About the library
Sources and licensing
Where AskReformation's texts come from, why they keep their original spelling, how to cite them, and what the library doesn't include.
Where the texts come from
Every text in the library is a transcription of an early printed book made by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), a project of the University of Michigan and the University of Oxford with ProQuest. The TCP keyed, page by page, books from:
- Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP): books printed in England, or in English, between 1473 and 1700;
- Evans Early American Imprints (Evans-TCP): books printed in America before 1800.
The transcriptions were released into the public domain under the CC0 dedication (EEBO-TCP Phase I in 2015, Phase II in 2020). The books themselves are centuries out of copyright. You can use the texts freely; please credit the Text Creation Partnership when you publish work based on them.
The library currently holds 2,151 works by 107 authors, about 136 million words in all, with 812,035 Scripture references indexed.
The Bible
The Bible on this site is the King James Version in the Oxford text of 1769, the text most editions of the KJV print today. It is in the public domain, and comes from the farskipper/kjv transcription. Words the translators supplied are in italics, as the King James Bible prints them.
Scripture references in the library's books, in answers and in articles link to it. The books cite many translations (the Geneva Bible, the Bishops' Bible, their own renderings from the Greek and Hebrew), so the verses shown beside a reference are the KJV's, not necessarily the words the author quoted.
Original spelling, original pages
Quotations keep the spelling of the printing they come from ("vnto", "loue", "sinne", "glorifie") so they match the page. Searches understand modern spelling, so you can search for "love" and find "loue". Two things are normalized for display: the long s (ſ) and printers' ligatures.
The transcribers marked what they couldn't read:
| Mark | Meaning |
|---|---|
| • | an illegible letter |
| 〈…〉 | illegible words |
| 〈non-Latin alphabet〉 | Greek or Hebrew the transcribers didn't key |
| ▪ | illegible punctuation |
Page numbers belong to the printing transcribed, which isn't always the first edition, and differ from modern editions (for example, the nineteenth-century Works of John Owen edited by William Goold). Translations are early modern English ones: Calvin's Institutes here is Thomas Norton's translation of 1561.
How to cite
Each passage page gives a citation like this:
John Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers (London, 1668), ch. 2, p. 11. EEBO-TCP A53715.
If you'd like to credit AskReformation too: "via AskReformation (askreformation.com)".
What the library doesn't include
- Modern editions and translations. The library holds the original printings only, so a quotation from a modern translation (such as Battles' translation of Calvin's Institutes) won't be found word for word.
- Latin originals, for the most part: the TCP concentrated on English books.
- Editions under copyright or restrictive terms. Many online editions of these authors carry their own copyrights or terms of use, so we don't use them.