Religious Studies

We in the Library can help identify tools and technologies that you can use in all phases of text and data mining, from cleaning and processing to text analysis, data visualization, and thinking about research methods.

Introduction to digital scholarship resources, tools, and projects in the field of digital humanities.

Holdings consist of approximately 300,000 volumes and more than 8,000 linear feet of archival and manuscript material. Notable collections for the study of religion include:
-- Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts devoted largely to religious topics and particularly representing Coptic, Byzantine, Ethiopian, Armenian, and Latin Christianity
-- Islamic Manuscripts Collection of ca. 1,103 volumes dating from the 8th to the 20th century CE and carrying roughly 1,800 texts chiefly in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish
-- Jewish Heritage Collection of books, artworks, ephemera (clippings, postcards, pamphlets, etc.) ritual objects, and materials of everyday life
-- Worcester Philippine History Collection of correspondence, articles, diaries, photographs, handwritten sermons, and other documents

The University of Michigan Library is home to the largest collection of ancient papyri in North America. The documents in the Papyrology Collection (located in the Hatcher Graduate Library), which span roughly 2,000 years, contain not only important religious texts — including 60 pages of the oldest known copy of the Epistles of Paul — but also personal letters, school primers, sales contracts and other records that paint a unique portrait of everyday life.

The Bentley Historical Library (located on North Campus) includes both the official University of Michigan archives and materials related to the history of the state including more than 50,000 linear feet of archives and manuscripts, 90,000 printed volumes, 1.5 million photographs and other visual materials, over 10,000 maps and nearly 60 terabytes of digital content. Highlights include:
-- Extensive holdings of records for a number of Christian denominations within the state. These consist both of records from the denominational office and records of individual congregations.
-- Papers and published biographies of individual clergy, pioneer and modern-day missionaries, and religiously based organizations.
-- A significant and growing collection of records from African American churches and papers of African American clergy, primarily from Ann Arbor and Detroit (see "Religious Leaders & Organizations" in the African Americans in Michigan subject guide)

The Clements Library's collections document all aspects of North America prior to the twentieth century. Its holdings are particularly strong in early exploration and settlement of North America, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War, and includes a wealth of materials on the history of American religious movements.

Houses more than 100,000 artifacts, ranging from prehistoric through medieval times. Most derive from the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, dynastic and Roman Egypt, or the Near East.

Over 500,000 records describing archival collections from the Research Libraries Group's Archival and Mixed Collections (AMC) file, with over 4,000 links to digitized finding aids and over 10,000 links to digital archives.

The National Archives covers England, Wales, and the United Kingdom, and was formed by bringing together the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission. The National Register of Archives contains information on British manuscripts and historical records.

"AODL provides free universal access to cultural heritage materials from and about African countries and communities. It brings together tens of thousands of digitized photographs, videos, archival documents, maps, interviews and oral histories in numerous African languages, many of which are contained in curated thematic galleries and teaching resources." Including numerous resources on religious experience and practice

Free and open access through the Internet to digitized American historical materials, including written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music.

Digitized periodicals, records, documents, photographs, and ephemera valuable for the historical and genealogical study of Cuban society

The Avestan Digital Archive (ADA) seeks to be a digital archive containing all Avestan manuscripts spread all over the world.

Digitized visual and cartographic material, as well as comprehensive catalog data from the Basel Mission Archives, related to settings in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and several other regions of the World. The main geographical areas of activity of the Basel Mission from its inception in 1815 until the mid-twentieth century were Ghana (from 1828), India (from 1834), China (from 1847), Cameroon (from 1886) and Kalimantan (from 1922).

Religious texts from the IntraText project, a "Full-text Digital Library offering books and corpora as lexical hypertexts on Creative Commons License"

Manuscripts from across the Taylor-Schechter, CUL Or. and Jacques Mosseri Collections available online, including a substantial number of documents (letters and legal deeds) and liturgical texts

Platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in texts in the Coptic language, particularly the Sahidic dialect.

Offers transcriptions (texts), translations, images, an inventory, and tools for carrying out searches and viewing the images of the Dead Sea Scrolls biblical texts.

Online Hebrew transcription and English translation of the non-Biblical texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls with high resolution images

The Israel Museum welcomes you to the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project, allowing users to examine and explore these most ancient manuscripts from Second Temple times at a level of detail never before possible. Developed in partnership with Google, the new website gives users access to searchable, fast-loading, high-resolution images of the scrolls, as well as short explanatory videos and background information on the texts and their history.

Free online digitized virtual library of the Dead Sea Scrolls provided by the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament is a long-term project at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It fills a huge lacuna, as no modern edition of the Bible in Coptic exists. The project aims to provide a complete documentation of the manuscript evidence, digital editions of all OT manuscripts, critical editions of all OT books, corpus-linguistic analyses and translations into English, German and Arabic.

University of Maryland Project site for the development of a born-digital critical edition of the Mishnah, the fundamental rabbinic legal text edited around 200 CE, which serves as a basis for the Talmud.

Curated digital repository of TEI encoded texts written in classical Syriac.

Digitized materials promoting the study and preservation of Syriac language and heritage. A collaboration of Beth Mardutho and the Rutgers University Libraries.

Online version of Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (edited by Steve Mason) with the addition of the Greek text in the form of Niese's editio major: Benedikt Niese, Flavii Josephi opera (7 volumes, Berlin 1885-1895).

Includes Cairo Genizah site, "Hachi Garsinan" Talmud Bavli Variants site, Judeo-Arabic corpus, Nahum Collection from the Yemenite Genizah, Yad HaRambam site with edition of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, and Mahadura site with tools for manuscript transcription. Freely accessible but requests registration.

