Research Projects
The Center for Religious and Legal History oversees research projects as funding and personnel permit.
Graduate students and faculty at Saint Louis University who have research projects that might align with the vision of CRLH should reach out to the director of CRLH for potential collaboration or short-term funding possibilities. External researchers, please review our page on short-term fellowships.
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CLRH Research Guide in the Field of Medieval Canon Law
Version 1.0 of the CRLH Research Guide was issued in fall 2025. This research guide’s purpose is to provide scholars in the field of medieval canon law and beyond with quick information about where they can access reproductions of manuscripts of texts. Such access may be in online repositories connected to the libraries that currently house the physical artifact; it may be through online collections such as Manoscritti giuridici medievali; it may be on site in St. Louis, Missouri, at Saint Louis University through the collection of our Vatican Film Library in partnership with CRLH. The guide is intended, then, to be of assistance to scholars around the world working wherever they live but also to highlight the unique resources available on site at Saint Louis University.
Scholars may view and download the CRLH Research Guide for their own purposes and may consider the resources available at Saint Louis University as reason to apply to one of our short-term research fellowships. Suggestions for additions are welcome; please email Atria Larson.
Gallery of Glosses
Gallery of Glosses (GoG) is an ongoing research project of the CRLH. With past funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and current support from the Collaborative for Humanistic Inquiry, Gallery of Glosses is a digital humanities project with two main outputs: (1) a data-management platform where users can input and organize glosses on pre-modern or early modern texts, including laws, (2) a public-facing website where scholars can browse the glosses. The platform has received substantial development from Saint Louis University’s Research Computing Group and is designed to accommodate the recording of glosses from pre-print materials and in out-of-copyright printed publications. GoG accommodates glosses on the legal tradition and is intentionally designed with texts of Roman law, canon law, English common law, and other laws in mind.
Applicable to all fields of medieval studies and to many others, the GoG data-management platform is available for use by any scholar in the world researching glosses or annotations to manuscript or print texts. Email Atria Larson to inquire and see about steps to set up an account and get started.
Biobibliographical Guide to Medieval and Early Modern Jurists (MEMJ)
The MEMJ originated with the work of Ken Pennington (emeritus, Catholic University of America), who first expanded upon the 1937 Repertorium der Kanonistik of Stephan Kuttner and brought it to the world wide web. In its original form, it contained entries on canonists and canon law texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In recent years, with funding from the Ames Foundation, the MEMJ has continued to be expanded, adding entries of Roman law jurists and jurists of the later medieval and early modern period. It is now an internationally recognized resource that is sometimes the only resource on the web with reliable, scholarly information about a particular Latin juristic text or jurist dating to twelfth through sixteenth centuries. The CRLH is partnering with the Ames Foundation to support additions and updates as well as technical support through Saint Louis University’s Research Computing Group.