Spotlight on Research

Passing on information concerning two searchable databases:

1. Electronic Thorndike-Kibre (eTK) - an expanded and updated digital version of Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (TK) (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy, 1963) with two supplements, has been produced with the permission of the copyright holder, Medieval Academy of America. While TK consolidates all manuscript information for a text into a single entry, eTK divides entries from the book into 33,000 records, each for a manuscript witness to a text.
2. Electronic Voigts-Kurtz (eVK2) - an expanded and revised version of Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). The second edition of the CD provides more than 10,000 records for the earliest technical and learned writings in English.

The digital records in both databases are organized in multiple searchable fields and allow searching of incipit words and word strings and searching by manuscript, library, author, title, subject, translator, date, and bibliography.

Both tools are now freely available via a link from the website of the Medieval Academy of America (see the link "Science and Medicine Databases at UMKC”). The Academy homepage also contains a slide show of images from Brunschwig's De arte distillandi (Strassburg, 1512).