Since the Second General Conference in The Hague in 2005, the research team at the Huygens Institute has been confronted with an ever growing amount of text editions for Europa Humanistica. Partly because of an unexpected quantity in various libraries in Europe and the United States, partly due to the activities of three external historians working as volunteers on behalf of our project. This means that we are going to need another two years to finish our first volume of Les Pays-Bas des humanistes I (ca.1480 – ca. 1575).
At this moment, we have a good idea about the editions that were crucial for the after-life of classical and patristic texts in the former Low Countries (modern Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands, plus some neighbouring regions in German Westphalia and the Rhineland). An important part of the work that still needs to be done, concerns the annotations. Leaving aside Erasmus for the moment, seven humanist-philologists can be reckoned among those who bore the burden during the early phase of Renaissance text editing :

(from the Latin Schools at Groningen and Deventer) Rodolphus Agricola, one of the first who went to Italy to study and translate Greek manuscripts into Latin ; Gisbertus Longolius, who had to defend Greek philology at the University of Cologne ; Johannes Murmellius, who introduced the study of Greek in Münster and Cologne and succeeded in replacing mediaeval school books with humanistic ones ;

(from the Latin School at Haarlem) Dirk Volkertszoon Coornhert, one of the first translators into the vernacular ; Hadrianus Junius, a succesful physician in the England of Henry VIII, before a rich dowry allowed him to concentrate on his activities as an editor in Holland ;

(from Antwerp) Theodorus Pulmannus, a poor draper who nevertheless succeeded to publish no less than forty-four successive editions from twenty-five different Latin authors ; Cornelis Van Ghistele, member of the local chamber of rhetorics, like Coornhert one of the first translators of Latin texts into the vernacular.

This first volume on the printing centres of Deventer, Haarlem and Antwerp does not include the numerous activities at the Collegium Trilingue of Louvain, founded in 1517 by Erasmus. Articles on Alardus from Amsterdam, Jacobus Cruquius, Martinus Dorpius, Petrus Nannius and Juan Luis Vives for example are to be expected from our colleagues at the Universities of Louvain and Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. A testimony we get from our prefaces is, that apart from their accomplishments in philology, many amongst these men had their difficulties to convince opponents, acting on behalf of the church as well as the local schools and the universities.

In order to enable a large audience to share what we have found, it seems imperative that the Budé database gets what it deserves : a large number of data which may be compared at will and over a large region : Renaissance Europe from the 15th to the 17th century.