Database of Medieval Logical Manuscripts
On June 5, 2007 the De Rijk / Bos Database of Medieval Logical Manuscripts silently went online from a server at Huygens Institute. The release of the Medieval Logical Manuscripts database by the Huygens Institue in cooperation with prof. dr. E.P. Bos of the Leiden University was in a certain respect a re-release, as the database had been on line for several years at the Leiden University Library. Unfortunately due to a lack of funds the Leiden project had to be discontinued some years ago. On request of dr. Bos the Huygens Institute decided to take up development and hosting of the database to preserve its scientific value for the scholarly community.
Note on the database
From 1961 till 1986 Prof. dr. em. L.M. de Rijk was professor in ancient and medieval philosophy at the universities of Nijmegen, Utrecht and Leiden (The Netherlands). Though his interests and research in philosophy in general ranged from Plato till far in the fourteenth century, he was especially interested in medieval logic and semantics. When he started his investigations the majority of texts written by medieval logicians were still unedited. De Rijk built up an archive of files in which he noted data of logical manuscripts. He collected these notes from the catalogues, but mainly from personal inspection of manuscrips in libraries (monasteries, universities) all over Europe, and even beyond. He discovered many manuscripts which were hitherto unknown, or not correctly catalogued. He noted manuscript numbers, incipits, explicits, dates etcetera. These files were the bases of his numerous publications. The most prominent is no doubt his Logica Modernorum, a Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic, (…), 2 vols, Assen 1962 – 1967.
In the present database one finds the De Rijk files in an electronic version. The reader should be warned that sometimes not all relevant information of manuscripts can be found in the database. The base may serve as a tool to start investigations in medieval logic and semantics.
Technical note to the second release
Unfortunately the source files for the original on line database application at Leiden University Library have been lost in the process of several technical migrations. At all times however, the original data files have been in the careful custody of professor E.P. Bos. The IT Research & Development Team of Huygens Institute has based a new on line database application on these original files. This second release of the database offers a simple but robust solution to publishing the database files on line. The original data files have been ported into a PostgreSQL database. The database has been full text indexed using the Ferret Ruby-port of the valued Lucene full text indexing engine. A front end query tool has been added using the Ruby-on-Rails (RoR) web application framework. This approach combined the speed and testability of Ruby development with a ‘best of breed’ approach to component selection. Momentarily the on line application offers a simple full text query tool. In accordance with our agile development approach we’re interested in additional user requests and requirements to enhance the functionality of the on line application.
Realisation
- E.P. Bos – University of Leiden.
J. J. van Zundert – Huygens Institute, IT R&D Team
