Alberti Magni e-corpus
Albert the Great (ca. 1200 – 1280) is one of the most important medieval philosophers and theologians, yet his thought remains as a whole relatively understudied. This can be explained by a variety of philosophical and historical reasons, but purely «material» factors are also at play. There is indeed no truly complete edition of his works, and the age and the rarity of the most complete one (Opera omnia, ed. A. Borgnet, Paris, 1890-1899, itself based on Opera omnia, ed. P. Jammy, Lyon, 1651) render it hard to access for many scholars. The new critical edition (sometimes called Editio Coloniensis), begun in 1951 and very competently led by the Albertus-Magnus-Institut of Bonn, offers a much more reliable text but will not be completed before many more decades and its high cost means that not all university libraries — including in North America and in Western Europe — can afford a subscription to it. In addition, the impressive number of Albert’s works, as well as the huge size of many of them, lead one quickly to dream of the day when the critical edition will be completed and made available electronically. (One can also dream, perhaps unrealistically, that the equivalent of the Corpus Thomisticum will one day exist for Albert the Great, thus enabling anyone with access to the internet to consult the best available editions of his works for free.)
While waiting for this providential day to come, scholars can use the present website in order to : 1) download image files (.pdf) of all of Albert’s works which can be found in the Borgnet edition as well as the 21 volumes of the Jammy edition, in addition to a few other writings which have been edited individually and which, like the Borgnet and the Jammy editions, are too old to be covered by copyright law; 2) search electronically 24 of those works, using a search engine which is endowed with boolean operators and which gives access to more than 4.1 million words (corresponding to more than 10000 pages in print); 3) browse those same 24 works on line.
This site will be updated at irregular intervals, both to fix the inevitable problems occurring in its first versions and to add new texts to those that can be electronically searched. The next addition should be the Summa theologiae.
