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Institute for Swiss Reformation Studies

Bullinger Digital

Statue Bullinger am Grossmünster mit I-Pad in Händen

Statue of Heinrich Bullinger, illustration
Main entrance Grossmünster, Zurich

Project Overview

The Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) was an associate and successor of Zwingli and an important multiplier of the ideas of the Reformation in Switzerland and Europe. His correspondence network was correspondingly large.

Bullinger evidently recognized the importance of correspondence in his own time. He not only kept the 10’000 or so letters he received, but also made efforts to return the letters he had written. As a result, 2’000 letters that Bullinger once wrote have also been preserved.

Most of the handwritten originals are in the Zurich Staatsarchiv and the Zurich Zentralbibliothek. Some of the letters (1524 to 1547) have already been edited. The aim of our “Bullinger Digital” project is to digitize the remaining letters and make them accessible via the Internet. The first step is to create a database, KoKoS-Bullinger, in which the essential metadata such as sender, recipient, place and letter language are recorded for each letter. Until now, this information was only available on paper.

The grants funded project, which is supported by the UZH Foundation, is being carried out in conjunction with the Department of Computational Linguistics.

KoKoS-Bullinger

Link to the Project (in German)

Weiterführende Informationen

Heinrich-Bullinger-Correspondence

Bullinger Digital, Bild

Presentation of the digital cataloging project “Bullinger Digital”

Bullinger Digital: 500 years of Bullinger’s correspondence

The oldest surviving letter from the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger dates back to 1523, making it exactly 500 years old. The “Bullinger Digital” project took this anniversary as an opportunity to invite interested parties to the workshop “Bullinger Digital: 500 years of Bullinger correspondence”.

The workshop offered a practical insight into the possibilities of the online search system and presented the results after two years of operation. Research areas involved gave an insight into the possible uses of the Bullinger correspondence corpus and the methods developed.