The Early Modern Pamphlets Online

Immediately on the heels of the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century there began a flood of pamphlets, many of them publicizing political and/or religious causes of various kinds. All through the sixteenth century and beyond, these ephemeral productions stripped bare the motives underlying the currents and tides of the period's history. The great institutional collections of such pamphlets as survive have been immeasurably valuable for scholars of early modern Europe.

Now Brill has launched TEMPO: The Early Modern Pamphlets Online, an ambitious project that aims to ultimately provide digital facsimiles of all pamphlets in the major collections.

The first release in this prodigious online resource contains more than 47,000 pamphlets. They are offered in the following series:

Dutch Pamphlets
German Pamphlets

The Dutch Pamphlets series comprises both the complete Knuttel collection from the National Library of the Netherlands and the Van Alphen collection from Groningen University Library. The famous Knuttel collection contains some 34,000 pamphlets, to which the Van Alphen collection adds another 2,800. There is no overlap between the two. Combined, these collections form an exhaustive treasure trove of primary texts on the history of the Low Countries between 1486 and 1853.

The German Pamphlets series provides online access to IDC's Flugschriften collection. Edited by Hans-Joachim Köhler, this ongoing series now contains some 11,000 pamphlets printed in the Holy Roman Empire between 1501 and 1600. The pamphlets are in German and Latin. They have been reproduced from various libraries in Europe over the past thirty years.

Your subscription gives you unlimited access to all the pamphlets in the database, currently 47,568 and growing. Before subscribing, however, you may search the online catalog for free and view bibliographic descriptions and title-page thumbnails of all the pamphlets TEMPO contains.