Project description

The Hymnological Database (HDB) is based on extensive preliminary work carried out by the Mainz Hymnbook Archive, which is supported by the Mainz Research Centre for Church Hymns and Hymnbooks, and the Strasbourg Chair of Church Music and Hymnology. The data collection for the project is financially supported by the Diocese of Mainz and the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), among others. Technical maintenance of the database is provided by the Open Access of Knowledge (univOAK) at the University of Strasbourg.

The Mainz Hymnbook Archive was founded in the early 1990s by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hermann Kurzke together with Prof. Dr. Dr. Hansjakob Becker. For many years, it was supported by the ‘Interdisciplinary Working Group for Hymn Book Research’, which included scholars from various disciplines (Germanists, theologians, book scholars and musicologists). The Hymnbook Archive is now part of the ‘Church Hymns and Hymnbooks’ research centre affiliated with the Catholic Theology Faculty, which is headed by Prof. Dr. Ansgar Franz together with Dr. Christiane Schäfer.

Between 1999 and 2008, the ‘Hymn Book Bibliography’ project, based at the Mainz Hymn Book Archive and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), compiled a database of all printed German-language hymn books of various denominations from the Reformation to the present day. In addition, since 1995, also in Mainz, the song collections of around 500 hymnals that are particularly relevant in terms of their historical impact have been recorded in an electronic song catalogue, which provides information on the temporal, spatial and denominational distribution of these songs.

At the same time, Prof. Dr. Beat Föllmi, Strasbourg, has compiled the rhyming almanacs of the 16th century (primarily in German and French) and entered them into a database.

The HDB, newly created in 2015, was designed and programmed by Prof. Dr. Beat Föllmi. It brings together data from the Mainz Hymn Book Bibliography and the Song Catalogue, as well as the Strasbourg Psalter Database, thus linking the bibliographic recording of books with the cataloguing of songs.

This has resulted in a powerful hymnological tool that already contains over 30,000 hymn titles and almost 38,000 individual song titles for internal use. The data will now gradually be made freely available on the internet. To this end, the Open Archive of Knowledge (OAK) at the University of Strasbourg has created a portal with a search engine.

The existing database will be continuously updated and expanded. There are also plans to integrate additional data (e.g. on the melodies). The data will be published in sections. Information on the data already available online can be found in the Data section.

The HDB allows detailed searches for hymnals, individual songs, their occurrence, authors, locations, bibliographic references, shows changes, song migrations and provides information about denominational affiliation.

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