Library Guides: Religious Studies Library Guide: Articles & Databases

Religious Studies Databases

Use Databases & Indexes (the terms are often used interchangeably) to identify research articles, book chapters, and other materials on your topic. You may need to search more than one database to locate the most appropriate materials for your information need.

Here are some key resources that concentrate on religious studies

ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials
Extensive, international online collection of major religion and theology journals, combined with an index to journal articles, book reviews, and collections of essays in all fields of religion. This key database is produced by the American Theological Library Association (ATLA).

Oxford Scholarship Online: Religion
Provides access to the full text of many key and recent Oxford University Press publications in religious studies, including comparative and specific studies covering a range of religions. It also contains book and chapter abstracts.

Religion & Philosophy Collection
Covers such topics as world religions, major denominations, biblical studies, religious history, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of language, moral philosophy and the history of philosophy. Offers more than 300 full text journals.
ProQuest Religion Database
Collection of journals covering religious issues and perspectives, including news and information, commentary on topics of general interest from the perspective of a particular religion, and formal theological studies.
Acta Sanctorum
Saints' lives, organised based on each saint's feast day.This database is an electronic version of the complete printed text of Acta Sanctorum, from the edition published in sixty-eight volumes by the Société des Bollandistes in Antwerp and Brussels. It is a collection of documents examining the lives of saints, organised according to each saint's feast day, and runs from the two January volumes published in 1643 to the Propylaeum to December published in 1940.

The Acta Sanctorum Database contains the entire Acta Sanctorum, including all prefatory material, original texts, critical apparatus and indices. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina reference numbers are also included.
Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts
The Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts covers the religious and social upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries and provides access to an extensive range of seminal works from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras.
Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation
Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation covers the religious and social upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries and provides access to an extensive range of seminal works from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras. The collection currently includes theological writings, biblical commentaries, confessional documents, and polemical treatises written by more than 300 Catholic authors.

Global Missions and Theology
A digital collection of primary sources on 19th-century religious missionary activities, practices, and thought in the United States, as well as on American missionary activities elsewhere in the world during the 19th century.

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Includes personal narratives, sermons, speeches, and church organizational records, in addition to biographies and histories published in the 19th century. Areas covered include the US itself (for example, missionary activities among Native Americans and African Americans, both slaves and freedmen), Africa, India, China, Southeast Asia, Japan, Hawaii, Fiji, and the Sandwich Islands.

Patrologiae Graecae
160 volumes of Greek material (with Latin translations) relevant to the study of the history of the Christian Church from its beginnings through the Council of Florence in 1439.
Patrologia Latina Database
The Patrologia Latina Database (PLD) is an electronic version of the first edition of Jacques-Paul Migne's Patrologia Latina, published between 1844 and 1855, and the four volumes of indexes published between 1862 and 1865. The Patrologia Latina comprises the works of the Church Fathers from Tertullian in 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216. The database contains the complete Patrologia Latina, including all prefatory material, original texts, critical apparatus and indexes. Migne's column numbers are included.
Index Islamicus
A bibliography of books, articles and reviews on Islam and the Muslim world. Compiled and edited by Heather Bleaney and produced in the Library School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
Oxford Islamic Studies Online
Scholarly interdisciplinary resource covering religious, historical, political, cultural, artistic, and economic aspects of Islam and Islamic countries. Includes articles, book chapters, primary sources with commentaries; maps and other images; timelines; a glossary; a date converter; current “Focus on ...” essays and “From the desk of ...” letters; and editorially selected links to external online resources. The editor-in-chief, John L. Esposito, is a prominent Islamic studies scholar. Resources can be cross-searched or browsed. The Browse function includes subject entries; biographies; chaptered works; primary sources; and images and maps. Search and browse limits are available via era, topic, and region.

Oxford Biblical Studies Online and Oxford Islamic Studies Online have retired. Content from Oxford Biblical Studies Online or Oxford Islamic Studies Online has now moved to Oxford Reference, Oxford Handbooks Online, Oxford Scholarship Online, or Oxford's What Everyone Needs to Know.

Witchcraft in Europe and America
A digital collection of resources on witchcraft and witch hunts in Europe, the American colonies, and the US, dating from the 15th century into the early 20th century, particularly the 16th-18th centuries.

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Includes religious and philosophical writings on witchcraft; works challenging the persecution of those accused of witchcraft; and legal and church documents, such as transcripts of trials and Inquisitional records. The documents are primarily in English, Latin, and German, with selected textss in French, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish.

Databases that include Religious Studies

Here are some more general resources that include or list articles, books, and/or other documents on religious studies.

African Studies Centre Catalogue
Database of the resources of the Afrika-Studiecentrum (African Studies Centre) at the University of Leiden, Netherlands. Covering all of the African continent and multiple disciplines, including religion, this catalogue includes books, journal articles, government reports, brochures, African newspapers, and videorecordings.

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The interface is in English as well as Dutch. Includes annotations.

