Church History Documents on Web

Church History resources on the Web are growing, but the best ones
remain expensive. There have been some recent commercial developments
which are very important.

1) Migne's Patrologiae Graecae
2) English Short Title Catalogue (STC)
3) Early English Books Online (EEBO)
3) Thesaurus Linguae Graecae
4) Patrologia Latina
5) Free Church History Documents on the Web

====================================================================== 1) Migne's Patrologiae Graecae
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The whole 160 volumes are being published in facsimile form, which would
fill about 200 CDs, so it is distributed on an external hard drive.
There will be limited searching facilities through completely rewritten
indexes, but the text itself will NOT be searchable. A searchable text
version is planned for the future, but this will be a huge work.
It is expensive, though there is a prepublication price till the
end of March 2003. See http://rosetta.reltech.org/reltech/PG/
Before buying it, I would check out TLG (see below). Aren't all or
most of the works in Migne in the TLG? And TLG texts are fully
searchable, based on modern texts, and linked to a lexicon.
Of course Migne is still important because many older history books
refer to Migne's text and page numbers. And Minge is a once-only
payment whereas TLG is a subscription.

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2) English Short Title Catalogue (STC)
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This lists all the books printed in Great Britain or any of its
dependencies in any language, as well as for materials printed in
English anywhere else in the world from 1473-1800. The original
'Short Titles' have been upgraded to full library records.
http://www.rlg.org/estc.html
Your university may well be subscribed to this already.
If is isn't, tell them about it. Cambridge University link is:
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/InformationServices/SubjectFiles/web_descs/estc.html

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2) Early English Books Online (EEBO)
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This aims to put all the books in the English Short Title catalogue
online as page images. Although most of them aren't done yet, they have
already completed thousands of titles including works by Malory, Bacon,
More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, Galileo etc, using the 10,000 feet of
microfilm which make up the The Early English Books library.
English Short Title Catalogue links to these images.
http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo/

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4) Thesaurus Linguae Graecae
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"All" Greek texts which now goes up to about AD 1453
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/
The online version now works very well, especially if you tick "Link
to Perseus" - then you can click on any work and get a lexicon definition.

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5) Patrologia Latina
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"All" the Latin church documents on CD, at a very high price
http://pld.chadwyck.co.uk/

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6) Free Church History Documents on the Web
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MAINLY CATHOLIC & THE FATHERS:
The Papal historical documents which were on listserv.american.edu
seem to have disappeared, but similar sites are found at:
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7273/encycx5.htm
- both cover popes from 1216 to John Paul II
The early Church Councils were also on were on listserv.american.edu,
but they can be found at http://www.piar.hu/councils/~index.htm
- covers Nicea to Vatican II
These are also found, with the Fathers and a huge number of other
church history sources at:
Internet Medieval Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook2.html
New Advent: http://newadvent.org/fathers/index.html
MAINLY PROTESTANT & REFORMATION:
For Protestant and Reformation texts, Hanover is still the best site,
but it has moved, to http://history.hanover.edu/texts.html
Also go to Project Wittenberg:
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/wittenberg-home.html
The complete works of Luther are only available (as far as I know) on CD
from Logos: http://www.logos.com/products/product.asp?item=1826
We are still waiting for modern Erasmus editions, but all the
old editions printed in England are available at EEBO (see 3 above).
MAINLY ORTHODOX:
Everything Orthodox (and more) is at St. Pachomius Library:
http://www.ocf.org/OrthodoxPage/reading/St.Pachomius/globalindex.html
GENERAL COLLECTIONS:
Virtually all public domain Christian literature can be found at:
CCEL: http://www.ccel.org/ (though this has been down recently).
Their CD is very reasonable, and is a quick way to look up documents.
The Ecole Initiative has moved to http://www2.evansville.edu/ecoleweb/
Project Gutenberg: http://promo.net/pg/
Oxford Text Archive: http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/