Notes
This page contains the documentation for our database and will be updated regularly.
Disputation or Dissertation?
Generally, we use the term "disputation" to refer to printed or orally given disputations. Some times, we call them dissertations, in alignment with the general usage to call printed disputations "dissertation." While most disputations were publicly defended term exercises, only very few of the disputations were earmarked to lead to the promotion to medical doctor or medical licentiate.
Compare: Matthias Asche, “Dissertation”, in: Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit Online, herausgegeben von Friedrich Jaeger. J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung und Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag GmbH, 2005–2012. First published online: 2019. Consulted online on 26 August 2019.
For a comprehensiv overview on early modern written disputations see the editors's introduction in Meelis Friedenthal, Hanspeter Marti, and Robert Seidel, eds., Early Modern Disputations and Dissertations in an Interdisciplinary and European Context. Intersections, 71. Leiden: Brill, 2021, 1-33. It contains an extensiv bibliography on the historiography of early modern written disputations as a genre.
Names of Locations:
We used four online databases to get the changing names of locations right:
Our most used, but also unhistorical database is google maps. All our non-historical map snippets are dated and taken as screen shots from google map researches.
We also used the vast David Rumsey Historical Map Collection for historical maps. When we used Rumsey, wikisource or any other map collection, we put the name of the collection in the map legend.
The Thesaurus Locorum (Thelo), provided and updated by the Forschungsstelle für Personalschriften der Akademie der Wissenschaften Mainz, collects names of locations in different times in a very thorough way.
Another resource we used is http://www.geonames.org/ . This database helps to compare and combine old and new names, for example the old names of cities in the Holy Roman Empire with their new Polish or Russian names.
Names of People:
People in early modern times used different ways to write their names, in the vernacular as well as in Latin. We researched our spelling with https://data.cerl.org/thesaurus/_search, with the spelling on the book cover (if authors or printers), also with the vast data that VD 16 and VD 17 provide about people writing in the German provinces of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Titles of Books, Pamphlets, Manuscripts:
Other than the above mentioned databases of VD 16 and VD 17, we used many online catagues and databases to get to our data. We found disputations not mentioned in VD17 at the Harvard Countway Medicine Rare Books Section of Harvard Libraries and at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF). We are continuously scanning catalogues for more information. Please see also our resources page at the end of this website for databases useful for this kind of research.