We are pleased to be publishing this week a catalogue of particular interest both to historians of science and to historians of collections: the correspondence of the first keeper of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot. Metadata for this correspondence has been collated from the indispensable work of Robert Gunther, the zoologist, antiquary, and historian of science who between 1920 and 1945 published fourteen volumes entitled Early Science in Oxford and who was himself the inaugural curator of Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science.

Robert Plot was known during his lifetime as ‘the learned Dr Plot’. He published natural histories of Oxfordshire and Staffordshire, and was appointed simultaneously Oxford’s first professor of chemistry and curator of Elias Ashmole’s substantial donation to the University, which formed the foundation of the Ashmolean. Plot lived and worked in the building in Broad Street (now the fittingly the Museum of the History of Science) that was constructed especially to display Ashmole’s gift alongside a School of Natural History, which was located on the middle floor, and a chemical laboratory, which was set out in the basement. Opening in 1683, the museum was the first institutional collection in England to permit access to the general public. Gunther is a mine of information about these crucial years of scientific advancement in Oxford, and there is many a treat in store for those who have not encountered his volumes hitherto. When discussing Plot’s resignation as secretary of the Royal Society, for example, Gunther considers the coach service between Oxford and London, speculating that this might have been a factor in Plot’s decision. ‘Between 1660 and 1669,’ Gunther writes, ‘a diligence ran from Oxford to London in two days. The passengers slept at Beaconsfield. In 1669 a Flying Coach started from All Souls College at 6 a.m. and reached the capital at 7 p.m. The cost was about twopence-halfpenny a mile.’ Somewhat pricey, my colleague the John Wallis scholar Philip Beeley has pointed out, when bearing in mind as comparison that a standard letter could be sent from Oxford to Scotland at a cost of just 5 pence.

Of course there is significant overlap between these letters published by Gunther and those in a number of alternative catalogues available already in EMLO, in particular those of Martin Lister and Edward Lhwyd (Lhwyd was Plot’s assistant at the fledgling Ashmolean and, from 1690, his successor to the post of Keeper), as well as with records in the Bodleian card catalogue. With the assistance of current Oxford students these parallel letter records are being linked to enable EMLO’s users to toggle between different interpretations of the same letter within the union catalogue, and this feature will be in place very shortly. In the meantime, we trust you will enjoy Plot’s letters, and we hope also you will take this opportunity to explore Gunther’s volumes.

In the week that a possible ninth planet appears in the BBC news firmament, we are exceptionally pleased to announce serendipitous publication in EMLO of the first installment of our catalogue of Johannes Kepler’s correspondence. Thankfully Kepler — following initial leanings towards theology — kept his gaze fixed steadfastly upwards and turned his attention to the heavens by making astronomical observations. ‘I wanted to become a theologian’, he explained in 1595 to Michael Maestlin, the Tübingen professor of mathematics who had first introduced him to Copernicanism, ‘and for a long time I was restless. Now however, behold how God is being celebrated in astronomy.’

We should be thankful also that it has been possible to compile this epistolarly calendar for Kepler in a number of stages. First, Professor Adam Mosley kindly made available to EMLO the treasure-trove that is his working spreadsheet of astronomical correspondence collated in the course of his research and publication on Tycho Brahe, from which we extracted records of Kepler’s letters and passed these to Dr Francesco Barreca of the Museo Galileo, Institute and Museum for the History of Science, Florence, for significant scholarly expansion. Working from Johannes Kepler. Gesammelte Werke (ed. Max Caspar, et al., currently 20 vols [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1938–]), Dr Barreca expanded the metadata considerably, enriching each letter record with invaluable and searchable abstracts and keywords, and by creating links between letters to indicate which letter is in reply to or is answered by which. Each letter record includes also a link to the indispensable Kommission zur Herausgabe der Werke von Johannes Kepler where, if users click through to ‘KGW Digital’, searchable PDFs of the relevant volumes may be downloaded.

