For example, a search of all references to women would reveal the precise usage and intent of the fathers, and examination of terms related to ascetic practices will give us new insights into the spiritual disciplines. Study of early Christian usage with respect to the Romans and the state should result in clearer understanding of church-state relations. Comparative studies will be equally useful; the comparison of Christian and non-Christian authors may show new ways in which the early Christians related to the surrounding culture.
Scholars will still find the published text of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca useful, but it will only be a matter of time before the new medium will force such traditional sources, when used in isolation, into obsolescence. However, when the Thesaurus is used in conjunction with the Bibliographic Information Base in Patristics for secondary literature (see chapter three, above), the ease of access to the entire field of Patristics, including both primary and secondary sources, is perhaps without parallel in any other specialization (http://www4.bibl.ulaval.ca/bd/bibp/english.html).
Chadwyck-Healey Inc., a major supplier of scholarly source materials in microform, has done for the Western, Latin Church what the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae has provided for the early church and Eastern Orthodoxy: it has produced the Patrologia Latina Database on CD-ROM and for online access by subscription (http://pld.chadwyck.co.uk/).The project makes the complete edition of Migne’s Patrologia Latina available, including text, notes, prefatory material, and indices. The original edition of 221 volumes includes all major and minor Latin Fathers from Tertullian in A.D. 200 through Pope Innocent III in 1216. As with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the retrieval software of the Patrologia Latina can revolutionize research through the use of Boolean delimiters, as well as single word, phrase, and proximity searches.14 A similar, albeit still less-extensive database, is the Cetedoc Library of Christian Latin Texts. Since this patristic and medieval database rests on the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina and its medieval continuation, the quality and accuracy of the text surpasses the Patrologia — it is, unfortunately, not as complete as Migne. Since the corpus of individual authors may be isolated, new studies of aspects of a single author’s thought will proliferate, and with the possibility of word studies, as well as concepts related to phrases, newly conceived projects on subjects that span a wide range of Western authors (from Augustine to Boethius to Alcuin to Anselm) will yield a tremendous number of new research topics. Scholarship on such pivotal theological terms as nature and grace, virtue, the soul and the spirit, Christ and the Trinity can now be extended over a much greater chronological sweep with a precision heretofore impossible. In addition, Scripture references, phrases, and even vague allusions can be traced with tremendous speed and accuracy.
The full text database that is associated with the Pollard and Redgrave and Wing short-title catalogs of English books, extending from 1473 to 1640 and 1641 to 1700, respectively, is known as Early English Books Online, or EEBO. EEBO provides a refined keyword, author, title, and subject search of all books published in any language in Great Britain from 1473 to 1700, plus all books published anywhere in English during the same period. The search engine allows both multiple word and specific phrase searches together with an ability to search between specific dates. Though still accessible in some libraries in microfilm, these texts have been converted into downloadable PDF files and are available in subscriber-libraries. Note that the PDF file can be moved through with considerably more ease and speed than the film version and can, in addition, be magnified or reduced by use of the “zoom in/zoom out” feature of the viewer.
The Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) effectively extends the chronological reach of Early English Books Online by one hundred years. ECCO was produced by Thomson/Gale (now Gale Cengage) as a digitized edition of approximately 200,000 printed volumes from 1701-1800, offering a fully searchable collection of almost every significant title published in the United Kingdom as well as many published in America.15 Texts appear in facsimile format, but as with EEBO, the capacity for name and key-word search virtually invites the creation of new research projects. Questions that have vexed historians for years, such as the influence of the writings of John Locke, can now be investigated with a degree of rigor heretofore virtually impossible. Beyond new research on the so-called canonical authors, less well-known writers who worked at what might be called the middle level of importance, but who clearly deserve more detailed treatment, will now become the subject of study.
The new project by Gale Cengage (ECCO), and the older project of UMI/ProQuest (EEBO), while essential for research and impressive in scope, do not presume to reproduce every printed text that is in fact available in libraries. The number of English works in EEBO and ECCO total about 325,000, and so while a reasonably complete search of specific authors or topics can be done with the search engines of the text databases, these sources should always be supplemented with a careful use of the English Short Title Catalogue. To illustrate the difference between critical online bibliographies and full-text databases, we may appeal to a notorious eighteenth-century sermon preached by the Bishop of Bangor, Benjamin Hoadly. Hoadly’s sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church of Christ” (1717) produced an uproar, and the subsequent “Bangorian Controversy” arguably defined an era of Anglican church history. With fourteen copies of the sermon reproduced digitally in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (all from 1717), and with very few differences between editions, one might plausibly conclude that ECCO offers a remarkably comprehensive coverage of the text. The English Short Title Catalogue, however, lists twenty-two different imprints for 1717, and the 2nd, 4th, and 12th through 14th editions that do not appear in ECCO are found in the ESTC. Given the importance of the controversy and the likelihood that Hoadly’s opponents referred to specific editions of his sermon, the more technical listing of all known copies provides essential information for students of the period.16
A major step forward in making available for general online access books on all subjects from the entire range of the history of printing is being made by major European libraries, the Internet Archive, and the Google Books digitization project. By far the broadest and most promising set of projects are those presently underway in the Europeana “Connecting Cultural Heritage” project, which promised to reach 10 million items by 2010 and to be capable of multilingual search. The main online site includes links to virtually all major European national libraries and archives which are in the process of making available readable texts of many of their holdings. By way of example, the project links to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Deutsche National Bibliothek, and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek of the Netherlands. A full list of partners to the project is available in the main Europeana site. Other major European efforts include the digitization project of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and the Bayrische Staats Bibliothek. These two last, together with Gallica project of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, have already made available vast resources of late medieval, early modern, and more recent out of copyright volumes for either online reading or download. The Internet Archive is a North American, nonprofit organization and member of the American Library Association that hosts a growing online digital library including many rare and out of print works from the beginnings of printing to the present, photographed at major American libraries, plus major image and audio collections. The digital library is available in a “flip book” page format, downloadable PDF, and a fully searchable full test. The Internet Archive has taken steps toward permanence by having a mirror site at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt and establishing permanent URLs.
