How to use this site

This site presents the first electronic version of the correspondence of Hugo Grotius. The site is based on the earlier seventeen-volume Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius published in The Hague from 1928 to 2001. We intend to expand the site’s facilities over the coming years. At present the site provides basic navigation and search facilities.
The Correspondence of Hugo Grotius is built on the eLaborate publication platform, that is being developed at the Huygens Institute.  For more information about eLaborate, see here. For other eLaborate editions, see Menschen en Bergen and Carolingian Scholarship.

Available material

The letters are numbered chronologically from 1 to 7460. Volume 17 presents letters discovered later and numbered e.g. 184A, 184B. The number indicates that chronologically these letters belong between 184 and 185.
Besides the letters, secondary texts from the original volumes are also available on the site: the introductions, the bibliographies,  name and title indices, quotation indices and corrigenda.

Navigating the letters

The basic navigation facilities that the site provides are navigation by year, by sender, by recipient and by volume. You can choose the navigation mode by selecting Years, Senders, Recipients or Volumes from the navigation mode drop-down box.

What results is a list of years, senders, recipients or volumes, and clicking one of these brings up a list of letters from the selected year, from the selected sender, to the selected recipient or from the selected volume. You can then select one of the letters from the list.
Using the arrows in the navigation panel moves you to the next or previous letter in the selection.
In the notes the letters, references to other letters have been hyperlinked to these letters. Click the hyperlink to be taken to the corresponding letter.

Searching the letters

The search facility is accessed by clicking the search option in the eLaborate command bar.

Search form
On the search form, you can specify search keywords for full-text search, you can indicate whether you want to use ‘fuzzy’ matching, and you can set the search domain.

Keywords:
Sample searches:
vossius : searches for letters that refer to vossius or Vossius (search is not case-sensitive)
vossius baudius: searches for letters that refer to Vossius or Baudius or both
vossius AND baudius: searches for letters that refer to both Vossius and Baudius
vossius -baudius: searches for letters that refer to Vossius but not to Baudius
"vossi clarissime": searches for the exact phrase “Vossi Clarissime” (bus still case-insensitive)
"lex naturae"~4: searches for the words “lex” and “naturae” within four words of each other
natura*: finds natura, naturae, naturam, etc. 

Fuzzy match:
When this box is checked, the search will also return words that match the given keyword more or less closely

Search domain:
By default, the whole site is searched. When ‘Search current document’ is selected, the search action only considers the current document.

Search results

The presentation of the search results includes a summary and a list of search results.

Results summary
The summary shows the total number of results and the number of results either in notes or in letters (which here includes secondary documents). By unchecking the boxes for the letters or the notes, the corresponding results are filtered out of the list of search results below.
The summary also shows lists of the top senders and receivers of letters with the given search term. In the future, this section may evolve into a facility for interactively exploring the correspondence based on multiple search criteria.

List of results
For each document with hits, the system provides a snippet of text surrounding the search term, the document title and a link to the letter or note that contains the search term. At present, we show only one result per document. To see more results, click the link to view the document. In the document, hits are highlighted. 
You can choose to have the list of results presented in order of relevance (this is a system-determined estimate of the relevance of the document to the search query) or by textual (roughly chronological) order. You can also set the number of results per page.

Using the panels

Navigation and search You can switch between the navigation and search panel by clicking the corresponding buttons on the command bar.
Add a panel A new panel can be created by clicking the ‘Add panel’ in the command bar.
Close a panel Panels can be closed by clicking the ‘x’ in the top right corner.
Change panel content The contents of a panel can be changed by a mouse-over on the ‘change panel’ button in the panel’s top left corner.
Resize panels Panels can be made larger or smaller by dragging the panel size slider horizontally.