Emerging from the crises of schism, war, and plague, the Catholic Church entered the sixteenth century with an intensified awareness of the need for renewal. At all levels of the Catholic hierarchy, the call for reform in capite et in membris was being issued. And like their Protestant counterparts, Catholic authors took advantage of print technology to create a vast treasury of published documents – a legacy that to this day has been but selectively sampled and appreciated. Now, the documentary riches of this era are being made more accessible than ever, as we gather them into a single, full-text, fully searchable database, the Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation (the DLCR).
