CAMENA – Latin Texts of Early Modern Europe

CAMENA – Latin Texts of Early Modern Europe è un progetto di German Department of Heidelberg University in Cooperation with the Information Technology Center and the Library of the University of Mannheim:
“Our successive projects are dedicated to building a digital library of the humanistic Respublica Litterarum. We now offer five collections as well as a growing data base (Lemmata) that contains words and names (with additional morphological and lexical data) linked to general and special dictionaries or encyclopedias of our digital library. These projects have been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) from 1999 to the end of 2008. At present, the database project is integrated in the eAQUA enterprise funded by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF). A new collection (ITALI) is under way thanks to support by the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici. The copies we digitize are supplied by the Rare Book Division of the University of Mannheim Library. The Information Technology Center (Rechenzentrum) of the University of Mannheim administrates our web server.

At this time we offer five collections:

The collection of Neo-Latin poetry composed by German authors (POEMATA) presents more than 60.000 pages of early editions reproduced both as images and as machine-readable texts. From 1999 to 2002 this project was run by the University Library Mannheim. It was then continued by the German Department of Heidelberg University, Lehrstuhl Prof. Kühlmann, and completed in 2004.

From 2004 to 2008 this same institution built a collection of Latin historical and political writing mainly from early modern Germany (HISTORICA & POLITICA). It now contains some 60’000 printed pages. In this section the page images are accompanied either by full e-text or by a transcript of summary or index only.

Starting in 2001, we built a handy reference collection (THESAURUS ERUDITIONIS) of dictionaries and handbooks of the period 1500-1750 that serves as a reading environment for the other texts we offer. It now contains close on 100 works totaling more than 85’000 pages. Here too, page images are accompanied by machine-readable transcripts of the whole work or of its summaries and indexes only.

From 2006 through 2008 we built our fourth collection, CERA (= Corpus Epistolicum Recentioris Aevi). It is comprised of printed Latin letters written for the most part by German scholars. It now offers some 90 prints of the period 1530-1770 totaling about 55’000 pages.

Our fifth collection, ITALI – Renascentium Litterarum Libri Rariores, is being published in the course of 2009. It will offer at least seventy early printed editions (25’500 pages) of works written by Italian Renaissance humanists born before 1500. As in other Camena collections, tables of contents and indexes are transcribed, and every entry is linked to the page it refers to in order to facilitate access to specific content.”

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