The Text Creation Partnership, involving some 150 libraries worldwide, is presently keyboarding in virtually all first edition texts published in England and America from the beginning of printing to 1800, including ProQuest’s EEBO, Gale Cengage’s ECCO and Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints, all previously digitized by Optical Character Recognition. The goal is to place these standardized electronic texts in the public domain, and as of 2014, 48,000 of the 70,000 unique texts in EEBO have been completed, and some 8,000 in ECCO and Evans combined.17 The move to standard text markup language (XML/SGML) means that the errors inevitably involved in texts produced through OCR will be virtually eliminated, and more importantly, that the entire corpus of texts from 1473 through 1800 will be linked into one massive document in which word and phrase searches (including proximity searches and the use of Boolean logic) can be done at one time.
The importance of these full-text databases for the research student can hardly be overstated because it means that the bulk of church historical and theological materials for the patristic era and the middle ages, plus the entire corpus of English literature (and, increasingly, most other western languages) from the period of the Reformation through the early modern period is presently available online at major research libraries. One has at one’s fingertips — in Los Angeles, Riverside, or Irvine, California (!) — a better library of historical materials on many subjects than at Oxford or Cambridge or the British Library. All that is lacking — from an aesthetic point of view, a considerable loss — is the ethos of the old-world setting and the aroma of the rare books.
Because of the wide geographical dispersion of sources, in the past a scholar was physically limited to the collections of a relatively small number of major libraries. Commonly, the scholar who cast the widest net commanded the greatest authority. But a library’s holdings are ordinarily established on the haphazard basis of the availability of primary sources, not on the rational grounds of collecting all the sources pertaining to an individual scholar’s narrow interests. Thus even a tolerably complete search would sometimes result in serious lacunae; and since the process of interpretation begins with the selection of sources, we cannot construe the old approach of examining collection after collection as genuinely critical. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to the efforts of the scholars working on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the Patrologia Latina Database, Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and various more specialized projects like the Albert Hardenberg library at Emden and the selected works available at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the researcher enjoys the possibility of perusing nearly all the extant literature in a field. Where the bulk of sources is too great, samples can be chosen on the grounds of a rational selection rather than simply one’s ability to travel the distance. In this case, the method is thus genuinely critical and not dependent on haphazard collecting.
Internet Resources and Their Limitations
Since the publication of the first edition of this volume, the Internet has emerged from what were then rather tentative patterns of resourcing, from a scholarly perspective largely confined to major libraries’ initial efforts in online catalogues, then available in the form of Telnet accessible files, to become a vast, multi-faceted research tool with sophisticated search engines and an enormous number of sites and databases of widely varying merit. In general, the text and bibliographical resources that are available on the public or surface web will not be the best resources for research, while those on the hidden or deep web (i.e., open sites that are not searched by the standard search engines like Google or Yahoo) will frequently provide the best materials of their kind available.
A good example of a superior web-based bibliographical resource is found at the Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (http://crrs.utoronto.ca/) and other sites listed in the Bibliography and Appendix. History sites include the excellent Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Sourcebooks, gathered into the Internet History Sourcebooks Project, edited by Paul Halsall and located at Fordham University (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/).The texts and maps made available at this site are all public domain or copyright permitted. The complete text of the works of Thomas Aquinas in the digitized (and quite accurate) Busa edition are now available in text-format at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/. There is also a website offering both the text and a translation of Bonaventure’s commentary on Lombard’s Sentences (http://www.franciscan-archive.org/bonaventura/), which, as it moves toward completion will provide not only the first translation of the Bonaventure text, as well as an accompanying translation of Lombard. The presence of the parallel column Latin text is also a significant service.
Also to be mentioned are the growing online collections presenting the history of art. Artcyclopedia at http://www.artcyclopedia.com/ is probably the largest site, with links to other online art resources. It includes art searchable by artist, subject, title, medium, and museums, plus links to other art resources. Art History Resources on the Web (http://arthistoryresources.net/ARTHLinks.html) is organized by era, from paleolithic to modern and has numerous links. Many of the world’s major museums also have provided online access to their collections: for example, the Louvre (http://www.louvre.fr/), the State Hermitage Museum (http://hermitagemuseum.org), and the State Russian Museum (http://rusmuseum.ru/) in St. Petersburg. The latter are particularly well photographed.