Sabin Americana, 1500-1926
Based on Joseph Sabin's landmark bibliography Bibliotheca Americana, this collection contains works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's. Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more. With over 6 million pages from 29,000 works, this collection is a cornerstone in the study of the western hemisphere.
L'Année philologique
Indexes scholarly work on classical antiquity from the 2nd millennium B.C.E. (pre-classical archaeology) to the period of transition from late antiquity to the Middle Ages (500-800 C.E.)
Art & Architecture Complete
Artstor
ARTstor is developing a rich digital library that will offer coherent collections of art images and descriptive information as well as the software tools to enable active use of the collections. The ARTstor Library's initial content includes approximately 500,000 images covering art, architecture and archeology. ARTstor's software tools support a wide range of pedagogical and research uses including: viewing and analyzing images through features such as zooming and panning, saving groups of images online for personal or shared uses, and creating and delivering presentations both online and offline.
Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) and RILA
European and American visual arts material published between 1975 and 2007 covering late antiquity to the present.
Bibliotheca Teubneriana Latina (BTL)
The comprehensive collection of the Latin editions in the Teubner series (Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana), which is one of the best-known and most reliable series of scholarly editions of works in Latin and Greek. It has been issued in print since 1849, and new titles or new editions continue to be published each year.

The Latin works include ancient, medieval, and modern religious texts. The online BTL supports precise searches within books in the series in addition to browsing by author and title or by broad time period. Filtering searches by author, title, or period is also possible.
Black Studies Center
Black Studies Center brings together essential historical and current material for researching the past, present and future of African-Americans, the wider African Diaspora, and Africa itself. All of the resources from Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience can be cross-searched with journals from the International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP) and newspaper articles from The Chicago Defender.

The HistoryMakers collection features videos and full transcripts for interviews with 100 contemporary African Americans influential in a range of fields.

IIBP includes current and retrospective bibliographic citations and abstracts from scholarly journals and newsletters from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean, and full-text coverage of core Black Studies periodicals.
Black Thought and Culture
In-depth browsing and searching of both the bibliographic and the full-text elements of complete published non-fiction works as well as interviews, journal articles, letters and other fugitive material. The works include monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to the present
Brepolis Latin Complete
Includes the Library of Latin Texts Online (Series A & B), the Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature, and Monumenta Germaniae Historica, as part of a package of cross-searchable databases provided by the Belgian publisher Brepols. The Library of Latin Texts Online includes Latin works by classical, medieval, and early modern authors, 2nd cent. BCE-17th cent. CE; a significant number of the titles are religious in emphasis. The texts are based on modern scholarly editions, often from standard series such as Sources chrétiennes, the Corpus Christianorum, and the Bibliotheca Teubneriana. The LLT is supplemented by the Archive of Celtic-Latin Literature, a full-text database of the corpus of Latin literature produced in Celtic-speaking Europe, 400-1200 AD (a project of the Royal Irish Academy). Monumenta Germaniae Historica is the online version of the massive series of critical editions of source documents for German medieval history, published in print from 1819 and still ongoing; many religious works by German authors are represented.
Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies
Includes International Medieval Bibliography and Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale, as part of a package of cross-searchable databases provided by the Belgian publisher Brepols.
Humanities Index
(Formerly BHI: British Humanities Index). International abstracts and index for research in the humanities, indexes respected humanities journals and weekly magazines published in the UK and other English-speaking countries, as well as quality newspapers published in the UK.
CHOICE Reviews Online
Database of reviews of current books and electronic resources of interest to those in higher education. More than 6,500 reviews each year.
DigiZeitschriften Archive
According to the guidelines of the sponsoring institution, the German Research Foundation, these are concentrated in subject areas where German research has a long tradition, and tend to be research intensive and highly used core journals of each subject. The DigiZeitschriften archive encompasses around 110 journals with about 3 million pages. At present there is a certain emphasis on the Humanities, Social Sciences and Mathematics.
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800
Based on the renowned American Bibliography by Charles Evans and enhanced by Roger Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography. For decades, the collection has served as a foundation set for research involving early American history, literature, philosophy, religion, and more. Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 is the definitive resource for information about every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America, from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, witchcraft, and just about any other topic imaginable.
Early American Imprints, Series II Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819
Covering every aspect of American life during the early decades of the United States, Series II provides full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century. The continuation of Readex's Early American Imprints: Series I, this primary source database, based on the authoritative bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker and now supplemented by thousands of new items, allows students and scholars to explore the development of the American nation.