Alongside Tycho Brahe, Kepler is one of the very central figures in early modern cosmology and astronomy, and together these two astronomers are forming the firm foundations of what we hope will develop into a rapidly expanding cluster of astronomically focussed correspondences in EMLO. As a first step towards this, eagle-eyed of users of the union catalogue may have spotted a change in how we are choosing to list and group our ever-expanding list of correspondences. Were you to visit EMLO’s catalogue page you would find now the full index of our correspondences set out alphabetically within the ‘Catalogues’ section in a manner you will recognize, as well as work-in-progress areas where we plan to enable in the very near future chronological, geographical, and thematic searching and where we will provide a number of bird-eye-view visualizations. We will be compiling also useful listings set out both by contributor to EMLO and by holding institution of manuscript versions. We hope you will find these of use as you navigate the expanding EMLO universe; please keep revisiting as it will not be long before you will meet both Kepler and Brahe again in the astronomically themed section. As our work continues, you will notice increasing links being forged between correspondences, across the subject matters contained therein, and among the people and places involved. It is in this way that we will begin to shed light on those who in the period under our investigation worked on, amongst a myriad of other topics, cosmographic mysteries.

Hard on the heels of the correspondence of Flemish mystic Antoinette Bourignon, which was published in EMLO earlier this month, our final catalogue to appear this side of Christmas is that of Amalia von Solms, daughter of Johann Albrecht I of Solms-Braunfels, lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth of Bohemia, and wife of the Dutch statholder Frederick Henry of Orange-Nassau. Although much of her correspondence is no longer extant, Amalia, who exercised significant political influence both during the lifetime of her husband and after his death, corresponded extensively with her secretary, Constantijn Huygens, on a myriad of subjects — everything from matters of state to the education of her grandchildren — and it is these letters that form the focus of the catalogue at present. The metadata for Amalia’s correspondence are being made available to EMLO by Dr Ineke Huysman of Huygens ING and over the course of the coming weeks and months additional letters, metadata, and links to external resources will be added. And of course both catalogues — those of Amalia von Solms and Antoinette Bourignon — will contribute in no small measure to the work being conducted by our colleagues at Women’s Early Modern Letters Online.

Whilst the correspondence of Constantijn Huygens, currently with metadata taken from J.A. Worp’s edition (The Hague, 1911–17) and provided to EMLO by our partners at the Circulation of Knowledge project from their text-mining database, the ePistolarium, may be consulted in tandem, users will find it particularly useful to follow the links provided in Amalia’s catalogue to the Huygens Brieven Online database, where manuscript images, transcriptions, translations, and printed copies, may be consulted. Hugyens Brieven Online is also under the expert oversight of Dr Ineke Huysman and we are working together to ensure the most accurate and up-to-date metadata is available to scholars in EMLO.

On this short, winter-solstice day, as many continue to consign to the mail cards and parcels for friends and relations, I’d like to post an epistolary gift to you, our invaluable community of early modern scholars. It comes in the form of two short videos, both directed by Nadine Akkerman of Leiden University and Jana Dambrogio of MIT. The first, A Tiny Spy Letter: Constantijn Huygens to Amalia von Solms, 1635, shows a reconstruction demonstrating how Amalia would have opened one of the smallest pleated letters known to have existed, before tucking it safely into her sleeve. The second, Amalia von Solms’s Holograph Letter to Eleonore de Volvire: A Letter of Condolence, 1670, reconstructs the folding, sealing, and addressing of the letter in which Amalia commiserates with Eleonore on the loss of her husband, François de l’Aubespine (1584–1670), Marquis de Hauterive-Châteauneuf and Governor of Breda. Do watch and marvel, and perhaps even venture to consider how today we could economise on envelopes and fold our Christmas missives …

On behalf of all at EMLO, I wish you neat locking and a happy midwinter break!