But a few caveats concerning these and related materials are in order because not all databases are equally reliable. The European libraries and the Internet Archive are producing a high quality product that is linked to their already excellent bibliographical work. Internet Archive is especially to be praised for its full cataloguing format and its identification of the location of originals. More recent material, including some eighteenth-century texts, but mostly out of copyright works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can be accessed through the online full-text resources of the Google digitization project. Google Books offers PDF versions of books with imbedded digitization capable of being word-searched and often downloaded in the PDF format. On the positive side of the project, an enormous number of volumes have been and will continue to be made available, free of charge on the Internet. Author, title, topical, and key-word searching is possible. Unfortunately, the quality of the project is highly variable and its bibliographical aspect ill-conceived. Due to the rapidity of the automated process in which the volumes are scanned and photographed, many pages have been copied imperfectly. This imperfect copying is also associated with problematic scanning of text. The scanning itself becomes increasingly less accurate in the case of early-nineteenth-century, eighteenth-century, and seventeenth-century volumes, all of which contain fonts that are easily misread by scanners — and, of course, words that have been erroneously scanned cannot be searched. Bibliographical format is not standardized, full references have not been extracted from the catalogues of libraries in which the original copies of the volumes were found, and often no distinction is made between a second or third volume in a series and other editions of the same volume.18
Research students, therefore, will need to exercise great care in evaluating Internet resources and come to terms with their limitations. Search engines will retrieve references to nearly any kind of topically identifiable materials, often ranked with a view to the closeness of correspondence between the terms searched and the use and frequency of those terms in a document. What the search engine does not do is assess the research usefulness or the quality of the document.
Many of the documentary materials on the Internet are out of date. This problem arises from the fact that much of the material in the public domain is older, out-of-copyright material. Good examples of this problem are the standard, older translation of the church fathers (ANF and NPNF) and the Catholic Encyclopedia. The danger of such resources is that a student will be seduced by the fine, up-to-date appearance of the Internet version of the resource and forget to apply the same kind of critical judgment that ordinarily would be applied to a printed book that is a century or more old.
The ANF and NPNF translations of the fathers were, at the time of their production in the late nineteenth century, an exceedingly fine effort, including introductions and annotations representing the state of scholarship at the time. The translations and the scholarly annotations are, however, hopelessly out of date today. In addition, however, the web-versions of these works, although to be commended for making these classics of the church available to a very wide audience, have the further disadvantage of minimal copy-editing, failure of the scanner to identify letters with absolute accuracy, loss of insertions in Greek or other languages not using the Roman alphabet, and a variety of other problems caused by electronic scanning. Scans also add the further problem of supplying a new and different pagination for the same text — a pagination governed by the 8.5 x 11 inch format of the scanned page. In the case of the ANF/NPNF text, the original page numbers have been scanned in, and (if this resource is used at all) ought to be followed out to the original hard copy for proofing purposes and ought to be used in the final footnote citation of the text. These generalizations apply to all projects that have been scanned using Optical Character Recognition software. As a test case to illumine the problem of Internet texts, scholars examined the accuracy of OCR software for the Burney Collection of early English newspapers digitized by the British Library and found that word accuracy was only 65%, and “significant” words (content words the researcher is likely to be interested in) a mere 48.4%. The digitized version of the nineteenth-century collections was slightly better with a 78% word accuracy and a 68.4% significant word accuracy. While OCR will improve over time, these facts obviously bear directly on the quality of search results. Tellingly, OCR has the most trouble with place and proper names, the very information that the researcher is likely to be seeking in searching an online database.19
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 Catholic-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 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/). The online version, however, suffers from the same problems of pagination as the ANF/NPNF collections noted above, but the problem is exacerbated in this case because the original page numbers are entirely absent.
Another major problem belonging to the new electronic media concerns their long-term viability. We have noted a somewhat analogous problem in comments on the history of the printed book: whereas, generally, books printed prior to 1850 were printed on unbleached rag paper and have an estimated life span of seven hundred to nine hundred years, those printed after ca. 1850 on bleached wood-pulp paper have a life span of fifty to seventy-five years. There are, in other words, the problems of built-in obsolescence, self-destructibility, and loss of the resource. In the case of electronic media, we have already seen the obsolescence of computer “punch-cards” and 5.25 inch floppy disks: data stored on such once “state-of-the-art” resources is now largely irretrievable except in museums harboring the dinosaurs of electronic hardware. Beyond this, these means of data-storage have not proved exceedingly durable in the long run. Significantly, the punch-card and the 5.25 inch floppy had shorter life spans than the book printed on bleached wood-pulp! The problem of long-term durability also obtains for 3.25 inch disks and the phenomenally useful 100 and 250 MB “Zip” disks, and the seeming solution of the multi-gigabyte DVDs awaits only the advance of the field and the development of newer software that will not read the files which were so precisely and permanently burned onto our present CD-ROM libraries. Editors of major projects like the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the former Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue have determined they will no longer support CD-ROM versions of their online full text databases, and the same applies to the older CD-ROM version of the ATLA Database.
These issues of obsolescence relate directly to a problem with the online database or documentary resource: the means of data storage and the software used on the sites will either need to be updated in fairly short order or the site will become unusable. In addition, websites appear and disappear with greater rapidity than punch-cards and floppy disks. Whereas the book printed on rag paper in 1520 brings with it the potential difficulty of access, given that it may be available in only several rare book rooms in the world, it will, apart from war or natural disaster, still be available for use several hundred years from now — and it will be readable in the same form of data-storage in which it was originally conceived. The up-to-date electronic database form of the same book, scanned both in facsimile and digitally searchable forms, available anywhere in the world to anyone with a computer and Internet access, may drop out of availability tomorrow when its web-site disappears, next month when an electronic problem develops in the medium on which it was stored, or next year when its software has become obsolete or unreadable. Finally, we face the problem that website addresses, the electronic equivalent of the familiar “Place: Publisher, Date” information, change without warning. Even physical copies of texts may face a similar fate over time. A leading example of the increasing obsolescence of an earlier medium of text duplication and its diminishing importance today is found in the massive number of historical records preserved in microform.
