Religious Studies

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

Provides access to over 50 million digitized items from European archives, libraries, and museums.

HathiTrust makes the digitized collections of some of the nation’s great research libraries available for all. HathiTrust was initially conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia to establish a repository for those universities to archive and share their digitized collections. HathiTrust will quickly expand to include additional partners and to provide those partners with an easy means to archive their digital content.

IUCAT, Indiana University's online library catalog, provides comprehensive access to millions of items held by the IU Libraries statewide, including books, recordings, US government publications, periodicals, and other types of material. Users can access IUCAT from any Internet-connected computer or device, whether in the libraries, on campus, or off campus.

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

Includes American and international collections aimed at educators, journalists, religious congregations, and researchers. Data included in the ARDA are submitted by religion scholars and research centers in the world.

For scholars of English literature, particular attention has been given to the Renaissance period. All the most significant texts from Tyndale to the King James Bible, including the highly influential Coverdale, Bishops' and Geneva Bibles, appear. For researchers in the development of the English language, texts from all eras are included, with emphasis upon versions that closely represent its contemporary state. For biblical and theological scholars, texts from the Protestant, Roman Catholic and non-conformist traditions are represented.

This website contains E. Gene Smith's extensive database of Tibetan literature and serves as the main access point to an evolving digital archive of texts, primarily in the Tibetan language.

IU subscriptions include Core Text Collections I through XIV. See IUCAT for print collections.

Includes access to two modules:

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

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

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

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

The British Library's collection of Arabic printed books was formed partly from the former British Museum Library (which became the British Library in 1973), and partly from the India Office Library. The India Office was set up in 1858 to oversee the administration of the Provinces of British India (today Bangladesh, Burma, India, and Pakistan), as well as Aden and other British territories around the Indian Ocean. It closed in 1947 with the independence of India and Pakistan. The India Office library originated in 1798 as the East India Company's library which was taken over by the India Office in 1867.

Module 1: Religion and Law
The Qu'ran, traditions (Hadith), tafsir, theology, commentaries on religious texts, religious teaching and practice, biographies of religious figures; law, fiqh and statutes, fatwas and rulings

Module 2: Sciences, History, and Geography
Natural history, medicine, physiology, other science, classical sciences, philosophy, logic, politics, ethics, mathematics, arithmetic, geometry, mechanics, astrology, chemistry; history, early caliphs and conquests, modern history, genealogy, biographies; geography and travel, regional geography, and topography

Module 3: Periodicals, Literature, Grammar, Language, Catalogues and General Works
Periodicals, folktales, pre-Islamic literature (Antar, Bani Hilal, Imru'l qays), Islamic poetry and prose (al-Burdah), poetry and prose (maqamat), Kalilah wa-dimnah, Luqman, proverbs and sayings, Thousand and one nights, later literature, poetry and prose, general literature; language and lexicography, dictionaries, grammar, syntax, rhetoric, 'ilm al-bayan, catalogues, manuscript catalogues, etc.

eHRAF World Cultures is a cross-cultural database that contains information on all aspects of cultural and social life. Information is organized by cultures and ethnic groups and the full-text documents are subject-indexed at the paragraph level. Use to find information on a particular culture or cultural trait or for making cross-cultural comparisons. Includes thousands of pages of text from books, articles, and unpublished manuscripts as well as English translations of foreign texts available exclusively in HRAF.

The Fortunoff Archive currently holds more than 4,400 testimonies, which are comprised of over 12,000 recorded hours of videotape. Testimonies were produced in cooperation with thirty-six affiliated projects across North America, South America, Europe, and Israel. Testimonies were recorded in whatever language the witness preferred, and range in length from 30 minutes to over 40 hours (recorded over several sessions).

Create Account & Request Testimony:

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Most of the writings date from the 1920s and 1930s and many are directly connected with Nazi groups. The works are principally anti-Semitic, but include writings on other groups as well, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jesuits, and the Freemasons. Also included are history, pseudo-history, and fiction.

Collection primarily concern the U.S. government's prosecution of these nationalists in the "Hindu Conspiracy Case" (as it was called in the press and Department of Justice correspondence) for violations of the Espionage Act (40 Stat. 217-231) arising from two major incidents. In the first incident, the German government provided funds with which the nationalists purchased arms for shipment to Indian rebels. In the second incident, several Indians (some of whom were U.S. citizens) and others were arrested for attempted fraud involved in soliciting funds for and calling themselves representatives of the "Nationalists Government" of India. In the spring of 1918, the "Hindu Conspiracy Case" trial was held in San Francisco, at which 29 people were convicted in indictments arising from the arms shipment. Indictments arising from the fraud case were dismissed. The trial ended with a sensational climax when Ram Chandra was shot to death in the courtroom by fellow defendant, Ram Singh.

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

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

Index Islamicus is the primary index to literature on Islam, the Middle East and Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, and Muslim minorities elsewhere. It includes citations to over 2,000 journals, conference proceedings, monographs, and book reviews from 1906 to present.