Gershom Scholem's words about various passages, verses and words from the Zohar can be found in the many notations he made in his copy of the Zohar, on notes that he tucked between its pages, which were published in facsimile in 1991/2 [Gershom Scholem's Sefer HaZohar, Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1991/2, with introduction by Yehuda Liebes.] as well as in his Milon HaZohar card index, which is now available on the National Library's website.

The HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the immense collections of partner institutions in digital form. The digital repository includes public domain and in-copyright content in a number of languages. Most are digitized versions of books and serials that originally appeared in print. Some content may be viewed in full depending on copyright restrictions. Some content may be full text searched depending on OCR quality for the language and typeface (or script).

"From North Africa and Europe in the west, through the Middle East to China in the east, our collection of Hebrew manuscripts manifests Jewish cultural and social lives spanning a thousand years. Explore some of these newly digitised collection items, examine key themes in our collection, and read expert articles to learn more about Jewish wisdom, culture, history and religion."

Allows searching primary Babylonian Talmud full-text first print editions,Talmud fragments from European book bindings, and at least 50% of relevant Genizah fragments.

Growing digital collection of over 3,000 Latin American books and periodicals on theology, biblical studies, and related fields, mainly in Spanish and Portuguese.

"Recognizing that history is written from the perspective of those who preserve their records, LGBTQ-RAN's overarching purpose is to ensure the preservation and accessibility of the voices and experiences of a great diversity of LGBT religious leaders and groups."

The present database attempts to collect the basic information on all ancient literary texts, as opposed to documents, not only in Greek (9,673 items) and Latin (2,162 items), but also in Coptic (1,994 items), Syriac (804 items), Demotic (721 items, not including the funerary texts) and Arabic (76 items). Here the user will find the oldest preserved copies of each text. At the same time she will get a view of the reception of ancient literature.

"Objects, images, and a proliferation of materialities engage bodies and minds, events and ideas, in ways both profound and subtle. Material objects, especially as they are activated in religious practices broadly conceived, are situated at the heart of MAVCOR. This Material Objects Archive offers an ever-expanding online gallery of such objects. We invite you to use it as a tool for thinking and teaching, researching and writing—and we welcome your suggestions and contributions to this collaborative enterprise."

Ethnographic and historical archives from missionary activity in Lesotho during the years 1832-2006

"This site is devoted to the study of Greek New Testament manuscripts. The New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room is a place where scholars can come to find the most exhaustive list of New Testament manuscript resources, can contribute to marking attributes about these manuscripts, and can find state of the art tools for researching this rich dataset."

NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) aims to gather the best scholarly resources on the nineteenth century and make them fully searchable. The NINES website includes a searchable database of digital scholarship and a listing of websites related to nineteenth-century materials. There is a Religion genre, but you can also search for specific people, places, faiths, and terms of interest (for example, sermons).

"The mandate of the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha is to develop and publish electronic editions of the best critical texts of the 'Old Testament' Pseudepigrapha and related literature."

Parker Library on the Web is a multi-year undertaking of Corpus Christi College, the Stanford University Libraries and Cambridge University Library, to produce a high-resolution digital copy of every imageable page of most manuscripts in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Subjects represented in the Parker collection are theology, music, medieval travelogues and maps, apocalypses, bestiaries, royal ceremonies, historical chronicles and Bibles.

This website provides an access to the article, the palaeographic tables produced using LaTeX, a digital access to the images of the hebrew letters and paleo-hebrew fonts.

Corpus of patristic texts from the Christian East published in the Patrologia Orientalis series available online

Open access online database for the Arabic text of the Gospels from the University of Balamand. Includes manuscripts, lectionaries, and literary references taken from "Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History."

Find stories, paintings, manuscripts, and archives ; browse bibliographies, repositories, handlists, and more. "The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) project is a comprehensive resource for the 1,000+ miracle stories written about and the 2,500+ images painted of the Virgin Mary in these African countries, and preserved in Geʿez between 1300 and the present."

3,000 years of Jewish texts in Hebrew and English translation, freely available, and encoded to support study, education and exploration of the intertextuality of the Jewish canon. The Sefaria Library includes an expanding archive of Tanakh, Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash, Halakhah, Kabbalah, Liturgy, Philosophy, Tanaitic, Chasidut, Musar, Responsa, etc. Platform includes various learning and teaching tools. Apps are available for mobile devices / tablets.

"The Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library is a publication of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai, Egypt, in collaboration with the UCLA Library and Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL). It hosts online the results of the Sinai Library Digitization Project, a ten-year collaborative effort to digitize the unparalleled manuscript library of St. Catherine’s Monastery."

Images and shelfmarks for Syriac icons organized by content

"Collection of rare and out-of-print titles that are of vital importance for Syriac studies. It is especially rich in early manuscript catalogs, dictionaries, and grammars, and contains many of the indispensable editions of Syriac texts that were produced in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries"

The William Davidson Talmud is a free digital edition of the Babylonian Talmud with parallel translations, interlinked to major commentaries, biblical citations, Midrash, Halakhah, and an ever-growing library of Jewish texts. As with all of Sefaria, The William Davidson Talmud will continually evolve as we add additional translations, commentaries, and connections.

A digital library of over 80,000 resources on theology and religion. It consists mainly of public domain books but also includes periodicals, audio recordings, and other formats.

vHMML makes abundant use of high-resolution images of manuscripts from libraries around the world, many of them digitized as part of Hill Museum & Manuscript Library’s mission to preserve and share important, endangered, and inaccessible manuscript collections through digital photography, archiving, and cataloging.

Search by artist, subject, technique, book / portion and browse by subject or artist