Books & Printing – RSA Digital Resources

ATMA – Ancient Texts of Military Art

https://ista.univ-fcomte.fr/omekatest/s/atma-english/page/welcome_ATMA

ATMA is a thematic digital library devoted to the technical works of the Western military tradition (tactics, military architecture, ballistics, etc.) from the 16th to the early 17th century. Its aim is to make these texts accessible and facilitate their consultation and study through a series of online digital tools:

3D models
interactive maps
technical glossary
identification of intertextual references (in progress)
“text” version by OCR (in progress)

The project, launched in September 2022, is in its initial phase: ATMA currently has 75 digitised texts (3 of which have been OCR’ed and can be searched using lexical terms), 2 author biographies, 1 3D technical illustration, a geographical map and 1 technical glossary.

Lodovico Media Library

https://lodovico.medialibrary.it/home/index.aspx

Lodovico is a multi-tenant media library hosting an increasing number of cultural institutions from the Emilia-Romagna region (currently it has about 30 participants). The Lodovico Media Library is conceived has a repository for digitized collections from libraries, museums and archives. Among the most relevant digital collections for Renaissance studies: the letters of Lucrezia Borgia; the Jewish fragments; documents from the Este and Farnese court. It has about 126,000 digital objects.

AGAPE: A Database of Greek Patristic Editions (1465–1600)

AGAPE Homepage — https://www.agapepatristics.net/public/frontend

AGAPE is a new open-access database which maps the reception of the Greek Church Fathers in print throughout early modern Europe from 1465 to 1600, in the original language, as well as in Latin and vernacular translations. It refines available data and substantially improves their level of detail: not only does it link each work to the ID of the Clavis Patrum Graecorum (CPG), the standard authority in the field, but also thoroughly describes all contents (text as well as paratext) and strictly relies on the analysis of at least one copy of each edition.

Urus. Techniques and Reception of Prints in Poland-Lithuania (15th–17th century)

Urus is a guide for academics and general users interested in the themes of production and reception of prints in Poland, Lithuania, and Prussia from the 15th to the 17th centuries. The database takes its name from the aurochs — or urus in Latin — a now-extinct species of large wild cattle whose habitat in the 16th century was already limited to remote corners of Eastern European forests. The ambition of the Urus project is to collect hitherto insufficiently explored instances of Early Modern printmaking and print consumption in Poland, Lithuania, and Prussia. The database provides an insight into robust East and Central European material, both textual and iconographic, and its far-reaching connections.

The making of Urus brought together members of two scientific projects led by Professor Grażyna Jurkowlaniec and funded by the National Science Centre, Poland: “Reframed Image: Reception of Prints in the Kingdom of Poland from the End of the Fifteenth to the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century” (2016–2020) and “Matrix of Confusion: The Production of Woodcut Illustrations in Poland–Lithuania and Prussia until the Early Seventeenth Century” (2019–2023).

Magnetic Margins. A Census and Annotations Database

Magnetic Margins homepage — https://www.magnetic-margins.com/resource/Start

The project Magnetic Margins investigates how and by whom the most important early modern book publications on magnetism were read and annotated. This database provides a census of major publications in this field of study and maps annotations in the individual copies of these editions.

Rara Magnetica. A Repository of Historical Sources Related to the Premodern Research on Magnetism

Rara Magnetica Homepage — https://www.raramagnetica.de/

Rara Magnetica (1269-1599) is the name of Gustav Hellmann’s well known anthology published in 1898. With this collection, he sought to provide access to some of the earliest, yet rare publications in the field of geomagnetism that predated William Gilbert’s landmark publication De Magnete of 1600. The digital project and platform Rara Magnetica translates these efforts into the digital domain, going far beyond digital editions.

The need to publish important but understudied sources is most efficiently achieved by providing curated digital structured and linked data. Rara Magnetica hence – as an ongoing project – is both a repository and an interactive research platform. It publishes scans and transcriptions of (many hitherto unpublished) sources, data visualizations, and databases, all related to the premodern study of magnetism. Moreover, it provides various tools to investigate each of these resources independently and in combination. A major aim in fact is to enhance multimodal analyses that transcend media barriers by allowing to research imagery along with full texts, material sources along with their conceptual content. This is achieved by various but interlinked tools providing different ways of looking at the same sources.

Early Printed Books: Resources for Teaching and Learning

http://www.earlyprintedbooks.com/

Early Printed Books focuses on what was unique about books printed during the hand-press period in the West—those features particular to works printed between 1450, when the printing press began to be developed in Germany, and 1800, when the machine press began to take its place across the Western world.

Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618)

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/content/furnace-and-fugue

https://furnaceandfugue.org/index.html

Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618), with Scholarly Commentary, edited by Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak

Re-rendering the German alchemist Michael Maier’s intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book, Atalanta fugiens (1618), as an enhanced, open-access, online publication, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that Maier perhaps imagined but that were impossible to fully realize before now. An interactive, layered digital edition provides accessibility and flexibility, presenting all the elements of the original book along with significant enhancements that allow for deep engagement by specialists and nonspecialists alike, while scholarly essays explore Atalanta fugiens and its place in the history of music, science, print, and visual culture in early modern Europe.

Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies

Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies – A digital critical edition, edited by Liza Blake

This website, as a freely available digital critical edition, makes the poetry of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, freely available online for all to use, for teaching or research. More importantly, the full textual notes show the numerous variants across the three editions, which will allow readers of these excellent poems to see the tremendous amount of revision that Cavendish made to her poems.

Post-Reformation Digital Library

http://www.prdl.org/

A select database of digital books relating to the development of theology and philosophy during the Reformation and Post-Reformation/Early Modern Era (late 15th-18th c.). Late medieval and patristic works printed and referenced in the early modern era are also included. The PRDL is a project of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research.