Alberti Magni e-corpus

Drawing from the notes of a 15th-century Uppsala student
taken during a lecture on the location of human faculties
according to Aristotle and Albert the Great

Portrait of Albertus Magnus
found in a 14th-century manuscript miscellany
(CLM 27029)

Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280) is one of the most important medieval philosophers and theologians, and one of the very few to have been recognized as an auctoritas in his lifetime. Despite this fact, his ideas remain relatively understudied. There are a number of philosophical and historical reasons for this, but problems such as scarce or incomplete modern editions, as well as the sheer number and volume of his works, play a part.

The aim of the Alberti Magni e-corpus project is to support research on Albert the Great by providing scholars the possibility: 1) to download image files of Albert’s works that can be found in editions no longer covered by copyright laws; 2) more importantly, to search 60 of those works electronically, using a Boolean search engine which gives access to a corpus of approximately 19,000 pages in print or 8.6 million words. (Errors such as typos being sometimes abundant in such editions and often representing an obstacle to electronic searching, about 6,000 very uncontroversial corrections have been made to the texts. They are always identified to the user.)

The free, searchable corpus should prove useful to scholars both with and without an access to the commercial online corpus of Aschendorff Verlag. The majority of the works included in the Alberti Magni e-corpus have not yet been edited by the Albertus-Magnus-Institut, whose critically-edited texts are published by, and constitute the electronic corpus of, Aschendorff Verlag.

All of my gratitude goes to Dr. Frank Tompa, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, for designing, adapting and setting up the search engine used by this website.

What’s new?

History and goals of the Alberti Magni e-corpus project

Downloading .pdfs of Albertus Magnus’ works

Searching the Alberti Magni e-corpus

How to help

Credits and thanks

Contact