CTI Textual Studies T h e o l o g y

Is the Patrologia Graeca (and any of the other major patristic series) available on CD-Rom or on the Internet?

I am responding with a more general reply to your query which also covers Latin as well as Greek sources, in case the information might be of interest to any of your colleagues

The Patrologia Graeca itself is not available on CD-ROM or on the Internet. I am unsure about its availability on microfiche but can make further enquiries. You may be aware that the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project issues a CD-ROM which consists of the canon of Greek literature from 8th century BC to around 600AD. This is really the standard electronic corpus of Greek texts for scholarly use and bases the electronic text on the best available printed edition. Further information about the TLG (including texts available, software to search it, and license information) can be found at http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~tlg/

The Patrologia Latina is now available online (at a price). It is made available by Chadwyck-Healey (who produced the CD-ROM edition which cost around 25,000 pounds). Chadwyck-Healey are currently offering a free month's trial to the service. Access to the online edition is by institutional annual subscription and is accessed through any Web browser. There would be a substantial discount if your institution already has the CD-Roms. Further information from http://pld.chadwyck.co.uk/

The electronic edition of the PL initially attracted some criticism from what many have perceived to be its rival (though really its a complementary resource) - the CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts. This is a full-text database containing searchable electronic editions of the works published in "Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina and Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis as well as a large number of editions from the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Patrologia Latina, Sources Chrétiennes and the Opera Sancti Bernardi." The present version (on CD-ROM) runs on Windows machines. The CLCLT prides itself on using the best available edition of each text (comparative to the TLG project above). The CD-Roms are published by Brepols who have a Web page at http://www.brepols.com They also publish the The Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature, Cetedoc Index of Latin Forms, In Principio: Incipit Index of Latin Texts, and working on an electronic edition of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

If you were interested in texts for teaching purposes then you may like to know that the entire Early Church Fathers series is freely available on the Internet at http://ccel.wheaton.edu/fathers/. Generally you need to download the entire volume but, given the time, it might be possible to download the entire lot and use them with a simple concordance/search software. Logos Research Systems have published an electronic version on CD-Rom using their Logos Library System with hypertext links from every biblical reference (cost $279.95; further information from http://www.logos.com/products/ecf/). Sage Digital Library have also made the series available on CD-Rom in Adobe PDF format (cost $69.95; see http://www.sagelibrary.com/ for further information).

Although not covering the Patristic period, the Perseus Project might be of interest to you. They have made available, amongst many other things, the Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon, the Intermediate LS Greek Lexicon, and a Greek work frequency tool. The full texts are drawn from 32 classical Greek authors. Each word of every text is linked through the appropriate headword in the lexicons and there is information on how to easily display Greek within Netscape. Each text has a corresponding translation and there is also an impressive collection of secondary sources. All available on the Web at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ (see also the plans for a Roman Perseus at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/neh.ann.html).

Finally, a professional online Internet resource is the Ecole Initiative at http://www.evansville.edu:80/~ecoleweb/ Apart from the peer-reviewed hypertext encyclopedia of Early Church History it is attempting to create, there is also a good alphabetical list of primary texts available online (admittedly mainly in translation).

(MF)

HTML Author:Michael Fraser
Document created: 9 October 1997
Document last modified:

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