History and goals
of the Alberti Magni e-corpus project

Albert, teaching
15th-century print from a wood engraving

Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200-1280) is one of the most important thinkers of that one-thousand-year period we awkwardly call the Middle Ages, and one of the few accorded auctoritas status in his lifetime. His works are not only extremely varied in their subject matter — covering logic, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of nature, philosophical psychology, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geography, astronomy, meteorology, mathematics, metaphysics, systematic theology, interpretation of Scripture —, they are also exceptionally numerous and voluminous. The Albertus-Magnus-Institut, in Bonn, believes that more than 70 of his works are extant, and among them one finds writings of such magnitude as the commentary on Pierre Lombard’s Sentences (4,167 pages in the nineteenth-century printed edition) and the Summa theologiae (2,010 pages).

The sheer number and volume of Albert’s works can be seen as a manifestation of his importance in the history of philosophy, science, and theology in general, and of his pivotal role between centuries of carefully transmitted Western traditions and the assimilation of a huge body of Ancient Greek and Arabic knowledge that came to Western Europe prior to and in Albert’s lifetime. They also pose, however, a challenge to the contemporary scholar: going through many tens of thousands of pages of dense Latin text every time one attempts to gather and understand Albert’s complete thought on, say, the metaphysical composition of created being, the nature of moral virtue, or the classification of the species of minks, takes either a very long time, or is impossible. Another very important difficulty lies in the physical access to such numerous and voluminous works. If we except a few individual works that were edited separately, there exist three edition of Albert’s works that are in fact all incomplete and hard to find, albeit for different reasons:

1) Opera omnia, ed. P. Jammy, Lyon: C. Prost, 1651. Although including a very impressive number of Albert’s works (as well as some inauthentic ones), the edition is incomplete, in great part because the last planned volumes never saw the light of day. Few outside of Western Europe libraries retain copies of this edition.
2) Opera omnia, ed. A. and E. Borgnet, Paris: Vivès, 1890-1899. Essentially a reproduction of the text of the Lyon edition, albeit with some (more or less fortunate) changes: transcription into the Greek alphabet of Albert’s highly latinized Greek terms; use of different spelling and punctuation conventions; changes made to some of Albert’s quotations of sources like Scripture in order to make them closer to late nineteenth-century editions; etc. This text remains easier to find than its Renaissance antecedent, and, for that very reason, more of an edition of reference. Still, it is also absent from the vast majority of university libraries.
3) Opera omnia, Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1951-present. This is a critical edition prepared under the supervision of the Albertus-Magnus-Institut of Bonn and its successive Directors. The work was undertaken many decades ago, and given the standards of modern critical edition, it will certainly demand, at its current rate of progression, many more. As of March 2018, a little more than half of Albert's works have been completely edited by the AMI, including most of those that were not included in the Lyonnais and Parisian editions, but also excluding many of the most voluminous ones (e.g., the mammoth-size commentary on the Sentences). Given the physical and scientific quality of this edition, its cost prevents most smaller and even average-size universities from purchasing it. This means it, too, is absent from the library shelves of almost all Latin American and East European universities. This edition, being more recent than the other two, remains under copyright.

Considering the lack of easy availability of Albert’s works, the great difficulty of dealing with their number and volume, and the fact that Aschendorff Verlag had at the time still not offered for sale an electronically searchable version of the critical edition, I decided shortly after my arrival at St.Jerome’s University to ask for a grant that would allow me to remedy in part those problems. My goals were threefold. First, to prepare image files of the Borgnet edition, as well as of a few other individually-edited works which, like Borgnet, are not under copyrights. Second, to transform those scans into machine readable and electronically searchable text files. Third, to build a free, non-commercial website from which scholars could download said image files and, above all, conduct electronic searches through Albert’s works. I obtained the desired grant, but the weight and complexity of the task exceeded it. I could not, as a consequence, fully achieve the project's initial objectives. As an alternative, I made available all image files (.pdfs) of Albert’s works, but as far as readable and searchable texts are concerned the focus would be put on the works not yet edited by the Albertus-Magnus-Institut. (The rationale being that if ever Aschendorff Verlag finally began to sell electronic access to the critically-edited texts, both databases would complement each other.)

Many things have taken place since that time. A first iteration of the Alberti Magni e-corpus went online in 2008, and new works have been added to the searchable corpus at irregular intervals ever since; Mr. Albert Pinto, who made scans of the 1651 Lyon edition and sold them online for a brief period of time many years ago, generously let me post them on the website in 2009; the Internet Archive and Google Books have later posted their own electronic copies (image files) of volumes of the Jammy and Borgnet editions; in Fall 2011, Aschendorff Verlag began selling a subscription allowing digital searches in the critically-edited corpus being built by the Albertus-Magnus-Institut.

As of April 2021, the situation, as far as electronic searches are concerned, is thus:

This table means that if we except the few sermons and letters that, to my knowledge, have not yet been identified with enough certainty and/or edited, all of Albert's numerous and voluminous extant works are now electronically searchable. As this has always been the primary goal of the Alberti Magni e-corpus, I am not foreseeing to make any more updates to the site.