A landmark publication appears in EMLO this week in the form of the correspondence of an early modern individual so central to the epistolary networks being pieced back together by our research project Cultures of Knowledge that he needs little by way of introduction. Suffice it to say we could not be more delighted to usher into the union catalogue our first installment of the catalogue of Henry Oldenburg’s correspondence. During the past year, work has been underway to collate metadata from the edition published between 1965 and 1986 by Alfred Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, and our intention is to release the resulting calendar in three batches over the course of the coming few months.

As secretary, Oldenburg conducted almost all of the official correspondence of the early Royal Society. The metadata of the Halls in their remarkable edition represents, therefore, the core correspondence of the Society from its inception until Oldenburg’s death in September 1672. This first third of the correspondence, taken from volumes I to V and spanning the years 1641 to the end of May 1669, intersects seamlessly with five of the key foundation catalogues around which EMLO was constructed: namely those of John Aubrey, Samuel Hartlib, Edward Lhwyd, Martin Lister, and John Wallis. Users of EMLO may wish to note that these are scheduled to be joined shortly by catalogues of many of Oldenburg’s other correspondents, including Robert Boyle, John Collins, David Gregory, James Gregory, Robert Plot, and Francis Vernon.

We hope very much that you relish EMLO’s early mid-winter gift of Oldenburg and, when his calendar is brought to completion, that you will watch as links are created and ‘dots’ joined. In the interest of joining still more dots, it should be remembered that although EMLO in its current iteration is primarily a catalogue of epistolary metadata, many individual letter records can accommodate a great deal of further work. Scholars and students focussing on individual catalogues, or portions of catalogues, are warmly invited to enrich them with additional data: people, places, or events mentioned; abstracts; transcripts; or links between series of letters sent and received. If you are interested in making a contribution of this nature, please do get in touch. These are the invaluable details that will help knit together crucial connections across the union catalogue and integrate its innumerable parts into a more densely interlinked whole.

For those who did not have the pleasure of attending the paper presented in the very first Cultures of Knowledge seminar series by the renowned scholar Professor Mirjam de Baar of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen (the podcast of this paper may be downloaded from our previous website), or for those who have not encountered before the subject of Professor de Baar’s research, I should like to introduce here Antoinette Bourignon, the Flemish spiritual mystic and prophetess, whose catalogue of correspondence became available in EMLO this week.

EMLO is particularly fortunate to have worked with Professor de Baar to make available online the calendar of this remarkable woman’s letters. Born in Lille in 1616, Bourignon, who received no formal education or theological training, embarked upon — to quote Professor de Baar — ‘a spiritual voyage of discovery, one that led her to take a critical and independent stance in relation to the church and its doctrinal authority’. Bourignon, who felt herself compelled to gather together true Christians and professed herself chosen by God to restore true Christianity on earth, purchased and ran her own printing press in a bid to disseminate her message via a myriad of published epistles. Among Bourignon’s more-renowned followers were numbered the Dutch natural scientist Jan Swammerdam, the French theologian Pierre Poiret, the Anglo-Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle (whose correspondence catalogue will be released in EMLO shortly), and one of the subjects of last week’s blog, Moravian-born pansophist Jan Amos Comenius. Large numbers of Bourignon’s disciples, both male and female, who gravitated to her from a wide spectrum of social backgrounds and political situations across the face of Europe, wrote to Bourignon for guidance on spiritual and personal matters, and their concerns and individual voices may be discerned clearly in Bourignon’s published responses. Where scans of Bourignon’s published letters are available online, EMLO provides links from the relevant letter record in the calendar and we urge you to take advantage of these to read some of her letters. Bourignon wrote a spiritual autobiography, published under the title La Parole de Dieu in 1663, and for further biographical information we could not recommend more highly Professor de Baar’s biography (‘Ik moet spreken’. Het spiritueel leiderschap van Antoinette Bourignon [1616–1680]), which was published in 2004 by WalburgPers.

