Six short tours, each on a real page of the library. Every feature is lit in turn with a sentence on what it does. Start with the first and each one leads to the next.
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Reading a work
Headings, contents, pages, reading settings, the tools tray and the research panel.
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Scripture
Read any chapter with the writers of the tradition who cited it beside each verse.
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Topics
The library arranged by doctrine, from God and the Trinity to the last things.
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Search
Find a word, a phrase or an idea across every work in the library.
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Research tools
Author rooms, Compare, Ask, the notebook and your saved passages.
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Connections
The whole library mapped by citation: who each author read and who read them.
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How the shelves are organized
The library has ten shelves. Open All Works and choose Browse the shelves to see them all, each with its best-known authors. The two largest, the Latin and the Greek Fathers, come from Migne’s nineteenth-century editions of the Fathers, and they are laid out the way Migne printed them.
Latin Fathers
Migne’s Patrologia Latina
Jacques-Paul Migne printed the Latin writers of the Church, from Tertullian to Pope Innocent III, in 221 volumes. Scholars cite his edition by volume and column: PL 32, cols. 657–868 is Augustine’s Confessions. Every work on the Latin Fathers shelf carries that address.
The shelf opens two ways. By author lists every author from A to Z, with dates and a count of works. By volume lists Migne’s volumes in order and is the quickest way to follow a citation such as “PL 139, 473a” back to its page.
Greek Fathers
Migne’s Patrologia Graeca
Migne’s Greek series runs to 161 volumes, from the Apostolic Fathers to the fifteenth century, with a Latin translation printed beside the Greek. The Greek Fathers shelf is arranged the same way, by author or by volume.
Titles appear in English and Migne’s Latin. Citations follow the same pattern: Gregory of Nazianzus’s On Holy Easter is PG 35, cols. 393–401. In the reader, Browse PG 35 opens the rest of the volume.
The Eastern Fathers, from the Patrologia Orientalis, have a room of their own in the same form. The other shelves, from Medieval to Humanism and Law, open All Works with that shelf chosen.
Finding an author on any shelf
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Jump by letter, or search
The A–Z bar shows how many authors each letter holds. The search box takes a name or a title and sorts what it finds: the matching authors first, then other works that name them, then unattributed works, such as the pieces Migne printed under Augustine’s name whose author is uncertain.
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Narrow the list
Filter by century, keep only the works with page scans, and on the Greek shelf filter by tradition. The English writers shelf also divides into Puritan, Anglican and the Westminster Assembly.
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Open an author
Each name opens to that author’s works on the shelf, and each work opens in the reader. About leads to the author’s own page: every work, with a filter by kind, and the author’s positions, Scripture, topics, reception and connections.
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See a shelf’s authors together
Authors, under Study this shelf, lists a shelf’s authors by period, from the early Church to later writers, in library order, A to Z, by number of works or by Scripture citations.
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Study the shelf
Study this shelf keeps the rest of the library on that shelf as well: Ask this shelf answers from its works alone, and Scripture, Topics and Connections open on the same shelf.