In addition to its books, pamphlets and broadsides, this comprehensive collection features many state papers and government materials, including published reports; presidential letters and messages; congressional, state and territorial resolutions.
America's Historical Newspapers
Early American Newspapers, Series 1 (1690 - 1876), Early American Newspapers, Series 2 (1758 - 1922), Early American Newspapers, Series 3 (1829 - 1922), Early American Newspapers, Series 4 (1756 - 1922), Early American Newspapers, Series 5 (1777 - 1922), Early American Newspapers, Series 6 (1741 - 1922), Early American Newspapers, Series 7 (1773 - 1922) and Hispanic American Newspapers (1808 - 1980).
Early Encounters in North America
Full-text letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters among American Indian, European, American, and African people in North America before 1850.
Early English Books Online
Contains the full text of about 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and Early English Books Tract Supplement.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Contains digital images of every page of 150,000 books published during the 18th Century. When complete, the database allow full-text searching of more than 33 million pages of material, in essence, every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

A variety of materials is included—from books and broadsides, Bibles, tract books and sermons to printed ephemera—with works by many well-known and lesser-known authors, all providing a diverse collection of material for the researcher of the eighteenth century.
Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Issues
Covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages.
Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs
Digital facsimilies of more than 4,700 publications concerning women's history from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945. he anti-feminist case is presented as well as the pro-feminist; many other titles present a purely objective record of the condition of women at a given time.
Historical Abstracts
Scholarship on the history of the world (excluding the US and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Includes world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more.
ProQuest News & Newspapers
Every issue of the time periods for each paper complete cover-to-cover with full page images and article images that are in downloadable PDF.

Tulane provides access to:
- The American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger (1857-1922)
- The American Israelite (1854-1874)
- The Atlanta Constitution (1868-1942)
- Atlanta Daily World (1931-2010)
- The Baltimore Afro-American (1893-2010)
- Baltimore Sun (1837-1998)
- The Boston Globe (1872-1993)
- Chicago Defender (1909-2010)
- Chicago Tribune (1849-1998, 2008-present)
- Civil War Era Newspapers & Pamphlets
- The Christian Science Monitor (1908-present)
- Cleveland Call and Post (1932-2010)
- Detroit Free Press (1831-1999)
- The Guardian and The Observer (1791-2003)
- The Irish Times and The Weekly Irish Times (1859-2022)
- The Jerusalem Post (1932-2008)
- The Jewish Advocate (1905-1990)
- The Jewish Exponent (1887-1990)
- Latin American Newsstream
- Le Monde (1944-2000)
- Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2010)
- Los Angeles Times (2008-present)
- New York Amsterdam News (1922-2010)
- The New York Times (1851-present)
- New York Tribune (1841-1922)
- Norfolk Journal and Guide (1916-2010)
- Philadelphia Tribune (1841-1922)
- Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2010)
- The Scotsman (1817-1950)
- The Times of India (1838-2012)
- The Wall Street Journal (1889-2013)
- The Washington Post (1877-current)
- U.S. Hispanic Newsstream
Iter Bibliography
Collection of 8 databases covering the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Included are: Iter Bibliography; Iter Italicum; International Directory of Scholars; Baptisteria Sacra; International Directory of Renaissance and Reformation Associations and Institutes; Renaissance Quarterly; Scholars of Early Modern Studies; The Electronic Capito Project.
JSTOR Advanced Search
A trusted archive of scholarly journals, primary sources, and books. Content spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. The most recent 3-5 years of journals are generally not available; this is known as a "moving wall."
Medieval Family Life
Full-color images of the original medieval manuscripts comprising the Paston, Cely, Plumpton, Stonor and Armburgh Papers -- 15th-century English family correspondence -- with full text searchable transcripts (from available printed editions), glossary, map, chronology, and references.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries
Collection of women's diaries and correspondence from Colonial times to 1950. Sources include journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous.
Oxford Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online contains access to the full text of 2,125 Oxford books. In addition to Economics and Finance, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion, Oxford Scholarship Online now access to new Oxford books in Biology, Business and Management, Classical Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature, Mathematics, Music, Physics, and Psychology.
Philosopher's Index
Indexing and abstracts from books and journals in philosophy and related fields.
South and Southeast Asian Literature
South and Southeast Asian Literature is a constantly growing collection of fiction, short fiction, poems, interviews, and manuscript materials written in English by writers in South and Southeast Asia and their Diasporas. The collection will also include interviews and manuscript materials.

The collection comprises literature written originally in English by writers who either were born in or identify themselves culturally with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Fiji. Because the South and Southeast Asian Diasporas are so widely cast, the collection also includes the work of writers living or working in Africa, the United Kingdom, North America, and the Caribbean. The collection focuses upon literature written during the late-colonial and postcolonial eras, but it will also include earlier work.

TOCS-IN: Tables of Contents of Journals of Interest to Classicists
Searchable archive of tables of contents of extensive selection of journals and some Festschriften in classical, Near Eastern, and religious studies.

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Hosted at the University of Toronto and the Universite catholique de Louvain.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
The history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000. Seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding about U.S. history generally at the same time that it makes the insights of women's history accessible.

The collection currently includes 91 document projects and archives with more than 3,600 documents and 150,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and more than 2,060 primary authors.
World Biographical Information System (WBIS) Online
Comprehensive biographical providing short biographical information on 4 million people with a historical coverage from the 4th century BC to the present. It contains 3.85 million digital facsimile articles from more than 3,700 reference works, including biographical information on 2.3 M people worldwide.

Based on the digitization of K. G. Saur's Biographical Archives, it compiles biographical articles from printed reference works published from the 16th to the 21st century, and reproduces these original documents as facsimile images on the screen.