Bourignon is just one of a number of intriguing and influential early modern women whose correspondences are in preparation at present for inclusion in EMLO’s union catalogue. Within the next few months, for example, calendars for the correspondences of Amalia von Solms and of Elizabeth of Bohemia will be released and, of course, we are working with our long-term partners at the British Academy project Women’s Early Modern Letters Online, headed by Professor James Daybell and Dr Kim McLean Fiander; their collection of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century women’s correspondence will be made available within EMLO and it will be possible soon to conduct searches either exclusively within the cluster of women’s correspondence or to expand out from this across the EMLO catalogue as a whole. These are productive times for the studies of early modern women, and we look forward greatly to publication of these catalogues as well as to the spotlight being shone onto the fascinating networks surrounding them when the prosopgraphical tools we are creating here in Oxford are brought into wider play.

This week’s publications in EMLO are focussed firmly around ongoing work orchestrated in ‘the Lands of the Bohemian Crown’ and we see the correspondence of Amandus Polanus of Polansdorf join the union catalogue, together with an ‘omnium gatherum’ of the correspondence of late-sixteenth and early seventeenth century Czech students who travelled to the Protestant learned centres of western Europe.

Amandus Polanus, the Silesian-born theologian, studied in Troppau [Opava], Breslau [Wroclaw; Vratislav], Tübingen, Basel, and Geneva, before settling as professor of Old Testament in Basel. The calendar of his correspondence has been assembled thus far under the aegis of a project established in Prague, ‘Correspondence networks between Central and Western Europe: From Comenius and Kircher to Hartlib and Oldenburg’, which was funded by the Czech Academy of Sciences for three years from mid-2012 to support cooperation between the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of Oxford. Members of the project’s team have investigated the relationship of the Unity of Brethren to the Reformed centres of education in the Empire and Switzerland, the connection of Jan Amos Comenius [Komenský] and his circle to the large international communication networks of the seventeenth century (in particular to the circle of Samuel Hartlib), the overlaps between Jesuit mathematicians in Prague and the correspondence networks of Athanasius Kircher and Christiaan Huygens, and contacts of scholars from Silesia with the Academia naturae curiosorum and the Royal Society. Funding from this project has enabled scholars working in these areas to be brought together and a series of workshops, meetings, and talks were conducted in Oxford, Prague, and Vienna at which new research topics were discussed and presented. Two exemplary workshops were organized in Prague: ‘Databases in Early Modern Research: Tracing People, Books and Letters’ took place in September 2013 and was followed a year later with ‘The Practice of Scholarly Communication: Correspondence Networks Between Central and Western Europe, 1550–1700’. A volume, edited by Vladimír Urbánek and Iva Lelková and based on reworked contributions from the latter workshop, as well as newly commissioned papers, is in preparation currently for publication next year with Ashgate. The project also funded extensive research in the archives and libraries in Wrocław, Berlin, Budapest, Leipzig, Halle an der Saale, Herrnhut, Oxford, London, Basel, Zürich, Olomouc, and Brno, and a number of hitherto unpublished letters from Comenius’s correspondence have been discovered and added to the catalogue in EMLO. Together with Czech participation in the European COST Action Reassembling the Republic of Letters, this project has enabled continuation of the fruitful collaboration between the Department of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History of the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences and our own Cultures of Knowledge here at Oxford.

In addition to the Polanus catalogue, for which metadata of the letters from the Swiss archives (Universitätsbibliothek Basel, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, and Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich) is published this week with further letters from a number of Czech archives to be added in the near future, a catalogue has been compiled of the correspondence of the physician Philipp Jacob Sachs von Lewenheimb, and this was published in EMLO last year. Meanwhile, ever eager to pull its weight, Cultures of Knowledge has rolled up its proverbial sleeves and, in partnership with our Prague colleagues and the Digital Library of the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, has assembled a calendar taken from František Hrubý’s 1970 edition of correspondence of Bohemian and Moravian students who studied at Protestant universities in Western Europe. It is a truly fascinating selection of letters and, all in all, these publications in EMLO and the work of our partners in Prague are a cause for celebration. We hope very much you will explore in EMLO some of the research being headed by Vladimír Urbánek at the Czech Academy of Sciences and enjoy the fruits of an invaluable collaboration.