The Index to Jewish Periodicals provides indexing to English-language articles, book reviews, and feature stories in more than 160 journals devoted to Jewish affairs. Titles include such journals as Contemporary Jewry, Holy Land Studies, Jewish Culture & History, Journal of Palestine Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature. Most references in the Index are not found in other guides to periodical literature. The database is intended for those interested in Jewish thought and contemporary Jewish and Middle Eastern affairs. Coverage of journals dates as far back as 1988.

Digital facsimiles from the manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland. Includes diaries and journals, official and private papers, letters, sketches, paintings and original Indian documents containing histories and literary works. The collection documents the relationship between Britain and India in an empire where the Scots played a central role as traders, generals, missionaries, viceroys, governor-generals and East India Company officials. The dates of the documents range from 1710 to 1937.
 

Includes access to the entirety of six major organisational collections and twenty-four collections of personal papers from the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Themes covered include: business, industry and enterprise; civil rights and liberties; culture, literature and the arts; early Jewish experience; everyday life: personal and family narratives; immigration and settlement; politics and the law; reflections on the Jewish experience; religion, tradition and community; war, conflict and persecution; and Welfare, health and education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Middle Eastern Manuscripts Online 1: Pioneer Orientalists (MEMO 1) consists of the Arabic manuscripts of Joseph Justus Scaliger (d. 1609), Franciscus Raphelengius (d. 1597) and Jacobus Golius (d. 1667) from the Leiden University Library, one of Europe's top repositories of Oriental manuscripts. These three collections are Leiden's oldest core collections of Arabic manuscripts. The Golius collection is particularly famous for its manuscripts on Islamic science.

All these manuscripts were acquired by the scholar Levinus Warner during his stay in Istanbul from 1644 until his death in 1665. This selection from the Warner Legacy to the Leiden University Libraries includes one autograph (Codex Orientalis 432), 10 unique manuscripts (Cod. Or. 498; 517; 801; 870; 1088; 1090; 1096; 1110; 1143; 1155; and 1175), and 11 manuscripts with unique parts (Cod. Or. 309; 333; 662; 697; 730; 765; 835; 870; 898; 917; and 923). The collection also includes several of Warner's diaries with research notes in various languages.

In addition to 5 autographs, the highlights of the collection include: the earliest dated manuscript in the collection (Arab O. 013) a dated copy of a unique arrangement of a rare treatise written by al-Ṣāḥib Tāǧ al-Dīn (d. 707/1307) produced in the year of the author’s death; two rare Mamluk treatises on horsemanship (Arab F.2); and an anonymous compilation (Arab O. 027) about the lives of the outstanding men who lived in Medina in the 12th/18th century.

A collection of eleven Russian periodicals dealing with all aspects of Russia's Muslim world before the fall of the tsarist regime. Their places of publication include not only the two metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also such provincial cities as Kazan', Simferopol', Baku, and Kokand. Also included is the Paris weekly "Musul΄manin = Moussoulmanine," which began to be published by the Russian Muslim diaspora of Paris, France, for the purpose of enlightening the mountain people of the Caucasus and educating Russian society about the local Muslim world of the Caucasus.

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

Covers Responsa Literature - rabbinic case-law rulings which represent the historical-sociological milieu of real-life situations; the Bible, the Talmud and their principal commentaries; works about Jewish law and customs; codes of Jewish law, such as Maimonides' Mishneh Torah and the Shulchan Aruch with its principal commentaries; midrashim, Zohar, etc. Also includes the Entsiklopedyah Talmudit.

This database, which previously was available only through the purchase of a CD, consists of an extraordinary collection of virtually all original documents of the Babylonian Talmud. Such documents include all full surviving manuscripts of Oriental, Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Yemenite provenance; hundreds of complete manuscripts and first printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud; and more than a thousand fragments from the Cairo and European archives. Many of these documents are available both as texts and digital images. -- OCLC

Includes documentary evidence collected in several different programmes: the eyewitness accounts which were collected before, during and after the Second World War, from people fleeing the Nazi oppression, a large collection of photographs of pre-war Jewish life, the activities of the Nazis, and the ghettoes and camps, a collection of postcards of synagogues in Germany and eastern Europe, most since destroyed, a unique collection of Nazi propaganda publications including a large collection of 'educational' children's' books, and the card index of biographical details of prominent figures in Nazi Germany, many with portrait photographs. Pamphlets, bulletins and journals published by the Wiener Library to record and disseminate the research of the Institute are also included.

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

The texts were printed in Hebrew letters in West, Central and East Europe. The dates range from the middle of the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The collection contains the whole spectrum of Yiddish texts, including a large number of women's bibles (Tse'na Re'ena), liturgy, medical guide books, science and education, works on religious customs (Minhagim), legends, historical chronicles and translations of well known tales like "A Thousand and one Nights".