In order to provide some sense of the range of materials now available in microform (including microfilm, microfiche, and microdot cards), we will survey in rough chronological order several pertinent collections of the more important publishers.20 But first we must take account of the widespread shift away from the production and use of primary sources in microform. Changes in the American Theological Library Association’s preservation program clearly illustrate the general reorientation from microfilm and microfiche as the preferred media to digitization and the Internet. Before the twenty-first century, ATLA and its member libraries were heavily invested in the preservation of monographs and serials in microform, with specific emphasis on works printed on acid-bleached wood-pulp paper in the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The acid remaining in the pages had long since rendered most of these works incredibly brittle and, in many cases, nearly impossible to use without major damage. The fiche series not only made many rare items readily available, it also prevented the total loss, literally to the dustbin of history, of the contents of many of these works. But while tens of thousands of highly vulnerable titles were salvaged, presently ATLA is no longer pursuing microform projects, but directing its main focus instead to digitization and the Internet. Readex is another major producer of microform resources, that, while retaining its old film and fiche editions under the heading “classic” microform, has now turned all of its efforts to digital reproduction.
The trend is further illustrated by the consolidation (and occasionally the disappearance) of formerly thriving microform companies. For example, Primary Source Media, an imprint of Gale Cengage Learning, has assimilated at least four major microfilm companies that had strong collections of primary sources pertinent to the field of church history. Brill has taken over Inter Documentation Company (IDC); ProQuest, formerly University Microfilms International, has acquired General Microfilm Company, among others. A few companies, such as Microform Academic Publishers and World Microfilms have held out, but their assurances of commitment to the older media, emphatically expressed on their own web-pages, are sounding less and less convincing. Since single items in microform cannot be accessed by more than one person at a time, and since searching in these media cannot be automated, almost all of the emphasis is currently falling on the value of microform materials for preservation rather than accessibility, and many publishers are even questioning the medium’s future in the realm of preservation.
Microform materials, however, will still be of use to the researcher in a number of areas. If the digital copy of a document reveals lacunae, or if one suspects errors in a text that might have arisen through the process of digitization, recourse may be found in the microfilm or microfiche record. The most ready access to medieval illuminated manuscripts and other artistic expressions, both ancient and modern, might well be a microform copy. Some entire classes of records such as newspapers and periodicals may still be accessed most readily by microform copies, though the move to digitization even in these cases is now well under way. The British Library, for example, restricts access to the original copies of newspapers due to their fragility and prefers that patrons use microfilm copies. Finally, some projects involving the quantification of information may still benefit from the massive collections of census data and the vital records of births and baptisms that are available on microfilm. Guides for major collections in microform are offered in the Appendix, and individual items in microform may be identified and located through several avenues online, including the English Short Title Catalogue, OCLC’s WorldCat (which has assimilated the earlier National Register of Microform Masters), and through the European Register of Microform and Digital Masters (http://www.eromm.org/).
A few of the leading publishers of microform, their collections, and the potential uses to which they may be put will be mentioned here, with fuller descriptions found in our Appendix. This overview is by no means intended to be comprehensive, but rather illustrative of the types of collections that support church historical and theological research. A number of microform publishers have concentrated their efforts on the Western world before the Reformation. World Microfilms specializes in microfilming medieval manuscripts with an accent on illuminated manuscripts. The manuscript collections of Trinity College, Cambridge, Lincoln Cathedral Library, and Lambeth Palace Library are available, including many biblical, patristic, and theological studies. Microform Academic Publishers has a large collection of both printed and manuscript materials on British history, including, for example, the Holkham illuminated manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Both World Microfilms and Microform Academic Publishers have recently launched programs to digitize some of their holdings and make them available online through subscriptions. Primary Source Media, an imprint of Gale Cengage Learning, now holds the microfilm of the literary and historical manuscripts in the Cotton Collection in the British Library. Additionally, the medieval manuscript collections of Pembroke College, Cambridge, the manuscript collections from St. John’s College, Oxford, through 1700, the Society of Antiquaries, London, and literary manuscripts, chronicles, and documents from Cambridge University Library are all found in the microform collections of Primary Source Media.
With the advent of printing in the late fifteenth century, the bulk of available source materials becomes daunting, and yet enormous strides have been made in rendering these sources in microform. Inter Documentation Company, now an imprint of Brill, has produced major microfiche collections on Reformed Protestantism, sixteenth-century pamphlets in German and Latin (1501-1530), the Radical Reformation, the Hungarian Reformation, Dutch Protestants (ca. 1486-1684), religion in Latin America, and massive missionary society publications. To give an idea of the magnitude of these collections, the German and Latin pamphlet series alone comprise approximately 5,000 separate documents, and at least some of these materials have been digitized and made more accessible by Brill. Other fiche collections produced by Inter Documentation Company will still be found at major research libraries cataloged under “IDC.” The collections formerly available at the Center for Reformation Research in St. Louis, now housed in the library of Concordia Theological Seminary, total some 12,000 printed books and ca. 500,000 manuscripts in microfilm (http://www.csl.edu/library/the-center-for-reformation-resources-collection/), and Concordia has an impressive range of fiche collections from IDC as well. The finding guide that describes these materials runs to eight volumes, and many of the items found in these collections are not available in any other microform version.