Dissent and nonconformity are firmly in focus this week with the quatercentenary of the birth of the ejected minister and religious writer Richard Baxter (1615–1691) to be celebrated on Thursday and, in consequence, we would like to draw your attention to an important editorial initiative as well as to a related symposium and to the beginnings of Baxter in EMLO.

Here in the UK, an international group of scholars at the Richard Baxter Correspondence Project are in the process of embarking upon their formidable task of preparing a comprehensive critical edition of Baxter’s extensive correspondence. This edition is to be published in nine volumes by Oxford University Press. Building on the detailed foundation laid in 1991 by N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall in their Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (which may be accessed, for those at a contributing institution, on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online [OSEO]), this edition will present for the first time the full text of every surviving letter within the corpus and the prefatory epistles to Baxter’s printed works, and will provide in addition extensive annotation and material description of the very manuscripts themselves. As this correspondence project begins, its elder sibling, the AHRC-funded Reliquiae Baxterianae Project, which is committed to providing — once again for the first time — a fully annotated and reliable scholarly edition of the complete text of Baxter’s 800-page folio Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), is nearing completion. Both projects are to be congratulated and celebrated in the course of this Baxterian week.

EMLO is delighted to be working both with the Baxter Correspondence Project and with our trusted partners at OUP. To mark the beginnings of the Project’s work towards this monumental undertaking, we are publishing this week a fledgling catalogue, the introductory page for which will serve to update its followers with postings regarding progress and relevant items of interest. As the Baxter scholars proceed with their work in the months and years to come, a full epistolary calendar in EMLO will be pieced together. You will find just eight letters within the catalogue at present — a curious number, you may think — but these pioneer letters have been mounted as a foundation because they have been selected by Baxter editors Johanna Harris and Alison Searle to feature in a small online exhibition, created to celebrate the quatercentenary as well as to act as what we at EMLO hope will seve as the pilot in an ongoing series of correspondence-related exhibitions.

Concerning the week’s concrete celebrations, we would like to draw your immediate attention to a one-day symposium hosted by the Baxter Correspondence Project in collaboration with Dr Williams’s Library, the leading research library of English protestant nonconformity. In the course of Friday’s proceedings, our own Cultures of Knowledge Project Director, Professor Howard Hotson, will deliver a paper entitled ‘”What I had out of books”: Richard Baxter and “the general reformation of common learning”’, and members of the two Baxter projects will present their research and discuss work on the forthcoming edition. Of course, the Baxter archive at Dr Williams’s Library, testifying as it does to Baxter’s arguably unrivalled social, political, religious, and intellectual connections, is a truly invaluable resource and there could be no more fitting place in the world to stage this event. Should you happen to be in London on Friday, 13 November, and would like to attend, please be in touch with the organizers; further details of the day’s proceedings may be found here. And to conclude this run of celebrations, were you to tune into BBC Radio 3 this coming Sunday you would hear broadcast as part of the New Generation Thinkers series a programme, presented by Dr Thomas Charlton from the Reliquiae Baxterianae Project, on the life and ‘trouble-making’ thoughts of our ‘man of the week’. Dissenters enjoy!

by Philip Beeley and Miranda Lewis

As a postscript to last week’s round-up of work in EMLO on mathematical correspondence, we would like very much to draw your attention to the latest volume of Leonhard Euler’s Opera Omnia. Edited by Martin Mattmüller and Franz Lemmermeyer, Leonhardi Euleri Opera Omnia vol. IVA 4: Commercium Epistolicum cum Christiano Goldbach — which is the first volume to appear in the ongoing series since 2004 — presents Euler’s correspondence with Prussian jurist and amateur mathematician Christian Goldbach (1690–1764).

