Abbey Library of St. Gall, Switzerland online

Just a reminder for any medievalist-types that the magnificent Abbey Library of St. Gall, in Switzerland, is a fabulous place for on-line study. Their website leads almost all others that I've seen in terms of the quality of the images and the wealth of information available. Here is (from the Library) a list of features:

• Free access: www.cesg.unifr.ch
• High resolution digital images: over 52,000 facsimile pages
• Regularly updated: now 131 complete manuscripts
• Manuscript descriptions and many search options
• Accessible in German, French, English and Italian

Keep up your paleography!

Biblical Thomistic links

There is a whole batch of neat links about Aquinas, favoring his connection with biblical material, to be found on the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology web site. See it here. You can also see some translations of sermons that are otherwise hard to find (such as the ones on the Pater and the Ave).

Fr Farrell’s Companion to the Summa on-line

I must be the last person on the planet to know this, but Fr Walter Farrell, OP’s, famous Companion to the Summa, is on-line for all to consult. You can use the thing as a handy on-line book, or simply download it for use on your own computer. It covers all the matter from the Summa theologiae in a conversational yet authoritative way.

Obiter dictum: Fr Farrell (1902-1951) is buried in All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois, next to the graves of Humbert Kane, OP, Raymond “Jude” Nogar, OP, and my beloved James A. Weisheipl, OP.

Online edition of Schütz's "Thomas-Lexikon"

Enrique Alarcón—known to us mortals as “Superman”—has done it again. This time he’s put up an on-line version of Ludwig Schütz’s immortal Thomas-Lexikon: Sammlung, Übersetzung und Erklärung der in sämtlichen Werken des hl. Thomas von Aquin vorkommenden Kunstausdrücke und wissenschaftlichen Aussprüche. Starting with the second edition of the work, Alarcón has tidied things up, resulting in a third edition of the work. The Lexicon contains Schütz’s “Foreword,” dating from 1895, and a list of abbreviations and editions-used. A useful tool, indeed.

Here is the link: http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/tl.html

¡Gracias, Enrique!

St. Thomas Aquinas and the Bible: A Bibliography

Christopher Baglow has generously agreed to allow the downloading of his St. Thomas Aquinas and the Bible: A Bibliography which you can find in MS Word format here on the web site. Thanks, Chris.

Update on 2006-03-11 18:30 by Mark Johnson

My constant help, Jörgen Vijgen, just looked over the Baglow document, and added a few references of his own. You can download those added references, too (also in MS Word format).

Abbreviationes Online 2.5 (for manuscript work)

Olaf Pluta has updated his marvelous on-line manuscript abbreviation system, aptly named Abbreviationes. Abbreviationes Online 2.5 now goes both ways (you can input a word and look for its abbreviation, or input an abbreviation, and get some good expansions. Here is what Olaf says:

Abbreviationes Online 2.5 has been greatly enhanced. The complete Abbreviationes database is now available online. You can search for words matching a given abbreviation and for abbreviations matching a given word. You can choose from a variety of search options (is equal to, contains, begins with, ends with). And you can switch between different views on the data (list view, detail view).

Abbreviationes Online 2.5 supersedes the original Abbreviationes database (available for Mac OS and Windows), and you may wish to switch to the online version. For details, point your Web browser at http://abbreviationes.net or at http://abbrev.net, for short, and have a look at the demos. To go to Abbreviationes Online, click on the link at the bottom of this page and then choose one of the available Web servers.

A wonderful service, if you’re at a machine that’s licenced. The basic program, Abbreviationes, is a Mac program, so you’d need a Mac emulator to run it in MS Windows (see the specifics).

A personal wish: a native MS Windows version, with OpenType support. But that’s easy for me to say, because I wouldn’t have to code the thing!

Thanks, Olaf, for showing how computers might actually help to make academics more productive.

Aquinasonline.com is back, er, on-line

After a hiatus of some time, Joseph M. Magee’s Thomistic Philosophy Page web site is back on-line. It sports Thomistic topics, quodlibetal questions, bibliography, links, and a bookstore. A fine resource, in English.

PHDData.org: The Universal Index of Doctoral Dissertations in Progress

Of use both to Ph.D. students and to the professors who advise them, this on-line resource lets you search for dissertations that are currently in process, which could possibly save a student/professor team the hassle and embarassment of duplicating a dissertation this is already "out there," or in the process of being put "out there." The site is PHDData.org.

You can run searches based on language, academic institution, up to five keywords, and more. The is a main category for ‘religion,’ and philosophy comes under the heading of ‘Arts and Humanities.’ Oddly, searches for "Aquinas," "Thomist," and other keywords that would associated with the academic study of Thomas Aquinas, all failed to generate any hits. Oh, well. In time…

French and Spanish versions of the site will be available shortly.

Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed on-line

I was reading this morning through a number of articles on Wikipedia, one of my favorite on-line resources for general knowledge. In response to a student’s query I started on an article on “kabbalah” and ended up (two hours later!) reading through a very useful article on Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. It contained a link to a 1904 publication that used the 1881 English translation of M. Friedlander. You can simply download the work in PDF format by clicking here. A nice resource to have.

When God starts creating 36-hour days, I fully intend to sit down and read through the whole Guide. Right after I read all of Aristotle, Augustine, Dionysius, Ambrose, Pope St Gregory…….

Averroes Database at the Thomas Institut in Cologne

A service of the Thomas Institut in Cologne, the Averroes Database aims to "provide scholars working on Averroes (MuÎammad Ibn Rušd, 1126-1198) with resources, supplying bibliographical information on Averroes’s works and the modern scholarly literature on Averroes." This includes bibliography, a complete survey of Averroes’s works, and, soon, a page on Averroes’s medieval translators.