The Nineteenth Century project, located at the British Library under the direction of Chadwyk-Healey, an imprint of ProQuest, is considerably more massive in size than other similar endeavors, simply because of the bulk of primary material that is available; the number of imprints in English language sources for the period 1800 through 1815 is roughly equivalent to the whole of the previous century. Primary Source Media now possesses major microform collections on nineteenth-century American literature and history (over 4,000 vols.), the anti-slavery collection from the Oberlin College Library, and theology and church history collections for Britain, the United States, and Canada (a basic library of about 2,000 vols.).
Several additional publishing ventures that bear upon modern church history and theology deserve mention. The Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives holds printed and manuscript Baptist materials in microform from North and South America, England, continental Europe, Africa, and Russia. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English Baptist materials from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and the Angus Library at Regents Park College, Oxford, are especially voluminous. The library accepts requests for the filming of specific documents that have not been filmed before. Typically, denominational archivists have been assiduous in the collection and production of microform libraries, and therefore if a project can be defined denominationally, the historical branch of the church should be carefully investigated.
Students need to be aware of the fact that just as scholars have compiled bibliographies of secondary literature in specialized fields, there now exist large collections of primary materials in microform in a number of specialized fields of study. Two areas illustrate such efforts particularly well: women’s studies and newspapers and religious periodicals. One of Chadwyck-Healey’s clearly defined subject areas in their microfiche collection is “Women Writers.” Primary Source Media’s History of Women project comprises a vast microfilm collection of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and manuscripts on women before 1920. Other reference works, already mentioned, have been utilized in a special way for those interested in women’s studies. For example, Hilda Smith and Susan Cardinale have compiled Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography Based on Wing’s Short Title Catalogue (Bib. III.C).
Newspapers have demanded the special attention of archivists and librarians, in part because of their fragile character, especially in the nineteenth century, and in part because the early numbers (seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) are so rare. Primary Source Media has filmed Charles Burney’s and John Nichols’s large collections of English newspapers, 1662-1820.21 This collection of “Early English Newspapers” brings an unprecedented number of English provincial papers together in one place, and many major research libraries subscribe to this series. Thus, for any given year, the microfilm collection offers the scholar a geographical sweep of public opinion that rivals the holdings of the British Library’s newspaper collection. The British Library itself has digitized the entire Burney Collection of more than 1,200 individual newspaper titles in a full-text searchable archive, but it is available only onsite. In American studies, a great many nineteenth-century religious periodicals that are essential for the history of the period are now available through Chadwyck-Healey’s Microform Library (ProQuest). In addition, World Microfilms has a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Quaker and Methodist periodicals.22
The strategic implications of some of these collections for new research projects should be readily grasped. The history of nineteenth-century primary, secondary, and college education, for example, cannot be understood apart from the contribution of Protestant Evangelicals, and the vast collection of religious periodicals now available in microform will greatly facilitate research in this field. Another illustration is found in the English provincial press. Broadly speaking, local English newspapers have not been read closely by modern historians, and this generalization may apply to other Western countries as well. Yet many important questions regarding religion and public opinion remain to be answered. The question of the relationship between the religious content and influence of the press, on the one hand, and popular forms of religious expression, such as the printed sermon, on the other, are begging to be addressed. A detailed comparative examination of the two should shed light on the highly debated issue of the secularization of the West and help illumine such matters as the timing of “de-Christianization” and the mechanisms of this phenomenon as well. One study utilized the medium of microfilm to examine English newspapers outside of London, looking at some twenty-nine newspapers for a six-month period of the American Revolution, without recourse to a single archive in Great Britain.23 The sample was rationally constructed on the basis of the geographic distribution of the papers and provided more information than any other work that had been done to date on public opinion concerning the war. The study challenged long-held assumptions about the popularity of the war in England simply because a wide variety of local papers were available in the same medium and all at the same place. While the newspaper digitization program of such powerful online products as the British Newspaper Archive is impressive (see Appendix), nearly two-thirds (eighteen) of the newspapers required for this geographical survey of public opinion are currently not available in the digital archive. In other words, microfilm is still a valuable medium, and new topics can occasionally be defended on the grounds that microform materials may provide a comprehensive overview that is otherwise unattainable.
The duplication of modern source materials has not been limited to the reproduction of printed materials alone; major archives of manuscript material have been rendered in microfilm or microfiche. For example, the Genealogical Society of Utah (now Family Search) has created the largest collection of filmed manuscripts in the world (Appendix). Many of these records are in the form of vital statistics (birth and baptismal registers), but there are numerous church records from a wide variety of denominations as well, including records of parish vestries, church wardens, and some Sunday School records. Microfilm archives are thus of value for anyone interested in the various ways in which quantitative or comparative techniques may be applied to church history, and they have value for the denominational historian as well.