Goldbach’s mathematical career can be said to have begun in Oxford. In 1712, while on a Grand Tour of Europe, he bumped into the Swiss mathematician Nicolaus I Bernoulli, also on European travels, in the Bodleian Library. When in discussion within those illustrious walls Goldbach declared he knew nothing of higher mathematics, Bernoulli lent him a book on infinite series by his uncle Jacob. After numerous false starts, Goldbach was able finally to establish himself as a mathematician and in 1725, then in Moscow, he began his epistolarly exchange with Euler. The new and comprehensively edited volume contains 196 letters, each one transcribed in the original language (either German or Latin) and supplemented with a full translation into English. The correspondence between the two mathematicians charts their lifelong friendship and spans more than thirty-five years. Their fascinating exchange offers an overview of eighteenth-century number theory, its sources, and its repercussions, as well as a glimpse into scholarly circles in St Petersburg and Berlin between the years 1725 and 1765, and, as it reconstructs the development of many of Euler’s most significant achievements, this volume will prove invaluable to mathematical historians around the globe.

For further details, and an order form, see here.

The publication last week of the catalogue of Pierre de Fermat highlights the growing body of early modern mathematical correspondences that is taking shape at present within EMLO. Fermat was one of the finest mathematicians of his age who rekindled interest in number theory. Through the exchange of letters he both initiated and participated in debates with contemporaries across Europe, including John Wallis in Oxford and Marin Mersenne in Paris.

During the first phase of the Cultures of Knowledge project a calendar was compiled for the correspondence of John Wallis, taken from Philip Beeley and †Christoph J. Scriba’s ongoing multi-volume edition published by Oxford University Press (volume IV was brought out last year), and this, in combination with our founding catalogues, became a cornerstone of the fledgling union catalogue that was to become EMLO. Within this past year, EMLO has seen metadata added for the correspondences of Christiaan Huygens, René Descartes, Athanasius Kircher, and Marin Mersenne, while the correspondence of Caspar Schott has been published in part and is due to be augmented significantly within the next couple of months by Thomas E. Conlon and Hans-Joachim Vollrath.

EMLO could not be more fortunate that this burgeoning cluster of mathematical correspondence is overseen by none other than Philip Beeley, the current President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. With funding from the AHRC, Philip works at present on the seventeenth-century mathematical intelligencer John Collins, a project he drafted originally with the late Jackie Stedall. A catalogue of Collins’s letters is in preparation for upload to EMLO, where — thanks to Philip’s indefatigable work in a number of Scottish archives during the summer — it is to be joined by the catalogues of the correspondences of James and David Gregory, which our Digital Fellow Kat Steiner, herself a former student of Jackie’s, is set to help prepare. We are thrilled also to announce that work has just begun here in Oxford in partnership with the Bernoulli Euler Zentrum in Basel to prepare calendars for the correspondences of members of the illustrious Bernoulli family [Daniel I (1700–1782), Jacob II (1759–1789), Johann I (1667–1748), Johann II (1710–1790), Nicolaus I (1687–1759), Nicolaus II (1695–1726), and Jacob Hermann (1678–1733)], as well as for that of Leonhard Euler, and with her particular brief to help with work on the latter we would like to welcome to our EMLO Digital Fellow team doctoral student and Euler scholar Rosanna Cretney.

With this work in train, it will not be long before long we shall be in a position to mount a dedicated online exhibition and enable scholars to look closely at the intersections and overlaps of these mathematical networks that are taking shape. This is an exciting time for the history of mathematics, which is seeking to realign itself within the broader spheres of the history of science and intellectual history. As he celebrates his birthday this weekend, we would like (in addition to wishing him a heartfelt ‘Happy Birthday’!) to thank Philip for his tireless work behind the scenes for EMLO and, by way of a virtual present, to quote here Isaac Barrow’s observation that in mathematics we find ‘the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs’. Perhaps Barrow is clamouring now for Philip’s attention and lining up to be next in this impressive table of EMLO’s mathematical greats …

Lest anyone imagine that editorial work in EMLO focuses solely on the publication of new catalogues, I thought it worth drawing attention to a number of enhancements made recently to correspondences published at earlier stages of EMLO’s development.

