Author:

Keywords:

Benedictine scholarship, Church Fathers, Corpus Christianorum, Patristic studies, C16/17/001#54271306

Abstract:

In 1947 a bright young monk of the Benedictine St. Peter’s Abbey in Steenbrugge (Bruges), Jan-Eligius Dekkers, first announced his plans to collect the complete works of the Latin and Greek Church Fathers in a single, uniform series of critical text editions. Over the course of 75 years the collection, called Corpus Christianorum, expanded chronologically, methodologically and logistically. To serve Dekkers’ purpose, the monastic library at Steenbrugge developed into a scholarly centre that despite many evolutions and transformations still operates today as the Corpus Christianorum headquarters in Turnhout, Belgium. Although the physical volumes in its flagship series continue to be produced in print, the digital turn, too, has come full circle: in 2019 Clavis Clavium was launched, an online collaborative platform building on the foundations of Dom Dekkers’ Clavis Patrum Latinorum.