Research in Archives, Special Collections, and Rare Book Facilities
As indicated previously, the contemporary efflorescence of online resources must not be allowed to obscure the continued importance of great libraries and archives for certain kinds of research projects. Not only is there a high aesthetic factor involved in the use of original sources in their original form — such as the correspondence of Abraham Lincoln, the handwritten minutes of the Consistory of Geneva, or a late medieval manuscript or printed book — there is also the fact that many such resources are not now, and may never be, made available in microform or scanned for use as an online resource. And even when such a source is rendered in electronic format, issues such as the correct reading of a sixteenth-century hand, the examination of a watermark, the proper understanding of marginalia, and so forth, can only be resolved from the original.
On the other hand, full text archives in major European, British, and American libraries are now available on the Internet, as are the manuscripts of well-known individual authors, including marginalia, and this shift of archival materials to the Internet is likely to become a trend. For example, digital reproductions of manuscripts from Oxford University’s Bodleian Library can be ordered online through the library’s imaging service (http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley). The British Library permits online search of its archive collections (http://searcharchives.bl.uk/) and offers digitized manuscripts online (http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/). The British Library will also digitize manuscripts on request at http://www.bl.uk/imaging/. The Swiss Electronic Library (e-rara) is now augmented by an online manuscript offering (http://www.e-manuscripta.ch). The massive papers of Jonathan Edwards are fully searchable at the open access Edwards’s project site at Yale University (http://edwards.yale.edu/archive); and the Yale Bernecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library will also digitize manuscripts on request (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu). The Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online (http://scriptorium.english.cam.ac.uk) both offers manuscripts and provides a tutorial on reading early modern English handwriting. Many other major libraries also now provide digital copies of manuscripts for a fee.
In some ways, research that utilizes unpublished manuscripts differs only marginally from that involving published books, especially when the books are dated before 1800 and hence considered rare (Bib. III.F; IV.G).24 Manuscripts are often very delicate and must be handled with the same care as rare books and pamphlets. Incunabula, and in many cases, particular editions of early printed books, survive in single copies. Individual manuscripts of sermons, diaries, and correspondence are almost without exception unique, and thus irreplaceable. This places an even greater burden of care on the person who wishes to examine them. Each archive has its own conventions and set of protocols; each has its idiosyncrasies that the student can only successfully navigate by exercising great patience. It is thus difficult to make general rules that apply to all circumstances alike, but there are a few stipulations that are universally applicable and should be strictly observed.
Research that involves manuscripts requires that students pay particularly close attention to the various printed guides that accompany the collection. In fact, it is highly advisable to study the guides to manuscript collections even before seeking permission to examine the collection, and the same applies to the introductory guides for readers provided by almost every major research library. We have known students who have failed to prepare themselves for research and then proceed to waste the time of librarians who have much more important things to do than tutor lazy students. Admittance to research libraries is commonly gained only by permission, and obnoxious research students reflect ill, not only upon themselves, but upon the school they represent and upon their primary supervisor. If their inconsiderate behavior contributes to difficulty for future applicants who request the privilege of access to manuscripts and rare books, they have not only hurt themselves, they have also, as one veteran put it, committed a “serious offence” against scholarship.25
If the first step of careful preparation is neglected, the result may be utter bewilderment and days of lost time. This advice is readily confirmed by the experience of many beginning students, and a few experienced ones as well, when they encounter new situations and fail to make the necessary adjustments. The Public Record Office in the United Kingdom (now the National Archives) offers a useful illustration of the point.26 This repository is, as the name implies, a record office; that is to say, it is not a library, nor are its holdings organized in a fashion that the uninitiated will recognize, much less fathom. Directories list classes of papers by government department, and this in itself can be daunting, because the system of classification necessitates some knowledge of the history and functioning of the British government. The beginner is frustrated further by the vastness of the collections and, until recently, their division into two entirely separate locations. Though research on a single topic may necessitate the use of papers under the classification R.G. (for Registrar General) and H.O. (for Home Office), for many years the former were located at the P.R.O., Chancery Lane, in central London, and the latter were at the new facility in Kew, Surrey. After the energy expended to learn such things and the inevitable accompanying discouragement, there is some consolation in having an excuse to travel to Kew and visit not only the archive, but the world-famous gardens as well. Happily, the new facilities at Kew are modernized and the time required to requisition documents is now much less than it used to be at Chancery Lane.
The specific method by which manuscripts are requisitioned differs from library to library; the Students’ Room at the old British Museum differed from the Rare Book Rooms in the University Library, Cambridge, and they are as different from each other as the Bodleian Library at Oxford is from the John Rylands University Library at Manchester. In some settings, such as Dr. Williams’s Library in London, the atmosphere is relaxed and the staff unusually helpful; in other settings, the ambiance may be depressing and the assistance unfriendly, possibly even hostile. Manuscripts are normally paged with a definite limit to the number of documents that one can examine at once, and the waiting period will vary between twenty minutes to two or more hours. In every case, proof of one’s serious intent as a scholar is required, and the use of ink in any form is absolutely forbidden.
