The Aristoteles Latinus Database aims at documenting the various tools that were used in the Middle Ages for the study of Aristotle, with a special emphasis on Latin translations. The first release of the database (ALD-1/2003) consisted mainly of the Greco-Latin translations in the printed Aristoteles Latinus series and also in some unpublished editions in preparation. In the second release (ALD-2/2006), this corpus of translations was further expanded with texts that had been edited within other contexts (such as the Editio Leonina of Thomas Aquinas’s works). The third release adds many new texts to this corpus, nearly doubling its volume, and in doing so, widens its scope. Not only does it add several previously unavailable Greco-Latin Aristotle translations, it now also includes other texts that have shaped the study of the Latin Aristotle in the Middle Ages. These incluce the corpus of Latin translations of Greek commentaries and glosses on Aristotle (most of them published in the Corpus Latinum Commentariorum in Aristotelem Graecorum), texts that were closely associated with the Corpus Aristotelicum (such as the Liber sex principiorum, the Paraphrasis Themistiana or the Vita Aristotelis), and some translations from the Arabic (the Analytica Posteriora, tr. Gerardi and Averroes’Poetria, tr. Hermanni).

At present, the Aristoteles Latinus Database contains more than 2.3 million Latin words, drawn from 110 works that are attributed to 45 authors.

The electronic database offers the complete texts but is not identical to the printed publication as it omits the prefaces describing the manuscript tradition and also the apparatus of variant readings. Nor does it include the Greek-Latin comparative apparatus or the bilingual indexes. The critically edited texts themselves, however, have been included with all their peculiarities, such as interlinear notes, and the typographical distinctions that characterise the texts of the revised versions.

The texts included have been prepared and supervised by the Aristoteles Latinus Centre of KU Leuven, under the supervision of late Pieter De Leemans and Lisa Devriese. The database is produced in collaboration with the Centre ‘Traditio Litterarum Occidentalium’ (CTLO), which is a humanities computing laboratory for the study of Latin texts. The CTLO, which looked after the textual and philological aspects of the electronic treatment, has undertaken the finalisation of the material into the required electronic form. The aim is to provide the academic world with a scholarly product of the highest quality.

The ALD uses the new search interface developed for the BREPOliS Latin databases.

The Aristoteles Latinus Database is a Latin full-text database which enables the user to profit from an elaborate system of tools that can be used with the help of a multilingual interface (English and French):

– One can use the database in order to read texts as a whole, to search for words and expressions, to access individual texts by means of their references, or to examine the distribution of word-forms across the entire database and to analyse vocabulary within an individual work, by displaying an exhaustive concordance for each form that is part of that work.

– One can execute a search across all the texts in the database or, with the help of filters, define a subset and limit the search to one or more periods within the corpus, to one or more authors, as well as to one or more titles of works.

– Other criteria for formulating queries are the century of composition and, for works of the Patristic Period, the number in the Aristoteles Latinus Clavis based on the classification of Aristotelian works followed by I. Bekker.

– Far from being limited to queries for single words, the user can search for groups of words or for a particular expressions.

– Search possibilities can be extended by the use of Boolean and proximity operators.

– The order of precedence of the search terms within a query can be organised.

– Queries can be simplified by using wildcards.

– By default, the field to which a query is applied is the sentence as delimited in the text edition used (“the string of text going from full stop to full stop”).

– The target of queries can be widened by extending it to groups of three sentences.

– The ALD makes it possible to perform a ‘similarity search’ (a kind of ‘fuzzy search’). This procedure offers the possibility to quickly search for strings of text that are not absolutely identical to those which are entered in the search field. It was developed to assist the user to find the origin of quotations or other text without having to know the exact words and/or their order.

The table of contents section, which gives access to individual texts by means of their references, offers the possibility of using the references of the Greek text according to the Bekker edition (page and column),which are the most commonly used.

– A direct link to the Database of Latin Dictionaries (which integrates different types of Latin dictionaries, whether modern, medieval or early-modern) allows the user to find relevant dictionary entries for Latin word-forms that appear in texts visualized by the ALD, and to read the articles in the selected dictionaries.