Projects

 

Sermon Reception and Religious Identity

This project will concentrate on continental Europe, where religion in the early modern period increasingly divided rather than united. In so doing, it will explore how different ways of listening to sermons demonstrated increasingly different religious, and thereby cultural and national identies. At the same time, it will allow us to examine how different confessions (with their attendant preaching cultures) influenced each other in an age of growing, if reluctant, religious coexistence.

Universal Short Title Catalogue Project

The AHRC Universal Short Title Catalogue Project is the successor project to the St Andrews French Book Project, which concluded in 2007.

From the 1920s onwards, scholars of British history have had at their disposal the Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland. There has been no comparable project to catalogue books published in France, where bibliographic studies have concentrated on individual centres of production or on particular themes or authors. The St Andrews French Book Project filled this hole with the publication of FB: Books printed in the French Vernacular before 1601. However, there are still no thorough short title catalogues for many other European countries. The USTC Project is an ambitious project to create these short titles and to unify them into a Universal Short Title Catalogue of all books printed before 1601.

The St Andrews History of the Universities Project

The Institute of Scottish Historical Research at the University of St Andrews is playing host to a major research initiative focused on the history of the Scottish Universities in their local, national and international contexts. The History of the University Project, overseen by Professor Roger Mason and Dr David Allan of the School of History and Dr Norman Reid, Keeper of the University Muniments, was initiated in 2002 in anticipation of the 600th anniversary of the foundation of St Andrews University in 2013/14. However, the project's remit is not confined to the history of St Andrews, but is intended to explore and illuminate the history of higher education in Scotland more generally.

The Protestant Latin Bible of the Sixteenth Century (1516-1600) Project

The principal objective of this project is to enhance fundamentally our understanding of the Protestant use of Latin in the sixteenth century through an examination of the movement's most important text, the Bible.

Although it is well known that sixteenth-century Protestantism placed a premium on translating the Bible into the vernacular, it has not been recognised that greater effort was made to produce new Latin translations of scripture. As the first study of these Protestant translations of the Bible into Latin, this research will enable scholars to see how Protestant reformers took different attitudes towards the process of translation, the formation of core text, and the role of Latin as a basis for the vernacular translations that were to be used in public worship and instruction. To explain how these translations came about it is essential for the project to explore the intellectual and commercial networks that existed among Protestant scholars and printers in the sixteenth century. These Bibles were extremely labour intensive, time consuming, and expensive to produce; this project will offer a clear picture of why sixteenth-century Protestants believed them to be indispensable to their cause.

The project will focus on the texts and contexts of Bibles. Through a detailed analysis of the translations, taking them in chronological order, we shall map the evolving nature of Protestant Latin - which varies significantly. In examining the contexts, we shall locate these Bible in the confessional debates and politics of the sixteenth century.