Students should first familiarize themselves with the general guides that provide broad overviews at the national level and then proceed to the guides of specific archives and libraries. For example, chapters five and six of the Harvard Guide to American History on public documents and unpublished sources is helpful at the most general level and will provide a good initial orientation for students working in American history.27 We have listed several guides under “Archives and Manuscripts” in the Bibliography (Bib. IV.G) that are important resources for Americanists, such as the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections and Hamer’s Guide to Archives and Manuscripts in the United States. For the United Kingdom, the second edition of Janet Foster and Julia Sheppard’s British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom should be examined (Bib. III.F). The Historical Manuscripts Commission in Britain (now a department of the National Archives) published guides for a large number of manuscript collections, but older hard-copy guides have now been superseded by the National Archives online. Students requiring information on the addresses, services and holdings of local record offices in Great Britain should consult the National Archives at http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse and browse the alphabetical list of the archives. A crucial resource for the use of archives in the U.K. is the Institute of Historical Research at Senate House Library, University of London. In addition to offering a gateway to historical sites and datasets, it provides guidance for the use of such major repositories as the Public Record Office and the Guildhall Library. In addition, guides to assist historical research in the UK in more general terms are available through the Institute’s web page (http://www.history.ac.uk/).
In the search for pertinent manuscript materials for research, we are no longer limited to hard-copy guides, but in many cases the older guides will remain useful, and major research libraries will typically supply hard-copy guides for its manuscript collections. Medieval and Renaissance Studies: A Location Guide from the North Carolina University Library is noted in our Bibliography as a random sample of a guide to manuscript holdings, and we have supplied several listings for the Huntington Library to further illustrate the point. The John Rylands University Library of Manchester has a small booklet entitled “Theology and Church History: A Guide to Research Resources,” with separate sections on “Aids to Research,” “Manuscripts and Archives,” “Printed Books,” and “Microforms.”28 Dr. Williams’s Library, London, provides similar guidance with its “Guide to the Manuscripts.” Nevertheless, Internet resources are rapidly replacing these older guides. In the previous chapter we have alluded to the fact that OCLC can facilitate research in archives as well as in printed sources, and hence, networked libraries ought not be thought of as useful only for secondary literature. Many of the major research collections have developed online catalogues, and increasingly, archives that contain materials in broad subject categories are offering full descriptions of their entire collections on the Internet. The Catholic University of America is a good example of one such archive with extensive finding aids and indices on Catholic history (http://archives.lib.cua.edu/). A researcher can now, prior to visiting a library, examine such facilities as the Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library, or the Leiden and Utrecht University libraries in order to identify holdings relevant to highly particularized investigation. Such Internet resources as OCLC WorldCat can also be used to identify concentrations of rarities in those archive and rare book facilities that have online catalogues.
Given the availability of online catalogues of rare materials, plans to do research in distant libraries ought to be made in considerable detail in advance. Researchers will do well not only to plan their time and travel itineraries, but also their research itinerary. If a researcher can identify clearly (including full bibliographical references, call numbers or shelf-marks when possible) which manuscripts or rare books he or she would like to examine, detailed correspondence can be initiated with the librarian or curator of the facility. Often librarians and curators will cooperate with researchers, making available study-desks, carrels, and even individual rare items for particular time periods, enabling a researcher to maximize a stay even of short duration. Major research facilities often also have access to accommodations for visiting scholars that are both relatively convenient to the facility and of considerably less cost than a hotel.
Students should always be alert to the desirability of innovative approaches in obtaining necessary information, and they should let nothing stand in the way of acquiring the sources they need. The complaint, sometimes heard, that the needed materials were unavailable is not a legitimate excuse. Several different sources, for example, can often be used in conjunction to find a reference. One can start with a bibliographical source for a particular century and then find out that the individual being researched has written something of significance. Granting when and where it was published, there may very well be a particular collection of materials that makes it readily available. Or, if that is not the case (i.e., if an older source is not found either in the Early English Books — either the original microfilm series or the online resource — or in fiche sets from Inter Documentation Company), then the next step may be to go to various bibliographical tools available electronically in most major libraries or to one of the many tools freely available on the Internet, such as the online catalogues of major research libraries, the collections of which are known to cover one’s area of interest, such as the Oxford University libraries, Leiden University, major North American university systems such as the University of California, and finally such global tools as WorldCat or the Universal Short Title Catalogue. When major electronic search tools fail, a researcher may still consult the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints to see whether a copy of the document exists in some other place. Good research technique is not just a matter of knowing individual sources; it is a matter of knowing how to move between the various sources to resource oneself.
Students should not overlook the fact that a considerable amount of research can be carried on by mail and by e-mail. There seems to be simply no end to the kind of materials that can be obtained on written request — from printed books that can be microfilmed to xerographic copies of rare archival materials. When requesting copied materials it is advisable to inquire in advance not only about the price of the copying process but also which of several processes may be available. The old standby 35 mm positive film is increasingly less likely to be used by libraries; many will supply fiche and some will even produce electronic copies in PDF or similar formats readable on a computer screen. Normally, archivists will not allow unpublished manuscripts to be xeroxed, although we have obtained the correspondence of several leading eighteen-century figures in this medium, via the Royal Mail. Additionally, if the needed materials cannot be obtained by post, or if the situation demands research in its own right, it is entirely possible to contact local researchers who will do some basic elements of the research for you, or who are willing to help with preliminary identification of materials and judgments concerning the strengths and weaknesses of the resources. In one small part of a much larger project, for example, it became necessary to obtain occupational information from a number of Anglican baptismal registers in Bristol, England. A letter of inquiry to the librarian at the Bristol Central Library resulted in a list of several local researchers. Armed with the names and addresses of these local historians, it was not a great deal of trouble to make the necessary arrangements for the work to be done. The expense, of course, was much less than the cost of travel to Bristol, though there was a commensurate loss in pleasure.