Behind the public face of EMLO, contributing scholars and editors continue to update and enrich our published catalogues either with new letters or by adding detail to existing records. In the past week, Dr Robin Buning has added to the Hartlib catalogue ten letters, all missing from the original calendar uploaded in 2010. Another of our Phase I correspondences, that of Martin Lister, has also expanded in recent months as Dr Anna Marie Roos supplemented the original catalogue with metadata for an additional seventy-one letters which came to light between the initial upload of the calendar to EMLO and the publication earlier this year of volume I of the hard-copy edition of Lister’s correspondence. The correspondence of Edward Lhywd has been worked on continuously over the course of the past year, and we are particularly delighted to be able to announce today the release of a set of newly worked transcriptions for all of his 2,128 letters. As might be expected when dealing with the correspondence of the ‘father of Celtic linguistics’ and author of Glossography (1707), work on these transcriptions involved a large number of scholars, and the challenges of representing accurately letters that contained words, phrases, and quotations in a spectacular array of ancient and modern languages were considerable, not least to ensure that the full range of diacritics and fonts displayed correctly. We are extremely grateful to Helen Watt for her work above and beyond the call of duty to oversee and coordinate this significant update. And with regard to languages and texts, we are equally pleased that the full set of transcriptions prepared by Professor Gerald Toomer of the letters of John Selden may now be downloaded as a PDF from each individual letter record in the catalogue. Work continues apace also in Prague, where our colleagues at the Czech Academy of Sciences are in the process of correcting and expanding the abstracts provided for letters in the Comenius catalogue, and all abstracts earmarked for inclusion in the first volume of the printed edition [Prague, forthcoming 2016] are to be updated in EMLO in the course of the next six months. In addition to this work, Dr Iva Lelkova is planning to enhance the Kircher catalogue with more precise information for places of sending and receipt.

With regard to more recently published catalogues, there are particularly significant additions to the the Mersenne catalogue: metadata for eleven new letters, which Sir Noel Malcolm published for the first time in two articles in The Seventeenth Century, may now be consulted in EMLO together with metadata taken from the de Waard edition. Over the coming year, it is our hope that letter records in Mersenne’s catalogue — as well as many in a number of other correspondences, including those of Peiresc and Tycho Brahe — will be enriched with manifestation details. It has been our intention from the outset to make available to scholars as much ‘work-in-progress’ metadata as possible and, in consequence, many of our more recent additions are being published in batches. Over the coming months, the correspondences of Johann Valentin Andreae, Caspar Schott, and Constantijn Huygens, amongst many others, and the collection of Bartolomeo Gamba, will be augmented significantly, while the first installments of the correspondences of Henry Oldenburg, Johannes Kepler, Pierre de Fermat, Abraham Ortelius, Justus Lipsius, and Leonhard Euler are scheduled for release.

Throughout this current phase, our work will continue to add new letter records to catalogues and to refine existing metadata. In part, this is thanks to the corrections and comments submitted by increasing numbers of scholars, and for which we are extremely grateful: this is precisely the kind of ‘community curation’ of our open-access resource that we hope to nurture in the future. No less gratifying is the steadily increasing frequency with which potential contributors write in to suggest updates and to offer fresh metadata. If you are working with, or are interested in, early modern correspondence and would like to contribute to EMLO, please do not hesitate to be in touch. Alternatively, if you would like to be involved but do not have a specific correspondence in mind, please bear in mind that we intend to host a series of crowdsourcing workshops, designed to resolve a number of inherent metadata problems (many of which can be described as ‘embarrassing bloomers’). At our inaugural workshop, we shall consider issues surrounding dates and calendars, and will embark upon a programme to tidy up metadata in the Bodleian card catalogue, particularly those records employing the Roman calendar. The day-long workshop, which will be held at the History Faculty in Oxford, will include short talks by scholars, as well as an introduction to EMLO itself. Volunteers will be given full acknowledgement for their work, and refreshments will be provided throughout the day. Places will be limited so, to become involved, please either contact us by email or keep an eye on this blog where further details will be released as our plans take shape.