Finally, it is essential that students recognize from the beginning the need to have hands-on access to their entire bibliography, either in the form of careful notes or in the form of hard copy or electronic materials. A scholar’s library will contain, in addition to books and journals, xerographic and microform copies of articles and documents. Typically, one will have a considerable library of secondary literature on hand as well. After having worked through periodical indices, a researcher will often make xerographic copies or download digital copies of every article that has a direct bearing on his or her topic and have them filed in a coherent order, coordinated with the research bibliography. Then, as one works through the bibliography for a dissertation or monograph, he or she will have almost instantaneous hands-on access to virtually every needed source, except, of course, the really rare items that can be found only in a specialized library. In some cases, depending on the importance of the source, even rare materials, in the form of xerographic or microform copies, will be immediately at hand.
1. G. Kitson Clark, Guide for Research Students Working on Historical Subjects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 17.
2. Kitson Clark, Guide for Research Students, p. 18.
3. Everett U. Crosby, C. Julian Bishko, and Robert L. Kellogg, Medieval Studies: A Bibliographical Guide (New York: Garland, 1983).
4. R. C. Caenegem, Introduction aux sources de l’histoire médiévale, trans. (from English) B. van den Abeele, new edition (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997). An earlier edition is in English.
5. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History, 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994-95).
6. Franz Brunhoelzl, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, 2 vols. (Munich: Fink, 1975-92); French version: Histoire de la littérature latine du moyen âge, trans. Henri Rochais, additional bibliography by Jean-Paul Bouhot, 3 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990–).
7. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
8. Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, ed. Jonathan Dewald, 6 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 2004).
9. For example, we find Freemasons and Freemasonry: A Bibliography Extracted from Volume 184 of “The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints” (London: Mansell, 1973). With some added material, this bibliography ran to about 5,000 items.
10. For example, some 12,000 new holdings from the New York Public Library were added in 2007, but the vast majority of these titles were already listed.
11. The libraries include: the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge and Newcastle University Libraries, the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, the National Library of Scotland, Harvard University Library, and the Library of Congress, and in the case of the last two, with holdings only from 1816-1919.
12. Some titles in Welsh and French and a few other languages are listed.
13. See the appendix for further information on these projects.
14. The publisher has adopted the well-established Text Encoding Initiative version of Standard Generalized Markup Language. Such care, while expensive and time-consuming, will undoubtedly guarantee the long-term durability of the project.
15. As with EEBO, licensing agreements require that the database be used on site, but since the vast majority of university libraries allow access to the collections, students will typically find this resource available within a sufficiently convenient geographical radius. While ECCO contains much Americana, the standard database for North American materials is Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints at http://www.readex.com/.
16. It is estimated that between a third and a half of all 470,000 entries in the ESTC are different editions of the same work.
17. Full access is presently available only for ECCO and the first phase of EEBO (about 25,000 books); it is currently limited to subscribing institutions for EEBO phase two and Evans. Naturally the priority is given to first editions of unique texts (http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/).
18. Beyond problems of scanning and the absence of correct information on editions and volumes, there are massive errors in the metadata, including publication dates, wrong or misleading classifications (categories that were designed for large chain bookstores) and mismatches of titles and texts. See Geoffrey Nunberg, “Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (August 31, 2009).
19. See Simon Tanner, Trevor Muñoz, and Pich Hemy Ross, “Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness: Lessons Learned from Assessing the OCR Accuracy of the British Library’s 19th Century Online Newspaper Archive,” D-Lib Magazine 15 (July/August 2009) at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july09/munoz/07munoz.html.
20. For a good, brief introduction to the use of microform materials in history, see Frank Freidel, ed., with Richard K. Showman, Harvard Guide to American History, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1974), 1:109-12.
21. The collection runs to some 6,600 reels of microfilm. Primary Source Media provides guides for this specific collection, but for guidance in the broader area of newspapers, students should consult the National Digital Newspaper Program of the Library of Congress (see the appendix).
22. OCLC is cataloging holdings for U.S. newspapers dating back to the beginning of printing in this country. Projects like the Subject Index to Pre-1800 British Periodicals undertaken by James E. Tierney and supported by Research Publications will transform the efficiency of the researcher. See The Clark Newsletter: Bulletin of the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th-Century Studies 20 (Spring, 1991): 10. As of 2007, Tierney’s project is ongoing (http://www.stoa.org/archives/716).
23. James E. Bradley, “The British Public and the American Revolution: Ideology, Interest, and Opinion,” in Britain and the American Revolution, ed. H. T. Dickinson (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 153-54.
24. An excellent book for recent works on searching archives is Ronald H. Fritze, Brian E. Coutts, and Louis A. Vyhnanek, eds., Reference Sources in History: An Introductory Guide, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2004), esp. chapter 13.
25. Kitson Clark, Guide for Research Students, p. 25.
26. See the excellent article by Geraldine Beech, “Historical Research in the Public Record Office, London,” Perspectives (the American Historical Association Newsletter) 29 no. 9 (Dec. 1991): 13-14, 16. The online guide is at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/atoz/.
27. See also the brief but helpful discussion of foreign archives on pp. 100-105 of vol. I.
28. In addition, there are more specialized guides for the John Rylands Library: for example, “Methodist Archives: Catalogues, Handlists, Bibliographies and Some Important Reference Works.”